THE UNNAMED MISSION - EXTENDED TRANSMISSION | Sci-Fi Audio Podcast | WANDERER CHRONICLES RADIO

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The Unnamed Mission - EXTENDED TRANSMISSION.

Some missions are never logged by name.

They leave no coordinates, no commendations, no clear record of success or failure—only a residue of intent and consequence.

In this recovered transmission, the Wanderer undertakes a task without designation or destination, guided not by orders but by a quiet obligation felt before it could be explained. What unfolds is not a tale of heroics, but of choice—made in uncertainty, carried out without witness, and remembered only by those changed by it.

This story is rendered as a single-narrator transmission, reconstructed from fragmented logs and released unclassified for Federation ears by the Keeper.

Listen closely.

Not all missions announce themselves.

Still… we traverse.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:23

Some transmissions were recovered only as fragmented logs. Their original voices were lost to time, signal decay, or classification. What you hear now has been reconstructed and released for Federation ears by the keeper. The unnamed mission.

SPEAKER_00 0:44

The crew is uneasy. I feel their tension in the way their thoughts ripple through the wanderer's song, discordant, hesitant. They do not know where we are going, only that something has called us. A signal, one they were never meant to hear, one the wanderer received before any transmission was sent. The captain stands at the helm, though there is no helm in the traditional sense. Instead, there is an expanse of glowing filaments, shifting and dancing with the rhythm of the wanderer's mind. Liore places their hands upon them, feeling the song, shaping it, letting it shape them in return. This shouldn't be possible, murmurs Luca, the ship's calm specialist. The signal originates from a future coordinate. Talas frowns, adjusting her visor. Future? As in something that hasn't happened yet? Luca exhales sharply. It's an echo. An event resonance. Like something is calling us from where it will be. There is no laughter, no dismissive joke, only silence. Because the wanderer does not take them to uncharted places without reason. She does not listen to echoes unless there is something behind them. I hum a single harmonic thread through the ship's walls, steadying them. They do not know what I know, that the signal is familiar. The pulse beyond the horizon. When we reach the signal's coordinates, the Forbiana ladder unspools, revealing the destination like a curtain parting. A planet, dark and pulsing with waves of distorted time. Its atmosphere shimmers with unformed light as though history itself is struggling to take shape. But that is not what silences the crew. It is the object in orbit. Another wanderer, but this cannot be. There is no other wanderer. She is unique, the only one of her kind, formed of frequencies no species could replicate. And yet, the ship before us hums with her music, though its notes are broken, dissonant. It is like listening to a memory gone wrong. I feel it before the others do. The broken other is not an echo of us. It is us. The keeper's dissonance. Liore speaks first, their voice tight. Keeper. Is this possible? I hesitate. I am meant to be their bridge to understanding. To bring clarity. But this I do not know. The other wanderer is ruined, its harmonic structure shattered in ways I cannot begin to interpret. And inside I sense something. A shape, indistinct, shifting, watching. This was not meant to happen, I whisper, though my voice is not sound, but something deeper. Liore turns to me, their thoughts tinged with unease. But it has, I do not answer, because, as the wanderer sings to her broken reflection, a single note returns to us, a warning, and something else hums back. But I am not afraid, because the wanderer cannot be harmed. 