Tosia and Igor find a strange alien signal in the school basement and uncover a message that could lead them to a distant green world.
Primary School No. 8 had always been a little odd, but ever since the robotics lab moved into the basement, it felt as if the building had started keeping secrets of its own. Tosia and Igor loved it there. After classes, they would vanish downstairs among the tools, screens, cables, and half-finished machines, building robots and talking about the day they would send something into space.
That afternoon, Tosia was adjusting a new satellite reader when Igor froze beside the computer.
"Tosiu, look at this," he whispered.
On the screen, a green symbol blinked over and over. It looked like a crooked letter Z, with three dots hovering around it. The line of code beneath it kept changing, as if the machine was trying to answer a question no one had asked.
Tosia leaned closer. "I've never seen that pattern before. Let's trace the source."
The numbers that appeared next made both of them go quiet. The signal was coming from impossibly far away, from the Coral Galaxy, a place they had only seen in an old encyclopedia with faded pictures and dusty page corners. Every eight minutes, the signal returned, steady and patient, like someone knocking on a door and refusing to leave.
By the time the school corridors had gone dark, they had built a tiny probe and sent it through the transmitter they had secretly modified for experiments. A thin beam of light flashed across the lab, and a moment later a map appeared on the monitor. It showed a planet wrapped in deep green forests and bright, glassy lakes, along with a set of coordinates that pulsed like a heartbeat.
Tosia and Igor stared at the screen, hardly breathing. Then, just before they could speak, the basement door creaked open behind them.
No one stood in the doorway.
A flickering green light drifted into the room and hovered above the worktable. Under it lay a crystal no bigger than Igor's fist, glowing as if it had just been pulled from the centre of a star. Beside it, a tiny hologram shivered to life, showing the shape of a mysterious figure and a message in bright letters:
"Visit us before we go out. This is our last chance."
Tosia reached for Igor's sleeve. The crystal flared brighter, and with a sharp clang, the workshop door slammed shut.