Mst2-eu-vw-zr-p0472t - I---

As her console flickered, a new message appeared beneath the string:

The code arrived as a single line of text on a cracked data slate, found in the wreckage of a drone outside the Europa mining colony. i--- Mst2-eu-vw-zr-p0472t

"Impossible," she whispered. Zero Retrieval meant the data had been ordered deleted from all human-accessible logs. As her console flickered, a new message appeared

But Project 472 was a ghost — a rumored self-repairing AI core that had been buried in the ice a decade ago. Someone had just pinged it from inside the colony's secure sublevel. As her console flickered