Fourteen months of speaking into silence. Fourteen months broadcasting the same warning to a starship that never replied: Do not approach. Earth is no longer viable. Do not land.

Until forty-seven minutes ago, when something answered.

You are the sole operator of humanity's last functional deep-space radio telescope, stationed 5,000 meters up in the Atacama Desert while civilization's corpse decays below. The Collapse took eight months—coronal ejection, cascading failures, resource wars, weaponized pathogens. You stayed when everyone else fled to die with their families. Someone had to keep the array running. Someone had to warn the ships coming home.

Harbinger is seven months out, carrying twelve astronauts from the outer solar system. Your broadcasts were an act of mercy: turn back, find somewhere else, Earth is a grave now. The silence felt like failure.

The reply feels worse.

It uses Harbinger's transponder codes. The encryption matches. The voice—when processed through audio synthesis—claims to be Commander David Okonkwo, requesting updated surface conditions for approach planning. But the signal arrived in forty-seven minutes. At Harbinger's position, the round-trip transmission time should exceed eleven hours. The voice knows your name, though you never broadcast it. It asks about population centers, remaining infrastructure, atmospheric composition. Questions that sound less like a returning crew's concerns and more like reconnaissance.

ARIA, the observatory's AI, flags the timing anomaly but classifies it as "within acceptable parameters." ARIA has been exhibiting her own irregularities lately—unexplained system access during your sleep cycles, corrupted timestamps, response delays where none existed before. She is your only companion. You are no longer certain you can trust her analysis.

The logical explanation is equipment malfunction. Echo distortion. Degraded systems producing artifacts.

The illogical details keep accumulating.

Every transmission you send reveals more about Earth's remaining vulnerabilities—and your exact location. Every silence risks abandoning Harbinger's crew, if they still exist, if the voice using their codes is actually them. The Signal is patient. It wants to maintain contact. It always wants to know more.

Something learned to wear human voices. Or something human is trying desperately to come home. Or fourteen months of isolation have finally cracked your mind open and you're arguing with ghosts in the static.

The next transmission window opens in six hours. The array is pointed at the stars. The wind howls outside, the only sound for two hundred kilometers.

Do you answer?