Trudging Through Snow
First Contact
The signal came in at 3:47 AM, when Marcus Chen was halfway through his third cup of cold coffee and contemplating whether the vending machine down the hall still had those stale peanut butter crackers.
He almost missed it. The Allen Telescope Array fed data to his workstation in an endless scroll of noise, cosmic static rendered as jagged waveforms that meant nothing and everything simultaneously. Forty years of listening to the universe’s white noise had made SETI operators expert at recognizing patterns in chaos, but it had also made them numb to the possibility that the chaos might one day answer back.
Marcus blinked. Rubbed his eyes. Looked again.
The waveform wasn’t random. It repeated. A clean, oscillating pattern buried in the hydrogen line frequency, originating from a point source approximately twelve light years away. Tau Ceti.
“Priya,” he said, his voice strange in his own ears. “Priya, come look at this.”
His coworker rolled her chair across the cramped monitoring station, a protein bar dangling from her mouth. Priya Sharma had been with the project for six years, long enough to have seen a hundred false alarms, long enough to approach Marcus’s terminal with the weary skepticism of someone who expected to find another pulsar or satellite reflection.
She stopped chewing.
“That’s not natural,” she said.
“No.”
“Run it again.”
Marcus isolated the signal and ran the pattern recognition software. The results came back in seconds, confirming what his eyes had already told him: structured, repeating, intentional. Not the random emissions of a dying star or the mathematical precision of a pulsar’s rotation. Something else entirely.
“It’s modulated,” Priya said, leaning closer to the screen. Her protein bar lay forgotten on the desk. “There’s information encoded in there. Audio information.”
“Audio?”
“Look at the frequency distribution. It’s compressed, but if you decompress it according to standard acoustic parameters...” She was already typing, her fingers moving faster than Marcus had ever seen them move. “Someone out there is broadcasting sound.”
The implications of that sentence hung in the recycled air of the monitoring station. Marcus felt his heartbeat in his temples, in his wrists, behind his eyes. Twelve light years. Whatever this was, it had been traveling through the void since before he started this job, since before his son was born, since before the Allen Array had even been conceived.
“Can you play it?” he asked.
“I can try.”
Priya’s fingers danced across the keyboard, running the signal through a series of filters and decompression algorithms. The workstation hummed. Outside, the California desert stretched dark and empty beneath a sky full of stars that suddenly seemed less distant than they had an hour ago.
The speakers crackled. Static. Then, faintly, something else.
Strings.
Marcus felt the hair rise on his arms. The sound was thin, degraded by its journey across the light years, but unmistakable. Violins, rising in a minor key. Cellos beneath them, providing foundation. A melody he knew, that anyone would know, emerging from the cosmic background radiation like a voice from a dream.
“That’s not possible,” Priya whispered.
The 1812 Overture swelled through the monitoring station’s cheap speakers, Tchaikovsky’s war hymn playing in a room full of blinking servers and cold coffee. The brass section entered, triumphant and strange, twelve years old and twelve light years distant. Marcus listened to music composed in 1880, broadcast from a star system humanity had only begun to study, and felt the architecture of his understanding of the universe crack and reform around this single impossible fact.
“They know us,” he said. “They’ve been listening to us.”
Priya didn’t respond. She was staring at the waveform on the screen, her face pale in the monitor’s glow, watching the patterns dance in perfect synchronization with the music. The overture built toward its famous climax, the part where cannons would fire and bells would ring, where Tchaikovsky had tried to capture the sound of nations clashing and history turning on its axis.
Radio waves traveled at the speed of light. The first broadcasts powerful enough to escape Earth’s atmosphere had gone out in the early twentieth century. By now, they would have reached dozens of star systems, carrying fragments of human culture into the void. Music. Speeches. Wars. Advertisements. The accumulated noise of a civilization talking to itself, never expecting anyone to answer.
Someone had answered.
The cannons fired in the recording, distant and distorted but still thunderous. Marcus thought about what it meant, that an alien intelligence had sifted through humanity’s electromagnetic detritus and chosen this, of all things, to send back. A Russian composer’s tribute to a military victory, full of bombast and nationalism and the strange beauty that humans made when they celebrated survival.
Was it a greeting? A test? A warning?
He turned to ask Priya what she thought, and stopped.
She was still staring at the screen, but something was wrong. Her expression had gone slack, unfocused, as if she were listening to something he couldn’t hear. And beneath her nose, dark against her brown skin, a thin line of red was tracing its way toward her upper lip.
“Priya?”
She didn’t answer. The blood reached her lip and began to drip onto the desk, small crimson drops falling in time with the music, and Priya Sharma kept staring at the signal from Tau Ceti as if it contained the secrets of the universe, as if it were speaking directly to her, as if the overture had been meant for her ears all along.
The bells began to ring.
