I clicked the ad because I was tired, a little drunk, and starting to suspect my body was keeping secrets from me.

  Forty-something. Living alone. A middle manager at a small pharma company that loved to talk about “work-life balance” and then sent me home after midnight. I had people under me now—names on org charts, metrics on spreadsheets—but the benefits were still cheap, the annual checkups were still bare-minimum, and every year the quiet worry in my chest piled up a little higher.

  That night I came back to my rented 2LDK, kicked off my shoes, and poured myself a late drink to celebrate the fact that tomorrow was a day off. I opened my laptop and wandered through the internet the way you do when you don’t want to think.

  That was when the carrier-mail ad caught my eye.

  A DNA screening service. The kind I’d hovered over before and talked myself out of.

  The copy was aggressively technical, the way bad marketing always is when it’s trying to sound like science:

  “Latest hybrid silicon nanopore next-next generation sequencer. Lifestyle disease factors, cancer-related genes, cause analysis, personalized health advice.”

  I looked it up. It was a new service from my mobile provider—the same giant that had made a killing during the adenovirus panic a few years back. Their pandemic app division had run out of plague, so they’d found something else to sell.

  Compared to competitors, it was cheap. Cheap enough that the alcohol in my system made the decision for me.

  One tap. Order confirmed.

  The kit arrived the next day.

  A glossy pamphlet. A contract printed in microscopic font, packed edge-to-edge like it was trying to hide in plain sight. A little tube, a tiny scraper, and a return envelope.

  Swab the inside of your cheek. Put the sample in the tube. Mail it back.

  I did it on autopilot, like I was sending off a warranty card. The results, the site promised, would show up online within a month, with a paper copy mailed afterward.

  Then Monday hit and my life went back to normal.

  Normal lasted until my phone rang in the middle of an analysis report.

  “Excuse me,” a young woman said, voice smooth enough to be practiced. “This is Haramatsu from Nine Gene Incorporated. Am I speaking with Mr. Hoshino?”

  “Yes. That’s me.”

  Nine Gene. The DNA screening company. My hand paused over the keyboard.

  “What’s this about?”

  “I’m calling because your genome sequence contains an extremely rare pattern,” she said. “A special one. We would like to ask for your cooperation in our research. Of course, we will provide substantial compensation.”

  My eyebrows drew together. “Compensation as in… a clinical trial? I’m not being used as a lab rat, right?”

  I kept the phone to my ear and walked out of the open office, past startled coworkers, and down the stairs until I reached the building’s side entrance. The cold air hit my face and steadied me.

  “No,” Haramatsu said, calm as a surgeon. “For a more detailed analysis, we would ask for a blood draw. Beyond that—no surgery, no devices that might affect the body. Nothing invasive. Please do not worry.”

  I didn’t feel special. I’d never felt special. Average university. Average job. A life that flowed along the channels it was given.

  Haramatsu continued, polite apologies wrapped around a pitch, and then she named a number.

  It was more than my annual salary.

  I actually loosened my grip on the phone, fingers going numb, like my body had decided dropping it was safer than believing what I’d heard.

  “If you come to our office, we’ll cover travel costs as well,” she added. “Please consider it an introduction.”

  I agreed before my brain fully caught up. I set an appointment. I hung up. Then I stood outside in the wind, staring at the pavement, wondering what kind of scam had enough budget to sound that real.

  On the day of the appointment I left work early and headed to Nine Gene’s headquarters.

  It sat on the upper floors of a recently built high-rise near the government district—glass and steel, the kind of building that looked like it had never known dust.

  On the appointed floor, a receptionist waited.

  Not a person.

  A high-definition 3D projection, perfect down to eyelashes that didn’t need to blink.

  “I’m Hoshino,” I told the image. “I have an appointment with Haramatsu.”

  A fluent synthetic voice told me to wait in the lobby.

  I sat in a chair designed by someone who hated spines. Minutes dragged. The door deeper inside the office opened, and a woman stepped out.

  Age was hard to pin down. Late twenties? Mid-thirties? Older, with work done? She carried herself like the question didn’t matter.

  Her suit was deep navy, sharp enough to cut. She wore it the way some people wore a uniform: as proof that she belonged in rooms other people feared.

  “Mr. Hoshino,” she said. “I am Haramatsu.”

  She offered me two business cards.

  Both read Haramatsu Yomiko.

