Three days into the Atropos survey, Station 7's long-range array picked up a repeating pulse at 47.2 MHz — well outside any known comms band. The signal was clean, structured, and definitively not random noise. By the fourth cycle, we realized it was repeating with a 22-minute offset, each iteration slightly degraded from the last.
Pattern Recognition at 47.2 MHz
The degradation was not random. Each cycle attenuated the mid-band by precisely 0.3 dB while amplifying the subharmonic at 23.6 MHz. That is not how physics degrades a transmission — that is how something rewrites it. I spent two weeks last winter rebuilding the demodulator from scratch just to confirm what we were seeing: the signal was editing itself.
CYCLE 47 — SIGNAL INTEGRITY 61.3%Message drift detected. Previous iteration unrecoverable. The carrier wave is now carrying structure that was not present in cycles 1 through 12.
— ASTRA Telemetry Log, Station 7