Dr. Soreya Nadir hadn't slept in forty-two hours.
The Geneva-based astrophysicist leaned over a holographic display, eyes bloodshot, watching a looping anomaly from Lagrange Station Six. The data stream wasn't wrong. It was just… impossible.
Cosmic microwave background readings had begun to "sing."Not metaphorically — the spectral residue emitted a self-modulating harmonic at precisely 43.112 Hz, pulsing every 1.618 seconds. Golden ratio timing.No known process could produce it.
Soreya whispered, "Not natural. Not random. Not human."
Then came the dreams.
It started among station personnel: engineers, researchers, even custodians. Night after night, they reported similar experiences — black corridors of shifting geometry, eyes that blinked in fractal patterns, and a woman's voice whispering just one name:
"Rael."
Soreya didn't dream. Not until last night.
And now, she understood something had changed in their sky.
She turned to the neural resonance mapping on the screen. For the first time in recorded history, human EEG patterns across unrelated individuals had begun to synchronize — subtly, globally, and only during deep sleep. The signal wasn't targeting minds. It was rewriting the medium of thought itself.
"She's speaking to us," Soreya said softly.
Her colleague, Dr. Alvarez, leaned in. "You believe it's Elara Voss? She's been missing for weeks. Declared KIA."
"No. I believe she's become something else."
Soreya tapped a console. On the screen, the anomaly's waveform adjusted, showing recursive interference structures. Not just a signal — a memetic architecture, encoded through cognitive resonance.
"It's not a message," she continued. "It's an activation key. She's trying to make us understand something we physically weren't evolved to perceive."
Suddenly, alarms blared across the lab.
UNSCOM (United Nations Space Command) had flagged a Level-5 cognitive breach.
Across multiple major cities — Tokyo, Lagos, São Paulo — individuals had entered dissociative trances, mumbling in unrecognizable mathematical tongues, sketching impossible geometries, bleeding from the nose. A few had attempted to construct symbols using whatever was at hand — wires, strings, even their own hair — forming patterns eerily similar to the lattice Soreya had seen in her dream.
"It's accelerating."
Soreya turned pale.
They weren't just receiving a warning.
The signal was preparing humanity.
But for what?
She reopened Elara's last known logs. The final entry — "Some transmissions should never be answered" — flickered in her mind.
Too late.
Because someone had already answered back.
And the sky was no longer silent.