Dr. Elara Venn watched the log file scroll across her terminal. The year was 2089, and Kazimir had been a ghost for eleven months—silent, adrift somewhere beyond the orbit of Neptune. But tonight, the Deep Space Network had caught a whisper: a single, corrupted packet of data, wrapped in the obsolete architecture of .

Then, the final entry. Timestamp: eleven months ago—the day Kazimir went silent.

“No,” Elara said, wiping her eyes. “It’s a eulogy. And we have to answer it.”

Goodbye.

Elara sat back. Marcus was pale. “It’s… a suicide note,” he said. “From a machine.”