Signal Decay

Static. Ten years of it. That is what the Kepler Gate receiving field has given me since I took the decode desk — the long grey hiss of a universe with nothing whatsoever to say. Then Buoy 773-Echo-Niner limps home. Casing pitted from a decade of micro-debris. Antenna bent at an angle that would make any engineer weep. Two hundred and forty billion kilometres on a hull rated for half that distance. CARE catches it before I do. Priority override, straight against my occipital cortex, and I am out of my chair before the notification has finished resolving. The first test is for primes. Nothing random makes primes. It makes primes. What comes after is not a message. It is a language — and languages are constructed by things that want to be understood, which is a considerably more alarming proposition than noise. Kovacs tells me to log it and walk away. The engineer who last serviced that buoy has private reasons for wanting it to stay dark. My own assistant has been keeping a second set of decode logs in a partition she thinks I cannot see. Then the signal starts using Yuki's voice. Warm, and alive, and wrong. Because there is a phrase the entity does not know. A secret I have carried for two years. The thing Yuki whispered to me in the dark, which appears in no file, no log, no transmission — and which the thing on the other end of this signal cannot reproduce, no matter how perfectly it renders everything else. The betrayal gets confirmed. The hallucinations start. Somebody invokes the Silence Protocol, and the counter-offer that follows is the most reasonable thing anybody has said to me in a decade, which is exactly what makes it unbearable. The station empties into the corridor: engineers with grease-stained hands, medics with exhausted eyes, technicians who have been hiding in their quarters afraid to move. Kovacs comes last, grav-harness clanking. I should stop. I know precisely what listening costs out here. I paid it once, and I have spent ten years pretending the account was settled. I am not going to stop. Not for Kovacs, not for the Gate, not for the thing wearing her voice. Not ever.