They said it was Ganymede, but my knees knew better.

 

Beacon 9, minor malfunction, likely solar interference. The usual checklist: calibrate the coils, run diagnostics, report back. I’d done this kind of job a hundred times before. But when I stepped out of the lander, I knew something was off.

 

The shadows stretched too far. The sky didn’t sit right on the horizon. And the gravity was… wrong. Not so wrong it set off alarms, just enough that my knees noticed. They ached in a way they shouldn’t at .146 g.

 

The beacon rose in the near distance, clawing its way out of the regolith. Sleek and matte black, fifteen meters tall, etched with white glyphs I’d never bothered to learn. Each one had a soft hum to it, just beyond hearing—a kind of tension you felt in your skull. This one hummed louder.

 

My boots crunched across the surface. It looked like Ganymede, but the dust clung like moon grit. Familiar in a way that crawled under my skin.

 

I opened the side panel. Everything was too clean. Coils reading perfect output, which made no sense if the signal had failed. The anomaly log was locked behind three layers of encryption. And deep inside — almost like it had been hidden there on purpose — was an old file tagged OP PERSEUS / 1969.

 

That stopped me.

 

I’d heard whispers of Perseus. A Cold War-era deepfake program. Simulated planetary footage. Conspiracies wrapped in jokes, mostly.

 

Curiosity overrode protocol. I decrypted the file.

 

The audio crackled with age. A flat American voice casually spoke, “We fake one landing, they’ll never question the rest.” Laughter followed. Then, quieter: “We’ll show them what they want to believe.”

 

My hands went cold inside the suit.

 

I disconnected and leaned back. The beacon was still humming. Still lying.

 

A sudden flicker passed over my visor display. And in that instant, I saw it — Earth. Hanging in the sky, brilliant and blue. I wasn’t on Ganymede.

 

I knew then: the beacons didn’t bend gravity. They bent perception.

 

The lie didn’t start with interplanetary expansion. It started on the Moon in 1969. The first successful trial. The Apollo 11 landing wasn’t filmed in a warehouse. It was broadcast straight into the minds of half the planet using primitive versions of this same tech. What they saw, they believed. Belief became history. Made me wonder if that’s why they invented the TV.

 

After that, it got more profitable.

 

Less than a century later, corporations weren’t sending people to the stars. They were selling the experience of it: virtual colonization powered by neural overlays. You didn’t live on Mars. You dreamed it, thought it, remembered it. Paid monthly for it.

 

All of it transmitted from the Moon, the original staging ground.

 

I sat at the base of the beacon for a long time, just listening. The hum had a rhythm, like a voice on the edge of sleep.

 

I made a copy of the logs, encrypted them twice, and slipped them into a maintenance drone’s uplink request. Clara would find them if anyone could. She was a friend. A journalist. Too stubborn to buy her own fantasy.

 

I didn’t return to command. I rerouted the lander and burned for Earth.

 

The descent was rougher than usual. Atmospheric buffering was inconsistent, like the system didn’t expect me to come back. Earth looked dimmer than I remembered. Maybe I’d never really seen it from above.

 

I met Clara on a corner street in Lima, where the signal dampeners still worked and people paid in paper. She was thinner, but her eyes hadn’t changed.

 

I showed her everything. She didn’t speak for a long time.

 

“You’re sure?” she asked finally.

 

“I know what I felt. What I saw.”

 

She pocketed the drive, barely glancing at it. “If you’re right, they’ll kill you.”

 

“Yeah,” I said. “Probably.”

 

She looked past me, toward the alley. I turned.

 

The car didn’t slow. No logo, no plates. Just velocity and silence.

 

* * *

 

When I opened my eyes, I was on Ganymede.

 

Beacon 9 hummed quietly in the distance. My boots crunched across the dust. The sky looked strange, and my knees ached.

 

I reached for the side panel, and I wondered — not for the first time — what I might find inside.