EARTH HEARS THE CALL
Earth's astronomers caught them first as noise.
Hydrogen-line whispers. Three-pulse rhythms defying scatter.
Not hacks, not flares—something older, tuned to the Aetherium's buried vein.
Desert scopes hummed. Orbital eyes strained.
The signal spread, infiltrating grids: reactor spikes, probe glitches, global nets watermarking with that insistent beat.
June 24, 2029 – 03:47 UTC
Atacama Large Millimeter Array, Chile
The void had been wailing—a sharp, endless cry—for forty-seven brutal minutes before Orion Vale felt it claw into his bones.
He'd escaped to the glass-domed watchtower to flee the dead air of his room, where machines hissed louder than his pulse and sleep had turned into a ghost that never came back. Now he stood there, gripping a mug of cold coffee that tasted like ash, staring out at the southern sky. It hung heavy, bruised purple and red, as fake dawn scraped at the edge of the world.
Behind him, the control room buzzed like a hive of buried machines: data raced through hidden wires, giant telescopes swallowed the stars' garbage and spat it into computers that never shut their eyes.
For twelve years, Orion had chased that garbage—the faint glow from the Big Bang, the universe's first gasp, stretched thin over fourteen billion years of cold nothing. He knew emptiness inside out. It was his job. His curse.
But when the soft alarm rang—like a whisper from a grave—he saw that silence could twist into something solid. Something alive.
"Dr. Vale?"
The voice cut through from the shadows. It was Chen Wei, the young night-shift tech—barely twenty-four, eyes still burning with raw wonder instead of dead fatigue.
"Array Three is glitching," Chen said, trying to play it cool but failing. His words shook. "Something's wrong in the hydrogen signal. You need to see this."
Orion set down his mug and walked over. His face ghosted across the screens and windows—thin, hollow, eyes like storm clouds drained of rain. A man fueled by nothing but old papers and blacker nights.
"What kind of glitch?" he asked.
"The kind that bites back." Chen's fingers flew over the glowing controls. "It's been repeating for forty-seven minutes. Pinpointed out past Neptune's edge."
"Past Neptune?" Orion's forehead creased like cracked earth. "We don't have anything out there sending signals. Our probes are dead quiet."
"That's the nightmare of it." Chen's breath fogged the screen. "The signal's too pure. No fuzz from space dust, no static bleed. It's cutting straight through, like the stars don't exist."
Orion leaned in close. The air smelled of hot metal and dry desert wind leaking through the seals. In the mess of cosmic noise—faint echoes of dead galaxies—a clean line sliced through. Sharp as a knife.
Three beats. Nothing. Three beats again.
Slow. Waiting. Watching.
"Run the SETI checks," Orion said.
Chen paused, hands freezing mid-air. "You mean... like, aliens!?"
"Just do it!"
While Chen typed, Orion pulled up the raw data. Frequency: 1.42 gigahertz—the hydrogen line, our old signal to the stars, a desperate hello flung into the black. But this wasn't hello. This was breaking in. The signal didn't ride the line. It hollowed it out, rewrote it like it owned the dark.
"SETI's got nothing," Chen said after a beat. "No natural blip. No old human junk. The program's crashing on it."
"Of course." Orion's voice was flat as a tombstone. " It wasn't built for things that aren't supposed to be real."
Chen went white. "Is it... smart?"
Orion let out a dry, bitter laugh—like wind over bones. "If it's not, it's smarter than us anyway."
He punched in a command. "Check the deep-space feeds. See if the others are hearing it too."
Chen's screen lit up with pings—from ESO La Silla's towers, Mauna Kea's fog-wrapped dishes, even Arecibo's half-buried corpse.
"It's in everything," Chen whispered. "Every big scope on Earth. Same beat."
"Everywhere," Orion echoed. His words hung low, heavy. "All at the same damn time."
The truth settled like dust after an explosion—sharp, choking, endless.
For most eggheads, this was the holy grail.
For Orion Vale, it felt like a death sentence.
"Pull up the DAVINCI probe," he said.
Chen blinked hard. "That's Venus orbit. Inner solar system. Wrong neighborhood."
"I know. Do it."
The main screen filled with Venus—golden clouds churning like acid storms, radiation spikes flickering like lightning in hell. All normal... except the code logs. Buried deep: the three-beat pulse, hiding like poison in the veins.
"That's—" Chen's voice broke. "No way. It's sealed off, encrypted tighter than a black hole—"
"It's not from Neptune," Orion said, quiet as a blade sliding home. "Or anywhere we can map."
He cracked open logs from around the globe: ITER's reactor spiking like a fever dream, quantum labs in Beijing's steel hives and Boston's rainy streets—all marked the same, timed to the second. The pattern hid in the cracks, a brand burned into the world's wiring.
"It's not sending," he muttered. "It's spreading."
Chen looked like he'd seen his own grave. "Like a virus? A space plague?"
"If it is," Orion said, staring at the looping signal, "it's not here to kill." He met Chen's eyes. "It's here to say hello. From the dark."
The room's hum turned icy, like breath from a cryo-vault. Outside, the Atacama Desert stretched forever—red rocks and thorns under a sky full of knives. But Orion felt it now: a slow wave from the void, black as oil, swallowing the planet whole.
His phone buzzed. Chen's too. Then every screen and speaker wailed. Messages flooded in—from lab coats, gearheads, backyard stargazers:
We hear it.
It's everywhere.
It sees us looking.
Orion caught his reflection in the glass—eyes like empty sockets in a skull, staring back with the weight of forgotten stars.
We were never alone.
Never safe.
And now it knows we know.
He turned to Chen, voice steady as rusted iron. "Gather it all. Every hit, every time stamp, every glitch. Then hunt the start."
Chen swallowed like it hurt. "When we find it?"
Orion watched dawn bleed over the mountains—blood-red light pooling in the sand, waking the wastes with fire.
"Then," he said, soft as a curse, "we figure out what we did to wake the thing in the black."
The stars had screamed for fifty-three minutes.
Soon, the whole world would scream back.