Iwamoto died in March. His coffee cup was still on the shelf in the observation room.

White ceramic, a hairline crack running through the handle. Nobody had moved it to the sink. It just felt wrong to.

She had taken over his research five years ago. The object was called J-3117 — a source that had been pumping out strong radio waves until, forty years back, it simply stopped. One day, nothing.

Iwamoto spent the next thirty years checking on it every morning.

“It’ll wake up,” he used to say. “That’s what this thing does.”

She never really believed that. She just didn’t have a reason to stop. When he hit mandatory retirement five years ago, he said exactly two words on his way out the door: Leave it to you. Then he was gone.

On a morning in June, she opened her terminal like always.

The numbers were moving.

J-3117. Signal detected. 03:12:47.

Her hands went unsteady. She pulled up the log. Faint radio pulses, intermittent, three bursts. Forty years of silence — over.

The junior researcher at the next desk leaned over to look.

“Wait, seriously? Is that Iwamoto-sensei’s——”

“Yeah.”

“That’s insane. You can write a whole paper off this.”

“I will. His name goes on it too.”

He nodded and turned back to his screen. She opened the report file.

But then, working through the data, her fingers stopped.

The waveform was wrong.

She pulled up the records from forty years ago and set them side by side. The rhythm was different. The shape was different. Same location — but not the same signal.

Whatever Iwamoto had spent thirty years listening for, it wasn’t transmitting anymore. What was coming through now was something else entirely.

The paper would still go through. The headline would write itself: First reactivation in forty years. Radio waves from the same spot again — that alone was a legitimate finding. She could tuck the waveform discrepancy into a footnote.

Her eyes went to the coffee cup on the shelf. The cracked handle. Iwamoto always hooked his ring finger through it, right there.

She typed into the report: Reactivation of J-3117 confirmed.

Her fingers stopped.

She knew it wasn’t a reactivation.

She left the words there anyway.