Wolf 1061c

Priya Acharya answered the video call on the second ring, which told Rowan she'd been sitting at her desk and not, as her calendar had suggested she might be, in a faculty meeting she'd been dreading all week. Her office at MIT looked the same as it had the last time they'd spoken — eight months ago, a condolence call disguised as a check-in, the kind of conversation where neither party says the real subject out loud — cluttered with printouts, a whiteboard crowded with equations in three colors of marker, a mug that said WORLD'S OKAYEST PHYSICIST that her graduate students had given her as a joke that had outlived several cohorts of graduate students.

"Row." She said it the way Lena used to, and he wondered, not for the first time, whether she'd picked up the habit from Lena during their PhD years or whether it had always been the two of them together, a shared shorthand he'd simply been folded into. "You look like a man who hasn't slept and wants to ask me something he's afraid is stupid."

"I need you to tell me if something is physically possible."

"That's usually how these calls start." She pulled a legal pad toward her, uncapped a pen. "Go."

He told her. All of it — the anomaly, the match score, Yuki's debunking sequence, the climbing percentage, Miriam's forty-eight hours. Priya did not interrupt, which was its own kind of tell; she was a woman who interrupted everyone, a habit that had made her simultaneously beloved and exhausting at every conference Rowan had ever attended with her, and her silence now felt like the silence of someone doing very fast mental arithmetic and not liking where it was landing.

"Wolf 1061c," she said finally, when he'd finished. "Say that again. The coordinates, not the name."

He gave her the right ascension and declination. She typed rapidly, cross-referencing something on a second monitor he couldn't see, and her face did the thing scientists' faces do when a number confirms something they were hoping wouldn't be confirmed — a kind of settling, not surprise exactly, more like watching a door close that you'd been holding open with your foot.

"Thirteen point eight light-years," she said. "Red dwarf, three confirmed planets, the second one's in the habitable zone edge, mass about four Earths, we've never gotten decent atmospheric data because the parent star is too faint and too active for good transit spectroscopy. It's a solid target. Nobody's ever sent anything there. No probe, no relay, nothing. The most ambitious thing humanity has launched toward that patch of sky is light itself — radio leakage, old television broadcasts, the occasional deliberate METI transmission from before the moratorium. Nothing with a return trip."

"I know all that. I need the part that's actually hard."

"The hard part," Priya said, "is the clock." She turned her monitor toward the camera, a star field map with Wolf 1061 circled in red, a set of numbers scrawled beside it. "If this signal originated at Wolf 1061c and traveled here at the speed of light — which is the only speed anything travels at, full stop, no exceptions, I don't care what science fiction has told you — then it left there thirteen point eight years ago. Do you understand what that means for your timeline?"

He understood. He'd understood it at four in the morning, staring at the coordinates, and had spent the hours since trying not to look at it directly, the way you don't look directly at a bright light because you know what it'll do to your vision afterward.

"Lena was twenty-seven, thirteen point eight years ago," he said. "She hadn't done the consciousness research yet. She hadn't built the archive. The neural pattern that's supposedly being transmitted from that location didn't exist yet, anywhere, in any recorded form, when the signal would have had to leave."

"That's the problem in one sentence, yes." Priya set down her pen. "There is no physical mechanism — none, Row, I've spent the last ninety seconds running through every framework I know and I want to be honest with you that this isn't false modesty, there is genuinely nothing in verified physics that allows this — for a signal to leave a location before the information it carries exists. Even if you invoke something exotic, closed timelike curves, some Wheeler-Feynman absorber nonsense, retrocausal quantum weirdness at cosmological scale — none of that survives contact with the specific, boring fact that Wolf 1061c has never had anything artificial in its system, ever, that we know of, and no natural process explains a neural-pattern-shaped signal originating from an uninhabited exoplanet."

"So it's not from there."

"I didn't say that." She rubbed her eyes, a gesture so exactly like Yuki's from twelve hours earlier that Rowan felt a small, strange vertigo, as if the whole world had quietly agreed to express this particular species of exhausted disbelief in the same register. "The triangulation is solid — you said three additional dishes confirmed it independently, and I trust your instrumentation. If the coordinates are right, the signal is coming from that direction, full stop, that part of the physics is not in question. What's in question is what 'coming from that direction' actually means, information-theoretically, if the timeline makes origination there impossible."

