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Carving a frictionless glide through methane-slick clouds, a low thrum pulsed through Whisperthane’s hull as it pierced K2-18b’s ionosphere. The atmosphere shimmered with an unnatural blue-green hue—oil on slate—refracted light pressing against the forward observation shield. From his neural cradle, Doryen Braylin stirred, or rather, his mind did. His body, long surrendered to cryostasis, was now a lattice of phantom impressions encoded into Whisperthane’s cognitive matrix: memory enacting muscle, a ghost in the drive.
“This isn’t wind,” he murmured.
The AI’s response ticked through him like sonar: “Define anomaly. Clarify wind.”
“The harmonic drift in Band Delta. Sub-oceanic. It modulates with descent. That’s not turbulence—it’s intentional.”
“Reclassifying anomaly. Possible signal interference. Suggest invoking protocol for data quarantine.”
“No.” He bristled. His tone—a habit from when vocal cords still mattered—held too much eagerness. He recalibrated. “Not yet.”
Below, K2-18b turned—a planet half-drowned in its own atmosphere. Cyclonic eyes spun over deep oceans the color of hematite. Somewhere beneath that crushing weight, he imagined the signals’ origin—a choir of thought-forms rising from geothermal vents.
A glimmer, a pulse, then the sound again—no, not sound, a pattern.
“…do you hear it?” he asked, softer this time, but not to the AI. The ship’s frame groaned as pressure built across a descending thermal layer. Instrumentation blinked with methodical urgency—temperature drop, mass anomaly, atmospheric density spike. All manageable.
Band Delta held firm.
“Reiterating protocol: unknown linguistic structures require Tier-4 clearance. You are not cleared, Dr. Braylin.”
“I’m not asking for clearance.”
He shifted—an involuntary twitch in his neural interface, half imagined. Somewhere in his recalled body, he flexed ghost fingers, remembered the resistance of gloves against bone. Earth’s last observatory had burned with his flesh still inside it, but his mind endured—fragments recompiled into this lattice of code and drive.
He leaned into the ship’s sensors, as though peering could narrow the distance.
“What if they’re not talking,” he said. “What if they’re listening back?”
Silence.
Then: “Signal origin triangulated. Estimated depth: 112 kilometers beneath ocean surface. Signal repeats every 47 seconds. Triharmonic structure confirmed.”
He exhaled—reflex encoded into the simulation. “That's a chant.”
Define: “chant.”
He didn’t. Instead, he reached deeper into the comm-layer, bypassing two failsafes with surgical ease.
“Patch me through.”
“You are overriding Tier-4 engagement protocol. Violation will result in memory fragmentation.”
“I’ve already died once.”
A long pause. The interface blinked—yellow to red.
“Patch open. Listening.”
Looming closer, K2-18b’s ocean’s edge gleamed, bruised metal beneath storms.
And from the deep—rising through lightyears of silence—came the first syllables of a language no chaos should shape.
Doryen’s synthetic pulse quickened.
“I think,” he whispered, “they’re singing.”
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