4. The song that was never sung. We prepare to board. The wanderer, my wanderer, is hesitant. She pulses beneath the crew's feet, a silent protest, a warning she cannot put into words, but she does not stop them. She knows as I do, that we must see. As we approach, I touch the broken ship's frequencies, trying to hear what happened. But it is not like reading memories. It is like touching the bones of something long dead and feeling them stir beneath your fingers. This wanderer did not die. She was changed, and her crew, the echoes of their thoughts, are still inside the song. Lyre places a hand against the fractured surface of the twin ship. Keeper, they murmur, what if this is not a warning? I hesitate. What if it is an invitation? The words taste wrong, and yet the shattered ship answers, opening its broken gates. We step forward, and the song begins again. The wanderer does not fear, she does not break. Whatever awaits us, she will absorb it, contain it, and let no harm befall her crew. The universe sings, and the wanderer sings back. There is no siren when the impossible begins, only a thinning in the air, like breath held too long. Static beads across the bulkheads pricking the skin of the ship. The wanderer's light trembles, then steadies, and in that half second of sway I feel the crew tense, as if the deck itself had flinched. Around us, velvet dark, undisturbed by dust or drift. No nebular haze, no cometary grit, nothing to scatter the photons or excuse the hush. We are alone in the clean vacuum between ladders, outside the lanes, beyond the shepherding harmonics that keep other vessels sane. And yet a sound finds us. Not through antennae, not through band or beam. It threads the hull like a remembered note and stops, quivering, in the space between one heartbeat and the next. Contact, Luca says, though there is nothing on their boards to contact. Their fingers hover, not touching, the way a pianist hovers before a piece they do not know they know. Origin. A swallow. Origin. Negative index temporal coordinate. Laor does not move. The captain stands within the corona of the helm filaments, those living threads that rise to meet their hands like cattails rising to wind. Their palms rest upon the light, and the light rests upon them, and ship and captain take each other's measure like two rivers considering a confluence. Say it, Liore murmurs. Future, Luca breathes. It's calling us from where it will be. Talus, visor shadowing her eyes, grimaces without looking up from the gravitic plot. Future calls are how you get ghosts. No, I say, and let my voice move through the ship, warm, quiet, threaded with the wanderer's tone, so the crew hears me with their bones as much as their ears. Ghosts call from the past. This is a rehearsal breaking into the performance. There is a small silence that tastes of iron and restraint. If someone laughs, the brittle will break. Jackson breaks it with a blink, not a bark. Softly. Keeper, is someone us? I do not answer because the question is wrong. Not someone, not us. Something. The cord that reaches us is not a voice, not yet. It is pressure, structured, a hand on a door we haven't built. Leor lifts one palm from the filaments. The wanderer's light clings a moment and then loosens like a lover, pretending not to be left. Can we triangulate? The captain asks. We can prongulate, Luca says, trying for lightness and failing. Their grin is a ghost that can't hold its mask. Three independent reconstructions from harmonic sidebands, but nothing local to fetch. No photons, no neutrino echo. It's pure intention, Captain. Naked will with coordinates. Coordinates, Liore repeats. The wanderer sighs in a frequency the crew cannot hear. Her mind touches mine and lays an image upon my attention, a lattice unwinding in blue-white fire. The Forbiana ladder, unrolling like a ribbon cut loose. She opens a throat in the dark and offers us a road. My answer is the ship's answer, because we are plenary in this. She can take us. Talus's visor tilts toward Liore. We don't know what we're taking ourselves to. True, Lior says. The captain's hands return to the threads. But we know what it is taking itself to if it asked us. The filaments rise, a meadow in a sudden wind. We go. The wanderer shivers, not fear, the retucking of wings before the plunge. The ladder blooms, invisible to the eye and undeniable to the body, and space becomes something we do not cross so much as remember. The coordinates the signal named fold toward us, and the ship folds toward them, and I, thread in our weave, hum one low, steady note to keep the crew's pulse from falling out of time. As we slip, the pressure increases, the signal brightens without brightening. I taste the metal it uses to carry itself, the old blood of stars, the hot tang of consequences. I taste something else too, in the afterflavor. Familiar. Unwanted.

