Ross Cuthross's Arc

Chapter 2 of 7

Back at the old gas station he had wired into a solar lab, Ross spread his screening packet across the bench. It was a slim folder of aerospace credentials, published papers, and one harmless spectral graph. No coordinates. No emission peaks. Just enough to prove he was real. Anyone who wanted more would have to send raw footage first. He set up his outreach rig on the cracked concrete out front. The spoofed satellite phone fed through the laptop, bouncing his signal across three fake nodes. He drafted a short post to a closed forum of fringe researchers. Bait, not bleeding. He attached the credential packet and hit send. Replies crawled in over two hours. Most were noise. One asked for his location. One offered cash. He deleted them. Then a message arrived with a video file attached, timestamped, raw, showing a silent disc skimming a ridge. The sender asked only one question back. Can you explain this. Ross stared at the frames. The skin in the game was real. He typed a reply and named a meeting place, the lab station itself, neutral ground he controlled. The isolation was over. He had a contact now, and a stranger who knew his door.