Chen Hao stared at the fleeting dot of light on the monitor screen, his throat bobbing. He didn't speak, but his fingers were already on the edge of the control panel, his knuckles turning slightly white.
Nana immediately began retrieving the data. She pulled up all the sensor recordings from the three minutes before and after, including infrared, gravitational wave, and electromagnetic remnant data. The lines on the screen jumped densely, like a swarm of frantic ants.
Carl moved his hand to the manual driving mode switch and whispered, "Yaw a little, create some distance first."
The spaceship slowly adjusted its angle, the thrusters vibrating slightly. On the main screen, the direction marker for the signal source was still flashing, but the dot of light disappeared and never reappeared.
“I found it,” Nana suddenly said. “The spot of light 50,000 kilometers to the right rear is a reflection phenomenon.”
"Reflection?" Chen Hao turned his head. "Who's reflecting?"
“Our exhaust plume,” she said. “The navigation buoy’s outer shell is curved and has a metallic coating. When the spacecraft’s thruster jets pass over its curved surface, some of the light is focused and bounced into the monitoring lens’s field of view, creating a brief image.”
"So..." Chen Hao blinked, "we're scaring ourselves?"
"The conclusion is valid." Nana nodded. "There is no evidence of an independent, moving light source."
Carl breathed a sigh of relief, his shoulders slumping slightly. "I told you we shouldn't have been so nervous. What could be watching us in a place like this?"
"But what about the signal?" Chen Hao looked at the waveform again. "It clearly changed its rhythm and has harmonics. It can't just be an illusion, can it?"
Nana switched the scene, and the object captured by the high-precision imaging system clearly appeared—a rusty cylindrical structure with a crooked and broken external antenna and blurry, discernible surface markings.
“Model confirmed: Standard Type 3 interplanetary navigation buoy,” she said. “It is a retired device from the old Federal Air Route System, used to mark safe routes, and its built-in beacon transmitter operates on the same frequency band as the current signal.”
"So it really is a road sign?" Chen Hao grinned. "And a broken one at that?"
"To be precise, it's 'aging operation'," Nana explained. "The buoy power module has a slight leakage current, and the energy storage capacitor charges and discharges periodically. Due to circuit aging, the discharge interval is unstable, causing pulse frequency fluctuations. The additional harmonics come from antenna resonance, which is a physical echo and not encrypted information."
The control room was silent for a few seconds.
Then Chen Hao slapped the armrest: "So all that anxiety I've been going through was just to have feelings for a piece of scrap metal?"
Carl snorted: "You expect it to send you a message back?"
"I really thought I'd stumbled upon a relic of a civilization." Chen Hao leaned back in his chair, wiping his face with his hand. "I almost prepared to write the universe's first two-way telegram."
"I suggest checking the database before getting excited next time," Nana said calmly. "More than 12,000 of this type of buoy have been deployed, and 89 percent of them have failed. Of those, 30 percent will generate false signals due to environmental interference."
"Alright then." Chen Hao waved his hand. "From now on, I won't rely on my brain; I'll rely entirely on you reading the instruction manual."
Carl reset the flight path parameters, and the automatic cruise mode was reactivated. The spaceship ceased its fine-tuning and returned to its original orbit. Outside the porthole, it was still pitch black, with sparse stars, showing no sign of change.
"Should this be recorded in the logbook?" Chen Hao asked.
“Archived,” Nana said. “Classified as a ‘non-threatening abandoned facility,’ and no further follow-up is necessary.”
“Let’s go then.” Carl released the joystick. “If we stay any longer, it might suddenly lose power and won’t even be able to send false signals.”
Chen Hao chuckled as he stood up and stretched, his chubby body bumping into the overhead railing, swaying slightly before regaining his balance. "I knew I shouldn't have invited you all to come and watch the show; it was a waste of everyone's time."
“I’d been awake even if you hadn’t called me,” Carl said. “How could I not have known when the alarm went off?”
"I'm not worried about anything going wrong," Chen Hao muttered. "What if it really is a message from aliens? At least we'd be on the scene."
“If aliens greet each other with broken road signs, then their level of civilization is not even as good as our neighborhood property management,” Karl sneered.
"We can't say that," Chen Hao said, scratching his head. "Maybe they did it on purpose? Maybe they faked a malfunction to lure the spaceship closer? To launch a surprise attack?"
Nana glanced at him: "The buoy weighs less than 20 tons, has no power system, and shows no signs of being equipped with weapons. It does not meet the requirements for a surprise attack."
"...I was just kidding." Chen Hao chuckled twice. "Don't take it seriously."
The three returned to their respective posts. Chen Hao sat back in the control chair, casually tapped the screen, exported the audio signal from earlier, and saved it to his personal folder.
"What?" Carl glanced at it.
"Just to keep as a memento," he said. "Even though it's not an alien language, it still has a certain feel to it. Like an old radio turning on by itself in the middle of the night."
“Why are you storing a bunch of junk data?” Carl shook his head.
"Who knows if it will be useful in the future?" Chen Hao smiled with narrowed eyes. "Maybe it will be used as an alarm clock ringtone someday."
Nana was organizing the scan reports when she suddenly paused.
"What's wrong?" Chen Hao noticed something was amiss.
"The last round of testing just now showed that the temperature inside the buoy is 0.3 degrees Celsius higher than the surrounding space."
"What?" Chen Hao sat up abruptly. "Didn't they say there was no energy?"
“The temperature difference is extremely small,” she said. “It could be from residual heat radiation or a slow oxidation reaction inside the material.”
“Maybe… it’s not completely dead yet?” Chen Hao lowered his voice.
Carl rolled his eyes: "Can you stop being so dramatic?"
"I'm just suggesting a possibility," Chen Hao said, sticking out his neck. "What if it restarts someday? It would be so rude of us to find out we passed by without saying hello."
“If it could restart, it would have sent out a distress signal long ago,” Carl said, “instead of playing a lullaby here with its beeping sound.”
Nana continued recording data without engaging in the argument. Her background process was still running a deep match, cross-referencing the buoy model with missing records in the historical database.
The progress bar is moving forward slowly.
Chen Hao lay on the control panel, staring at the waveform line that had stopped jumping, and suddenly sighed.
"Tell me, the universe is so big, why doesn't anyone want to talk things out properly? Why do they have to do all this vague stuff?"
“Because you expect too much,” Carl said.
"I'm not looking forward to it, I'm just curious," Chen Hao muttered. "Isn't the point of living to see something new? Otherwise, what's the point of eating compressed biscuits and watching the night sky every day?"
"I want to live a long life," Carl said. "The more mundane, the better."
Nana closed the last window.
“The signal has stopped,” she said. “The buoy’s last discharge ended forty-seven seconds ago. There is currently no sign of activity.”
Chen Hao gazed at the blurry metal wreckage in the distance, slowly raised his right hand, and made a salute.
"Goodbye, old friend," he said softly. "Thank you for keeping me company as I finished this one-man show."
The spaceship slowly drove away.
The indoor lighting was restored to normal brightness. Carl checked the navigation log to confirm that there were no issues with the next phase of the voyage. Nana packaged and archived all relevant data, marking it as "completed."
Chen Hao opened the snack cabinet, took out a bag of potato chips, and took a bite.
He was about to speak when Nana suddenly looked up.
"etc."
Her gaze fell on a subpage in the corner.
That was a log notification that had just popped up.
Continue read on readnovelmtl.com