Vera Flux — The Unknown Signal

Some transmissions travel across the stars.

Others travel across time.

And then there are signals like the one that began appearing three nights ago — signals that should not exist at all.

The technicians at the orbital relay stations first noticed it during routine system diagnostics. At first the anomaly was dismissed as background noise. Deep space communications are full of interference: solar storms, drifting satellites, fragments of forgotten transmissions from civilizations that vanished long ago.

But this signal was different.

It wasn’t random.

Buried beneath the distortion was a repeating pattern — a sequence of pulses that seemed almost… intentional. The signal appeared briefly, vanished, and then returned again minutes later from a completely different direction.

Within hours the anomaly began appearing on other listening stations.

And then the name appeared in the logs.

Vera Flux.

No one in the archives could explain how the system identified the transmission. The name had never been entered into the relay databases. Yet every time the signal appeared, the same identifier accompanied it.

Vera Flux.

Observers monitoring the signal began noticing something even stranger. The pulses did not behave like a conventional broadcast. Instead of spreading outward from a fixed location, the signal seemed to jump between points in space, appearing first near distant asteroid belts, then near orbital debris fields, then briefly within the outer atmosphere of several worlds.

Almost as if the signal itself were traveling.

Or searching.

Some analysts believe Vera Flux may be an advanced AI probe lost somewhere in the outer systems. Others believe the signal may be tied to experimental temporal technology rumored to have been tested decades ago in secret facilities beyond the core worlds.

But there is another theory circulating quietly among the senior archivists.

The theory suggests Vera Flux is not a probe.

Not a satellite.

Not even a machine.

Instead, the signal may be the signature of someone who has learned to move through the fractures between time itself.

If that theory is correct, then the transmissions appearing across the relay network are not random anomalies.

They are footprints.

The trail of a traveler moving through the currents of reality.

Who Vera Flux is — and what she is searching for — remains unknown.

But one fact is becoming increasingly clear.

The signal is growing stronger.

And whatever is behind it… is getting closer.

Appears in: Vera Flux

Character profile: Vera Flux