  One card bore Nine Gene’s logo.

  The other carried a government seal: Ministry of Science and Technology.

  I looked up at her. “You’re… government?”

  “Yes.” Her smile held no warmth, but no threat either. “I am on assignment to Nine Gene. It relates to why you’re here. This way, please.”

  She led me into a conference room with a sleek, almost theatrical design—frosted glass, embedded lighting, surfaces too clean. On the table sat a portable speaker.

  Haramatsu tapped her phone and connected it. Then she pressed play.

  Static.

  And under the static, a sound like a flute trying to sing through a wall.

  The instant it hit my ears, the room changed.

  I wasn’t in a conference room anymore.

  A metal dome stretched overhead, curved panels cold and dull. The air felt wrong—thin, dry, like the inside of a sealed machine. In front of me stood a girl with gold hair and slightly pointed ears. She wore a silver suit that clung like a wetsuit, built for vacuum and speed. She smiled at me, mouth forming the beginning of a song—

  The audio cut.

  The dome vanished.

  I jerked in my chair, breath catching, vision snapping back to the conference room’s perfect geometry.

  “What…?”

  Haramatsu watched me like a cat watching a mouse test the edge of a trap. “You saw something.”

  “Yes.” My throat felt scraped raw. I forced words out. “I’ve… had things like that, rarely. Daydreams that turn too real, triggered by something. My mother’s great-grandmother was from Tohoku—an itako, or something like it. A shaman. I always figured it was… that. Family stories.”

  I hadn’t meant to spill it all. It poured out anyway.

  Haramatsu listened, head slightly tilted, as if my confession was a lecture she’d heard before.

  “It may be related,” she said. “Please look at this.”

  She pressed a remote. The frosted glass wall became a display, projecting crisp computer graphics: a lineup of human chromosomes, stylized like interlocking columns.

  “A schematic. Chromosomes one through twenty-two.”

  “I’ve seen this in textbooks.”

  “Focus here.” She gestured, and a pointer appeared, highlighting a segment that blinked steadily. “Do you know that modern humans, Homo sapiens, interbred with other branches of sapiens as we spread out of Africa?”

  “Neanderthals. Denisovans.”

  “Yes. And there are traces of at least one more sapiens lineage we have not found fossils for. This segment is one of those traces. It appears—very rarely—in Europeans and in northern Mongoloid lineages, including Japanese. You are one of the carriers.”

  I stared at the blinking segment like it might blink my life apart.

  “We call that lineage, for convenience, the Number Niners,” Haramatsu said. “And as we studied it, we began to understand that they possessed an unusual ability. A form of synesthesia. Certain sounds produce vivid imagery.”

  “So the audio—”

  “Yes. When you heard that signal, your brain reconstructed an image. The clarity you described is… exceptional.” For the first time, her composure cracked with something like excitement. “We will not know until we examine your full sequence, but you may have a near-complete ‘transmission region’—a genetic cluster that enables this effect.”

  My gaze drifted back to the chromosome schematic. Counting from the long first chromosome… two, three… the highlighted area sat on chromosome nine.

  Number Nine.

  Haramatsu continued. “We study the relationship between the signal and the imagery it evokes. You are necessary to that research. Please consider a contract with us.”

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  “What does that mean in practical terms?” I asked. “Where would I go? For how long?”

  “We have a laboratory in Academy City. We would like at least three months of your time. In addition to the compensation mentioned on the phone, we will provide a monthly furnished apartment, meals at the facility, and a daily stipend.”

  Three months. This wasn’t some weekend study. This was my life being picked up and moved.

  “I need to talk to my supervisor,” I said. “I have responsibilities.”

  “Of course.” Haramatsu’s lips curved, slow and deliberate, in a smile that felt like it belonged in a different story. “Take your time.”

  She explained conditions in fine detail. Then she walked me to a small room that looked like a clinic. I signed documents about privacy and secrecy. A nurse drew my blood. I left with cotton pressed to my arm and questions pressed to my skull.

  The next day at work, I kept rehearsing ways to bring it up to my boss.

  I didn’t get the chance.

  He called me into his office before lunch, scratching his head like he’d found a weird bug on his desk.

  “Hoshino,” he said, “I don’t know what you did, but I got told you’re being seconded to Academy City starting next week. Direct order from above.”

  “What?”

  He slid a single sheet of paper across the desk.