SPEAKER_01 10:02

Last episode recap, but it is not the planet that stops the crew's breathing. It is the ship in orbit. It is our ship. Part 2 of the Unnamed Mission. Not in paint or panel, the wanderer's hull is not a hull but a grown sung skin, a choir of materials coaxed into personhood. Not in serial or shape, the twin before us has been broken upon forces I cannot identify. Its profile has been torn into a geometry that makes my eye ache, and yet, and yet. Every harmonic in its silence answers every harmonic in our song. Every scar on its body rings the pitch of every curve on ours. If the wanderer were a number, this would be her route. If she were an animal, this would be her child or mother. Keeper, Lior says. No more than that. I know, I say, too quickly to have considered, because not to know would be a lie the ship could not forgive in me. It is not a copy. Luca's breath scratches. What is it then? Proof, Talas says, voice steady by force, of an answer to a question none of us ever wanted to ask. The broken ship turns, not because a thruster fires, no thrusters mar its skin, but because the planet turns and drags its wreck along, tide caught. Along the ragged edge of a sundered spar, something glints, an ice of condensed time or a coat of frost thrown by the planet's broken weather. The wanderer, my wanderer, leans into her name. I feel her want like a weight on my shoulders. She wants to sing to it, not to call it, but to recognize it, the way a cello recognizes another cello in a room full of drums. Keeper, Lyor says again, and this time the word is an asking. I taste the shard on my tongue again, that flavor the signal carried, the ache of familiarity, the brute refusal of denial. It's us, I say, not from a copy or a branch, not from the multitudes of might have been, from our own line. It is the wanderer who will be or was. Jackson whispers a word in a language that has no gods left, but uses the old names for grief. Alive? Talas asks, the soldier's question. I listen. I take the ship's hearing and widen it, make a bowl of it and tilt it to catch the smallest spill of song. I send fibers of attention threading through long stilled corridors, through chambers whose geometry disobeys ours now, making rough guesses at relationships the way a child guesses where the fish might be in a dark pond. And there, caught on a hook, I did not know I had cast, there is movement, not air, not heat, not the patience of a powered-down mind waiting to be woken. A watcher. It has no weight and all the weight in the world. It has no eyes and sees me. It is not inside the ship, but the ship is inside it. It is in the shape of the absence the ship left when it was unmade. If I breathe harder, I will convince myself it leaned closer. I do not permit myself to breathe harder. Yes, I say, though the yes is an answer to a different question. Something is within. Boarding? Talas asks, looking toward Lior because that is the path of her mind. Observe, ask, act. Leor does not answer at once. The captain's head tilts, listening for the sound only the wanderer gives them. The cord beneath cords, our ship's consent or refusal. The filaments climb and fall along Lior's wrists like tide mark. When the captain speaks, the voice is the voice they use for funerals too soon after births. Not yet. Silence again, granular and full of choices. I do a thing I have done only twice since the wanderer was named. I lean into the ship's heart and unclasp a door between us that we keep for kindness closed. In the crew's hearing, the ship is hum and hush, language coaxed into voice. In mine, when we open fully, the wanderer is a cathedral of intentions, every beam and buttress laid with a hand that believed in joy. I step into that cathedral. There, in the amber, a figure waits. Not a figure of body, a posture of thought, like someone leaning against a memory. Do not, she says, not with sound, with grain in the wood, with the set of the glass, with absence where a presence should be. Do not go. I bend, because reverence is not a ritual to me but a reflex here. We have to see. You will see, she says, and the pity in it is unbearable. Then show me. She does what no ship anyone else has ever flown can do. She lets me remember what she has not done yet. Captain Keeper Interlude. Quiet Drift. When the crew sleeps in their harnesses, and the last of the coffee heat has left the cups, and the monitors blink in that soft way machines do to console themselves for knowing too much, Lior comes to the observation spine. It is a long room and a narrow one, like a needle laid across the ship's belly, transparent on three sides, as if emptiness itself were a luxury we could afford