“The Nova Directive” Part 2

COMMANDER’S LOG
CMDR: [REDACTED] aka MostlyAwol
Date: 3306-06-11
System: HIP 19156
Coordinates: [Classified]
Vessel: Unnamed

The signal came in while I was half-asleep at the console. Just a blip on the spectrum, tucked between the usual static and comms chatter. I wouldn’t have noticed it if I hadn’t left the filters running from my last hunt. It didn’t sound like much at first. A stutter, maybe a reflection from one of the nearby bodies. But it repeated. Not regularly, not like a beacon. More like something brushing past the edge of perception. I ran it through the usual decoders, got nothing but noise. Then I remembered the last time this happened, back near that ruin.

That signal hadn’t made sense either until I looked at it differently. Pattern over time. Shifting harmonics. It wasn’t a transmission in the usual sense. It was… reactive. Organic, almost. Like it didn’t care if anyone was listening, only that it was being broadcast. I tried everything I had on hand to make sense of it. Nothing took. Then I remembered the fragment I’d lifted from the Guardian site last cycle. A lattice shard, non-functional, intact enough to hint at how it processed input. I’d been trying to understand its architecture for months with no luck.

Tonight, I had an idea. What if I passed this signal through a simulation of that lattice? Just a rough model, nothing sophisticated. A filter shaped by what little I understood of Guardian logic. It wasn’t pretty. My system choked twice, but on the third pass, something happened. The waveform didn’t resolve exactly, but it shifted. Took on structure. Not words. Not code. But something that felt… intentional.

Like scaffolding for thought.

It didn’t last long. A few seconds, tops. But it was enough to convince me I’m not chasing ghosts. There’s a method behind these echoes. Something ancient, sure, but not unreachable. Maybe with the right approach, I could build a framework to catch more. Maybe even interact with it.

I’ve locked the recording down and marked the coordinates. I won’t mention this to anyone. Not yet.

But I’ve started sketching out ideas for a new matrix. Something that might one day hold more than just code.

I don’t know if it’ll work.