First Contact: Derek McCormack and his Groundbreaking Project, Orbit Log Chapter _18🔴

Sector Munich was one of the most desired assignments on Mars. Its scans had shown dense subsurface anomalies for decades, patterns too structured to be natural, too deep to be accidental. Every major expedition had tried to decode it. Every one of them had failed.

That was why Derek McCormack was sent.

He had built a reputation for finding what others overlooked, not by brute force, but by patience, intuition, and an almost unsettling ability to sense when data was hiding something. His past discoveries had rewritten entire excavation doctrines. Munich was not a reward. It was a responsibility.

On the twelfth day, the ground finally gave way.

What rose from the dust was not a ruin, not a machine, but something monumental and layered, standing upright beneath the surface like a fossilized thought. It towered over the team, split down its center, grown rather than built. Derek halted all heavy equipment and ordered manual excavation only.

He didn’t call it an artifact.

He called it a memory.

And from that moment on, Munich stopped being a sector.

It became a question.