  A transfer order. Official. Cold. And attached to it, a description of duties that matched Haramatsu’s offer almost word for word.

  My skin went damp.

  Government, she’d said. I’d believed it in a vague way, like people believe a logo. Now it had teeth.

  I hadn’t entered my workplace into the DNA service. I was sure of that. So how had they reached into my company and moved me like a file in a cabinet?

  Carrier contract details. Personal data. Ministry power. Or something worse.

  The rumor mill had been whispering for years about a Japanese version of the CIA—some new agency with a polite name and no public face. My imagination latched onto it and refused to let go.

  Running felt pointless. And, sick as it was, I was curious.

  I emailed Haramatsu: I accept.

  The reply came almost immediately.

  A brief thank you. A cheerful “looking forward to working with you next week.”

  Academy City was about an hour away on a line that had opened a decade earlier. I’d been there before on sales trips. I knew the stations, the streets, the rhythm.

  That was why I told Haramatsu I didn’t need someone to meet me.

  Then I got off the bus at the edge of the city and stared up at the gate.

  Japan Aerospace Science Agency. JASA.

  A research campus with security that took itself seriously.

  A guard checked my ID and pointed me toward a building tucked farther in, half hidden behind newer construction. The air smelled faintly of disinfectant and machine oil.

  At the entrance, Haramatsu waited with a man in silver-rimmed glasses, hair peppered with gray. He looked like every stereotype of a senior researcher who lived on caffeine and stubbornness.

  “Welcome,” Haramatsu said. “This way.”

  A card key landed in my palm. We went inside. The interior was fresh and sharp, like it had been built yesterday. The conference room they led me to was disturbingly similar to the one at Nine Gene headquarters.

  I couldn’t keep it in. “Why does your lab sit inside JASA?”

  The man with the glasses answered before Haramatsu could.

  “I’ll explain,” he said, and offered his business card. The JASA emblem. Researcher. Tanaka Jiro.

  He watched me read it, then asked, “Do you remember the ‘Uwaa!’ signal? It made the news a few years ago.”

  I did. A burst of radio noise that some professor had hyped as possibly alien, and then nobody could repeat it. Internet articles, conspiracy threads, half-laughed jokes.

  “The one that might’ve been extraterrestrial?” I said. “They couldn’t find the source, right?”

  Tanaka’s mouth pulled into a small, satisfied grin. “That’s the public version.”

  “So the real version is different.”

  “Yes. The source has already been identified.” He leaned forward slightly. “A moon of the Ninth Planet.”

  “The Ninth Planet,” I repeated. “Not Pluto.”

  “Pluto is a dwarf planet now. This one hasn’t been announced publicly. A body roughly Neptune-sized, on an extreme elliptical orbit, taking about twenty thousand years to circle the sun. The data fits prior predictions.”

  My mouth went dry. “And something on its moon sent the signal.”

  “Not necessarily ‘something’ in the cinematic sense,” Tanaka said. “But there is an emitter. A device, or a system. When we recognized the transmission as artificial, a classified international project formed. We have been working since.”

  Haramatsu took over, voice silk over steel. “What we received resembled an old menu screen from early computer networks. Like the ones that used phone lines.”

  “You mean the beeping modem stuff.”

  “Similar. The modulation was ordinary enough that the project panicked at first—worried another nation had slipped a probe in under our noses.” Tanaka said it like it had been a lively dinner conversation. “But the character encoding didn’t match any human standard. We responded anyway.”

  “And it responded back,” Haramatsu said. “Like there was a server waiting, running endlessly, listening.”

  Tanaka nodded. “We tried commands. We tested patterns. Then one command triggered a flood—an absurdly dense transmission. Compared to the earlier signal, it was like comparing dial-up to fiber.”

  They spoke like engineers describing a new router.

  “And when you decoded it?” I asked.

  Tanaka’s grin faded. “We decoded it. We didn’t understand it.”

  He looked to Haramatsu. She gave a short nod.

  “I happened to walk past a lab where they were converting the data into audio for analysis,” Haramatsu said. “When I heard it… I understood.”

  “Because you can see images.”

  “Yes.” She didn’t bother denying it. “Not as clearly as you, I suspect. But my family is also from Tohoku. That suggests we are, distantly, related.”

  Tanaka cleared his throat, as if the idea of bloodlines irritated him.

