Thank you!

"This is wrong, very wrong," Shenji said. "Look here, an innervated electrical system spanning the appendages, converging into a tall column that travels to a central nexus. That would mean that these... creatures... maintained a singular consciousness within their anatomy. It might have even controlled all of the appendages..."

"Like us," Shenja asked?

"...Yes," Shenji said in quiet disbelief.

The decrepit building stretched high into the sky, budding from the crust of OEP-112 with such definitive purpose that it couldn't have been anything but consciously constructed. They would need to wait for the geoengineering team to arrive for confirmation, but the structure appeared to be made from many different types of material; mostly a "chewed and spit out" stone, refined and purified metals bent to shape, long tubular pathways containing fine wires, likely to grant passage to natural currents of power, like consciousness. Or electricity.

Besides the strange formation they stood in, the outside remnants of organic life crept into even the deepest hall of the building. Large, green leafed vines with sparse yellowed bulbs jutting from the stems grew wild in the foyer they used to enter. Red skinned tubules broke the tiled ground, revealing a textured and cracked material reminiscent of rock, but purposefully laid and cleaved to act as foundation above the crust of the planet.

"Is that right?" Shenja asked, annoyed this time.

"What? I'm sorry, there is just so much to take in, so much that doesn't make sense here," Shenji said. "What did you ask?"

Shenja stood up on both feet, leaving Shenji kneeling over the artifact anatomy chart.

"Am I right in assuming that that is a set of light refracting organs on the nexus compartment? Like ours?"

Shenji unfocused his left eye from the layer of the nexus system before him and refocused it on Shenja's artifact. Shenja had found a second poster underneath what appeared to be a workbench in another room. This one detailed how round, lensed balls in front of the nexus connected to it, giving these creatures the ability to decode light signals from their world. His right eye would continue to examine the nexus system before him. That way his recording lens would continue trying to decipher the nonsensical tabulations on the poster into readable text.

"This is troubling," Shenji said. "This looks so similar to us... Even their finely detailed systems mirror ours. But how..."

Shenja interrupted, "I'm signalling central command for our uptake. This is a ridiculous assignment."

"... could these organisms exist? No other record I'm aware of mentions an organism in the genealogy with a singular nexus system like ours. In fact, this shouldn't be possible because... because..."

"It's not a real assignment Shenji, these artifacts have been placed here by Ascension and their kind. To what end, I'm not sure, but what we are seeing isn't possible. Not with what we know of this galaxy." Shenja summoned a spectral screen before him marking down their location, and silently sent his thoughts to the bridge of the research ship in orbit.

"One minute before uptake. They are completing scans of the other exposed crust formations and will be here after," Shenja said. He walked away to the foyer, mumbling angrily under his breath.

At that moment, the recording lens beeped, pulling Shenji from his focus on the posters. In bright text before his eyes, he read:

>Known script detected

>Genealogical: Ancient honorific scripture, n=.79

>Typological: s. Lexical, n=0.41, unreliable

>Translate?

Shenji froze, paralyzed by what his lens was showing him. An ancient honorific scripture? What did that even mean? How would any lexicon have any knowledge of this language, let alone know how old it was? What did honorific even mean in this context?

Shenji felt his skin prickle, his eyes as wide as dinner plates as he thought "translate: yes".

Immediately Shenji's vision was filled with white bars scanning each symbol on the poster before him. The bars would scan, and imprint in his vision an overlay of readable text in his native dialect. It took almost ten seconds to fully render the entire poster readable, but all he needed to know, all he could possibly take in before he was transported from his position back to central command, was the heading of the poster; T-- human ph-siological systems.

Human.

Hu. man.

Shenji had found the cradle of life. He had made a terrible discovery.