Rob Fallow once again gazed out the window at the sunrise. Everyone always talked about how incredible the views were, about how nothing down there could match the majesty of what he now had the rare chance to behold. Rob… Well, he didn’t exactly disagree, but to say he wasn’t a bit disappointed would be a lie. Sure, it was everything he was told, at least on paper. It really did look just like the pictures.

Maybe that’s why, Rob mused. I’ve already seen dozens of pictures of this exact spectacle, and it’s just like the pictures. It was missing that something extra; the emotional affect was simply not present. That he could see it in person? Sure, that one gave him a sense of elation that he could feel throughout his whole body. To stand at the pinnacle of what humanity had to offer was his pride and joy. But the view itself somehow just… didn’t feel as special as it should have.

Of course, he couldn’t exactly go around and say that, now could he. Of the hundreds, or possibly even thousands, of applicants - they never told him the exact number - he was one of the few selected to go. He should be more properly awed by the sight. He cringed internally a bit as he imagined how that conversation would go.

His musings were interrupted as Alice floated up next to him. “Breathtaking, isn’t it?” she asked.

“It’ll never get old,” Rob, of course, lied without hesitation. He had literally just been thinking he wasn’t going to admit his actual thoughts, after all.

“Yeah…” she sighed and stared out the window of the ISS at the sun rising over Earth for a moment with him. After a moment, she turned to him again and said, “Hey, could I tear you away from the window for a minute?”

He had figured she probably wanted something. He wasn’t going to say anything, but he was pretty sure she was supposed to have been working on getting the computers hooked up to the new long range sensor array, and it wasn’t like her, or really anyone here, to be seeking out conversation during their scheduled work hours. “Sure, what’s up?”

“I think I’ve got the sensors properly connected and everything, but they keep on telling me there’s a big object about 5000 kilometers away from us that definitely isn’t there. Wanted to get your thoughts.”

“Oh yeah, sure thing!”

“Thanks, it’s over here,” she responded as she started pushing herself along the pristine white walls through the tunnels and to the room in which she’d been working.

It was his break day, but Rob was happy to help; he always was. He wouldn’t admit it, but figuring out the issues that stumped his coworkers always gave him a deep sense of satisfaction. He pushed himself to float after her with a smile on his face. The views might not be all they’re promised, but he loved the zero-gravity. It took a bit of getting used to, but floating around was just so much fun.

She reached the computer before him and pulled up the screen she was talking about. “It’s showing up right here,” she said as she pointed at a mark on the screen. Sure enough, it was picking up a genuinely massive object right where she was pointing. Massive didn’t cover it; easily the size of a football field, if this was an actual asteroid, it could wipe out an entire city at the bare minimum.

“Yeah, I see what you’re talking about. If there really was something that big, there’s no way we wouldn’t know about it. Hell, it’d probably have started an international incident months ago.”

“Yep. I asked ground control to confirm with a few other satellites and double checked our other radars. Any thoughts on what’s causing it?”

“Hmm. Let me try a few things real quick.” Rob reached over and promptly restarted the computer.

Alice gave him a look. “Rob, I’ve been working in tech for 15 years. Do you really think I didn’t try restarting it myself?”

“Well it can’t hurt, can it? Maybe a second restart will work; tech issues have a tendency of not showing up when you show them to someone.”

You’d think with a budget in the tens of millions, NASA could spare fifty bucks for an SSD for the onboard computers, but no, the best they could do was a bunch of hard drives configured in RAID. Which meant Rob got to wait a solid five minutes awkwardly floating around waiting for the computer to finish rebooting and initializing all of its programs while Alice stared at him in judgment.

Finally, it was ready again, and Rob pulled up all the configuration and started reading through the options. He hadn’t been trained for this, so he didn’t really know what he was looking for. As he read through the options, he spoke of his thoughts out loud, partially to himself and partially to Alice.

“Hmm, a sensitivity of 1.0 seems reasonable.” pause “The noise elimination threshold seems a bit high, but that wouldn’t cause this issue anyways.” pause “Refresh period of 5 seconds makes sense”.

This continued on until he reached the bottom of the settings. He checked all the drivers on the computer to make sure they were loaded and running without issue. Then he pushed himself on over to where all the cords plugged into the computer and started checking all of the connections. After giving each one a quick tug and making sure they didn’t come out then making sure they were all plugged all the way in, he pulled himself back over to the screen.

