Chapter Text
Her index finger lightly tracing invisible geometric patterns across the worn surface of her desk. Squares, circles, crosses filling the wood and appearing before her eyes. None of it meant anything, it was just a way to keep her mind occupied as the lesson went on.
When you turn eighteen people like to pretend that, by then, you're supposed to have your life already planned out. To know exactly where you are going, what type of person you will become, and how the rest of your life would unfold. What they rarely admits is that, in reality, most people spend their twenties trying to answer those questions, their thirties revising the answers, and their forties wondering if there had ever been a right one to begin with. No one tells you that the feeling of running out of time arrives long before time actually reaches you. It settles quietly into your bones until it begins to feel like a convinction. And what starts as a personal urgency, becomes part of the human existence itself.
Unless, you fall in love with space. Because space have this beautifully strange way of making any human deadlines appear insignificant.
And when you're interested in space, you notice how stars takes billions of years to be born, how any civilization could be destroyed in a matter of seconds, you mindlessly draw invisible patterns on your desk and you attend physics lessons at University.
"-As I was saying, we're in the middle of the 20th century, when a brilliant scientist and physicist whose name was Enrico Fermi, during a rather animated discussion with his colleagues about the possibility of extraterrestrial civilizations, he posed a simple question that would forever reshape our perspective on the cosmos as we know it:
"Where is everybody?" the professor took a short pause to catch his breath and to switch to the next slide. A bunch of different names written on the slide caught her attention.
"If there are so many advanced civilizations, why haven't we found any evidence of them yet? To answer this question, many others scientists tried to give us an explanation of this so called Paradox. Whether it's because we lack the technology to be able to detect a signal, or because we are truly alone in the universe, the answer remains unknow-" suddenly, a raised hand caught the professor's attention, followed by a confident and hopeful tone of voice.
"What if we've been searching the wrong way all along? What if they do communicate through channels humanity never thought to listen to". She looked around, everyone was looking at her, some with interest and curiosity, others seemed to judge her for having such opinions, but all that just convinced her to continue her speech. "Perhaps, through something more personal and intimate, that carries the same emotional weight our language does for us".
"Oh, I didn't know we had such a romantic thinker in here" replied the professor in a rather snarky tone, assessing the young woman "May I suggest you to consider changing your course from physics to philosophy?"
A murmur of snickering laughter spread through the class and reached her, followed by a few indistinct whispers. She lowered her head slightly, secretly wishing she could disappear faster than the time light takes to cross the Universe. Heat flooded her cheeks, the unbearable sting of embarrassment creeping up her neck and settling on the tips of her ears.
"May I know your name? Miss..." the professor kept going on, subtly pleased in seeing such a refreshing approach to his subject.
"Benyapa Jeenprasom" replied the young woman, with an barely audible voice, in hope to avoid further embarrassment.
"Well, Miss Jeenprasom. If you find a way to scientifically prove what you just said, we might be able to hear your name for generations to come".
The idea made her feel better, she raised up high her gaze again and a bold smile spread across her lips.
First Touch
The bathroom lights above her head flickered relentlessly, casting shifting shadows on her face. The small, cramped room made the air feel thick and almost impossible to breathe, but View had a far more important issue to take care of. Under cold running water, she stood over the sink, veemently scrubbing away every last trace of blue ink that still clung to her delicate fingers. For the past two hours, she had been writing down hundreds of data points and mathematical equations. And yet, despite having barely enough energy left to keep her eyes open, her work was far from finished. She was supposed to stay over for the night shift, one of many that same week.
The loud sound of a bathroom stall opening behind her made View rise her head on the mirror in front of her and search with her gaze the one's of the woman stepping out. She seemed to have the same age of View, both in their 30s, if not a bit older. As she moved torwards the sink, to stand side to side to View's left shoulder, she covered half her face with her hand.
"Ugh, how can anyone breathe in here? This place is disgusting" she turned her head to look at View, expecting to see, at least, a silent sign of agreement, but when the latter remained completely unfazed, she continued "Seriously, is this supposed to be the second change they so generously gave us?" A mocking and annoyed tone filling every words coming out of her mouth "it looks and feels more like a punishment than anything".
"Be thankful we still have this job in the first place, even if they transferred us all here" replied View without missing a beat to her thorough cleaning of her fingers.
