Data from the Deep

Produced by J.August Jackson sith support from ChatGPT, MidJourney, and ElevenLabs. A podcast version is available on Spotify.

It was 2:37 a.m., the hour when the world feels thinner, like reality itself is tired of holding itself together. My apartment was silent, save for the faint hum of my laptop and the occasional pop of the radiator. That’s when the encrypted message landed in my inbox.

No subject line. No signature. Just one cryptic sentence:

“Check the black archives. Cydonia Codex.”

I stared at the words, adrenaline kicking in. The black archives weren’t just dark web rumor—they were practically legend. Hidden within encrypted servers, they were the graveyard of forbidden knowledge: abandoned government projects, classified research, things the public wasn’t supposed to see. If the Cydonia Codex was real, it wasn’t just a lead. It was the kind of thing that could blow my entire investigation wide open.

It took me half an hour to find the file. The deeper I dug, the harder it was to breathe, like I was tunneling into forbidden ground. When I finally located it—a file labeled in blocky, unreadable text—my fingers hesitated over the keyboard. I ran a basic decryption script, and the screen came alive with symbols.

They weren’t random. Martian glyphs. I’d seen them before in research papers buried in academic journals, back when I was chasing theories no one wanted to believe. But this was different. The codex wasn’t static. It moved—shifting, rearranging itself like it was alive.

For hours, I poked and prodded, trying every tool in my arsenal. Nothing worked. Every time I thought I’d made progress, the file reconfigured itself, taunting me. Exhausted and out of options, I opened my encrypted chat and reached out to someone I could trust: Deep Quasar.

“You’ve got what?” His voice cracked through my headset a few hours later, equal parts disbelief and fascination.

“Interactive Martian glyphs,” I repeated, pacing my apartment as I explained. “The codex adapts every time I try to crack it. It’s like it’s playing with me.”

Deep Quasar’s laugh was muffled, and I could hear the clink of a mug. “Maya, I love you, but you’re insane. Send it over.”

I hesitated. “If I do, you need to be careful. This isn’t just a file. Someone wanted me to find it, but someone else… someone else definitely doesn’t.”

“Relax,” he said. “They don’t call me Quasar for nothing. I’ll pull in the team.”

For the next three days, Quasar’s network of rogue codebreakers and underground linguists threw everything they had at the codex. Our group chat lit up with theories and arguments, the screen names as colorful as their ideas: GlyphHunter, ZeroByte, Metatron88. It was exhilarating at first. Everyone was excited—sure that this was the kind of puzzle they’d tell stories about for years.

But then the codex pushed back.

Glyphs reconfigured themselves mid-decryption, and when we managed to isolate parts of the text, they switched into mathematical patterns that made no sense. ZeroByte suggested running the codex through an AI translator, but it spat out garbled nonsense. Every time we thought we’d made progress, the codex slipped through our fingers.

By the end of the second day, morale was tanking. GlyphHunter typed out in frustration: “It’s not just a file. It’s smarter than us.”

On the third day, I couldn’t even look at my screen without feeling a headache coming on. The symbols had become noise in my mind—patterns I’d seen for so long that they no longer registered.

“You okay?” Quasar’s voice crackled in my ear. He sounded tired too.

I sighed, sinking into my chair. “I don’t know. Maybe GlyphHunter’s right. Maybe we’re out of our depth.”

There was a pause on his end. “Maya, I don’t buy that. You don’t send an impossible puzzle if you don’t want someone to solve it. Maybe we’re just looking at it the wrong way.”

I closed my eyes, massaging my temples. “The wrong way…” My voice trailed off as something clicked.

“Quasar,” I said, sitting up. “What if this isn’t meant to be cracked like a code? What if it’s meant to be seen?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Stereograms,” I said, heart racing. “You know, those 3D images that look like static until you relax your eyes? What if that’s what the codex is?”

For a moment, there was silence. Then Quasar muttered, “You might be onto something. Let me tweak the visual processor… Okay, try now.”

I leaned back, letting my gaze blur as the patterns on the screen dissolved into noise. At first, it was nothing. But then—a shift. Depth. Shapes emerging from the chaos, pulling into focus.

And there it was.

A map.

The map shimmered like a hologram, a perfect rendering of an ancient Martian city. But the coordinates weren’t on Mars—they were on Earth. I barely had time to process what it meant before the screen flashed red.

“Intrusion detected. External access initiated.”

My stomach sank. “We’re being hacked,” I said, fingers flying over the keyboard to shut down the connection.

“Shut it down now,” Quasar said, voice sharp.

My screen went dark, the network severed. The silence that followed was deafening.

“They know,” Quasar said softly, his voice unusually serious. “They know we found something.”

That night, I couldn’t sleep. The map was burned into my mind, its jagged lines and alien architecture impossible to forget. I sat at my desk, staring at the blank screen, and wondered who—or what—was watching.

My answer came in the form of a new message, unsigned and chilling in its simplicity:

“Stop now, Maya. Or you’ll wish you had.”

The threat hung heavy in the room, but it wasn’t enough to scare me off. If they wanted me to stop, it only meant I was on the right track.