Episode 10: Echoes of the Pioneers

The Vanishing Neighbor and Invisible Monitoring

5 April 2301, 22h30 — XE-1 Residential Sector 7

After the Mars Unity Festival ends, Vera leaves the central commercial district alone, heading to visit her neighbor Wanda — a Polish woman she grew close to during the Pioneer-12 journey. Wanda had been an assistant pilot in the EU military air force before choosing to leave it all behind and migrate to Mars. On Pioneer-12, she was one of the happiest people Vera knew — always talking about music, Mars, and new beginnings.

But Wanda’s door does not open. Vera checks the residential directory. Wanda’s registration is still active. She waits, knocks again, checks her messages. Nothing. Eventually she manages to look into the apartment through a maintenance access panel she was not supposed to find. The apartment has been cleared — not packed up, not moved out properly, simply emptied. The furniture is gone. The walls are bare. No note. No forwarding address.

Vera contacts Firo and Seb. They come immediately. Seb runs a scan of the residential unit’s security logs. That is when he finds it: a micro surveillance camera, installed inside one of the wall fittings, so small it would be invisible to a casual inspection. It constantly adjusts its own transmission wave field to avoid standard scanners. Firo examines it carefully. “This wasn’t installed recently,” he says. “It has probably been here for a long time.”

They pull Wanda’s official migration file. Everything looks normal until near the end: a section has been forcibly overwritten, leaving only one short system line. STATUS TRANSFERRED. No destination. No authorization code. No department signature. Vera leans back in her chair. “So now we have a missing neighbor. A highly advanced spy camera. And a partially erased migration file.” Seb adds quietly: “And it happened while the entire city was focused on the festival.” Tonight’s Mars Unity Festival, they all realize, may not have been only a celebration.