“Well, I didn’t see any issues. It looks like the radar signal comes in over those two wires,” he said, pointing to the top two wires plugging into the computer. Once the signal makes it to the computer, the drivers interpret it and make it available to the analysis program. Both of those seem fine. The sensitivity configuration looks like it tells it how high of a signal is needed to mark something as present, and 1.0 seems like a reasonable setting for it. The noise elimination threshold seems to tell it when to ignore certain small findings–”

Alice cut him off. “Rob, I’ve trained using this exact program for quite some time. Trust me, I know how it works.”

“Right, right, sorry. Anyways, all of the configuration settings look good. My guess is the hardware is misaligned or something. I’m gonna go check it out.”

“That’s what I was thinking it probably was too. It’s your break though, you want me to go check it out instead?”

“Nah, I got it; I’m curious now. I thought for sure I installed it all correctly the first time.”

“Eh, no sweat off my back. Suit yourself.”

As Rob started making his way over to the airlock to suit up to get ready for an EVA, he sincerely hoped that wasn’t meant to be a pun. Suiting up was an ordeal to say the least. First, he had to put on special clothes to keep him cool. Then came the suit that’d have weighed hundreds of pounds back on Earth. Of course, there was no gravity to make it heavy, but it still took more work to move the suit than it would, say, a feather. After all, higher mass still means more momentum required to move something. That part took about 45 minutes.

That part was fine though, really. Rob was really quite a fan of EVAs, and while it was a bit of a chore, at least donning the suit wasn’t boring. What came next though, Rob could do without. The powers that be had decided that suits didn’t need a full atmosphere of internal pressure, which meant Rob had to spend an hour doing nothing, just slowly adjusting to breathing pure oxygen at a lower pressure. He was sure there was a good reason for it. Maybe a suit that could handle a full atmosphere difference between internal and external pressures would cost ten dollars more.

At least the ISS had some modern niceties like Internet, at speeds even higher than what he had at home. His phone could play music or audiobooks or tv shows or movies, but his suit blocked out all outside sound, except by radio. It had taken him probably too many hours to rig this up, but after who knows how many EVAs worth of waiting to adjust to the lower pressure, it was definitely worth it. He’d rigged up his phone to connect to the ISS radio transponder, which would then send his audio right to his suit. He was quite proud of that one. What good were technical skills if you couldn’t use them to make life better?

After an hour of listening to his latest audiobook, his suit finally beeped telling him it was time to head to the airlock to depressurize. He left the audiobook on. After all, why not? If someone needed his attention, when they called his radio, his book would pause.

Rob stepped into the airlock, closed the door behind himself, and began the depressurization process. After a brief wait, it was finally time to head out into the depths of space. He hooked his tether to the wall of the airlock. He wasn’t really supposed to do that, but who cared. It was so much easier, and it wasn’t hurting anyone, was it? He opened the outer door, and stepped out into the void beyond.

Whatever the sunrise over Earth was missing, spacewalks had in spades. It was the difference between standing at the top of a tall building and taking the plummet down the first hill on a roller coaster, in seeing versus experiencing. Rob was in the great unknown beyond the reach of anyone but himself. If he detached his tether and jumped, nobody would ever be able to reach him again. He would just go forever and ever and ever and… He pushed that invasive thought away. He never truly understood the call of the void, something about making your mind acknowledge the danger.

He pulled himself out of the airlock and began using his suit’s thrusters to send himself slowly gliding towards the new long range sensors. As he started getting closer, he pretty much immediately saw that all was not as it should be. He thought he could vaguely see the shape of some foreign object caught up in it, but he couldn’t be sure. What he could be sure about was that it was definitely glowing a pale green, and since there were no lights in the sensor array, that was a bit concerning.

Could another part of the station somehow have come detached and floated over to it, yet somehow remained powered? It seemed unlikely, but he couldn’t think of any other reasonable explanation.

By the time he reached it, he saw the culprit more clearly. There was a small object lodged in the middle of the radar array, about the size of a watermelon. One side of it protruded in a slight dome shape that was glowing a soft, pale green, but otherwise, it just looked like a generic asteroid. Shockingly, it had somehow managed to get stuck without obviously damaging anything. The odds of it just happening to hit the ISS at all were minuscule. But to land there with a speed so similar to that of the ISS it didn’t just tear right through the entire space station? The odds of that would be, well, astronomical.

As for how it was glowing… Maybe it had a phosphor in it? Some substances naturally absorbed light only to release it again later. He decided to take it back into the station with him when he went so he could examine it in more detail. The possibility of it being an alien device crossed his mind, but that seemed unlikely. They’d have seen other evidence of it first, and this didn’t look manufactured. Regardless, a glowing asteroid had never been observed before, so this definitely had some interesting research potential.

