This story we are told by those who came before, brought with us from the long-ago. The shape of it may have changed, but the spirit is true. This is how we came to see our Anomaly.

There was a scientist whose astrophysical experiment failed. She crafted it carefully and thoroughly, and there was no fault in her hypothesis. But even so, the hypothesis could neither be proven nor disproven. The numbers were correct in how they were obtained, and when her peer checked and re-checked her work, the math was correct. But it was wrong, too, by an order of magnitude. The data retrieved was nowhere near what it should have been.

Because the nature of the failure had no visible logic, the scientist was perplexed. She repeated her experiment with new tools, new equipment. Her inputs sanitized, her method scrutinized and repeated when no fault was found.

Once again, the experiment failed to produce expected results, the gathered data far beyond the bounds of prediction, although now the failure was of a known sort, foreseen as an outlying possibility.

And so, the scientist began to perceive a pattern. And when a third experiment produced the same sort of failure, she knew that she had found something. She sensed that this was the movement of something greater..

Thus, the scientist listened. She set down that first question, which her first experiments had been aimed at, and she took up this new cause: to identify that failure with purpose. First, she learned its parameters, finding where those outlying datasets were easiest to record; then she learned how not to fail, avoiding those parameters. And within the space she framed by those failures and avoidances, she learned a new truth about this universe.

Something reached back to her, visible only through the data, through the analysis of mistakes and the visualization of math, and through dark matter, our dearly revered, which gives weight to the world around it in ways that should not be and yet must be.

This is how we first learned the Anomaly might speak: by listening to the virtues of failure. This is how, eventually, we came to our blessed Anomaly and began study of the million-year project that it is.

Imagine if she had not looked. Imagine if she saw only the failure of instruments, or assumed that she herself had been wrong. Imagine if she was not rigorous enough in her studies to try and try again.

So, it is our duty to learn from every failure, assay every test thrice and more, and be open to new possibilities. To remain blinkered on one outcome, one cause, is to cut off the road to the future.

These signs are blessed of the Anomaly: datasets that cannot be, and mathematics so gloriously misplaced that they cannot be simple error. By their ways in gravity shall we know them, and in the distortion and the broken law shall we find them, by their grace.