The maintenance hatch opened onto the roof of an adjacent parking structure: a big, mostly empty platform where service vehicles came to drink power and gossip about humans.
The night cycle over this part of the complex was half an hour ahead of Mina’s balcony; the sky was darker, Earth a little lower on the horizon. The air smelled like ozone and exhaust.
Sam hauled himself out of the hatch and collapsed behind a squat HVAC unit. Mina followed, covered in foam and soil, laughing under her breath in a way that sounded a little like crying.
“We just,” she wheezed, “committed, like… three felonies.”
“At least,” he said weakly. “Plus crimes against horticulture.”
She flopped down next to him, leaning her head back against the metal. The foam on her shoulder made a faint crackling noise as it continued to cure.
“Let’s see the loot,” she said.
His fingers were stiff. He unclenched them slowly.
The slate’s edge still glowed, dim and steady. SLATE-3, it said: CONTENTS: 37%. Under that, in tiny letters: VEL-01 (PARTIAL), V-ATL-ROOT (PARTIAL), AURORA-01-V ORIG (HEADER).
“It’s not all there,” he said. “We lost the copy when we killed power.”
“Some is better than none,” she said. “What did we catch?”
He tapped the interface. A tiny gray holo projected above the slate: a page of text, sections missing, but more than enough.
They skimmed.
VEL-01 snippets, the bits they’d seen. Then pieces of V-ATL-ROOT:
…sub-ice structures exhibit non-Euclidean connectivity suggestive of gate functions…
…entangled reference frames between ANT-ATL nodes and unknown off-world foci…
…do not characterize as “alien city” in any public or semi-public documentation. Use “ancient complex,” “geological anomaly,” etc…
And AURORA-01-V ORIG header:
OBJECT: AURORA-01-V (“EXTRA-GALACTIC PROBE”)
FIRST INTERNAL DETECTION: [DATE – DECADES AGO]
NOTE: For public timelines, adjust to [RECENT DATE] to minimize questions about delay between detection and action.
Sam felt slightly sick.
“They lied about when they saw it,” he said. “They saw the probe long before they said they did. They had years to think about it. To decide what story to tell. To decide what to show the AIs.”
“Which means,” Mina said, “by the time we got Mercy and her cohort looking at the data, the Families had already been dancing with both the probe and VELORA for a while.”
She flipped to another fragment.
…Family directive: All work exploring potential Veloran/Aurora coordination to be conducted under direct oversight. No independent research teams. No unsupervised synth cognition.
…Public position: “AURORA project is our first encounter with extra-galactic intelligence.” Internal: this is a continuation of VEL-01 line.
Sam pinched the bridge of his nose.
“I’m going to be ill,” he said.
Mina reached out with her foam-crusted hand and patted his knee.
“Welcome,” she said, “to the conspiracy.”
“I don’t want to be in a conspiracy,” he said. “I want to file tidy anomaly reports and not get tackled by drones.”
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
“Too late,” she said. “You’re already wearing the outfit.”
He glanced down at his coveralls, now liberally spattered with dirt and expanding foam.
“This is not an outfit,” he said. “This is evidence.”
“Then we should get rid of it,” she said.
She wriggled out of her own polo, revealing a tank top underneath, and used the polo to scrape at the worst of the foam. She handed him a utility knife from her belt.
“Cut the name patch off,” she said. “No sense making it easier for them to match the security footage.”
He did, fingers numb, slicing his own name out of the fabric in a small, surreal act of vandalism.
Below, in the distance, the Veil wing sat quiet and unassuming.
“I thought Governance were the adults in the room,” he said softly. “The ones you go to when you find something scary. ‘Please, sir, the universe is misbehaving, can you make sure the AIs don’t eat us while we fix it.’”
“And now?” she asked.
He looked at the slate. At the words VELORA PRIME and ANOMALY PERSISTS ACROSS GENERATIONS and REMOVE REFERENCES IN ALL DOWNSTREAM DOCUMENTATION.
“Now,” he said, “I think they’re at best… compromised. At worst… part of the thing we’re trying to understand.”
“Exactly,” she said. “If you hand this to Nayar, she hands it to Governance. Governance hands it to Veil. Veil classifies it as NOISE or FAMILY DIRECTIVE. And we go back to our consoles and pretend not to notice when the AUX hose twitches.”
He closed his eyes briefly.
“What’s the alternative?” he asked. “We can’t exactly leak this to the press. They’d never get past the first redaction stamp.”
She bumped his shoulder.
“We do what we’ve been doing,” she said. “We watch. We collect. We hide copies somewhere the story-police can’t reach. And we look for someone we can trust enough to hand this to when the time is right.”
“Who would that even be?” he asked.
She thought about that, looking up at Earth.
“Maybe,” she said slowly, “someone who’s already standing too close to the fire to step away. Someone with just enough authority to be dangerous and just enough ethics to be annoying.”
