Signal Lost / Season 1, Episode 12
Red Alert Quarantine
The red emergency strobe pulsed against the sterile white walls of Johnson Space Center’s quarantine wing, each flash carving shadows across Ben Nakamura’s face as he half-ran down the corridor. The klaxon blared in short, insistent bursts, cutting through the hum of recycled air and the faint buzz of overhead fluorescents. His boots slapped against the linoleum, the sound swallowed by the sealed environment, while his tablet vibrated in his left hand—another priority alert from Med Lab Three. Sweat prickled at the base of his neck, not from exertion but from the weight of the last 48 hours pressing down like a low-orbit reentry. “Ben, you there?” Ravi’s voice crackled through the earpiece, tight with something beyond urgency—something jagged. “You need to see this now. I’m not waiting for clearance.” “I’m thirty seconds out,” Ben snapped, his breath sharp against the mic. “Don’t start without me. And don’t touch anything until I’m in the room.” He didn’t trust his own tone, the way it frayed at the edges. Seventeen days of silence from the Odyssey. Four years of impossible aging in the crew. Non-human markers in their blood. And now, whatever Ravi had decrypted from Katya’s logs was enough to trip a facility-wide alert at 3:17 a.m. local time. His fingers tightened around the tablet, the screen glowing with fragmented...