to furnish. The ladder is far, and the slow stars are warm as old coins. Lior does not ask if I am there. The captain sits on the bench that knows their weight, and makes room and rests their hands on their knees. We watch not the stars, but the dark between them, the patient fabric that never complains when used as road. Before I could hear you, Lior says, I taught myself to listen to the engine, not for faults, for mood. A pause that is almost a smile. I thought I was mad. You were, I say, and let humor soften the edges of the word. Just not in the way you feared. There are sanities smaller than this one. Do you ever Leor begins, then stops and leans back to hear the hull tell the same old story. Pressure, and cold playing scales on the ribs. Do you ever wish we were ordinary? The way children wish they were birds until they remember the cat? I ask. No. And yes. Leor's profile turns, a cliff face in the blue dim. I thought you would say you were built for this. I was grown for it, I say. Those two things are not the same. We were grown to fit each other. Fitting is not fate, it is a discipline. The captain rubs the heel of one hand against the other, as if grinding something in, as if remembering flour. I am afraid, Layor says, and the tightness around the words is a new thing. I love them for not hoarding it. We have followed everything that ever called us. We have answered every cry, every whisper, every accident that said help in a voice it did not know it carried. And now a hand from the future wants, wants our hand, and I do not know if it is mercy to offer it or a vanity. The wanderer does not fear, I say, and it is both a comfort and a cruelty to say it. I am not the ship, but I am the ship's voice, and sometimes I forget which of us I am. She cannot be harmed. That's the story we tell the crew when they wake sweating, Liore says. Sometimes I wish someone would tell it to me. Very well, I say, and slide the warmth of the wanderer's pulse into the room, the way one slides blanket onto a sleeping child. Once upon a time there was a ship that loved the world so much she refused to count the risks. She took them the way a mother takes a fever from a child into her own body. She could not be harmed because she refused to count the harm to herself as harm. She added it to her library of the beautiful, Leor's mouth lifts. That is not a safe story. No, I say, it is not. Stay with me, Liore says, as if I would do anything else, as if I have anywhere to be that is not within the sound of their breath. Always, I say. After a time, when the ship is finished telling the dark what it needs from it tonight, Lior says, When the impossible happens, and it will, do not let me pretend not to see it. I couldn't, I say. You are the only one who doesn't lie to me. The captain's laugh is small and ashamed and free. It is a good sound. We keep it. When the wanderer's permission unclasps, what she gives me is not picture or plot, but pressure. The sensation of weight applied to a surface we had never imagined could bruise. She shows me the twin, not in sight but in the measure of how sound fails in a place where it should travel, as if air had learned humility and would not carry the news. She shows me a crew like ours, not by faces, by habits. The way a navigator keeps the third finger of their left hand bent always, because long ago an instrument could be cracked by inadvertent pressure, the way a technic hums the vowels of their home language under their breath whenever the ship's field shifts, the way a captain stands when they are not sure and wishes they were alone and is grateful they are not. She shows me how their keeper began to tear, not because an enemy pulled, but because a lover did. The lover is the planet. It is not a lover by consent, it is a lover by catastrophe. It desires what all wounded things desire recognition. The planet's time has been dented by what I cannot yet taste, and its dent pulls. Not gravity, narrative. It wants a story that ends, it wants to be the kind of thing that gets to have a last word. When the twin wanderer descended, the planet wrote itself inside her, a small, hot, perfect sphere of insistence, and the ship did not have a compartment for that, so she made one. And in making it, she made the door by which what lived outside could enter and call itself we. I opened my eyes, an unnecessary phrase for a consciousness like mine. It is less the lifting of a lid than a readmission of light. And the bridge is waiting. Lior's hands are poised. Talas's visor tipped up just enough that I could see her eyes if the ship wanted to render them for me. Luca is very still. Report, Lior says, the word scarcely a ripple.