Raquel’s going to lose her mind over this, he thought. He’d never call one of his friends a conspiracy theorist, but Raquel certainly had theories that there was a conspiracy to hide evidence of alien life from the public.

He dislodged the object from the array, and checked it over for anything else that might have been causing interference with its operation. He was pretty sure the object he’d found was the cause for the anomalous readings, but just to be safe, he made sure everything was at the right angle, in the right spot, and without any other dust or debris blocking it. He paused his book and radioed in to Alice.

“Hey Alice, I found some debris stuck in your sensor array. I cleaned it up and checked everything else and didn’t see anything wrong. Go ahead and give it a recalibration and we can check if it’s working once I get back.”

“Thanks Rob, I’ll go ahead and get started,” she answered.

Asteroid in hand, he began flying his suit back to the airlock. On his way, he radioed Vaughn, asking him to prepare a large specimen bag in the airlock. After all, many natural compounds were toxic to people. For all he knew, the object could have polonium dust on it or something absurdly toxic like that.

When he was almost back to the airlock, he heard back from Vaughn over the radio, “Hey uh Rob, you left your tether attached to the mount inside the airlock C. I’m not going to be able to open it to put the bag in there for you. How about I leave it in airlock B for you? That’d be faster I think.”

Oops. “Yeah, sure sounds good. Thanks Vaughn.”

Fortunately, the tether was long enough for him to reach just about anywhere on the station, so he didn’t have to reattach it elsewhere. He flew over to airlock B without issue and found the requested bag waiting for him there, with Vaughn waving to him through the airlock window.

“Whatcha got there?” he heard Vaughn ask over the radio.

“I found it stuck in the long range scanners Alice was getting set up. I think it was screwing up some of the readings. It’s glowing though, and I’ve never heard of a glowing asteroid, so I wanted to check it out.”

“Interesting… you think it could be alien related?” he inquired. “Oh, Raquel’s going to lose her mind over this.”

“Oh yeah, she definitely will. I’m sure it’s just a glowing rock though.”

“I wouldn’t be too sure. Come on though; hurry up, I wanna take a closer look at it!”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m coming.”

Rob flew out of the airlock and began sticking the asteroid in the specimen bag. He didn’t want to do that in the airlock; after all, if it was covered in some sort of toxic dust, putting it in the bag in the airlock wouldn’t do anything about the dust already there. Once he got it in, he flew back to the airlock from whence he came. As he prepared to close the airlock door behind himself, he took one last look at the vast void of space he was leaving behind with a hint of disappointment. This was so much more fun than anything inside the station.

He closed the airlock door and began the repressurization process. Raquel was waiting right in front of the door, staring at him intensely. She didn’t have her radio on her, but he could see her mouth forming the words “alien” and “faster”. He rolled his eyes at her, but honestly, he understood. It definitely wasn’t alien related, but to such an enthusiast, anything from space without an immediate explanation was worth getting excited for. That was why she had wanted to be an astronaut, after all; she was hoping they’d tell her about all the aliens she “knew” NASA had hidden away from the public.

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Rob opened the airlock door and Raquel practically lunged for the specimen bag holding the asteroid he’d found. He was still in his suit and couldn’t hear her, but he could just imagine the squeals of joy as she grabbed it and floated with it back to the lab at what he was sure was an unsafe speed, with Vaughn following behind her. To be honest, he was pretty curious about what compound had naturally formed in space to make the asteroid glow. Maybe while he was waiting for Alice to finish recalibrating the scanner, he’d head to the lab and see what they could learn about it.

After about half an hour of repressurizing the suit to normal atmospheric pressure, he finally began the process of taking it off. As he did so, he found himself wondering again what could be making the asteroid glow and why they hadn't seen it before. It definitely wasn't alien technology, so what was it? Once again, it took about forty five minutes to get everything off and back where it was supposed to be.

He called Alice over the radio. “Hey Alice, how much longer you got on that recalibration?”

“Looks like another half hour. It takes like two hours to do a full recalibration. You know that,” the response came.

“Alright alright, well I’m going to head to the lab until then. I found something interesting on my EVA that I want to check out.”

“Okie dokie, see you once this is done, then!”

