Chapter 20: Signal
Pasadena was quiet.
At 11:38 p.m., the night shift at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory was low on caffeine and lower on expectations. Voyager 1 hadn’t sent back anything meaningful in years. Most of the team now monitored the signal like archivists, not explorers—tending to a relic, not chasing discovery.
But then the console blinked.
Just once.
A ping—low priority. Echo path. Unusual.
Nobody reacted at first.
But a few minutes later, a technician named Kendra Liang noticed something odd: the packet’s checksum had resolved before the receiving time stamp. She ran a diagnostic, expecting an error. She didn’t get one.
Instead, she got signal.
And then—structure.
—————
By 3:12 a.m., the waveform was displayed on three screens and had been passed through a half-dozen analyzers. It wasn’t binary. It wasn’t telemetry. It wasn’t even audio in the way they understood it.
But it repeated.
And more strangely, it held—its signal integrity sustained longer than any deep-space artifact they’d seen in months. That alone warranted escalation.
By 4:00 a.m., someone from Mission Ops was on the line. By 4:20, another tech cross-referenced the inbound ping with the system clock.
22.5 hours.
The time it takes for a signal from Voyager 1 to reach Earth.
The room fell into the kind of silence only serious anomalies create.
—————
They called a closed-door meeting at 6:45 a.m.
A few department leads. One press liaison. Two observers from a three-letter agency who never gave their names.
The waveform pulsed on the screen like a heart that wasn’t quite human.
Kendra summarized first: “It’s not coming from Earth. It’s not solar interference. It’s not background noise.”
“Then what is it?” someone asked.
Kendra hesitated. “We don’t know yet. But whatever it is—it came back through a dormant echo path. One that hasn’t been used in decades.”
They played the signal aloud, through modulation.
It wasn’t music. Not exactly.
But it had shape. Peaks. Spirals. Nested harmonics.
As if it carried emotion.
The waveform felt… intentional.
—————
At 9:02 a.m., a press bulletin was quietly drafted and reviewed by legal.
It was brief, cautious, and vague:
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has received an anomalous transmission appearing to originate from the Voyager 1 echo path. Scientists are currently analyzing the signal to determine its source and significance. Further updates will be provided when available.
No speculation. No theories. Just enough to prepare the world that something had happened.
—————
Thousands of miles away, the sun rose over the edge of Sam Ratnam’s estate in Hawaii. The light filtered through glass walls and onto polished concrete floors. Sam stood barefoot in the main studio, sipping lukewarm espresso, his phone in hand, open to a tech news alert.
He read the headline three times.
Voyager Sends Back Mysterious Signal, NASA Says
“Scientists Investigating Possible Deep-Space Anomaly”
He blinked.
Then turned slowly toward the secure wing of the house—the one with the Faraday cage.
He walked without hurry, but not slowly either.
Through the glass wall, he saw Chris.
Cross-legged on the floor. Silent. Still. Eyes closed.
Sam stared at him for a long time.
In the back of his mind, he recalled the drone footage from the night before last.
Timestamp: 1:08 a.m. PST.
22.5 hours ago.
Chris, falling into the pool at Sunnylands.
Atman, submerged.
The blue spark.
The hum.
—————
Sam didn’t believe in myth.
But Atman had told stories.
Stories about Walter. About a robe. About a mirror. About consciousness as energy, and Voyager as a receiver.
It had all sounded like nonsense.
But now?
A signal. At the exact time. From the exact path.
Sam took a long breath.
Outside, the sea glittered like glass.
Inside, Chris didn’t move.
Atman was gone. The cage was still. But Sam’s mind was racing.
He turned away from the glass, already dialing a number. One of his contacts at JPL. Not the official line.
As the phone rang, Sam muttered under his breath:
“I’m going to find out exactly what you did.”
He looked back once more.
Chris still hadn’t moved.
THE END