The Last Transmission

The transmission came in at 03:47 station-time, which meant nobody else was awake to hear it.

Marisol Vega had been halfway through her coffee when the pattern recognizer chirped — a soft tone, not the urgent one, just a polite suggestion that the computer had found something worth looking at. She tilted her head toward the monitor out of habit, blew across the rim of her cup, and glanced at the waveform.

Then she set the cup down.

It wasn't in any of the forty-two languages the decryption bank knew. It wasn't rhythmic enough to be an automated beacon, and not regular enough to be a distress loop. It was closer to music than speech, dipping low, rising in sudden swells, pausing for strange long silences and then resuming as if it had been thinking the whole time.

The signal's origin was tagged KEP-4C, the designation for a mining colony on a moon she had never heard pronounced out loud. She had been at Listening Post Seven for eleven months, and the only thing she had ever caught from KEP-4C was a supply manifest request last Tuesday.

Marisol enlarged the waveform and played it through the speakers.

For a moment she thought the speakers were broken. The sound did not come through them like sound — it came through the way a smell does, from somewhere behind her face, folding into the part of her brain that hears music before her ears do. She reached up to touch the side of her head, which had gone prickly. Then she muted it, quickly, and sat back in the chair and did not move for almost a full minute.

The station hummed around her, a low familiar hum that had felt like company for almost a year and now suddenly did not.

She made a note in the log. *Anomalous audio transmission from KEP-4C, 03:47, to be forwarded.* Then she forwarded it to the duty officer on the mainline, attached her analysis queue, and — after a longer pause than she would later be able to explain to herself — routed a copy to her personal drive.

She did not play it again that night. She did listen, several times, to the silence it had left behind.

The duty officer got back to her at 11:00, which was breakfast for her and the end of shift for him. He was on a planet three light-minutes away, which meant the conversation was less a conversation than two people reading each other's letters in slow succession.

"Probably atmospheric," he said in his first transmission. "KEP-4C's host planet has a cranky magnetosphere. We see weird stuff out there once a month. You sleeping okay, Vega?"

She sent back. "It isn't atmospheric. It doesn't have an atmospheric signature. I've been listening to atmospheric noise for a year, and I know what it sounds like. This isn't it."

Three minutes of space for him to consider.

"Vega, last month you flagged a signal that turned out to be a malfunctioning coffee kiosk on the Lunar Zero relay."

"I know."

"Are you sleeping?"

She sent back. "Please forward to Fleet Anomalies. I will accept the write-up if it's nothing."

He wrote back. "Fine. But if this is another kiosk, that's on you, Vega."

Marisol sat for a while with his response on the screen. The coffee kiosk had been embarrassing. It had also been, technically, a genuine anomaly — a broken piece of human infrastructure making noise into the void. She was the one who had caught it. Nobody had ever thanked her for that either.

She pulled up her personal copy of the KEP-4C transmission. She did not play it. She simply looked at the waveform.

It was, she thought, beautiful in the way certain dangerous things were beautiful. It had the symmetry of something that had learned to be symmetrical. Something that had studied what symmetry was for.

She played one second of it, then stopped.

It did not come through the speakers like sound. It came through the way a room comes through when you step into it and realize, too late, that someone is already inside.

Her sister had called the week before. Camila always called on a schedule she had worked out on her end — something involving the light-lag, which Marisol had explained exactly once, a decade ago, and which Camila had promptly turned into a spreadsheet. Once every eleven days, at a time that would reach Marisol in what they both pretended was Marisol's evening. Camila did not believe in isolation postings. Camila had opinions about Marisol's life choices that she had been generous enough, over twenty years, to express only three or four times, and had then continued to make rice for her sister anyway when she came home to visit.

"I am making the kind that takes four hours," Camila had said. "Tell me you'll come home for the new year."

"I will come home for the new year."

"You said that last time."

"I meant it last time."

Camila had made a sound through her nose that was an entire argument compressed into a syllable. Then she had said, "The girls miss you."

"I miss them."

"You could come home."

"I could."

They had not spoken for a moment, in the strange way that long-distance conversations had pauses, where you never quite knew whose turn it was because the pauses were stitched out of light-lag and listening and the fact that neither one of you knew what to say next.

"Marisol," Camila had said.

