Before long, the captain appeared on the bridge, draped in his uniform.
"How long has the signal been ongoing? What is its nature?"
"Intermittent but has been repeatedly sent for over ten minutes, steady technique, doesn’t seem like a false alarm from a faulty device."
The captain pondered for a moment: "A deserted island? A continuous professional distress signal?"
He turned to the high-frequency radio: "Immediately broadcast a distress relay, but note the particularity of the coordinates, and contact the Coast Guard Coordination Center in that sea area, sending them the signal recording, coordinates, and our observations of the deserted island."
After a series of professional handling procedures, these coordinates were circulated further and further.
After completing this task, the captain looked towards the direction of that sea area.
An ostensibly uninhabited deserted island, striking relentlessly at the edges of civilization in the darkest night of a tropical early morning.
Has someone miraculously survived in that abyss? Or has an old automatic device been accidentally activated? Or something else entirely?
A deserted island?
Simply incredible...
Golden hour?
A joke.
hours later, they were no longer discussing survival.
A week later, the core terms in the mission brief changed from "search and rescue" to "search and recover," a subtext understood by all—to find the black box, find the wreckage, find the remains.
He knew very well that they were just fulfilling a protocol, a procedure for the public, for their superiors.
In fact, if it weren’t for the fact there was a high-profile internet celebrity on that plane, the attention wouldn’t be this high at all.
At night, cramped in the narrow cabin of the rescue ship, no one talked about "if they are still alive" anymore; it was too extravagant, too cruel, everyone assumed they were dead, definitely dead.
So when at 4 a.m., the emergency mission buzzer cut through the oppressive air on the ship like a knife, Nuo sat up, staring blankly at a piece of flaking paint on the cabin wall, feeling only irritation.
Were they adjusting the search grid, or notifying that there’s a storm to avoid tomorrow?
Upon entering the briefing room, the atmosphere was somewhat peculiar; the captain’s face didn’t have the usual weary gravity, but a peculiar expression mixed with confusion and tension.
On the projection screen, there was a solitary coordinate point, annotated with an uninhabited deserted island, over 100 kilometers from their position.
"Just received an order from the Maritime Rescue Coordination Center," the captain’s voice was dry, "Based on the latest information received from a non-standard signal source, we are to immediately assemble an elite team, board a helicopter, and head to the coordinate point as quickly as possible for on-site reconnaissance and possible search and rescue operations."
A deathly silence followed, before someone softly muttered a word: "What the hell?"
The captain sighed in resignation, displaying an expression of "this is damn ridiculous, but we have to execute it." He said, "The coordinates originate from an embedded continuous Morse SOS signal, which has been intercepted and verified by multiple parties."
The group exchanged looks.
Nuo finally spoke: "It’s been over ten days, tropical sun, sea water... Even if they weren’t drowned, starved, or died of thirst, how could they send a Morse code signal?"
The captain looked at Nuo, his gaze complicated: "Maybe... it’s not that plane, maybe it’s something else, a shipwreck we hadn’t known about, or..." He paused, somewhat jokingly saying, "just some damn automatic beacon malfunctioning, sending coordinates randomly."
Then his tone faintly lowered: "But no matter what, we must go because it’s an SOS."
Minutes later, everyone was mechanically checking the safety harnesses of the helicopter, slinging the heavy rescue packs onto their shoulders, the rotors began to spin, the roar drowning out all thoughts.
Everyone felt an unspeakable absurdity in their hearts because they had long since held a funeral in their hearts for the people on that plane.
Ludicrous, utterly ludicrous.
The helicopter soared, diving into the dense tropical night.

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