  “Mr. Hoshino,” he said, “we can’t tell you everything. Bias affects results. But the Ninth Planet continues to transmit. Your job is simple: listen. Tell us what you see.”

  It was the same trick as in the Nine Gene office. Only now it was weaponized by an agency with rockets.

  Tanaka stood. “We’ve confirmed several carriers of the transmission region. They’re working separately. You won’t meet them. Now—this way.”

  They led me into a room that looked like a small recording studio. Soundproofing on the walls. A thick glass window. Equipment racks that hummed softly.

  Tanaka handed me headphones.

  Haramatsu’s voice came through a mic from behind the glass. “We are starting.”

  The moment the first warped tone hit my ears, the studio fell away.

  And the image came.

  Days blurred into routine.

  Academy City. A furnished apartment that still smelled new. Shuttle to the JASA lab. The studio. The headphones. The signal.

  Sometimes I spoke into a recorder while a stenographer captured it. Sometimes they shoved paper at me and told me to draw. I painted as a hobby—oils, mostly—so my hands obeyed. Domes. Corridors. Machines that looked grown instead of built. Faces that clung to me long after the sessions ended.

  Haramatsu and Tanaka picked over my sketches with the intensity of people dissecting a bomb. Their arguments were technical, but the hunger underneath was simple: prove the universe wasn’t empty.

  The images weren’t just images. Meaning came preloaded, like subtitles burned into the footage. Worse—emotion came bundled with it. Grief. Joy. Panic. None of it mine, and my body still reacted: sweat on my palms, throat tight, heat behind my eyes.

  Tanaka floated theories—tagging mechanisms, compression tricks. I stopped caring what he called it. When the signal played, I didn’t watch.

  I lived.

  Over time, a pattern emerged.

  The signal wasn’t random. It was a record—an old record—organized like a diary. A single man’s point of view, capturing what happened to the Number Niners.

  When the “chapters” finally lined up in my head, the story inside them was simple.

  And brutal.

  I was standing—behind his eyes—before a thing in a clear tank.

  It was huge. Muscle and fin and slow, careful tentacles, like someone had spliced a deep?sea fish with an octopus and then taught it patience.

  It “spoke.”

  Sound first—warped tones, layered like music—and my brain did the rest. Images arrived preassembled, meaning welded to them so tightly it hurt.

  Tanaka later called the creature a “Dagonite,” a placeholder borrowed from an old sea god. In the vision it felt less like a monster and more like a teacher trapped behind glass.

  A planet unfolded: blue-striped, all ocean, no continents. A super?Earth under a tired star. The Dagonites had grown up in pressure and darkness.

  Then the ocean soured. Dead zones spread. Heat shifted. Something in the planet’s balance snapped, and the images carried a clean, metallic panic.

  They built a ship and crossed interstellar night.

  They reached our system and anchored a base on a moon of the Ninth Planet.

  But there were too few of them. Keeping an outpost alive was one thing. Expanding it was another. So they looked inward and found Earth.

  Not cities. Not us.

  Older humans. Upright, tool-using—close enough to be shaped.

  They took them.

  They changed them.

  And they made the Number Niners.

  Artificial people, pushed along an accelerated track and built for labor. Close enough to modern humans that my brain kept insisting “human,” but different in the places that mattered. The Dagonites grafted in clusters of genes—an interface—so the Niners could survive the Dagonites’ image?language without their minds tearing apart.

  With the Niners’ hands, the base grew.

  Then the teacher in the tank released a bubble that felt like a sigh.

  The Dagonites’ home world collapsed faster than predicted. The blue-striped planet darkened, sickened, turned wrong. And with that came a decision: no migration. No new home. They would spend what time they had left on the world that made them.

  The man whose eyes I wore tried to stop them. He begged. He raged. He pleaded until my own throat felt raw.

  It changed nothing.

  The starship left with the Dagonites inside, sliding into black space as if the solar system had never mattered.

  The Number Niners stayed behind.

  On a moon where the sun was just another star, nitrogen snow fell in silent sheets. They kept the base running out of sheer stubbornness. They patched, rerouted, cannibalized. They could not maintain miracles.

  Fuel cooled. Materials aged. Systems failed one by one. Entire corridors froze and were sealed away.

  Food ran short. Air thinned. The base became a slow tomb.

  One by one, the Niners died.

  Until two remained.

