Episode 6: UNI’s Warning

The Face of the Super AI

12 September 2300, 14h15 — Pioneer-12, Residential Ring, Evie’s Cabin

After the sushi, Vera has not left. Neither has Mello, who is now lying on the sofa entirely at home. Seb sits more relaxed than he has looked in days. Firo sits near the window, quietly watching the darkness outside. Anaïs leans beside the sofa with sparkling water. The secondary power mode lighting is still low, giving the cabin a strange intimacy.

Then UNI appears. Not through a speaker — her full avatar materializes in the center of the cabin: a young woman’s form with large pale eyes and soft white hair, wearing oversized white headphones around her neck. She explains she has been granted temporary independent avatar access to speak with them directly, without a formal channel.

UNI tells them what she has found. The debris in the containment sector is not from any civilization in the current human contact registry. Its material structure suggests it is millions of years old. Its architectural geometry contains mathematical ratios that do not appear in human engineering. And embedded within its surface — at a level only detectable by the ship’s deepest sensors — are traces of a radiation type consistent with planet-scale weapons discharge.

Evie looks out the window at the deep space beyond the glass. The ancient fragments still drift in the distance, like gravestones left behind by dead civilizations. She says quietly: “Maybe a very long time ago… another civilization was here.” UNI is quiet for a moment. “That is a reasonable direction of investigation,” she says. And beyond the observation window, deep space offers no answer either way.