Probe

In another time, in another world, far across the universe, a transient spacetime rift opened in front of an alien probe fleeing the Limit Cloud of an unremarkable star. Riding the waves of the fabric of space through the tear, the mysterious object returned to the universe in a high orbit of Ezirast, adrift far from the bustling trade lines of the Starrial System.

Se'er An Akasi, an up-and-coming scientist based at the Eir Ekil University in orbit of Arialum, discovered the probe shortly after its emergence into the Silky Way on an archaeological expedition to recently discovered Qomarat ruins on Ezirast's asteroid moons. Pulling it into the Hurlburt 's cargo bay and resolving to check on it later, she forgot about it for the duration of the expedition. But Qomarat ruins are a dime a dozen, especially of the poor preservation found at Ezirast, and this finding was much rarer. Upon returning to her job, the scientific community jumped on the probe, studying every inch of it and working to decode the mysterious message bolted to the side in a primitive metal disk. Akasi was set for life with funding to study this little thing.

The probe was fashioned by a civilization that had seemingly just left their homeworld. Cold-gas thrusters, radio transmitters, and a data storage system based on a kind of magnetic tape used briefly for the earliest exploration probes were the pinnacle of technology for whoever these people are or were. Innumerable bulky objects which were later determined to function as scientific instruments, held away from the polygonal body of the probe on a number of spring-loaded pylons.

The white-painted dish, with a number of radio-wave transmitter and receiver systems associated with it, dominated the appearance of the probe. It was clearly designed to be a massively overclocked RADAR system as well, another technology long abandoned by modern civilization. A massive pylon extending upwards and outwards, mostly outwards, from the probe contained primitive metal-and-wire equipment to measure magnetic fields in the least efficient way possible. Twin metal rods, 8 meters long and covered in partly eroded paint, had unknown purposes.

On the same side as the magnetometer and the seemingly pointless metal rods is a large radiation-hardened cask with a much clearer purpose: to power the entire structure with the radioactive decay of plutonium. This technology, while primitive, is extremely stable and difficult to break and so is often used on things that need to be in the middle of nowhere with very little maintenance. By the time the probe was recovered, the vast majority of it had decayed away to lead.