"Meaning what? Someone's projecting it? Faking the direction?"

"I don't know, Row. I want to be careful here, because I can hear in your voice that you want me to hand you an answer, and I don't have one; I have a very precise description of the shape of the impossibility, which is not the same thing as a solution to it." She looked directly into the camera, and for a moment her face lost the analytical distance she'd been maintaining and became, simply, a friend's face, worried. "Has anyone from outside the ACF contacted you about this yet?"

The question arrived at an angle he hadn't expected, and something in his chest went cold before he'd consciously processed why.

"No. Why?"

"Because I got a call two hours ago," Priya said, "from a man who identified himself as working for something called the Office of Strategic Signals Assessment, which is a name so deliberately boring that I looked it up during the call, and it doesn't exist in any public directory of federal or UN agencies, which usually means it exists very much in a private one. He asked me, in a tone that I can only describe as extremely polite menace, whether I had discussed any recent findings related to consciousness-pattern transmission with colleagues at the Arecibo Continuance Foundation. I told him I hadn't, because at that point I hadn't, and he thanked me and hung up, and I have been sitting here for two hours trying to decide whether to be frightened or trying to decide whether to tell you, and then you called."

Rowan's mouth had gone dry. "The UN Intelligence Directorate."

"He didn't say that. But the phrasing, the structure of the question — that's UNID language, or close enough to it that the difference doesn't matter. I did a stint on an advisory panel four years ago, before the funding dried up, that put me in a room with people from that world exactly twice, and I remember exactly how they talk. Like every sentence has been reviewed by three lawyers before it left the building."

"Miriam asked for forty-eight hours before she tells me anything more. She said she needed to make calls."

"I think," Priya said carefully, "that the forty-eight hours may not be entirely hers to give."

Before he could respond, his comm unit — the personal one, not the station line, the one that almost nobody had the credentials to reach — chimed with an incoming call. Unknown originating node. No caller ID, which his unit's software should have made structurally impossible; every call in the civilian network carried at least a routing signature.

This one didn't.

"Priya, I have to go."

"Row—"

"I'll call you back." He ended the video call before she could finish whatever she'd been about to say, and stared at the blinking, unidentified incoming call for three full seconds before he answered it.

The voice on the other end was calm, professional, and entirely unfamiliar. A woman's voice, mid-register, the specific flat courtesy of someone trained to sound reassuring regardless of content.

"Dr. Elias. My name is Analyst Constance Reyes, Office of Strategic Signals Assessment. I understand you had an interesting morning."

"I don't know what that office is."

"That's by design, Doctor, and I apologize for the inconvenience it's caused you. I'll be brief, because I know you're processing a great deal right now and I don't want to add unnecessarily to that burden." A pause, calibrated, the kind of pause that had been practiced. "We are aware of the transmission received by the Meridian Array this morning. We are aware of its apparent point of origin, and we are aware of the neural-pattern match against archive LV-001. I want to be direct with you, because I think directness is what you deserve in this situation: this is now a matter of significant interest to several bodies whose interest, historically, has not made things easier for the people at the center of it."

"Are you threatening me."

"No, Doctor. I'm informing you." Reyes's voice did not change register at all, which was, Rowan thought, somehow worse than if it had. "I'm informing you that Director Holt's timeline and our timeline are not the same timeline, and that you should expect a visit from our office within the next twenty-four hours, not the forty-eight she may have discussed with you. I'm also informing you, because I believe you'll find out regardless and I'd rather you hear it from me in a controlled manner than discover it in a way that damages the trust I'm hoping we can build, that your late wife's file was flagged for classification review the day after her death — not weeks later, as the public record shows. I understand that fact may be distressing. I am telling you now because I would rather you be distressed and informed than calm and blind."

The line went quiet. Outside his office window, one of the dishes shifted almost imperceptibly on its gimbal, correcting for the Earth's rotation, tracking a coordinate that, as far as any human being currently understood, should not be capable of producing what it had produced.

"Twenty-four hours," Rowan said finally.

"Twenty-four hours," Reyes confirmed. "I'd use them wisely, Doctor. And Dr. Elias — for what it's worth, and I understand it may be worth very little, coming from someone in my position — I am sorry for your loss. I've read the file. I know what today must be doing to you."

She ended the call before he could ask what, exactly, she meant by *the file*, or how she had a copy of a grief she'd never met.