Leo realized the truth with a sickening clarity. The old firmware hadn’t crashed. It had been trying to tell them something for weeks—corrupting logs, dropping frames, failing gracefully. It was screaming in the only way it knew how.

Leo reached for the power cable. The blue light blinked once, twice—and then the console screen cleared, showing a single, pristine line of text:

The docking cradle was empty. The emergency rover was gone. And written in the frost on the viewport, in frozen breath and desperate finger strokes, was a single word:

[ERROR] CRC mismatch in kernel vector table. Attempting rollback…

He initiated the upload.

Then the light turned red.