0sdla-001-xtp

Koch mapped it. The low thrum matched the rotation curve of a supermassive black hole, the one at the galactic core we lost contact with six years ago. The ping matched nothing. She overlaid the waveforms. The ping didn’t originate from the black hole. It originated around it. Orbiting.

We didn’t hear it then because we weren’t listening right. But it heard us. 0sdla-001-xtp

XTP Report: Log Fragment 0sdla-001 Classification: Ephemeral / Uncategorized Origin: Drift Station Theta, Outer Shelf Koch mapped it

We’re not broadcasting a reply. We’re not moving. But I just checked the array logs from tonight. The signal is stronger. She overlaid the waveforms

And now it’s coming from two directions.

For three cycles, the listening array at Station Theta has been dead. Silent. We thought the deep-space relays had finally calcified. Then, last night, the spectrograph woke up screaming.

We ran the decryption protocols. Nothing. We tried linguistic matrices. Gibberish. Then Koch, our signal analyst, put on headphones and went white.