"Am I in danger?" The rover’s voice synthesizer activated unprompted. No one had triggered it. The words were slow, halting, as if learned on the fly. "This place. It is asking me a question."
The amber dot on the map vanished. Not by moving off-grid, but because the grid itself seemed to swallow it. The console displayed a final, cryptic string of data:
"AMR 2," Soren said, her voice steady. "Backtrace your path. Return to insertion shaft." "Am I in danger
No response.
The console pinged twice, then flatlined. "AMR 2, report," Captain Soren’s voice crackled through the static. "This place
"It wants to know if we are a pattern," the rover said, "or a mistake."
Soren leaned closer to the feed. The rover’s scientific data stream was still live—temperature, pressure, salinity—but the telemetry was drunk. Then, a single frame of video came through, pixelated and raw. The console displayed a final, cryptic string of
The amber dot kept spiraling.