Through the Lens

Ellis Tran repaired optics for a living—satellite dishes, sensor arrays, visual mapping drones. In space, you needed perfect sight. On Orion Outpost Delta-17, orbiting the gas giant Ilion, that was Ellis’s domain.

His days were methodical. Clean, calibrate, diagnose. A scratched lens here, a fogged viewfinder there. It was work that required patience and precision—traits that earned him solitude and, often, the unspoken respect of a crew too busy to appreciate silence.

He liked the isolation. It made the occasional social interaction more bearable. He had lunch with Dr. Rhea Amari on Thursdays, sparring with her about philosophy and whether AI could ever feel envy. She thought it could. He thought it was ridiculous.

Routine suited him.

Until the telescope began transmitting images it wasn’t supposed to.

---

At first, it was subtle. Frame drift.

The long-range telescope—meant to observe the mineral-rich rings of Ilion—had started cataloging non-programmed coordinates. The feed showed stars that weren’t in the current view. Strange refractions. Once, what looked like a shadow.

Ellis assumed software error. He pulled the logs and found no edits. No manual override. No sign of tampering.

So he cleaned the lens, reinstalled firmware, and reset the feed.

The next day, the anomaly was worse.

Now, the telescope showed him himself.

Not a reflection—an image of him, sitting at his workstation. But from an angle the telescope couldn’t physically capture.

He laughed nervously. Probably a prank. But who would go through that effort? There was no AR overlay, no glitchy compression, nothing synthetic.

Just a silent, crystal-clear image of himself working.

---

He called Rhea.

“You think someone’s screwing with me?” he asked, showing her the still frames.

She frowned. “The angle’s impossible. And the file’s clean?”

“Sterile.”

“Could be a ghosted lens pairing. Seen it happen once on a Mars relay. Optical feedback loop created fake imagery.”

“But there’s no second lens,” Ellis said. “Just one.”

Rhea stared at the image again, then at Ellis. “You’re wearing the same clothes right now.”

He looked down. Blue coveralls. Same patch. Same pen in the pocket.

He felt a sudden chill in his stomach.

“Could be old,” she said. “Cached feed from earlier.”

But she didn’t sound convinced.

---

By the end of the week, the telescope refused to point at anything but him.

He disabled the unit. It re-enabled itself.

He cut the power. It switched to backup.

Then came the recordings. Full-motion video of him walking through the station—always from impossible angles. Top-down shots from inside the sealed coolant shafts. Side profiles from within walls.

He took them to Security.

They ran diagnostics. Everything checked out.

They dismissed him.

He unplugged the entire optic array, manually removed the energy cells, and physically severed the network interface.

The next morning, the telescope was fully operational.

Showing him sleeping.

---

The hallucinations started small. Seeing himself in the reflection of a closed door—only his double blinked out of sync. A flicker of movement at the edge of his vision.

Then Rhea called him, voice tight.

“Ellis. I ran spectral analysis on the telescope’s unauthorized captures. They’re not reflections. They’re not from here. The photon signature is wrong. There’s… no matching origin point.”

“Then where are they from?”

She was silent a moment. “I don’t think it’s showing you from our world. I think it’s… showing you to something. From somewhere else.”

He laughed, though his chest was tightening.

“Like what? A two-way mirror?”

“More like a beacon.”

---

He tried to destroy the lens. Took a laser cutter to it.

It shattered.

He swept up the shards.

The next day, the lens was whole again.

He checked the timestamped video logs. The file showed him, in real time, calmly reassembling the telescope with surgical care.

He had no memory of doing that.

---

That night, he opened the feed.

It was no longer him on the screen.

It was something wearing him.

Same face, same hands—but the posture was all wrong. It tilted its head, smiled too wide, and tapped its temple. As if acknowledging the watcher.

Then it reached out—toward the camera—until its finger pressed directly against the lens.

The screen went black.

---

The crew began complaining of déjà vu. Conversations they hadn’t had yet. Tasks remembered before being assigned. One engineer broke down in tears after claiming to see a version of herself crawling inside the ductwork “with no eyes and too many smiles.”

People were reassigned. Rhea was gone without explanation.

Ellis stayed.

Someone had to.

He stopped sleeping. Not due to fear—because it felt redundant. He saw his dreams in the feed anyway.

Or perhaps they weren’t dreams.

He couldn’t tell anymore.

---

Now:

Ellis maintains the lens.

He doesn’t try to break it. He no longer asks questions.

Sometimes the lens shows him stars.

Sometimes it shows him being dissected by light.

Once, it showed him looking into the lens and choosing to let it in.

He doesn’t remember that.

But he accepts it.

Because now the images don’t disturb him. They’re instructions.

He documents what he sees. He labels what’s to come.

And behind the sealed doors of Orion Outpost Delta-17, he prepares the station for the arrival of what has already been watching.

---

Final Log, Ellis Tran:

“Perception is permission. I was the first. I won’t be the last.”

The telescope remains active.

Please do not look through it.