It's late afternoon when the alert chime sounds. First once, then again, after that a relentless staccato.

"For goodness sakes, Valerie, turn that thing off..." Arthur starts to say, but she's already leaning forward, fingers dancing across the holographic display.

"Signal's real," she murmurs, her breath fogging the screen's edge. "Deep space origin, unmodulated, repeating in... if you can believe it, prime number intervals."

The overhead lights flicker as the array recalibrates, casting jagged shadows across the observation deck's crumpled star charts.

"Prime intervals?" Arthur grips the edge of the console until his knuckles blanch. "That's not solar interference. That's not anything we've ever seen."

Valerie taps a jagged waveform into focus. "It's coming from the edge of the heliosphere. Right where that new nebula formed last month."

The signal pulses red on the display, each peak landing exactly seven, then eleven, then thirteen seconds apart.

Arthur exhales sharply. "You know what this means." He doesn't say 'aliens,' but the word hangs between them like a charged particle.

Valerie traces the signal's origin point, fingers trembling. "It's not just random noise. The nebula's ionized gas shouldn't be dense enough to refract radio waves this cleanly."

She zooms in. The signal's source resolves into a perfect geometric lattice, its edges sharper than any known cosmic structure.

"This isn't a nebula," Valerie whispers. "It's..."

Arthur leans in, squinting at the latticework pattern. "A construct," he finishes for her. The realization slams into them both at once.

Crystalline edges too precise, angles too uniform for natural formation. The display flickers again as the array strains to resolve details at the limit of its resolution.

Valerie's fingers freeze mid-gesture. "Arthur... the lattice isn't reflecting the signal." She swallows hard. "It's generating it."

The display stutters, then resolves further revealing nested hexagons within hexagons, each pulsing in perfect sync with the prime intervals.

Arthur wipes sweat from his brow, his voice dropping to a whisper. "That's no nebula. It's a transmitter."

Valerie's fingers tremble as she isolates a sub-frequency, a whisper of something beneath the pulses. "There's... structure here."

The waveform decomposes into fractals, each segment containing identical, impossibly compressed patterns. "Like Russian nesting dolls made of math."

Arthur's breath catches. "Yeah, like encryption." His fingers dart to the console, peeling back layers of static until the screen resolves into stark clarity: binary sequences spiraling inward, terminating in a single pulsating core.

Valerie's nails dig into her palms. "It's not just transmitting. It's also waiting for a response." The overhead lights dim again as the array strains, throwing her shadow across the wall like a stretched question mark.

Arthur's console blinks red indicating bandwidth overload. "We're losing resolution," he snaps, slamming a fist against the housing. "Whatever this is, it's adapting faster than we can decode."

Valerie watches the fractal patterns ripple outward, each iteration subtly different. "Not adapting," she breathes. "Learning. Look at the error rate. It's optimizing its waveform for our hardware." The display flickers as the outermost hexagons reconfigure into near-perfect ASCII.

Arthur's laugh is brittle. "So it's polite and smarter than us." He taps the console's emergency override, routing auxiliary power from the station's life support grid. The lights dip ominously, plunging them into pulsing crimson.

Valerie's breath hitches as the ASCII resolves into letters, then words. "It's English. I recognize it." Her voice cracks. "Unbelievable! It's my dissertation title. From seven years ago." The screen scrolls line after line of her unpublished research on xenolinguistics.

Arthur leans closer, his shadow merging with hers. "Not just yours," he murmurs, pointing to a citation buried in the data stream. "That's my doctoral thesis reference code. Whatever this is has been watching us for decades."

The air grows thick with static as the overhead lights flicker wildly. "It's... imaging us." The display fractures again, resolving into a their own faces staring back at them from the screen.

The surreal voices that they hear are a perfect mimicry of themselves. First the Valerie image speaks, then is interrupted by the Arthur image.

"We have a message. Please listen carefully..."

The words spilled from the screen-Valerie's lips are in perfect synchronization with Valerie's own racing thoughts, as if plucked from her frontal cortex before she'd fully formed them.

The real Valerie staggers back, knocking over a chair. "That's impossible... that exact phrasing was just in my head."

Screen-Valerie tilts her head slightly, a mannerism the real Valerie recognizes from her own mirror.

"We're transmitting through quantum entanglement," the image says, its voice overlapping with Arthur's own internal monologue now spilling from screen-Arthur's mouth. "Your brains make excellent receivers."

Valerie grips the console's edge, her knees threatening to buckle. "That's why it knows us, why it is us... It's been reading our neural patterns this whole time."

"What is your message? What do you want to tell us? We have many questions also, however, you go first since you are our guest." Arthur says.

Screen-Valerie's mouth curls into a smile that never reaches her eyes. "We are not guests," she says, her voice layered with harmonics that vibrate the workstation's metal casing.

"We are you, from a timeline where this first contact went... differently." The display flickers, showing a brief glimpse of Earth: cities dark, continents reshaped by forces neither scientist can name. "We're here to prevent the cascade."

Arthur's fingers hover over the emergency cutoff. "I don't believe you! Even if time travel were possible..."

Screen-Valerie interrupts, her words emerging milliseconds before the real Valerie forms them. "You're thinking of causality paradoxes... But we're not changing time. We're... merely unraveling it."

The display flickers again, revealing a fractal branch of timelines, each splitting at the moment of first contact.

"You see?" Screen-Valerie murmurs, tracing the branches with a finger that distorts the image like water. "In ninety-seven percent of realities, this conversation leads to extinction-level events within eighteen months."

The real Valerie presses a fist to her mouth. "Then why talk to us at all? Why not just..."

"Because in three percent of branches," screen-Valerie continues, "you do something we never predicted." The display zooms in on one shimmering timeline strand where the station's lights remain steady, Earth intact. "You refuse to respond. You shut down the array."

Arthur's hand twitches toward the power cutoff. "That's it? Silence saves us?"

Screen-Valerie's image distorts, pixels scattering like disturbed insects. "Not silence. Resistance. You must let the transmission fade unanswered. No acknowledgment. No reply. Break the loop before it begins."

Arthur hesitates His hand hovers over the cutoff switch, trembling. Valerie mashes her hand over his. It's done.

The screen fractures into static. The overhead lights surge back to full brightness with an audible pop, leaving them blinking in sudden silence. The hum of the array winds down like a dying animal.

Valerie exhales a shaky breath, her hand still clamped over Arthur's. "Did we just... give ourselves another chance?" she whispers, half-expecting the answer to come from thin air.

Arthur stares at the blank screen, his fingers twitching against the console. "Or did we doom ninety-seven percent of ourselves?" His voice cracks, not with fear, but with the weight of infinite roads not taken.

THE END