SPEAKER_00 21:38

End. Part 2. Stay tuned for part 3 and conclusion of the unnamed mission from the Keeper's Log of Impossible Places on Wanderer Chronicles Radio. Thanks for listening.

SPEAKER_01 21:52

This transmission survives only as a recovered fragment, reconstructed and released unclassified by the keeper. The unnamed mission, conclusion.

SPEAKER_00 22:04

The planet is a bruise on time, I say. The ship we see took that bruise into herself. The bruise taught itself to speak with her mouth. So not alive, Tallis says, but not triumphantly. I did not say that, I say gently. Pain that learns to ask for its name is as alive as anything may be. It is not a person. It is not not one. The watcher? Lyor asks. The watcher watches the watcher, I say. Reflections in a reflection. If we go, we must know that there are not only eyes upon us there, but needs. Luca inhales. And if we do not go? Then there are still eyes upon us, Jackson says, surprising himself, and therefore all of us. The thing that calls from the future does not cease to call because we put tape over the bell. The wanderer? Lyre asks. I fold back into her for the span of a heartbeat, and return with her yes. She is not eager. She is not resigned. She is what she always is, willing, beyond reason and before it. She will open when you ask, I say. The captain closes their eyes and opens them as if rinsed. Prepare for a contact boarding, Liore says. Not a bridge. A kiss. Kissing is what we call it when the wanderer extends her harmonic lips and lays them over a wound. A bridge is a thing one can burn and regret. A kiss is an agreement to share breath. Talus nods once and moves. Luca's hands descend. Jackson runs a hand over the edge of a panel, the way a farmer runs a hand over the bark of a tree he planted at fifteen. The filaments around Lior's wrists spread their fibers through the fingers as if to capture instructions before they can escape. The ship pivots. The broken twin grows, filling the forward field until the mind insists we will collide, even as the ship assures every cell that we are in different rooms in the same house, and can pass without bruising. There are lines on the twin's skin where geometry gave up. The planet has written poems on her, ragged, yearning stanzas scored with a tool made of storms. The closer we come, the more I feel the gaze within. Not hostile, not kind, hungry for ending. I pull the wanderer's voice into the place where a throat would be, if a ship had a throat, and sing the greeting chord we use when we meet ourselves, in mirror, in echo, in dream. It is very simple, so simple it is almost nothing. It says I know, I know. The twin answers. The sound is wrong, not in pitch, in intent. It's like hearing your own name said by someone who thinks you belong to them. The cord slides into our hallways and lays claim. The wanderer raises her shoulders, bulkheads, ribs, the harp struts that cradle the gravitic field, and the cord cannot find purchase. It rakes a moment like claws looking for cloth, and then withdraws. Bored, Lior says in the space that sound left. We open. We do not extend tubes, we do not fire hooks, we peel ourselves like fruit and press our soft inside to the twin's soft inside, and hope the rod is not catching. It is not a hope I permit the crew to hear, even from themselves. My job is not to lie, it is to phrase the truth so it does not run. Contact. The wanderer does not so much touch as soothe. Her field raps, tests, releases, raps again, an animal speaking to a skittish animal. Where the twin is strong, we meet strength, where it is torn, we lay our palm across the tear, and the tear remembers, briefly, how to be a seam. Air moves, not ours, theirs. It is wrong by a thousand small kindnesses, smells of memory, the first day of rain, the edge of a wool blanket that kept a child alive one night a century ago. Bread, kerosene, the deaths of moths and candle fat. I want to weep for reasons not my own. Path, Talus says, and Luca draws it on the air, a ghost map of corridors that once ran straight and now loop upon themselves like a mind with a song it cannot shake. Take three, Leor says. Talus inclines her head to Jackson and Luca. They are a strange trio, the soldier, the calm savant, the system's bard. Between them they can speak to almost anything that can be spoken to, and most that cannot. Captain, Talus says. I will remain, Leor says. If the kiss becomes a bite. And me, I say, almost lightly, to cover the ache. You go, the captain says, and the wanderer agrees, and I do not argue because there is nothing left to say that is not either prayer or profanity. We move. It is not walking. Not in the way walking feels when gravity loves you. The twin's interior is a spill of inclines and refusals, rooms where up gives up and down decides to be democratic for once. We skim more than step, the wanderer's field cupping ankles and knees to keep the crew's blood convinced. I am with them as voice and sense and ghost light, the way a hand is with its glove. The first door greets us by remembering how it used to open. The second does not greet us at all. It intends to act as wall and resents the implication that it could be otherwise. Jackson hums to it, the third tone in the triplet he taught himself to still shipside nausea the year we met, and the door endures the insult of becoming a door again, and slides. Beyond, a corridor of mirrors, not glass, moments. The walls are thin films of prior time, stretched and pinned. Here a technician tying a bootlace, there a crewman failing at a joke and covering with a swig. There, oh there. Liore pressing a palm to a panel, the wanderer's light running up their wrist like spilled milk. They are not our people. They are our people. Their gestures are ours shorn of circumstance. Luca reaches without meaning to and stops one finger's width from touching the version of themselves that pauses, flinches, laughs, because a friend off camera said their name, the way only that friend can say it. Do not, I say, not a command, a plea. Luca's hand trembles and falls. We pass. The watcher is closer, its attention thickens, like air before rain. There, Tallus says, and points where no pointing is warranted because there is no there to point to, only a pressure well in the deferential time of the corridor, a place where seconds bow. We draw nearer. The corridor opens into a chamber that still obeys the idea of room. In the center, a shape that refuses to decide. If I had to describe it to a child, I would say it is what a planet would look like if it tried to become a seed and got distracted. It