They had barely made it inside the ship
when Zeros, without a pause, moved straight to the terminal with the galactic map.
While Blindy was choking on air, trying to reassemble himself,
the android was already extending a tablet:
“Phoenix. Read the data. Set the route.
Short version: where we’re going, why, who we’re killing.”
Phoenix scanned the packet and replied coldly:
“Target: V518 Persei.
Distance: approximately 2300 parsecs.
Honestly, gentlemen… have you ever considered asking, ‘can we not go?'”
Meanwhile, Z-P-N-E-S 2.0 had already executed its first hyperjump,
dropped out at the edge of the Prime system,
aligned a new trajectory,
and slipped back into hyperspace—
like cutting itself out of the previous scene in a rough edit.
[Dick turned to Jackie, blinked]“Well, baby… this is your territory.
Tell us what kind of cosmic asshole they’re flying into.”
[Jackie clapped her hands, delighted]“Finally!
Dick, you should let me talk more often—
listening to you complain is possible… but painful.
Don’t worry, though—
I ran everything through ΣigmaMind
and came prepared with something fascinating.”
[She cleared her throat like a professor about to begin a lecture]“So! V518 Persei, also known as GRO J0422+32…
Distance — about 8,200 light-years from Sol, roughly 518.6 million AU,
in the Perseus Arm, way out at the very edge—
so far the map starts giving you warnings in tiny font.”
[Whispering, conspiratorial]“It’s not a star.
It’s a black hole.Inactive.
No active luminous accretion disk at the moment.Behaves itself—doesn’t shine, doesn’t eat everything in sight…
Just hangs there in space, generating gravity
and an atmosphere of existential dread.Around it—three planets:
GRO J0422+32 a,
GRO J0422+32 b,
and GRO J0422+32 c.The first—just a gas bag, too close to the hole.
It’s being stretched, squeezed, twisted—
soon it’ll be breakfast for V518 Persei.In a million years… maybe two…
Space is never in a hurry.The third—an icy little dwarf butt.
So far out the temperature’s a few degrees above absolute zero.
Only thoughts about the meaning of life could survive there—
and even those would freeze.But the second—GRO J0422+32 b—
in BlackNet, they call it ‘Erebus.’Named after the ancient Greek god of darkness.
Because it is DARK.
Not “evening.”
Not “night.”
But “black abyss inside your soul” dark—
like, Dick, your tax history.And yet… the planet is alive.
Not frozen like the third,
not torn apart like the first.Erebus has an elongated orbit—
when it gets closer to the hole,
gravity squeezes it.
When it moves away—it relaxes.And there’s a small moon.
That combo—black hole plus the moon—
shakes the planet’s crust constantly,
so inside everything is boiling, churning, breathing.A strange, hot planet
in a starless system.There are volcanoes,
atmospheric eruptions,
thick, suffocating air—
a greenhouse effect like Venus,
but more toxic and more…
well… depressing.The star gives no light—
but there’s still heat.From within.
From the core.
From constant gravitational violence.The atmosphere is dense, turbulent,
full of methane and sulfur.Holds heat perfectly—
blocks light completely.So yeah, dear gremlins…
it’s a dirty lightbulb of a planet.It heats—
but it doesn’t shine.Perfect place
for a romantic murder.Yes—Erebus is inhabited.
We know catastrophically little about them—
so little scientists still argue
whether they even qualify as a ‘civilization’
or something… else.But one thing is certain:
They exist.
They’re intelligent.
They have culture.They’re… transparent.
And bioluminescent.
They never had an evolutionary reason to develop pigment:
No sun.
No ultraviolet.
No visual predators.Just darkness.
And in that darkness—
transparency
is perfect camouflage.Their language… is light.
The pulsing of their bodies.
Patterns shimmering beneath their skin.
Music made of fluorescent waves.Imagine—light that nature never gave them…
they created it themselves.Scientists called them Vitreus pneuma,
because we don’t know their real name.They don’t have a verbal language, so we had to invent one:
Vitreus—’glass, transparent’
Pneuma—’breath,’ ‘spirit,’ ‘air’But on BlackNet, they go by something simpler:
Virtixes.
Or… the Glass Breathers.
They barely walk.
They float—like jellyfish drifting through a thick, heavy atmosphere.Inside, they carry gas sacs filled with hydrogen-rich lifting gas—
produced by slow chemical reactions in gut-like chambers,
then filtered and stored through thin living membranes.They move quietly,
pulsing their bodies
or flicking small, semi-transparent fins,
barely touching the world around them.Their eyes—if you can even call them that—
are more like biological computers, capable of seeing:
infrared heat from volcanoes,
electrical signals in living organisms,
thousands of shades of bioluminescence,
and temporal light patterns
that would look like noise to us.To us, their conversations look like a silent disco.
To them—
it’s deep philosophy.Their cities are vertical.
Towers of porous volcanic glass
rising upward into darkness.They don’t need roads—
they just… drift.
Up and down, like swarms of glowing spirits.A probe was sent there once.
It lasted forty-two seconds.
Then the atmosphere just… ate it.
Oxidation. Pressure. Chemical soup.
But the footage it sent back became legendary:
massive dark silhouettes drifting through the fog,
and soft flashes of light—
their speech.Now imagine the sky of Erebus.
On one side—
a bright, hazy streak of the Milky Way stretched across the horizon.On the other—
absolute emptiness.
A deep black void without a single star.Like you’re standing on the edge of a cliff,
and beneath you—
an endless black ocean.”
[Jackie inhaled]“Aigo…
I’m actually jealous of Blindy.
They get to go to places like that… see things like that.
Even if it all ends in disaster…Do me a favor, Dick…
tell me they’re not gonna kill the Virtixes.
Or blow up the planet.I’m already worried… like, really worried.”
[Dick softened his voice, trying to calm her down]“Don’t worry, baby… what’s done is done.
We can’t change it now…Let’s just put something on… hmm… Butt Pimple?”
[Jackie tapped on the terminal, music kicked in]