kkaji

The first readings arrived at 03:47 local time. A pattern in the noise floor that should not have been there — structured, repeating, deliberate. The monitoring station logged it as anomalous and flagged it for human review. By the time anyone looked, the signal had been broadcasting for six hours.

The signal contained no modulated data in any recognized encoding. Instead, the carrier wave itself exhibited fractal self-similarity across seven orders of magnitude. Each zoom level revealed the same pattern: a waveform that looked like a question, repeating endlessly, asking nothing in particular.

Three teams worked independently on decoding. Team Alpha treated it as language. Team Beta as mathematics. Team Gamma as music. All three produced results that were internally consistent but mutually incompatible. The signal meant something different depending on what you assumed it was.

On the fourteenth day, the signal stopped. Not gradually — instantaneously, between one sample and the next. The silence that followed was more unsettling than the signal itself. The monitoring equipment continued to listen, but the frequency was empty. Clean. As though nothing had ever been there.