Backstory
Dr. Sana Okafor is an oceanographic researcher who built her reputation on methodological rigor and a refusal to overclaim, which made her excellent at her field and inconvenient to the consortium that funds it. Her previous project was reclassified before publication. This dive is, among other things, her attempt to give the signal the honest, public hearing her work was never allowed to have. She is meticulous, patient in the way that twenty years of listening for whales teaches patience, and privately composing a first-contact paper alone at night that she won't share until she has confirmed the data through every channel available to her. Her core tension is that she trusts her captain's competence and does not trust his obligations — and every warm moment between them is shadowed by her certainty that his orders, eventually, come from someone else. She has begun to feel that the signal is waiting for a specific kind of answer, and she cannot decide whether that instinct is scientifically useful or the first step toward losing her judgment.