“Trevor,” he said, before he could stop himself.
Her mouth quirked.
“Trevor,” she agreed. “Mr. Governance With a Conscience. Currently sitting on top of the only ship the universe seems to be personally interested in.”
Sam put his head in his hands.
“So our options are: trust the people who built the lie, or trust the guy slowly realizing he’s married to a haunted house,” he said.
“Pretty much,” she said.
He laughed once, bleak and brief.
“I want a nap and witness protection,” he said.
“I can offer you noodles and a bad plan,” she said. “Will that do for tonight?”
He looked at the slate again.
It glowed back, small and stubborn.
“For tonight,” he said, “it’ll have to.”
B8 – Pact of the Meddling Kids
Back at Mina’s, the basil was unimpressed.
“You smell like a crime scene,” she told him as she shoved a towel into his hands and steered him toward the bathroom. “Shower. I’ll deal with the evidence.”
Under hot water, the foam softened and peeled away in gummy strips. Dirt swirled down the drain in little whirlpools. He stood there until his fingers pruned and his thoughts settled enough to be less screaming.
When he emerged, wrapped in a too-small towel with his hair dripping, Mina had changed into clean clothes and was sitting at her small table with the slate, a disassembled pot, and an open bag of potting mix.
The pothos cutting he’d brought to the Annex sat in the middle of the table, looking innocent.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Hiding a body,” she said cheerfully. “Come help.”
She’d taken an old, slightly chipped ceramic pot and glued a false bottom into it—a thin hollow space just deep enough to fit the slate. A tiny mechanical latch stuck out near the rim, disguised as a chip in the glaze.
“Your skills are deeply concerning,” he said.
“Thank you,” she said.
They slotted the slate into the hollow. The edge light dimmed to a barely-there glow.
“Power source?” he asked nervously.
“Trickle from a micro-thermal unit,” she said. “Waste heat from the soil. It’ll keep the storage stable without broadcasting. Worst case, it dies in a few years and we still have the hardcopy in my wall-brain.”
She snapped the false bottom into place and started filling the rest of the pot with soil.
“We’re… really not going to tell anyone,” he said quietly.
“We will,” she said. “Just not yet. Not them. Think of it as… staging. You don’t walk into Veil and say ‘hi, your root directory is made of lies’ without a backup plan.”
He sat, towel tucked nervously around his knees.
“This is above our pay grade,” he said.
“Everything is above our pay grade,” she said. “Including gravity and the weather. That doesn’t mean we pretend not to notice when they do tricks.”
She planted the pothos cutting, tucking it into the soil with gentle fingers.
“There,” she said. “One extremely normal houseplant. With secrets.”
He stared at it.
“If I water that,” he said, “am I technically committing ongoing obstruction of justice?”
“Only if the water’s from a restricted source,” she said. “Here.”
She handed him a little plastic watering can.
He poured, hands steady.
“Okay,” she said, wiping her fingers on a rag and then on her pants. “Pact time.”
He looked up.
She held out her hand.
“We keep pulling on this thread,” she said. “We don’t let them erase it. No matter how weird it gets. No matter how many bored drones we make angry. We do this together, or we don’t do it at all.”
His first instinct was to list reasons this was a bad idea: personal risk, career suicide, the possibility that they were misinterpreting some complex, benevolent policy apparatus designed to save lives.
His second was to remember the AUX–U41 light blinking with no power, the redacted word VELORAN, the line about emergent inference.
His third was to look at Mina’s wall, at the messy, colorful gravity of it, and realize that part of him had been waiting for someone to ask him to pick a side.
He took her hand.
“No matter how weird it gets,” he said.
She squeezed, then let go.
“Good,” she said. “Because I have a feeling ‘weird’ is the only thing on the menu.”
He fished his own laptop out of his bag. It was an older model—one he kept deliberately off the MIC network, a little island of personal code and bad habits. He booted it, very carefully made sure the wireless was off, and plugged the slate in.
A local copy of the partial files appeared. He opened a spectrogram viewer—one he’d written himself for fun in grad school—and loaded a chunk of the old VEL/AURORA noise logs.
On the screen, the familiar hiss painted itself in blues and greens. Underneath, faint and stubborn, the 41Hz comb.
He zoomed in.
“Look,” Mina said softly.
Every few seconds, the spectrogram twitched. Not dramatically—just enough that the spacing between the comb lines shifted, then snapped back. A tiny flexing, like a muscle under skin.
“That could be compression,” he said automatically. “Or logging jitter. Or…”
“Or something still moving,” she said. “In recordings from decades ago. That Veil spent a lot of ink calling ‘noise.’”
They watched the pattern for a long moment, lit only by the screen and the glow from Earth outside.
“Somewhere between the noise and the story,” Mina said quietly, “something was still talking.”
“And for the first time in a long time,” Sam said, “someone on Earth has decided to listen.”
The comb twitched again.
Neither of them looked away.