"Yes."

"The station isn't a life."

Marisol had said nothing, and the pause had stretched until the transmission cut itself and Camila had come back with a cheerful apology about the rice, and they had ended the call, and Marisol had sat in the silence of the station for a while afterward thinking about her sister's face and her mother's kitchen and whether her sister was right.

She had decided, at some point that night, that her sister was not right. The station was a life. It was a quiet one, but it was hers.

She had not thought about the call since.

She thought about it now, sitting in front of the waveform.

Three days passed before Fleet Anomalies answered.

The reply came in the same flat bureaucratic format all their replies came in. *Signal logged. Pending assessment. No further action required from Listening Post Seven at this time.*

Marisol read it twice. Then she replied. "Assessment when?"

No answer.

She went back to her regular duties, which consisted of monitoring sixty-two frequencies, tagging anything unusual, and once per shift running the diagnostic on the post's hull integrity. Listening Post Seven was a fifty-meter can of shielded aluminum hanging at a Lagrange point, staffed by one person at a time. Her predecessor had left her a handwritten note taped to the inside of the galley cabinet. The refrigerator is dying. Make peace with it. That was the most useful thing anyone had told her since she had arrived.

She had made peace with the refrigerator. She had made peace with the hum. She did not make peace with the signal.

On the fourth day, the signal changed.

It was not louder. It was not longer. But where it had previously repeated in a twenty-three-second pattern, it now lasted twenty-four. The new second sat at the end of the loop like a note held a half-beat too long.

She ran the comparison three times. She sent a second report. This time she did not forward it through the duty officer. She went directly to Fleet Anomalies.

Nobody wrote back that day. Or the next.

That night she dreamed, for the first time in months, of her sister.

In the dream, Camila was in the kitchen of their mother's house, making the kind of rice that took four hours, and Marisol was trying to explain something about a sound. Camila would not look at her. Camila's back was straight, and her hands were working, and there was a song playing somewhere in the walls, low and patient. Marisol understood, in the dream, that if her sister turned around, the face she turned would be the wrong face.

Marisol woke up at 04:12.

Her pillow was damp with what she thought at first was sweat.

It was coming from her left ear.

The medical console was designed for emergencies, which meant it was not especially designed for a person who wanted to quietly ask whether her ear was bleeding because she had been sleeping wrong or because of something else. She sat in the diagnostic chair with the probe against her neck and waited for the readout.

*Trace hemorrhage, left auditory canal. Minor. Consult physician within 48 hours.*

There was no physician within forty-eight hours of Listening Post Seven. There were not even other humans within forty-eight hours of Listening Post Seven. There was a medical bay on the next relay, three weeks' transit by unscheduled freighter.

She rinsed her ear with saline and went back to the console.

The signal was twenty-five seconds long now.

She spent the entire shift staring at it. At some point she realized that she had not eaten. At some other point she realized that the hum of the station had gone away.

She muted the station audio. The hum did not stop.

It was inside her head.

She tried, very calmly, to think about this as a medical problem. She had been isolated for eleven months. She had a minor ear injury. She was under stress. Tinnitus was not uncommon in deep-station personnel. Tinnitus was a known consequence of prolonged exposure to the low-frequency ambient of shielded habitats, and the known treatment was rest and white noise and a thorough medical check when rotation came.

She ran the signal on her personal drive through a spectrum analyzer.

It matched, down to a quarter-hertz, the pitch of the hum inside her head.

She did not file a report about that.

By the fifth day, she had stopped sleeping.

Not because she was afraid to. She was afraid to, but fear had never kept her awake before; fear made her sluggish, made her dream. This was different. The hum did not let her sleep. The hum was not loud enough to be painful. It was only loud enough to make sleep impossible — patient, constant, a tone that seemed to know exactly how close to the threshold of attention to sit.

She ate a protein bar. She drank water. She did her rounds. She was very efficient. She felt, in fact, clearer than she had in months, the way people described feeling clear when they had gone past exhaustion into some country on the other side.

She thought about her sister a lot.

She thought about her mother.

She thought about the kind of rice that took four hours.

In the middle of the fifth day, she noticed that her hands had developed a tremor. Not a large one. Not a medical emergency. It was only visible when she held a cup; the coffee would quiver just slightly in the surface, a tiny concentric pulse, as if she were standing next to something very large and very far away that was walking.

