Twelve-year-old Zuzia and her brother Kacper find a message in their school’s space lab that wakes a dead computer, names Zuzia, and counts down to something urgent.
The school space laboratory was the kind of room most pupils hurried past. It smelled of warm dust, old wires, and metal that had spent too long in the dark. But Zuzia loved it.
She was twelve, sharp-eyed, and good at solving problems that made other people groan. Her younger brother Kacper, eleven, preferred to stand close behind her and act brave when he was really just curious. On that cloudy afternoon, they sat beneath a model Saturn V rocket, surrounded by glowing posters of planets and space stations. In the corner, a real flight computer from a retired research ship blinked faintly, though nobody had touched it in years.
Zuzia had just finished sketching a new level for her computer game when a dry crack sounded from the corner of the room.
Both of them looked up.
The flight computer had switched on by itself.
The screen flickered, washed the room in a pale blue light, and then words appeared letter by letter:
CAPTAIN ZUZIA - ARE YOU READY?
Kacper stared so hard his mouth fell open. "Zuzia," he whispered, "I think it knows you."
"That’s impossible," she said, though her voice came out thinner than she meant. "I didn’t do anything."
The screen changed again. A map of the stars filled the monitor, with one red point pulsing at the edge of it. Underneath, a line of code flashed in bright, warning red letters:
DANGER TO EARTH. ONLY YOU CAN READ THE CODE. DECRYPT AND COME TO THE STAR SHELTER. TIME: 10 MINUTES.
Zuzia leaned closer. Her fingers were already moving toward the keyboard when the lights overhead snapped off.
Darkness swallowed the lab.
Then came the sound of slow footsteps from the far corner, where nothing should have been there at all.