Waaa-aaa-aaa.
He did the math.
STATUS: ACTIVE – UNCLASSIFIED SOURCE: Deep-space acoustic array, Sector 7-Gamma waaa-358
For 4.2 billion years, something in the dark between galaxies had been crying out. And now, for the first time, someone had whispered back. Waaa-aaa-aaa
At this rate of decay, would go silent in precisely 24 hours. And now, for the first time, someone had whispered back
The identifier was auto-generated by the system’s bored AI: . The ‘waaa’ prefix denoted a Wide-Angle Anomalous Acoustic. The ‘358’ meant it was the 358th such blip the array had ever caught.
The computer’s analysis scrolled up the screen: Unknown. Trajectory suggests origin point outside the Local Group. AGE OF SIGNAL: Approx. 4.2 billion years. DECODED CONTENT: Single repeated phoneme. Phonetic approximation: “WAAA.” TRANSLATION: None. No known linguistic root. EMOTIONAL SIGNATURE: Grief. Abandonment. Longing. Aris played it again. And again. By the third repetition, he noticed the anomaly the AI had buried in the metadata: the waveform was decaying . Each iteration was 0.003% quieter than the last. The signal wasn’t repeating. It was fading.