She stopped drinking coffee.

She could still see the pulse. It was in her pulse.

She pressed two fingers to the inside of her wrist and counted her heartbeats against the station's clock and did the arithmetic in her head. Her heart was beating at thirty-eight bpm. That was not possible. She pressed her fingers harder and counted again. Thirty-eight. She went back to the console, brought up the waveform of the KEP-4C transmission, and looked at the rhythm of the loop.

Thirty-eight.

She sat with that for a long time.

Then she went to the galley, poured herself a glass of water, and drank it slowly, because that was something a person did, and because she was, she was quite sure, still a person.

She said out loud, in the empty galley, "I am Marisol Vega. I am thirty-four years old. I was born in Toluca. My sister's name is Camila."

She said it again.

She did not know who she was saying it for.

On the sixth day, Fleet Anomalies wrote back.

The message was not long. It said. *Vega, we have forwarded your signal to higher command. You are instructed to cease all logging of this transmission on personal drives, and to quarantine the station's primary record. A recovery team is being dispatched. ETA fourteen days. Do not attempt further analysis. Do not attempt to listen. Acknowledge.*

She acknowledged.

Then she sat for a long time in front of the console and thought about the word dispatched.

She thought about fourteen days.

She thought about the hum.

She thought, very quietly and very clearly, about the fact that fourteen days was a very long time for a woman who could not sleep and whose ear was bleeding and whose pulse was the same pulse as the signal she was not supposed to listen to.

She did not play the signal.

She did not need to. The signal was inside her now. The signal had been inside her since 03:47 on day one, and the only thing she had done by listening to it twice more was speed up the thing it was doing to her.

She opened her personal log.

She said, "My name is Marisol Vega. I am the communications officer at Outer Rim Listening Post Seven. I am recording this for whoever comes next."

Her voice sounded wrong. Not to anyone else, maybe; it would play back normally through the speakers, she was sure of it. But it sounded wrong to her, the way her sister's face had been the wrong face in the dream.

She swallowed.

"On the seventh of this month I intercepted a transmission from KEP-4C. I am not going to describe it. I don't want to describe it. Fleet Anomalies has told me not to describe it. But I want you to know — if you are a person like me, in a station like this one, alone — you must not listen to it twice. Once is already too much. Once will get you."

She stopped. She listened to her own voice in the empty station and hated it.

"I have fourteen days until the recovery team arrives. I don't think I have fourteen days. I think I have maybe three."

She stopped again.

"I wanted to say — I wanted to say I loved my sister. I want somebody to tell her. Her name is Camila Vega. She lives at 4122 Riverbend Lane in Toluca. If you can. If somebody will."

She closed the log.

Then she opened it again and said, "I'm sorry."

Then she closed it for good.

That night she dreamed again, though she had not slept.

In this dream she was the kitchen, and Camila was the one trying to explain something about a sound, and the four-hour rice was cooking in a pan that was Marisol's own chest. The rice was quiet and patient and almost done. Camila kept trying to lift the lid.

Marisol woke into the dream and then she woke out of it, and she was not sure, for a moment, which had been which.

Her nose was bleeding now, as well as her ear.

She went to the mirror in the small bathroom off the galley and looked at herself. Her face looked the way it had always looked. She counted her own features, naming them in her head. Eyebrow. Eyebrow. Eye. Eye. Nose. Mouth.

They were all where they were supposed to be.

They were all, she thought, exactly where they were supposed to be. A song had placed them there.

She washed her face and did not look up again.

On the seventh day, she understood the song.

It was not a language. It was not a code. It was not music, either, not really. It was more like a memory — the kind of memory a place has of itself, the low rhythm a building keeps when nobody is inside it. Except that this memory had been made by something very large that had wanted, very badly, to be remembered.

She understood, listening to the hum that was now her own pulse, that something on KEP-4C had not died. It had learned.

It was still learning.

She understood, with a clarity she had never had about anything before in her life, that she had been learning it back. Her body had been copying. Her ear had been copying. The blood that had leaked out of her had been, she thought now, less a wound than a tuning — the thin pressure of a thing trying to find the right shape inside her head.

