She double-checked the读数. Then triple-checked.
“That’s not possible,” whispered her colleague, Dr. James Okonkwo, peering over her shoulder. “The Moon’s supposed to have a small iron core, maybe some partial melt. This… this is structured.”
Elara wept inside her helmet. Not from fear, but from the sudden, vertiginous understanding that humanity had never been alone—and had never been the主人 of its own sky.
For exactly seventeen minutes after the meteor strike, low-frequency vibrations echoed through the lunar interior—not the chaotic jumble of cracks and echoes expected from a solid body, but clean, harmonic frequencies. As if the Moon were a hollow sphere with an inner shell.
Elara was chosen to lead the first descent. As her capsule dropped through the borehole and into the cavern, her helmet lights illuminated a landscape of impossible engineering: arching ribs of a metal no spectrometer could identify, vast conduits pulsing with residual energy, and at the cavern’s center—a dais. On it rested a single object: a translucent sphere the size of a fist, glowing with captured starlight.
Not natural. Not human.