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"They told you the signal was a warning," Elara says, her voice vibrating through the ship’s hull rather than the speakers. "It wasn't. It was an invitation. The breach didn't kill us, Aris. It woke us up."

She looks directly into the lens. Her eyes aren't brown anymore; they reflect the shifting, iridescent violet of the horizon. She holds up a small, pulsating shard of obsidian—the source. 5e9df807631f47f2739f6_source.mp4

The footage is grainy, tinted in the harsh ultraviolet of a dying star. It shows a single figure standing on the edge of a glass-flat salt plain. This is Elara, the lead xenobiologist who had been declared "vaporized" in the 2084 laboratory breach. But in the video, she is very much whole. She isn't wearing a vacuum suit. She’s breathing the thin, toxic atmosphere of Kepler-186f as if it were a spring breeze. "They told you the signal was a warning,"