"Well I think we shouldn't get punished for someone else's mistake. What she did was-"
"MILK!" View had finally pronounced the mysterious woman's name, and with a really loud tone at that. "Enough! We already promised to not talk about this"
"No, we promised to not do it when she's around" explained Milk. "but she clocked out half an hour ago. And View, look..." a hurt expression flashed on Milk's face, so sudden that View thought she imagined it "you were assigned at the night shift yesterday, so you weren't here when she lashed out on me. You should've seen it, she was so angry and no reason at all!"
"She has probably heard another of your stupid jokes" joked View, in hope to ease some of the tension weighing on Milk's shoulders.
"Hey! First of all my jokes aren't stupid" Milk shot back, with her index finger pointing straight in front of View's nose. "Love adores them" she admitted "and second, stop defending her so much". View could hear, for the first time ever, a certain envy, that refused to be ignored, underneath Milk's playful sarcasm. Her eyes were still fixated on View's, her gaze was so intense, almost expectant, like she wanted View to understand what she didn't dare to say out loud, but she didn't need to say it, View knew exactly what that whole conversation meant.
"Just... I get it ok? I really do. But cut her some slack, alright? Seriously, that's all I'm asking. She's hu-"
"-hurting, yeah I know" she looked away for a moment, her jaw tightening ever so slithly, swallowing down the frustration that had been building for far too long "But that doesn't allow her to treat me as her punching bag" her gaze shifted back to View, subtly softening after seeing her friend worried expression "And View, it doesn't make you one either". Her voice was quieter now "Think about it".
"Anyway, good luck on your night shift, and remember if an alien spaceship were to contact you tonight..." Milk stopped talking to suspiociously look around and lowered her voice as if she was about to reveal one of humanity most important secret ever, and then added "send it to the United States so they will have the new source material for the next two hundreds apocalyptic movies"
"Milk, are you certain your wife isn't lying to you about the jokes?" View's furrowed brows and deadpan look was a clear enough proof the joke didn't have the effect Milk hoped it would have.
With that, View leaves the bathroom, trying to put the conversation she had with Milk behind her. It didn't recognized her. Usually, she's the patient and calm one among the group but View couldn't shake away this ominous sinking feeling in her stomach, that something around her was about to change and Milk's weird behaviour had probably been the first sign.
Back inside the observatory's main office, View sat at her desk. She quietly observed all the papers nicely stacked across the surface as a strong and sharp smell of ammonia hits her nose, a familiar sign that the janitor had already started her shift. After taking a minute to recollect all her thoughts, she moved torwards the software's monitors. She calibrated the telescopies to make them point at her field of expertise and got to work right away.
View had spent ten years of her life studying Pulsars, enough time for their rhythms to become more familiar than her own heartbeat.
When her career was still starting, she was interested in black holes and their cryptic complexity, the idea of observing something so elusive, chaotic and merciless fascinated her. To View, despite their destructive nature, they seemed to shy away, refusing to show themselves entirely, and the only way to understand them is only by going through that same path of devastation they leave behind on everything that surrounds them. View liked to imagine them as 'wounds' and 'deep scars' adorning the Universe.
But then, somewhere along the way, she changed. Well, her ideas and vision of the world did.
She chose predictability over the unknown, certainty over mystery. She dedicated the rest of her life, until that point, to the study of Pulsars, the dense and incredibly small remnant of a star after it collapses under its own gravity.
Her ex colleagues and familiars asked her why she switched her studies to such a narrow and limited field. Indeed, Pulsars' reliable patterns and steady rotation make it difficult for any astronomers to make success and headlines out of them, even if we consider their correlation to gravitational waves.
But View didn't mind that, the reason why she devoted her time and efforts to Pulsars was the exact same reason as to why many avoid them.
Everytime a Pulsar rotates its own mass, it releases a beam of radiation from its magnetic poles that travels through space and reaches the Earth. Here, what can be considered the fastest spinning objects in the Universe, gets translated as a pulse, similiar to a radio wave, a painfully and incredibly stable tick that acts as natural Universal clocks. To View, there's such beauty in knowing that, in an system full of chaos, despite it all, millions of light-years away from each others, Pulsars would never miss a single beat.
And somehow, that same sense of security and stability, it did remind View of her own life. A life carefully planned and organized, where she would move, day by day, through the same routine with deliberate slowness and caution. She was starting to forget the last time she took an actual risk that had nothing to do with her work, or the last time she accepted an invitation without knowing any of the guests, or again, the last time she ordered a new dish at the restaurant only out of curiosity. Her home and her work place, instead, became the only places where she would spend most of her time.
