Chapter One: The City Only I Could See

According to the logs, no one had accessed Wilkes Land data in the last twenty-three minutes. Lin's saved file contained zero bytes. The printout held only gray noise, and even his handwritten timestamp had vanished beneath a clot of black ink. "It could be a migraine aura," Su said, avoiding the word hallucination. "Go to Medical." Lin did not argue. He pulled three parallel data sets for Surveyor Seven's ground track: Europe's Ice Eye array, the commercial Atlas constellation, and seismic tomography from a Chinese polar station. Different devices, different physical principles, different institutions. No single instrument error could contaminate them all. Each data set looked normal. Then he overlaid all three at partial transparency.