“The fluctuations are back, sir”

The disembodied voice of his assistant pulled him away from his observations and dumped him ungently back in the realm of meatspace.

“Damn,” he said gingerly removing the immersion helmet. “Are you any closer to finding out what’s causing them? I thought we’d done a complete systems reset.”

“We did, sir.” He struggled to keep the sarcasm out of his voice. The ‘we’ who had grovelled around flicking switches and twisting dials, for ten long cycles had actually been more of a singular ‘I’. The perils of being a research assistant, he supposed, but it still irked him.

“Did we run a full diagnostic suite?”

“We did.” That had taken the other five cycles. Time for eating, sleeping, or, the deities forbid, socialising, had all been sacrificed to his desire to worship at the altar of the most illustrious historian of the current era.

Xeno-history had never been so sexy. The streams they had broadcast from the Sol 3 simulations had been some of the most accessed data bursts ever.