Surely, she felt lonely sometimes, but in those moments she had to remind herself to rise her gaze up to the night sky and think of the enourmous number of stars keeping her company, an advice her dad taught her when she was still a child. Now, that she had no one to take care of, and time would merciless continue its own march, day by day, her father's words had a reassuring effect on her.
However, as many knows, life's got a sense of humor, and she soon would find out too this terrible truth.
Hunched over the console, View was listening to the familiar noise emitted by the observatory's software as her lips curved into a satisided smile. She gently traced intricate and mysterious patterns with her fingers up in the air, paying no mind to it, as usual.
The software steady beeps filled the entire room, weirdly similiar to a human heartbeat, registering with precision the arrival time of 10 different pulsars scattered across the observable Universe. That same noise have been accompanying her for ten years. View could have sworn that sometimes, when she was alone at home and the world seemed to be quieter than usual, she could still hear it, deep inside of her. So it's no wonder that when, out of the blue, the software changed its own tune, View noticed it right away.
The unknown interference reached View's ears and made her shoot up from her chair to look at the screen. New data flashed up in front of her eyes.
She took a look at the first pulsar: the arrival time of its radio waves was on point and its rotation was perfect too, the second one showed the same result and the third one as well.
The fourth... View took a moment to inhale and exhale with her eyes tightly shut, in hope that her mind was playing a trick on her, but when she opened them again, the result remained unchanged: 3.4 microseconds earlier than usual. Short enough for anyone else to notice, but long enough for someone as experienced as View to notice there was something wrong. Then her gaze shifted to the fifth one, off by 3.2 microseconds. The sixth one was perfect again, the one below it was later by 1.7 microseconds. An anomaly, that's what it was.
View ran back to her desk as soon as she could, with her legs threatening to give up under her own weight. She took a large and thick file from the bottom drawer and opened it. It was a protocol spanning dozens of pages, containing strict procedures to follow in the event of an anomaly.
Of course, tiny deviations are natural, but most of the times these discrepancies can be easily explained scientifically or by a machinery's fault. That's why View started with that hyphotesys first things first.
She recalibrated every received and all the telescopies pointing at the pulsars, let the software run its programm again, recalculate and correct itself but it never did. She checked if other radio frequencies were interfering with her studies, she looked through the registrered logs of that same day but they revealed nothing unusual. She performed an engineering diagnostic to identify the root cause of the malfuction of the system but she found nothing that could prove her initial hyphotesys right.
On the outside, it might have looked like she knew what she was doing, but truthfully, View has never had to deal with such an issue before. It was her first time, and despite how hard she tried to remain composed, fear was slowly beginning to take a hold of her. The only things betraying the confidence she desperately tried to maintain, were the slight trembling of her fingers and the frantic pound of her heart against her ribcage, hammering with such force that she was convinced it was only a matter of time before it would fall out of her chest. Dozens of different thoughts swarmed inside her head like a bunch of angry wasps, but when a knock on the door, violently anchored her 'back to Earth' View screamed out of desperation.
"FOR FUCK'S SAKE! Can't you see I'm working in here?!? Come back later".
A loud silence stretched endlessly between the space occupied by the two bodies. View didn't even need to turn around to know who it was, there was only two people that could work there at that ungodly hour, and she was one of them. She kept her back towards the door the entire time and when she finally heard the footsteps fade away, along with the squeaking sound of the janitor’s cleaning cart, she let out a sigh of relief.
View brought her attention back to the instructions guide. At the end of the list, there was an emergency contact. View had been carefully following the list until that point, for some strange reason, she couldn't bring herself to dial the number. Her shift was almost over. Before clocking out, she decided to check how much time passed since the appearance of the first anomaly to the last registrered one.
7 seconds.
For exactly 7 seconds the Universe changed its own asset and View became the only wintess to it.
View was glad to be able to finally go back home, at least, she could sleep and pretend for a few hours that nothing from that night had ever happened, but not even three hours after leaving her workplace, View stormed in once again.
"Woah!" Milk jumped off her seat out of fear after hearing the door loudly slamming against the wall "View?? Are you crazy? Who the fuck storms inside a room like that?"
"Quick, I need this morning registered datas of the pulsars' arrival time".
"Uhh...what?" Milk was even more confused than usual but when she took a better look at View's current state, she realized something was not right with her colleague. She had the look of someone who hadn't gotten even an ounce of sleep. "Is there something wrong? Talk to me View"
"Fuck, you know what? I'll check for myself". She dragged her tired eyes across the screen. No anomalies, every single pulsar spinning as it should. For View, yesterday night was starting to look as if it had all just been a bad dream and nothing more.
