The Observer
The question that kept Anya awake was not who had built the archive. The question was who it was for. A monitoring station implied a monitor — someone or something that would eventually read the record, review the data, draw conclusions. The archive was too vast, too meticulous, too persistently maintained to be an academic exercise. It had purpose. It was waiting for someone to come and collect the results. And the fact that no one had come in the time it had been recording suggested either that the intended recipient was very patient or very far away or both.
Pavel found the transmission log on the ninth day. Buried in the archive's metadata — the data about the data, the system's own operational records — was a communication protocol. At regular intervals, the archive compiled a summary of its most recent entries and transmitted it. The transmission was not electromagnetic. It used a mechanism that Pavel could not identify, something that operated outside the spectrum of known physics, a method of sending information that left no trace in any detector they possessed. The intervals between transmissions were long — roughly eleven thousand years — and the most recent transmission had occurred approximately eleven thousand years ago, which meant the next one was imminent. Perhaps days. Perhaps hours.
Anya stood in the drilling chamber, two hundred metres below the Siberian