A World Beyond
Eyes from Afar
Eyes from Afar
The following document is an internal report prepared by the Orbis Archive Acquisitions Division. The subject is a collection of personal materials recovered from John Tukei following his return after approximately twenty years away.
Archive Accession Report — AAD-47-B
Date: 12.08.44 Handler: M. Velez, Senior Archivist Collection: Tukei Personal Effects (Returned)
Description of Materials
Three notebooks, a data chip, and a folded sheet of paper with handwritten notes in a language I do not recognise. The notebooks are technical — trajectory calculations, spectral analyses, engineering diagrams. The data chip contains encrypted files I was unable to open without Level 7 clearance.
The folded sheet is different. It is personal. The handwriting is consistent with known samples of John Tukei's script, but the tone is unlike anything in the Orbis public record. It reads like field notes — observations recorded in the field, under conditions of stress or limited time.
The sheet references an entity, a planet, and an event that does not appear in any official mission log.
The Folded Sheet — Transcription
The following has been transcribed verbatim. Line breaks indicate physical breaks in the original handwriting. Underscores indicate words I could not decipher — the ink had smudged or the handwriting deteriorated.
Fusir-seta-ba. That is what they call it. The planet. Alpha Centauri Ab — that is what we would call it. Different names for the same star. Different eyes looking at the same light.
She called herself Hatha-veq. The "veq" part is a title, not a name — something like observer, though that translation is too simple. She said it meant someone who resists definitive categorisation when the cost of being wrong is high. I thought that was a description of the job. I后来 understood it was a description of the person.
She had been watching Earth for fifty years. Not Earth — she called it T'nagari IV. A cataloguing designation. To her, Earth was a signal source, not a home.
Her people detected our radio emissions decades ago. Narrow-band, structured, far exceeding natural patterns. Enough to confirm intelligent origin. She and a linguist — Kethan Res — began decoding fragments. Numbers, identifiers, speech markers. The signals came from multiple sources on the planet, which told them something we already knew: Earth was many cultures, not one.
Then the signals stopped.
Not gradually. All at once. One decade the planet was screaming. The next — silence.
She said: "You cannot erase fifty years of planetary radio noise by turning down the knobs. Not cleanly. Not in the way this data presented."
Her people sent probes. Four of them. Horizon 5, they called it.
The first landed in a hydrothermal vent zone — Dalol, she said, though I didn't recognise the name. Electronics destroyed by superheated brine. The second landed in a desert. Solar arrays coated in dust. It died within days. The third landed in polar ice. It sat there, immobilised, finding nothing but microbial life beneath kilometres of ice.
The fourth — this is the one that haunts me — locked onto the wrong planet. It mistook Venus for Earth. Reported back a hellscape of sulfur storms. Someone in the processing chain mistook the noise for a living world.
Her people concluded Earth was dead. Long-abandoned. Case closed.
She did not agree.
She kept watching. Scraping time on shared long-range arrays. Decoding old signal archives. Developing what she called an "emotional attachment" to the T'nagarians — fascinated by what their culture might have been.
Nearly two decades after the silence, she detected a faint optical anomaly. An inbound object from deep interstellar space, on an intercept course with her system. Calculations suggested deliberate navigation.
She proposed an unrelated project — an "Outer Moon Survey" — to gain clearance to intercept the vessel. Publicly: geological mapping. Privately: first contact.
The object was Peregrine 2. I was inside.
She told me Earth was dead. I told her she was wrong. I had maintained DXN contact with Axy throughout my voyage — Earth was alive, transmitting, very much not silent. The silence her people detected was not natural. Something was in the way. Someone was keeping them from listening.
She did not believe me at first. Then she checked my data against her archives. The resonance patterns matched. The carrier harmonics matched. The alloy traces in my hull matched fragments her probes had recovered on Seta-9.
We made a trade. I left Peregrine 2 with her for study — intact enough to teach lessons you cannot derive from fragments alone. In return, she agreed to keep my presence secret and share any findings.
Between nights of work and crater wind, her team fed their best spectros to my resonance array. I taught a few of them what I had learned about closed-loop harmonic coupling. They taught me about probe lattice survival.
Between those fragments grew something else: proof that the probes had not been sent into a mute world by accident. That their returns had been deliberately misread.
I built Peregrine 3 on the moon's fabrication facilities. Small moonyard. Good people. Quiet work.
I left Fusir-seta-ba to find the third party that had cut their reception. The hand that dimmed the lights.
She watched me go. I could feel it — not because I looked back, but because that is what a veq does.
Archivist's Analysis
The folded sheet describes an encounter with an entity called "Hatha-veq" on a planet designated "Fusir-seta-ba" — identified in the notes as Alpha Centauri Ab. The notes describe a civilisation that detected Earth's radio emissions, sent probes that failed, and concluded Earth was dead. The writer claims to have corrected this conclusion and formed a partnership with the observer.
Several details in the notes are verifiable:
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The Horizon 5 probe fates described in the notes — hydrothermal vent, desert dust, polar ice, Venus mis-lock — match fragmentary data in the CNVR deep-space archives, though the archives do not attribute these probes to any known agency.
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The alloy traces on "Seta-9's shards" are referenced in a separate AXYZ metallurgy report (filed under a different classification) that describes "anomalous fragments with non-standard harmonic signatures" recovered from a Belt sampling mission.
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The name "Fusir-seta-ba" does not appear anywhere else in the Orbis archive. Nor does "Hatha-veq." Nor does "T'nagari IV."
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The Orbis review panel has classified this material as "unverified personal narrative" and declined to pursue further investigation. The panel's reasoning: the materials are consistent with the kind of speculative journal a person might keep during extended isolation.
I am not certain the panel is wrong. I am not certain it is right.
What I can say: the handwriting is authentic. The paper is consistent with Progenitor-era manufacture. The ink shows aging consistent with the claimed period.
And the folded sheet was stored inside the data chip's casing, wrapped around the chip like a letter inside an envelope. The chip itself contained files that required Level 7 clearance. I did not attempt to open them.
Compiler's Note
The collection is currently held in restricted storage. Access requires Level 5 Orbis clearance or a direct request from the Tukei family.
I was granted access for the purpose of this report. When I returned the materials, I noticed that the folded sheet felt warm — not room temperature, but warm, as if it had been held recently.
I did not record this observation in the official log.
This story is part of the A World Beyond Here & Now anthology.