  After years of trial and failure, they rebuilt a shuttle from scraps—degraded, barely functional. Its capacity had been reduced to one.

  Only one of them could reach Earth.

  The vision snapped back to the metal dome I’d seen on my first day—the same cold hall, the same wide window full of starpoints that did not flicker.

  A woman stood there.

  Pointed ears. Gold hair. The same face that had smiled at me before.

  Now she was screaming.

  Tears carved tracks down her cheeks, and the emotion hit me so hard I tasted metal.

  Her belly was round under her suit.

  Pregnant.

  The man behind my eyes—her partner, her husband, whatever their culture called it—could only stand there while she shook with grief.

  Then the hangar: the shuttle like two metal bowls pressed together, ready on its cradle. Around it lay the wreckage of other tries, failed shells scattered like bones.

  The woman sealed herself into a suit and helmet. She pulled the man into one last embrace, hard enough I felt it in my ribs.

  Then she climbed in and closed the hatch.

  Engines flared. Plasma spat bright enough to burn afterimages into my mind. The craft lifted and vanished into the dark.

  The man watched until his vision blurred. Exhaust drifted down and crystallized into snow.

  Alone, he began to record.

  He believed Earth’s humans would someday grow far enough to find his message.

  And I understood: this wasn’t my imagination filling gaps. It was his archive, written in sound and stolen sight, thrown across time like a bottle in an ocean.

  The headphones came off.

  The studio was back.

  Haramatsu’s voice asked through the mic, “How was it?”

  “It ended with the shuttle leaving,” I said. My voice sounded wrong, like it belonged to someone else. “Two of them. One left. The other stayed.”

  A wet line ran down my cheek. I touched it and came away with tears.

  Haramatsu entered the room, eyes sharp, studying me as if my emotions were data.

  “I wasn’t affected that strongly,” she said. “Your transmission region is… excellent.”

  “They made it to Earth,” I said. It wasn’t a question. The certainty sat in my bones. “They reached us.”

  “Yes.” Her smile returned, elegant and predatory. “They likely interbred with Neanderthals or another archaic human group, then later with modern humans. That is why we exist.”

  I forced myself to breathe and grabbed onto a safer thought. “The base on that moon… the man’s grave is there.”

  “It is,” Haramatsu said. “Our current probes would take decades to reach it. But once the Dagonite reactor system under development is complete—along with a relativistic plasma engine—we may be able to investigate directly.”

  My head snapped up. “You’re recreating their technology?”

  “The server on the Ninth Planet’s moon responds to commands,” she said. “It has sent technical briefings, maintenance manuals, manufacturing guides. The world is decoding them as we speak.”

  Before I could press further, the studio door opened.

  A girl walked in.

  Gold hair. Pointed ears.

  She looked exactly like the woman in the visions—only younger, maybe early teens by human standards, with the same unsettling calm in her face.

  My lungs locked. “You…”

  Haramatsu placed a hand lightly on the girl’s shoulder. “The transmission included full genome sequences for the Number Niners. The Dagonites were far ahead in molecular biology. Following their guides, we synthesized long-chain DNA directly, implanted it into na?ve pluripotent hepatic cells, and cultured an embryoid at accelerated rates.”

  She said it like she was describing bread dough.

  “This is Kaguya,” Haramatsu continued. “She is my adopted daughter.”

  “Isn’t that… illegal?” The words came out harsh.

  Haramatsu’s gaze didn’t waver. “No one expected the Dagonite medium to take a week to produce a viable birth. Human law hadn’t imagined this scenario.”

  Kaguya looked at me.

  She opened her mouth and produced a sound like a violin string scraped too close to the bridge—flute-tones braided through it, almost musical.

  The studio vanished.

  Not into a dome this time, but into something warmer: an image of arms wrapping around someone, of a light in the dark, of fierce, uncomplicated affection. It hit me in the gut with such directness that my hands trembled.

  It wasn’t love the way humans talked about love.

  It was recognition.

  Like she was calling to someone who had been missing for a very long time.

  Haramatsu’s voice floated in from somewhere outside the image. “Kaguya cannot speak modern human language. Her anatomy is different. But she can produce the image-language naturally.”

  Kaguya smiled.

  The image sharpened, and with it came a promise that tasted like a door opening.

  I didn’t know what she was trying to tell me yet.

  I only knew my life wasn’t mine anymore.

  (FIN)