![]() The entire population of the planet - including your ethnography team - is absent, with all the business of a sudden but not violent exit. No signs of life.Īnd here's the final report. No vehicles moving on the road, no emissions or thermal signatures in population centers. Reports from satellites and survey craft flyovers confirm: there is no activity on the planet at all. In fact, all communication seems to have ceased, planet-wide. In fact, they're returning preliminary evidence of this last when their communications abruptly cease. They hypothesize secret communication channels, steganographic prayer-encodings, or algorithmic underpinnings to the rituals. Our ethnographers are fascinated by the complexity of the ceremonies. They are set to popular music they are published in collections. But its dark spaces have a distinctive, menacing beauty, and the poetry of the invocations to the Worm-in-Waiting becomes fashionable. The temple holds no cosmic secrets or alien weapons, as far as we can tell. We have yet to find a physicist who's prepared to go on record as agreeing that the references are meaningful, though. There is also a body of inscriptions describing the "operations of the universe," which our more excitable archaeologist swears contains references to advanced field equations - nothing new to us, but very impressive for a temple of this vintage. Most of the inscriptions are sonorous, poetic invocations requesting its appearance or, if read in the other direction, its departure. The temple is dedicated to the "Waiting Worm" or the Worm-in-Waiting. We've had better luck with the "unknown alphabet." It's a debased variant of a better-known hieratic script - not an alien language at all - and we've successfully deciphered it. If the builders found particular dates important, we'll never know which ones. A roof aperture, along with the radial altar, suggests it was once a solar calendar but it's so badly damaged by the earthquake that we can't be certain. Our scientists have learned a great deal about the subterranean temple, but some questions remain. The Signal, dead or sleeping, says nothing at all, ever again. The ship is renamed the "Foundling" and returned to service. But there's a journal entry in 's name, titled WHAT WAS WILL BE. A salvage team finds it pristine and empty - no trace of crew, and no sign of violence. It's 's vessel, lost these years past, drifting now away from the Exit Point. Nothing? The monitoring team mutter furiously. The conditions around it are returning to normal. The telemetry becomes intermittent and then it, too, is silent. Again, our sensor arrays soak up fascinating data. Once again, the single-pilot ship approaches the Exit Point. Whatever is in the hole has been waiting for us for a long long time - I think it's been waiting for me, since before I was born.". But I think I always knew this would happen. This will be the end of me," says at the briefing before launch. But our team may find something interesting in the ashes of the ship. Whatever we encountered there, it may regret its interference. The drive has detonated: a brief flare of stellar fury, quickly lost in the darkness of. Our monitoring team is just reporting that the prediction interval is increasing when there is a sudden energy spike. The telemetry disagrees, but only for a few seconds, until it catches up. is no longer echoing the data: They're predicting it. It takes a little while for anyone to realize that something is peculiar about the timing. They are commendably calm: we've sent a professional. reads off the headline data, echoing the telemetry. Once again, space flexes, gravity uncoils. As it approaches the exit point, the telemetry stream fills up with fascinating data. and its systems are programmed to detonate the drive once conditions match those immediately prior to the last ship's disappearance. This time, is the only crew-member aboard. The Horizon Signal story begins with the The Worm-in-Waiting: Signals event chain, which can be triggered by a science ship with a scientist assigned to it entering the correct black hole system.
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