She ran it through the archive. The result came back cold at first. Then a single match: Subject 008, designation “Mila.” Status: Missing. Origin: Seed Ship 099. Last contact: 1,247 days ago.
A girl. Maybe ten years old. Standing in front of a cracked viewscreen that showed a planet Elena didn’t recognize — rings like shattered glass, two moons overlapping. The girl wore a faded green jacket, too large for her. Her eyes weren’t looking at the camera. They were looking past it, at something just out of frame.
Elena zoomed in on the girl’s left wrist. A bar code. Faded, but readable.
Elena leaned back. The file’s metadata was clean except for one thing: the GPS coordinates embedded in the JPG led not to a planet, but to a hallway in her own building. Twenty feet from where she sat.
Seed Ship 099 had been declared lost. No survivors. But this photo — dated last week — showed a child in a green jacket, alive, on a planet no one had ever named.