Author: RY

Jack floated in the observation blister, the void pressing silent against the reinforced plasteel. Earth hung like a chipped blue marble a million klicks sunward. Behind him, the comms array of Lagrange Point 1 hummed its patient vigil, vast silver dishes straining to catch whispers from the interstellar dark. Mostly, it caught static. Forty years mankind had listened; thirty-nine years, eleven months, the universe had offered only the background hiss of creation.

Until last Tuesday.

The signal hadn’t arrived on any standard frequency. It wasn’t radio, not laser, not gravity waves. It registered first as a recurring anomaly in the station’s neutrino detectors. Specifically, the ones designed to monitor solar flares. A faint, impossibly regular pulse train buried deep beneath the sun’s roar.

“Probably instrument noise,” Mission Lead Chen had grumbled over the link from Lunar Base. “Run the standard diagnostics, Jack. Don’t waste bandwidth chasing ghosts.”

Jack ran the diagnostics. Nominal. He recalibrated the sensors. Nominal. He cross-referenced with orbital neutrino telescopes. They saw nothing unusual. But the pulse persisted, stubbornly regular, right there in LP1’s shielded core detectors. Pulse-pause-pulse-pulse-pause. Pulse-pause-pulse-pulse-pause. Always the same. A heartbeat from nowhere.

He spent three shifts trying to isolate it, filter out the solar noise, the cosmic ray impacts. Futile. It was like trying to hear a specific cricket chirp during a meteor shower. But it was there. A faint, rhythmic thump-thump in the neutrino data stream, regular as a metronome set to a tempo slightly faster than his own resting heart rate.

On the fourth shift, driven by boredom or desperation, he did something stupid. He bypassed protocol and routed the raw neutrino pulse data directly into the main comms array’s signal processing unit, telling the AI to treat it not as particle physics, but as information. “Look for patterns,” he keyed in. “Assume non-random origin. Decode.”

The station lights flickered as the AI diverted power. For ten agonizing minutes, the array sat silent, dishes pointed sunward, processing ghostly particles instead of expected transmissions. Then, the console chimed. Not an error code. A text file had been generated.

Jack opened it, heart suddenly pounding a frantic rhythm against his ribs.

The file contained only two words:

WE HEAR.

He stared at the console, the reflected glow making his face pale. He checked the timestamp, the source code. Raw neutrino pulse data, processed as binary information, timestamped from reception less than five minutes ago. Impossible. Neutrinos barely interacted with anything; encoding and decoding them instantaneously across astronomical distances… it violated known physics.

He ran the process again. Diverted power, fed the pulse train into the comms AI, set decode parameters. The station hummed. Ten minutes later, another text file:

YOU CALLED?

He felt ice crawl up his spine. Forty years of listening, assuming any contact would come via radio waves from distant stars. But the call hadn’t come from out there. It seemed to be coming from inside the signal. From the impossible pulse buried in the sun’s neutrino glare. Something riding the ghost particles, something that heard their listening, something impossibly close.

He looked out at the silent, empty void between Earth and Sun. Forty years, humanity had strained to hear whispers from the stars. What if the voice had been right beside them all along, waiting in the static, listening back? His hand hovered over the comms panel, protocol screaming warnings in his head.

Who – or what – had just answered?

And what happened when he replied?