Chapter 2: Contact

The news spread through the scientific community like fire through dry grass. Within forty-eight hours, every major radio telescope on Earth was aimed at Proxima Centauri, and every one confirmed what Maya had found. The signal was consistent, powerful, and intentionally structured. It was not a natural phenomenon. The prime number sequence ran for exactly sixty seconds, followed by a thirty-second pause, then repeated. After the first day of global observation, the pattern changed. The prime sequence was replaced by something more complex: a series of mathematical relationships that built upon each other like a textbook, starting with basic arithmetic and progressing through algebra, geometry, and into branches of mathematics that several observers noted were entirely unfamiliar. 'They are teaching us,' Maya said during the first international conference call. 'The prime sequence was the handshake, the proof that the signal was intelligent. Now they are establishing a shared language.' 'Or testing whether we are intelligent enough to follow the lesson,' Ramon added. The mathematical transmissions continued for two weeks, growing more sophisticated each day. Maya and her team worked in shifts to decode each new sequence, publishing their translations in real time to a global audience that had grown from a few hundred astronomers to several billion people who followed the updates with a mixture of excitement and fear. On the fifteenth day, the signal changed again. The mathematics stopped, replaced by a pattern that took Maya three hours to recognize as a compression algorithm. Embedded within the algorithm was a message, and when she finally decoded it, she sat alone in the control room and read the words on her screen with tears running down her face. The message was simple. It said: We have been listening to your radio transmissions for ninety-one of your years. We know you are there. We have been waiting for you to hear us. Are you ready to talk?