It’d been over an hour since they left with his asteroid. Rob was sure Raquel and Vaughn had at least some info on it by now. It wasn’t aliens, but… wouldn’t it be cool if it was? He’d make history. The person who found the first evidence of alien life. That’d sure be something, wouldn’t it?

He found himself pushing himself towards the lab faster than normal in anticipation. It wasn’t aliens, but he was still excited.

When he got into the lab, he saw Raquel staring intently at the asteroid floating around outside its bag while Vaugn was looking at the readings on some computer screen.

“Um, please tell me you checked to make sure that asteroid wasn’t made of arsenic or something.”

“Yeah, don’t worry, we checked for toxic elements and didn’t see any. It’s pretty interesting though”

“Oh?” he asked. “What have you all found, then?”

“It’s aliens.” Raquel said confidently.

“Uh huh. And what makes you say that?”

“Actually, we don’t know that for sure yet,” Vaughn interjected. “I ran a spectrograph on the normal looking part, and yeah, that looks just like you’d expect from a normal asteroid. Lots of oxygen and silicon, some traces of iron too. But the glowing part is strange. It doesn’t match any known compound, and it’s so hard I can’t easily scrape off a bit to analyze further.”

“Yeah, that’s because it’s alien technology.”

“Thank you, Raquel.”

For the next twenty minutes or so, they kept poking and prodding at the asteroid, trying different tests, and not really learning anything of much use. Raquel, of course, kept insisting that this was definitive proof of extraterrestrial life. Vaughn was mostly running test after test, while Rob mostly just floated to the side, curious to see what they’d end up finding.

Finally, Vaughn tried hitting it with a hammer. Immediately, its glow began to intensify. After a second, it starts slowly fading to different colors in different spots. Rob’s eyes began to hurt, but he couldn’t help but stare at the rock as it changed. They were all soft, diffuse colors, pale and washed out. A bright sky blue followed by a pink so light, it was hard to tell it wasn’t just pure white, which was then followed by orange and yellow and purple and every hue imaginable. At times, its light seemed to dim, yet if anything, that just made his eyes hurt worse. Various shapes of infinite geometric complexity briefly began glowing in different colors in constant flux, only to shift back into the ever changing background.

All three astronauts watched in stunned silence for a solid minute as this continued getting faster, the shapes getting smaller, more complicated and more densely packed, and the colors getting deeper, more saturated, and more vibrant.

Finally, Raquel broke the silence by shouting out, “IT’S ALIENS!!! I KNEW IT!! I’M GONNA MAKE SURE NASA DOESN’T COVER THIS ONE UP TOO!! OOOOOOH THIS IS SO EXCITING!”

Right as she finished, a sound began coming out of the object that, at this point, was clearly not just an asteroid. It was the sound of a thousand waterfalls, all crashing down together. It was the sound of a crowd of a billion people all clambering to have their voice heard over the others. It was the sound of a pregnant silence, ready to give birth to a speech that would rock the books of history. It was the sound of a baby crying, of a child begging, of a mother grieving, of men screaming as weapons fired. It was the sound of the end of a world and the birth of a new one. It was that quiet but inescapable ringing that reverberates off every surface in a room, saturating the air with its noise. It was all of these and it was none of these; its very nature simply defied description. Rob had never heard anything like it.

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A minute passed, and nobody within earshot moved so much as a muscle. To describe Rob, Raquel, and Vaughn as transfixed would be an understatement by far. Even in the excitement of potentially finding evidence of alien life, three highly trained astronauts should still have had the presence of mind to be aware of their surroundings, but none of them had noticed as the minutes flew by. None of them had noticed when Alice said she got the radar array working again. None of them had noticed when she said the object it had detected was still present. None of them noticed when she said it had gotten much bigger and much, much closer. And none of them noticed when she said it was coming their way.

But perhaps most importantly, even minutes later, none of them noticed when she very calmly said she had figured out what it was. An ablation cascade, she had called it.

----------------------------------------

The glowing object abruptly stopped. Its glowing shapes stopped changing, it stopped making noise, and it stopped spinning, instantly, something that should not be possible.

A voice rang out. It was a female voice, but a voice like any other, nothing distinguishing it from what one might hear if they stopped a random woman on the street for a conversation. It simply said, “Language reconstructed.”

Then the background once again faded back to its original pale green as the shapes on its surface slowly flowed to form black letters. English letters. Forming English words. It looked like a command line interface on a computer might have printed out. The font was a monospace, technical looking one. It read

Scanning surroundings...

Planet identified

Life forms detected

Sapience detected

Cognition interface constructed

After a brief pause, the voice called out once again, “Ready to continue. Sapient representative's verbal affirmation required. Say yes to continue.”

