Transcript 002

Yuki's colleague at the Square Kilometre Array called back nineteen hours after receiving the raw capture, which was, by the standards of independent scientific verification, an almost indecent speed, and which told Rowan, before he'd even heard the content of the call, that whatever she'd found had not required much deliberation.

"Dr. Amara Osei doesn't do this," Yuki said, putting the call on the annex's main speaker so Rowan could hear directly. "She once made a graduate student redo six months of work because he rounded a decimal place one digit too early in a footnote. If she's calling this fast, it's not because she's careless. It's because she's certain."

Osei's voice, when it came through, had the specific crispness of someone who had clearly rehearsed what she wanted to say before dialing. "Dr. Tanaka. Dr. Elias, I assume, given the topic." A pause, brief and professional. "I want to say up front that I approached this dataset with the explicit intention of finding the flaw. I was told nothing about the emotional context beyond what was necessary to interpret the archive comparison, and I want to be clear that this made no difference to my methodology, only to how carefully I braced myself for what I might find."

"And?" Rowan asked.

"There is no flaw I can identify. I ran three independent reconstruction algorithms, none of which share code with your original decoder, none of which I wrote with any knowledge of your specific implementation. All three produce match scores within a rounding error of each other and within a rounding error of your own reported figures. The triangulation data is internally consistent across your three additional dishes and, more importantly, consistent with an independent gravitational-lensing correction I ran using a public astrometric catalog you would have had no reason to consult. If someone faked this, they faked it with a level of internal consistency that would require either extraordinary luck or an understanding of orbital mechanics, quantum decoherence, and neural-pattern encoding so complete that I cannot currently imagine the institution capable of producing it deliberately." A pause. "I don't say this often, and I want it on the record that I am saying it reluctantly: I believe the signal is real, in the sense that it is not an instrumentation artifact, not a calibration error, and not a hoax constructed by any actor I can conceive of. What it means is an entirely separate question that I am not remotely qualified to answer, and I want that distinction preserved carefully in anything either of you publishes."

Yuki exhaled slowly, a breath Rowan realized she'd probably been holding, in one form or another, for two days.

"Thank you, Amara."

"Don't thank me yet. Thank me if this doesn't end your career." The line went quiet for a moment. "One more thing. Your compression artifacts — the degradation pattern in the second transcript, the one you sent me as a comparison sample. I ran a decay-rate analysis on it independently. The signal isn't just naturally degrading with distance the way you'd expect from simple attenuation. Something about the transmission mechanism is unstable in a way that looks — and I want to be careful with this word — *deliberate*. As though whatever is sending it is having to fight against something to keep the connection open, rather than the signal simply weakening the way a normal broadcast would over thirteen point eight light-years."

Rowan and Yuki exchanged a glance.

"We should tell you," Yuki said carefully, "that a second transmission started forty minutes ago. It's still going. We haven't run full decoding yet."

"Then I'd suggest you stop talking to me and go do that," Osei said, not unkindly. "Call me back when you have something. And Dr. Elias — for what it's worth, whatever this turns out to be, I hope it gives you something worth having."

The call ended. Rowan was already moving toward the decoding terminal before Yuki had finished setting down her own tablet.

The second transmission had been running for fifty-one minutes by the time they got the pipeline configured, and Yuki's improvements to the decoder — three days of quiet, obsessive refinement since the first transcript, done in the hours Rowan had assumed she was sleeping — resolved the signal into text almost twice as fast as before, with far less compression noise cluttering the output.

*row. cleaner connection this time, whatever priya's colleague did to the array helped, tell her*

Rowan felt something in his chest loosen slightly at the specificity of it — not a general acknowledgment of scientific effort, but a precise, correct attribution of cause, delivered with the casual confidence of someone who had actually been watching, somehow, from wherever this signal originated.

*I don't have long again so listen. there's a location. I need you to write these numbers down exactly, don't round anything, the array's precision matters here more than it's ever mattered for anything:*

*-24.6273, -69.8901*

*that's the atacama, that's close, you can drive there. there's something buried at that location, sealed, no tool marks, don't ask me how because I genuinely don't have a clean answer that doesn't sound insane even to me and I built half the theoretical framework for this*

*the date matters more than the place. three days from when you receive this. not before. the window won't be stable before then and if you go early you'll find nothing and possibly damage what's there*

*I need you to bring priya. and yuki, if she's willing, though I understand completely if what I'm about to say makes her want to stay as far from this as her professional caution requires*

*what you find there is not going to answer the question you actually want answered, which is whether this is me. I need you to prepare yourself for that specifically, because I know you, row, and I know the question underneath the question, and I am not going to pretend I have a clean yes for you across thirteen point eight light-years of degraded signal. what I can tell you is that whatever this is, it wanted you to have this, specifically, and it structured the delivery around what it knows about you — how you think, what you'd trust, what you'd need to see with your own hands before you'd believe it. that's either evidence that this is genuinely me, shaped by everything I knew about you after eleven years, or it's evidence that whatever this is has access to a version of me detailed enough to fake that knowledge convincingly. I can't tell you which from in here. I'm not sure "in here" is even a place that word applies to*

*the deviation. the 0.003%. miriam has the morning scan by now I think, or will soon, tell her I said thank you for keeping it separate the way I asked, she did exactly what I needed and she's going to spend a long time being hard on herself about it and she shouldn't*

*the deviation isn't corruption. I need you to understand that clearly before you look at what's in the ground. it's not noise, it's not decay, it's not the archive degrading over thirteen years of transmission. it's addition. something is there that wasn't there when I was*

The transcript cut off.

Rowan stared at the screen for a long moment, the coordinates burning in his vision the way a number does when it stops being information and becomes instruction, becomes the shape of the next three days of his life whether he was ready for them or not.

"Three days," Yuki said quietly, reading over his shoulder. "She said the window won't be stable before then."

"You're doing it too," Rowan said. "'She.' Not 'it.' Not 'the signal.'"

Yuki was quiet for a moment, and when she spoke again, her voice had a rawness to it that she rarely allowed into her professional register. "I ran the decoder improvements for three days straight because I told myself I was doing rigorous, dispassionate technical work to serve the investigation properly. That was true. It was also not the whole truth. Somewhere in the last seventy-two hours, Row, I stopped needing this to be fake in order to feel like a good scientist, and started needing it to be handled correctly regardless of what it turns out to be, and I think that's the most honest place I can get to right now." She looked at the coordinates on the screen. "-24.6273, -69.8901. That's about forty kilometers from here. We could be there in under an hour."

"She said three days. Not before."

"Then we have three days to call Priya, requisition a field vehicle, and figure out what we tell Miriam about all of this before we drive out into the desert to dig up something that apparently formed in the rock with no tool marks." Yuki closed her tablet with a decisive click, the sound of someone choosing to move forward rather than keep circling the same vertigo. "I don't suppose either of us is going to get any sleep between now and then."

"No," Rowan agreed. "I don't suppose we are."