"Hey Milk, if you notice something weird just call me, alright?"
"Weird how?".
That wasn't Milk's voice.
View slowly turned her head and saw her. How is it possible that View didn't notice her presence sneaking up behind her back?
"Emi". View pronounced that name with a noticeable tint of hostility and resentment in her tone, allowing the bitterness she felt inside of her to slowly seep into her next words "Don't worry about it, I was talking to Milk".
"Oh no, I heard you loud and clear" the sharpness in her voice made View take a better look at her. Emi stood there with her arms crossed, her expression unreadable but her eyes carrying a clear warning.
"Don't act like i'm stupid View" she continued "You were talking about the software's data logs" she boldly took a step forward, her gaze slightly shifting at the monitors behind View, before giving her full attention to the woman in front of her. Their faces only a few inches apart. "As far as I know, this is my office too". replied Emi pointing her index finger toward her personal desk, placed on the right side of the office. "If something doesn't work as it should, you're required to update me about it"
"Please" scoffed View. That simple word carrying years of pentup frustation with it.
As a sarcastic, yet tired, smile tugged on the corner of her lips, she added "you stopped being my superior a long time ago Emi. Whether you like it or not, we're on the same level now" the words seemed to have an effect of Emi's blank expression. A flicker of irritation flashed across her eyes. But it didn't stay on long enough for View to notice.
Then, to avoid any suspicions and to not let Emi dig any deeper View closed the conversation by saying "And no, everything works perfectly".
View might had been right about that, if not that for the next two weeks, the same anomalies occured. Only when View was alone working her night shifts and only for 7 seconds, as usual.
From that moment on, after studying every log recorded over the past ten years, day and night, View knew it wasn't a software failure or some physical phenomenon. For 7 seconds something or someone had the ability to transform the entire known Universe into its own communication array, and among every single human being on Earth, they used it to communicate only and only to View.
Back once again at her house, after a little over than two weeks, View was looking through the past few weeks collected informations she 'borrowed' from the observatory.
It made absolute no sense to her, she was smart enough to realize the entity was trying to initiate some sort of communication, but not smart enough to know what it was trying to say to her. Was it even a message in the first place?
She tried different decoding languages, but they all ended up with the same result: a terrible headache.
What was she doing wrong? The answer was out there, she was sure of it, she was certain she could reach it, but how? Maybe the mysterious being was making fun of her right now. An entity that could communicate by altering something so accurately precise, had all the reasons to mock her. She could not believe how something she had so familiarity with, could suddenly become so unrecognizable.
She knew that tune by heart, she went to sleep and woke up everyday, for ten years, with that tune inside her head. And at some point, just like that, she stopped knowing and all of her beliefs crumbled down like sand pillars. Not only that, but she stopped eating and sleeping properly because of the burden weighing on her shoulders. After her workshift she was sometimes too tired to cook, and even when she did, the food would sit untouched for hours. As for sleep, she could only toss and turn endlessly in bed.
Moreover, View would never admit it so openly but she was angry too, at the entity. She was pissed at it, because what right did it have to completely shatter the world as she knew it? What right did it have to consume completely every single thought of hers and make her question everything?
That's an intimate act and extremely personal and... it dared View to communicate through channels she never thought to listen to.
She lowered her gaze on the pile of papers scattered in front of her. She realized she was wrong all along. Her attention focused only on the discrepacies, on the anomalies, on the Universe's 'flaws'. But what if the steady, stable pulsars were part of the equation too? What if they were speaking two different languages? One in which View regarded flaws as something that needed to be fixed as soon as possible, and another where the entity used them, along with everything else, to connect.
She took a notebook from her bedroom and started writing. She assigned a 0 to the pulsars presenting a 'no delay' situation, and 1 to the other ones. A long binary code slowly took place on View's diary yellowish pages. Finally, she imported the code on her computer.
For a moment nothing happened, time seemed to froze in place, View could barely hear her own thoughts as she waited, her breath caught and stuck in her throat, and afterward the output window refreshed, making a single word appear:
"Hi"
She did it. She finally did it.
She managed to successfully translate the entity's first contact toward her. But then the emotion was too big for View's tired body to bear.
The pen slipped off her hand, as a cold sensation spread across her skin, sending goosebumps over her spine. Then her vision blurred, until a black void consumed her sight and she dropped limply on the floor.