The frame was routine—the seventeenth in a monitoring series of the interstellar anomaly 3I/ATLAS. Then, in the eighteenth, it was there: a sharp, silver point of light, holding a perfect formation off the object’s dark flank. It hadn’t entered the frame. It manifested.
For precisely 3.82 seconds, it moved, tracing a graceful, impossible arc around the visitor, not like a natural fragment, but like a dragonfly orbiting a lily pad. Its path was a geometric correction, a silent conversation with the laws of momentum. Then, between the eighteenth and nineteenth frames—in the zero-time of the sensor’s blink—it ceased to exist. It didn’t streak away.
It didn’t fade. It was simply deleted from reality. The control room’s silence broke not with gasps, but with the hollow sound of a single coffee mug shattering on the floor. The data was undeniable: something had not just been near 3I/ATLAS. Something had, for four heartbeats, activated. And then, its business concluded, it turned itself off. The visitor was never alone. It was just the only part of the machine we could see.