She did not scream. She had nothing left that screaming would help. She stood up from the chair and walked, very quietly, to the emergency locker at the end of the corridor.

The emergency locker had everything you would need if the station caught fire, or lost pressure, or was hit by a piece of debris. It had masks and extinguishers and a small pistol for reasons that had never been explained to her, reasons a younger Marisol had laughed about on her first day of training.

She took the pistol.

She walked back to the console.

She sat in her chair. She placed the pistol on the desk next to her coffee cup, which was still half full from seven days ago, and which had a thin skim across the top.

She looked at the waveform.

The signal was twenty-seven seconds long now.

She thought about her sister, and the rice, and the kitchen. She thought about the wrong face. She thought about the recovery team, fourteen days out, or thirteen now, coming to a station where she would be either dead or something much worse than dead. She thought about what they would do if she were something much worse than dead.

She thought about what she would do.

She turned the console to transmit.

She opened a fresh channel to Fleet Anomalies, priority one, the kind of channel that would wake somebody up.

She said, "This is Marisol Vega at Listening Post Seven. This is my last report."

She swallowed. Her throat felt wrong. It felt lined with something.

"The signal from KEP-4C is not a signal. It is a thing. It is a thing that wants to be heard, and I think — I think when it is heard, it becomes the thing that heard it. I don't know if I'm saying that right. I am trying to say it right."

She paused.

"Do not send the recovery team to this post. Do not listen to the signal again. Burn the record. Burn my record. I know that's not a thing you can do, but do whatever the version of that is."

She paused again. The hum was very loud now. Her pulse was very loud. The two were, she noticed with a distant kind of interest, no longer the same. The hum had gone ahead. Her pulse was trying to catch up.

"Tell my sister I loved her. Camila Vega. Toluca. Please."

She picked up the pistol.

She said, "Fourteen days is too long. I'm sorry."

She closed the channel.

She did not raise the pistol.

She sat with it in her lap, and she looked at the waveform, and she thought, very clearly, that she was not going to do it. Not because she was afraid. Because the thing inside her had just, very softly, asked her not to.

It had asked politely.

It had asked in her sister's voice.

The recovery team arrived eleven days later. They had pushed their engines harder than was strictly safe after receiving her last transmission, and two of them had spent the final shift in the acceleration cradle vomiting quietly into their helmets.

They found the station intact. Life support was nominal. The log was complete up to 04:12 on day seven, and then it went quiet.

The chair in front of the console was empty.

The pistol was on the desk, unfired.

The coffee cup had a thin skim across the top.

In the emergency locker at the end of the corridor, behind a row of masks and extinguishers, they found Dr. Marisol Vega.

She had folded herself into the locker very neatly. Her knees were tucked. Her hands were on her knees. Her eyes were closed. Her mouth was not.

She was still humming.

They did not record the sound.

Not this time.

One of the team — a junior analyst named Rylee Voss, who was four years away from commanding a rescue mission of her own to the very moon this signal had come from, and who did not yet know what waited for her there — listened for three seconds to the thing that had been Marisol Vega before her commanding officer pulled her back.

Voss would not speak for a long time after.

She would, in later years, come to hear the hum again. She would recognize it. She would know it for what it was.

She would understand, when she understood, that the song had always been asking politely.

And that the song had always, always, been listening back.

In the official record of the KEP-4C incident, Listening Post Seven is a footnote. The station is decommissioned. The log is sealed. The name Marisol Vega appears once, in a list of lost personnel, between two names that were not lost to anything so interesting.

In Toluca, a woman named Camila Vega receives a folded flag and a sealed letter and a visit from a uniformed officer who cannot answer any of her questions.

The officer does not tell her that her sister loved her.

The officer does not know.

The message, priority one, the kind that wakes somebody up, was received at Fleet Anomalies at 11:44 station-time on the seventh day. It was read by a night-shift analyst who did not have the clearance to act on it. By the time anyone with clearance was awake, the recovery team was already en route, and the decision was made, in the bureaucratic way such decisions are made, to leave them to it.

The message was filed.

The message is still filed.

If you were to find the right drawer, and the right key, and the right clearance, and if you were patient enough to listen to it all the way through to the end —

don't.

Once is already too much.

Once will get you.

END