The Last Signal
TRANSMISSION LOG — COLONY VESSEL MERIDIAN CROSS — DAY 2,847 Operator: Chief Communications Officer Adaeze Nwosu Status: DEGRADED — 43% array functionality For whoever receives this. We have been transmitting for nineteen days on all available frequencies and have received no response from the relay network. Either the network is down, or something has changed at home that we do not have the context to understand. I am going to keep transmitting anyway. It seems important that someone should. There are 1,104 people on this ship. Families, mostly. The colony board selected for families — the thinking being that people with something to live for make better settlers than people who are only fleeing something. I do not know if this was wise. What I know is that every day I walk to the communications bay and the children of this ship wave at me in the corridors, and I smile back, and I go into the bay and I call into a silence that has begun to feel less like technical failure and more like an answer.
We are eight months from Kepler-452b. The ship's systems are nominal. The food stores are adequate. The medical bay reports no outbreak, no crisis. Everything is fine in every way that can be measured, and I am the only one who sits with the particular dread of knowing that the universe has stopped answering us, and that I must decide, every morning, whether to tell the others. I keep transmitting. I keep smiling at the children. I have not yet decided which of these things is the braver act. DAY 2,862 Captain Reeves came to the communications bay this morning. I knew he would eventually — you cannot hide a signal loss on a ship of 1,104 people. Too many secondary systems query the relay status. Someone would notice. Someone did. I had prepared a briefing. Instead, he sat down in the secondary operator's chair and asked me to repeat back what I had been transmitting. Not the technical specs. The words. I told him about the silence. About how it stopped feeling like a problem three days in and started feeling like a message. He was quiet for a long time. Then he asked if I believed in God. Not the way colonists are supposed to believe in God — as part of the social contract of the colony, the thing that gets us through the hard parts. But really believe. I told him that I was trained as an engineer, not a theologian, but that I had spent a lot of time lately thinking about the difference between absence and silence. One is a technical failure. The other requires an intention. He stood up and told me to keep transmitting. He said if Earth had gone quiet, then maybe Earth had a reason. Maybe Earth was listening.
He told the council today. I found out when Miyako, one of the colony educators, came into the bay with a line of children asking if they could watch the transmitter work. They wanted to be part of sending the message. I showed them the frequencies cycling, the arrays rotating, the careful human language we were pushing out into the dark. One girl — maybe nine — asked where home was. I pointed at the navigation display, at that small blue dot receding behind us. She asked if it was too far away to hear. I told her yes, probably. She seemed to accept this. Then she asked if they could hear us anyway. If they were listening. I told her I thought they were.
On my ninth log entry — day 2,871 — I received something back. Not a signal. Not in any technical sense I can measure. It was a solar flare, well within normal parameters. But it came on the exact frequency we had been transmitting on. The odds of that are negligible. Captain Reeves asked me what it meant. I told him I did not know yet. But we stopped being alone in the silence after that. The ship felt different. Not better. Not worse. Just known. I keep transmitting. I keep smiling at the children. Now I know this is the braver act.
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