TFS Proxima, mobile fleet hospital quarantine ward.

Joon-ho was lying unconscious in a medical pod undergoing scan after scan at a blistering pace. In a side room, separated by a thick plate of armorglass, doctors were scurrying back and forth from screen to screen, tracking the real-time data coming from the medical pod.

All of them were mystified at his miraculous survival. Sure, he had lost weight, but hed survived for months on the surface of a planet with hostile life forms, yet showed no sign of the hypotrophy they expected from someone who hadnt had a bite to eat in all that time.

They werent alone in their surprise, either. Every single crew member aboard the Proxima, naval, marine, and scientific staff alike, were curious as to how Joon-ho had survived. Anyone who wasnt currently standing watch was focused on the public security feed, tapping into it with their implants and staring at Joon-hos medical pod, searching for the slightest sign that he was about to be released from it. Even the off-watch medical staff had clustered in the passageway outside the quarantine ward, practically choking it off; calls of make way and make a hole occasionally rang out in the packed mass of doctors and corpsmen.

A small group of researchers had gathered in the mobile fleet hospitals wardroom, each of them holding a cup of coffee or tea, or a soft drink, and were discussing what the fleet had already dubbed The Miracle.

So hes the only survivor, eh? one of the researchers asked. By the flash on his lapel, he was a seismologist, making it likely that he knew one of the researchers in the doomed rover.

Seems that way, another answered. She was wearing a lapel pin that showed her specialty was xenoanthropology. I heard the Proxima did a full-powered scan of the entire equatorial orbit looking for other anomalies similar to the one in the clearing they found Warrant Lee in, but.... She sighed and her shoulders slumped a little. They didnt find a damn thing.

It does make a certain amount of sense for him to be the only survivor, though, a third researcheranother seismologistinterjected. Hes an awakener and he was in the middle of a mana-infused storm of unimaginable proportions. With that much mana at his fingertips, he wouldve been like a fish in water.

Agreed. But well have to wait until he wakes up and can tell us what happened to him before we can reach a conclusion, though. PCb has given us so many surprises that any hypothesis we come up with before that would just be us shooting in the dark and hoping we hit something, the first seismologist said.

PCb? another person at the wardroom table asked, his head tilted a bit in confusion.

Proxima Centauri b. Its a mouthful, so I took a page from the marines and shortened it, the seismologist laughed.

The xenoanthropologist couldnt help but sigh in disappointment. She wasnt friends with any of the seismologists who hadnt been rescued, but they did share a mission and a sense of scientific curiosity that had brought them this far. And that made her ponder the realities of existence, the discussion around her fading into the background and becoming white noise as she fell deeper and deeper into her own thoughts.

A few minutes passed like that before she came back to reality with a jolt, then stood and headed back toward her lab without a word.

The other researchers at the wardroom table, used to the hyperfocused state that some scientists would enter when they were on the verge of a breakthrough in their research, didnt think anything of it and the discussion of The Miracle proceeded apace.

As Sun Tzu once said, the world is run by meetings and Fleet Admiral Bianchi had called another general meeting of his staff, plus the doctors working on deciphering the results of Joon-hos scans. Also in attendance were Ayaka and Captain Marinakis of the TES Farsight, present in the form of holograms.

Are you one hundred percent positive that this the admiral gestured at a pair of holograms floating over the conference table, is the same Warrant Officer Lee Joon-ho that survived the attack during the storm?

His skepticism was understandable; the new Joon-ho was taller, had more defined, toned musculature, and was somehow even better looking than before. Not that that was really a stretch, given that hed previously had squinty eyes and facial features that were covered in a thick layer of fat, hiding his features and making them indistinct. Overall, he looked like he had matured by a few years and now appeared to be around twenty-five years old instead of his actual age of eighteen.

[The probability of the awakener in my medical pod being one Warrant Officer Second Class Lee Joon-ho approaches unity, Admiral,] the Proximas AI reported.

We have a 99.999% match across all biometrics, Sir, Dr. Elaine Cho, Task Force Proximas chief surgeon added. Weve compared retinal scans, facial scans, fingerprints, and DNA sequencing, and its all a hundred percent match to the same person who was originally assigned to the task force. The only questions we have are a variance in his mana signature and the unexplained absence of any of his fleet implants. Were comparing the results of his situational interview with his akashic record as we speak for a more positive identification.

Since the security clearances of those at the meeting varied, and some werent cleared to have been read in on the empires memory mapping and modification technologies, the good doctor was using situational interview as code for the comparison of Joon-hos memories with the memories in his akashic record files. No interrogator, no matter how good they were, could possibly get every single memoryeven the ones a person had completely forgottenout of their subjects minds. The only thing the empire knew of that was capable of that was their own brain scanning tech, which was still currently held as tightly secured as the classification levels allowed.

And the only people in all of Task Force Proxima who had been read in on it were the fleet admiral, his flag intelligence officer, the chief surgeon, and Ayaka herself, who had the need-to-know as the head of the ground exploration team. After all, while they had expected that something like Joon-

hos... condition... was possible, the probability of it happening was so vanishingly small that the protocol for it was only held in the hardcopy vaults of the mission contingency plans. Or as people in the know called them, the think tanks doomsday archive.