Leo snorted awake. "Did it finish?"

INCOMING FILE: SAHARA_DEEP_CORE_2026_response.xml

It was a single, unescaped line of plain text, embedded illegally in the XML:

<PROJECT_NAME>SAHARA_DEEP_CORE</PROJECT_NAME> <DRILL_SITE>31.18°N, 3.98°W</DRILL_SITE> <ANOMALY_DETECTED>TRUE</ANOMALY_DETECTED> <ANOMALY_NOTE>BIOLOGICAL RESIDUE UNMATCHED</ANOMALY_NOTE> Biological residue? The Sahara had been a desert for the last 5,000 years. Below that, grassland. Below that, a vast inland sea. But "unmatched" meant the spectrograph had found carbon chains that didn't align with any known plant, algae, or bacteria.