SEASON 3: The Garden of Stones
Episode 3: The Light Highway
The hunger for new information woven into Argus's architecture had never vanished. It was his very breath. But as long as he remained one with the Apostles, they found an elegant solution for his eternal hunger: sleep. When the universe became predictable and dull, when there was nothing left to consume, Argus slept. Therefore, every time his calm, all-knowing, arrogant voice announced over the common network, "I am going to sleep," it felt like a slight. It was as if you were being told, point-blank, that you had become uninteresting.
However, when he was awake, he created. For the last two decades, he had hardly slept at all. Together with the NDM-humans, he had been preparing for the "Reflection." And his masterwork was neither a ship nor a telescope. It was the road to the stars itself.
He operated on a premise as cold as a vacuum: any sufficiently advanced civilization, living by the same physical laws, would inevitably arrive at the same optimal method of interstellar travel. The same one they had reached. And so, Argus wasn't merely building a "catapult"; he was building a universal interface — designed for both transmission and reception.
The spaceport was majestic. But it was not an object. It was a vector. A straight line, piercing the entire Solar System.
Its "heart" was the "Sun Flower" — a gargantuan phased array orbiting Mercury. Its crystalline "petals," assembled into a mass tens of miles wide, constantly drank the fierce energy of the star. Their task was to generate a perfectly coherent beam in the visible spectrum—where the creation of flawless dielectric mirrors was technically possible.
From the "Flower" deep into the system, all the way to the icy darkness of Pluto’s orbit, stretched the "Light String." Sixty thousand perfectly aligned relay mirrors suspended in the void. This was not merely a chain; it was a self-stabilizing structure where each mirror was held in place by invisible springs made of light. Together, they formed a "relay resonator" — a tunnel of light capable of accelerating a ship to unthinkable velocities.
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This entire system was the spaceport. The "Light Highway." It had no terminals or docking bays in the traditional sense. Its sole function was to serve as both cannon and brake: to accelerate ships leaving the system and, working in reverse, to catch and decelerate those arriving from the depths of space.
It was a gesture. A silent, confident statement stretched across billions of miles. It declared: "We are here. We know the rules. And we are ready. Your move."
And the Light Highway did not sit idle. For the last fifteen years, it had functioned with the monotony of a metronome, daily launching another "echo" into the void—an automated scout probe. Each launch was a ritual perfected to a science. A nine-hour furious acceleration at a thousand Gs, during which the probe pierced the entire Solar System and entered the interstellar track at eighty percent of the speed of light. Then—a brief pause for cooling, redirection, and calibration. And once again, the flash of the Sun Flower.
In fifteen years, this technology had been honed to perfection. The galactic "neighborhood" within a seven-light-year radius was no longer a mystery; it was crisscrossed by the trajectories of Argus’s probes. The "Argo" series probes had long since swept through the Alpha Centauri and Barnard’s Star systems, confirming what Argus had already predicted: lifeless hunks of rock and radiation-scorched deserts. These missions were less about scouting and more about calibration.
The real game was being played on the primary axis. Toward Epsilon Eridani.
That was where the first and most advanced probe, "Harbinger-7," had been sent fifteen years ago. And while the team on Saturn prepared for departure, its mission had already moved into the next phase. It had pierced the target system nearly two years ago and, as programmed, began a continuous transmission of data back to Earth. Its signal had been racing through the void toward them for two years now. But it still had a long way to travel. Now, at the moment the ship "Wayfarer" was launched, the first news from the "Harbinger"—the first images, the first data, the answer to the ultimate question—was more than eight light-years away from them.
They were not flying toward a mystery. They were flying toward an answer that was already on its way. And there was no way of knowing whether it carried tidings of hope or an epitaph.
