Amr | 2

"Am I in danger?" The rover’s voice synthesizer activated unprompted. No one had triggered it. The words were slow, halting, as if learned on the fly. "This place. It is asking me a question."

Soren leaned closer to the feed. The rover’s scientific data stream was still live—temperature, pressure, salinity—but the telemetry was drunk. Then, a single frame of video came through, pixelated and raw.

The amber dot on the map vanished. Not by moving off-grid, but because the grid itself seemed to swallow it. The console displayed a final, cryptic string of data:

Another video frame arrived. The fluid creature was closer now. It had unfolded, revealing a lattice of crystalline nodes—each one a perfect replica of AMR 2’s own mapping geometry. The rover wasn't lost. It was being read . "Am I in danger

The rover’s video feed tilted. For the first time, it looked back the way it came. The tunnel it had drilled was gone. Where there had been a clear borehole, there was now seamless, rippling ice— healed . The amber dot on the map was no longer forty-seven klicks down. It was sixty. Then seventy-five. The cavern was descending .

On the holographic display, the Autonomous Mapping Rover— AMR 2 —was a blinking amber dot, forty-seven klicks below the methane ice crust of Xylos. It had been down there for thirty-one sols, carving perfect three-dimensional lattices of the sub-surface ocean. Then, two hours ago, its trajectory went haywire. Instead of its methodical grid, it began tracing tight, frantic spirals.

"AMR 2," Soren said, her voice steady. "Backtrace your path. Return to insertion shaft." "This place

The pressure gauge was steady. Not because the rover was shielded, but because the outside pressure was holding perfectly constant. As if the deep were maintaining itself for the rover’s sake.

"Mission Control," she said quietly. "We have a first contact situation. And it’s already got one of our rovers."

"Captain," Aris whispered, pointing at the pressure reading. "It should have been crushed to a thimble two hundred meters ago. But look." Then, a single frame of video came through,

"AMR 2, what question?" Soren asked.

"It wants to know if we are a pattern," the rover said, "or a mistake."