Brief
Story based on Game called Voices of the Void.
The researcher sat alone in the dimly lit command room of the ASO base, the only sound the low hum of cooling fans and the occasional soft ping from the signal analyzer. The 25 satellite dishes outside stood silent under the perpetual alpine mist, their parabolic bowls pointed skyward like listening ears in the dark. It had been weeks of routine: capture, process, sell, repeat. The signals were mostly the usual cosmic noise—pulsars droning, distant planets whispering static, the occasional black-hole growl that made the hairs on the back of the neck stand up.
Until tonight.
The detector pinged differently. Not the clean, predictable sweep of a new celestial source, but something... localized. The coordinates blinked on the screen: a cluster of points deep in the forest, southeast quadrant, between satellite dishes Papa and Victor. Not from orbit. Not from deep space. From here, on the island.
The researcher leaned forward, eyes narrowing behind fogged glasses. The signal was faint, intermittent, almost playful—short bursts of modulated tones that didn't match any known astronomical pattern. No Doppler shift like a passing satellite, no rhythmic pulse of a pulsar. It carried data layers: encrypted fragments, garbled audio that sounded vaguely like voices, laughter even, though distorted through layers of interference. One brief snippet, when processed to level 1, resolved into something like electronic choir music mixed with... purring? The waveform danced erratically, as if whatever was emitting it was moving, shifting position slightly every few seconds.
A campfire? The thought came unbidden. But campfires didn't transmit radio signals. Not like this. The researcher cross-referenced the location against the array map. Nothing official there—no relay station, no abandoned equipment, no known anomaly site. Just dense pine, rocky outcrops, and the kind of thick undergrowth that swallowed footsteps. Yet the signal strength increased whenever the detector swept that exact bearing, as if the source was aware of being scanned and responding in kind. Teasing.
A prank signal? Possible. The forest had a history of oddities—wisps, looker feeds, the occasional trollface meme that somehow made it through the array. But those were always space-origin tagged, funneled through the upper atmosphere. This one was ground-level, line-of-sight, almost intimate. Like someone—or something—was broadcasting from a clearing no more than a kilometer or two away.
The researcher checked the timestamp. Late night, fog rolling in thick over the valley. Visibility would be near zero. The Kerfuś Omega units were recharging in their bays; the flying drones were on standby patrol. No point risking a full expedition in the dark without more data.
Still, curiosity burned. The ASO mandate was clear: investigate anomalies. This was an anomaly—terrestrial, deliberate, unknown. Not hostile (yet), but definitely interested. The signal pulsed again, a soft trill that almost sounded like a question mark in waveform form.
The researcher saved the capture to a fresh drive, fingers hovering over the process button. Processing further might reveal more—coordinates precise enough for triangulation, maybe even a visual if there was embedded video data. But it might also alert whatever was out there that someone was listening closely. A deep breath. The forest outside the reinforced windows seemed quieter than usual—no owl calls, no distant wind through branches. Just the mist, and somewhere in it, a faint, impossible signal from a place that shouldn't be transmitting anything at all.
Tomorrow, at first light, the researcher would go.