With that, their trance slowly began to break. There were so many things that could go wrong with agreeing. What even were they being asked to agree to? As exciting as what at this point was definitely a first contact was, they had to exercise caution. This clearly was technology far, far more advanced than anything humanity had to offer. Rob tried to hold up his hand to signal to Vaughn and Raquel that they should discuss before doing anything further, but before he could do anything, Raquel practically shouted, “Yes!”

The voice immediately rang back out one final time saying, "Project Evolution 12th Generation: Initializing," and with that, text began appearing on the object once more.

Constructing Framework...

A moment later,

Framework Construction Results (Trial 1)... Inconsistent

Then another moment,

Framework Construction Results (Trial 1)... Incompatible

This continued for quite a while.

Framework Construction Results (Trial 43)... Candidate Already Eliminated

Framework Construction Results (Trial 44)... Candidate Already Eliminated

Framework Construction Results (Trial 45)... Incompatible

Framework Construction Results (Trial 46)... Success

And with that, came more lines.

Framework Information:

- Heterogeneous Deployment (30.1%)

- Direct Physical Reality Interface (0.09%)

- Direct Sapience Interface (58.8%)

- Layered Construction (0.02%)

- Direct Access Channel (1.85%)

- Novel (0.0000%)

Note: Novel Framework Constructed!

Observation Priority: Moderate.

Results reported to Realm Control.

As this was happening, Rob’s mind began catching up with what he missed while in his trance. Alice had gotten her sensors back up, and the glitch was back, but what did that matter compared to this? Real, bona fide alien technology!

What was that? The glitched object appeared to be getting closer? Strange. And bigger? That’s even stranger.

Ablation cascade? What’s that? Wait… that’s… no. It can’t be. Rob slowly came to the realization of the meaning behind what Alice had said. An ablation cascade was a storm of space debris, destroying everything in its path. Each piece of debris was perhaps the size of a small marble, but that didn’t matter when each one’s relative velocity was dozens of times higher than that of a bullet. Each satellite it hit would explode into millions of pieces and join in on the cascade, eventually taking out everything in low earth orbit.

It was basically a death sentence to all current and future space development. Say goodbye to GPS, satellite imagery, starlink, ISS missions, all of it. And there was one headed their way. Alice had finished that announcement perhaps a minute ago, and just as he finished thinking that, she came floating into the room, tears in her eyes.

She was just in time for another line to appear on the object.

Applying Framework...

And with this line, a deep shiver passed through Rob. It wasn’t cold, but he shivered nonetheless. He got the distinct sensation that something had changed, something fundamental.

Alice must have felt it too, since her whole body shook a bit. Though, that could have just been her crying. The knowledge of one’s inexorable death could do that to someone. She somehow ignored the glowing rock in the middle of the room as she looked at Rob and the others and said in a too-calm voice, “The ablation cascade will reach us in less than a minute. There’s nothing we can do. I… goodbye. I feel honored to have known you all.”

On the object’s surface, more words began forming, but Rob couldn’t focus on them anymore. Alice’s words had fully dragged his attention away from it. He looked around at Raquel and Vaughn but saw they must not have processed what she said yet; they were still reading the glowing object.

Assigning Guardian Against External Threats...

Grand Protectorate: Sector 448615 | Realm 971

Local Protectorate:

Universe: f8ddb9cbb321d7dfbf6cb059736f0b3d

Star: ebd556e6dfc99dbed29675ce1c6c68e5

Contacting Sector Guardian Command...

Rob tried to come up with a response. I’m going to die? He felt the clutch of despair try to take hold as the realization settled in, but…

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Before Rob could finish that thought, a small piece of aluminum about the size of a pinky nail flew right through the wall of the ISS and directly into the base of his neck, killing him instantly. Hundreds, then thousands, and then millions more followed. Nobody else in the ISS lasted much longer. Not fifteen minutes later, the ablation cascade had grown once again, leaving nothing of the ISS behind beyond a perfect sphere slightly glowing with dozens of cracks spiderwebbing all over it and a single hole right through the middle. Only one line of text was left. If someone had survived, they might have been able to make out what it said through all the cracks:

Guardian Deployment Status: Interrupted; Unrecoverable Damage Accrued

If only Rob had tethered himself outside the airlock like he was supposed to. If only Vaughn had hit it with the hammer it just a few seconds earlier. Maybe then, all that was to follow could have been avoided.