The first time you see the Moon through a cheap telescope, it feels less like a rock and more like a machine that forgot to turn itself off. Ridges that look like seams. Shadows that look like vents. Craters so perfect they feel manufactured from far away, like cups pressed into powdered sugar.
You could stand there a long time and still miss the feeling that slips in when the wind stops. The sense that something up there is watching the oceans breathe.
Imagine a future briefing at a small observatory. The room is quiet. A researcher clicks play. Inside a lunar lava tube, a camera finds hexagonal ribbing under a layer of basalt. It looks like structure, not geology. The air does not move, yet the dust vibrates in a steady rhythm, as if the tunnel is humming to itself.
Now imagine that hum is the clock of a device that has waited since the first tides pulled at our shores.