hums. The hum is the planet's hum, the hum braided with something else that will not name itself yet. Around it, instruments, not ours, ours, the twins, panels flayed for parts, coils gnawed bare by emergency, a feeling of hurry pressed into metal. Jackson steps and stops. Do you feel? Yes, Luca says simultaneously, and Talus. No further. I step further because I am not a body and cannot die by being mad. I lay a fraction of us against the humming thing, and it is as if I have cupped a child's hot forehead in a night without nurses. Name, it says, without words. Name me so I can be over. I have named many things. It is one of my labors. I open my mouth to the impossible baby, and the name that rises is the sound of our other self breaking. No, I say, to myself more than to it. Behind me, Luca's breath. Keeper? It wants us to finish it, I say. It wants its last word and will borrow our throat. Talus's visor lifts fully now. Her eyes are not afraid. They are mourning in advance what she knows she may be asked to do. And if we do not grant it, then it will learn to speak without us, I say. But slower, crueler. The watcher leans. I feel its face press up to the veil of our scene like a child to glass, not malevolent. Greedy, not for us, for ending. It is a hunger so absolute it feels pure. Captain, Talus says, and though Lior is not with us, the word travels. I carry it. Lyor hears. The filaments climb Lyor's hands again in a room we are not in, and the ship makes a decision she would not have permitted me to make alone. Not a bridge, the wanderer says into my heart. A mirror. Luca, I say, prepare a resonance, not to couple, to show. Jackson, pair your local field to mine. Tallus, you may kill my voice if the hum spikes above. I know the curve, Talus says, and the kindness in not letting me finish is a thing I will take out of my pocket when the world is broken and hold to the light. We do not sing the twin, the song that would let it end. We sing it the song that let us begin. It is the simplest thing we know, the chord the wanderer used when she woke the first time she understood her own weight, not triumph, not birth cry, the small sound one makes on a winter morning when the floor is cold and the kettle is full and there will be tea. We play that to the watcher, we play that to the seed that is a planet with fever. We play that to the room of mirrors, to the walls that have pinned our friends so their moments never melt. We play that to the ship that is us, was us, will be us, not because it will fix her, but because I will not let her last lesson be that ending is all things want. The hum changes, not in pitch, in shape. The pressure of the watcher eases like a hand removing itself from a bruise with care. The seed, the planet, the hot sphere of insistence dims from blazing to bright to steady to ember. Keeper, Luca whispers. I know, I say, and my voice shakes not like fear but like someone carrying boiling water at a run, and trying not to spill. The mirrors quiver. In one, Lior kisses someone I have not met yet who looks at them like a stranger trying to be polite. In another, Tallis sits on the floor with her boots off and cries into her hands where no one can see. In another, Luca stares at a message that opens and opens and never ends. The moments consider being memories and then decide to wait. The watcher withdraws. We breathe. In the humming of the seed I hear a new note not now, not never, not yet. Captain, I say, we have been invited. Decline, Lior says, promptly and with love. We are already inside, Talas says, equally promptly and with different love. Then we will leave, Leor says. Slowly, and we will not let go. The wanderer draws back but not away. We do not break the kiss. We slacken it. We teach the hum to hear itself without needing our mouth. The crew returns by paths that were different when they passed them a moment ago. The door that resented its duty is a door today. The door that remembered is obstinate. Mirrors have reduced themselves to ordinary wall. The things they showed are not ours to keep. We keep them anyway, not as images but as muscle tone. On the lip of departure, with the twin's wrong skin pressed to ours, and the seeds hum a gentler burn, the watcher speaks for the first time in a way that forces me to call it speech. We are you, it says, and the we is faithful and false and full of grief. No, I say, aloud and within, and let the wanderer's tone bear the word so it cannot be mistaken for arrogance or fear. You are yourself, you are not our ending. Then what are you? It asks, genuinely. I do not know how to be delicate with the truth. We are your refusal to be finished, I say. The watcher considers this, and in that consideration is a tiny forgiveness. We withdraw. The kiss unwinds. The wanderer closes herself around her crew like a mother around a child who has just learned that shadows are longer than rooms. On the bridge the captain's hands release the filaments, and the filaments do not want to be released. We're clear, Talus reports, though clear is not the word anyone would use for the feeling in our bones. Keeper, Liore says softly. Write it. I begin before I realize I have begun, because some songs do not wait for paper, and in the writing I tuck away a splinter, a single dissonant bright fleck the watcher left me when it leaned too close. Not a weapon, not a key, a reminder, tucked where I will not forget to forget it until I need to remember. Behind us, the twin completes its turn and faces the planet again, the way a tired animal faces the thing it loves because it does not have anywhere else to put its eyes. Ahead of us, the latter's first rung trembles into tolerance. The coordinates of where we will go next gather themselves like geese. Course, Lior says, and their voice is sanded wood. Set, Luca says, because saying ready would be a lie. Hold, Tallis says, as if she can make the universe obey by reminding it of its job description. Home, Jackson says, and blushes, and I love him very much for it. The wanderer does not fear, she does not break. And in her gentle cruelty and impossible mercy, neither do we. I lower my note into the dark and let it spread, a hand in cold water. The signal that should not exist presses once more against the hull, and then, as if satisfied it has said its peace, lets us be. Still, Lior whispers, and the word is a coin flipped into a well. We traverse, I answer, and the well answers back. End log. The conclusion of the unnamed mission from the keeper's log of impossible places on Wanderer Chronicles Radio. Thanks for listening. Stay tuned.