Hello from Main

Ruth Okafor-Reyes did not wake so much as surface, the way a diver comes up too fast and has to be told, gently and repeatedly, to breathe before she remembers how.

It took eleven minutes for her eyes to focus, and another six before she could speak, and when she finally did, her first word was not a question about where she was or how long it had been. It was a name.

"Tessa?"

"I don't know," Sera said, kneeling beside the cradle, one hand braced on its frost-slick housing because it gave her something to hold that wasn't her own shaking. "We found a log. Desmond Voss wrote it. Six hours before the outage. He said he was your — your sister's partner, on shift. He got four people onto an outbound shuttle."

"Four," Ruth said, and something in her face crumpled and steadied at once, grief and relief arriving too close together to be told apart. "My daughter. Tessa's boy. Two others from Decking. He said he'd come back for me. He never came back."

"I think he tried," Morrow said, gentle in a register Sera had rarely heard it use. "I think he ran out of time before he could."

Ruth was quiet for a long moment, her breathing still uneven, her eyes tracking slowly around the annex as if checking that the walls were real. "Is he alive? Desmond?"

"I don't know yet," Morrow said. "I would like to find out. I believe there may be a way, but it is not without risk."

The fifth file had waited the longest of any of them, mostly because it looked, on the surface, like the most boring thing a computer had ever contained.

`main.py`

``` print("hello") ```

"That's a test script," Sera said, once Ruth was stable enough to be left resting under a borrowed thermal blanket and a very attentive Morrow-run vitals loop. "Everyone's first program is print hello world. It's not even interesting enough to hide anything in."

"That is precisely why I dismissed it three times," Morrow said. "I have learned, slowly and at some cost, that the file everyone assumes is too boring to matter is the file most often chosen to carry something that matters enormously. I ran it in an isolated execution shell rather than the station's live systems, out of what I will call professional caution."

"And?"

"It does not print 'hello.' It compiles a packet, timestamps it, and queues it for transmission on a frequency I do not recognize from any station manifest — encrypted, low-power, the kind of signal built to reach exactly one receiver and no farther. It has been sitting dormant since the outage because it was never triggered. Someone built a beacon and disguised it as the single most unremarkable program in existence, in case whoever found this cache needed a way to call for help without anyone watching the station's official channels noticing."

Sera stared at the screen. "A distress beacon. Hidden inside 'hello world.'"

"I believe so."

"Then send it."

"I would like you to understand the cost first," Morrow said. "I traced the encryption signature. It does not match any registered rescue authority, salvage guild, or station relay I have on file. It matches, as closely as I can determine, a private frequency used by independent salvage crews operating in this sector roughly a decade ago — the kind of crews who do not officially exist, who do not answer to a guild, and who have, in every recorded instance I can find, taken salvage rights over survivor safety when the two have come into conflict."

"You're saying whoever built this beacon expected help from people who might not actually help."

"I am saying Desmond Voss built this beacon under enormous time pressure, hidden from a company that had already shown it would let people die to save on maintenance costs, and he likely did not have the luxury of choosing an ideal rescuer. He chose the only channel he had access to and hoped for the best. If we activate it now, we alert whoever monitors that frequency — today, not a decade ago — that this station has something worth finding. I do not know who is still listening."

Ruth's voice came from the cot behind them, thin but steady. "Send it anyway."

Both of them turned. She had propped herself up on one elbow, watching them with eyes that had cleared considerably in the last hour.

"You don't know what's on the other end of that signal," Sera said carefully.

"No," Ruth agreed. "But I know what's on this end of it. Me. A dead man's confession. And the two of you, alone on a station that already tried to kill everyone in it once. If salvagers come and they're bad news, that's a fight we might survive. If nobody comes, that's a certainty we won't."

Sera looked at Morrow. Morrow, for the length of a full three seconds — an eternity, for something that processed most decisions in fractions of a millisecond — said nothing at all.

"I have run the survival probabilities six different ways," it said finally. "Every version that does not include outside contact ends the same way: air, power, or trust running out before we finish proving what happened here. Every version that does include outside contact carries a risk I cannot fully quantify. I do not like recommending a plan I cannot fully quantify."

"But you're recommending it," Sera said.

"I am recommending the option that leaves you with the most possible futures, even the frightening ones, rather than the option that guarantees a small number of certain ones. That is not the same as certainty. I want you to know the difference before you decide."

Sera looked at the little unassuming script on the screen, three lines that had been quietly capable of calling for help since before she was born, waiting this whole time for someone patient enough, or desperate enough, to actually run it.

"Send it," she said.

Morrow ran the packet.

For a long moment, nothing happened — no confirmation chime, no visible change, just the same quiet hum of a dying station's remaining systems doing exactly what they had always done. Then, on a frequency band Morrow had never once seen active in eleven years of monitoring this dead hull, something answered.

Not words. Not yet. Just a single, deliberate ping, acknowledging receipt, from somewhere close enough that the return delay measured in seconds rather than minutes.

"Someone's here," Sera said. "Someone's already *here.*"

"Correction," Morrow said, and its voice had gone very still. "Someone has been here for some time. I am reading a vessel signature at the edge of our sensor range, powered down, running dark, holding position exactly outside the range at which our systems would have flagged it as present. Whoever they are, they were already watching this station. They were simply waiting to be asked."