THE SIGNAL

by Stephan Krok

 

182 Earth years ago

 

“Sentinel Rnmoarch,” came the transmission from the neural network of the Subdomain of Reconnaissance: Kryonet. “The Curator summons you to the Strategem regarding your latest Report.

Signature:

Orbital cycle: Year 1015, Harmonic 4 of Kryonet; Year 351923 of Skelora.

Axial cycle: Quarter 1 of Kryonet.

Curator’s Assistant Unit, level 4‑01.”

#

The guard technopolis Kryonet of the Confederation of Cygnus-Hydra-Serpent-Lyra was located on an icy asteroid twelve kilometers in diameter, orbiting at an altitude of 11,600 kilometers around the second planet of the red dwarf Gliese 433 in Hydra (by Earth registry), 29.6 light-years[1] from Earth. Though young by planetary standards, it was already integrated into the Confederation’s network of strategic nodes.

The implementation of the “Kryonet” project was initiated by the Skelorians in the year 346,794 of their civilization’s chronology, which itself began about fifteen thousand Earth years ago. With an orbital cycle (the rotation of the Confederation’s Core – the planet of Skelora - around its star, the red dwarf Wolf 1069 in the constellation Cygnus, by Earth register) of 15.6 Earth days, this corresponded to the year 1810 AD in the Gregorian calendar of Earth.

2387 Skelorian years (102 Earth years) before construction began, a fleet of five transports - one military, four civilian - departed Skelora for the vicinity of the third planet of the system of GJ 433 (by Earth registry). Each carried fifty thousand personnel and settlers. At a moderate cruising speed of 0.2c[2], with brief acceleration and braking phases, they covered twenty light-years. Upon arrival, the military vessel established perimeter security, while civilians divided into specialties: geology and framework, atmosphere and hydroponics, energy and quantum computing, and social infrastructure.

At Stage Zero, during the first forty-seven Skelorian years (two Earth years), the asteroid was coated with metallic nano‑particles of silver and aluminum, creating an Albedo Mirror that reflected 98-99% of stellar light and heat without melting the ice. The object resembled a giant mirrored drop.

A fleet of drones deployed a superconductive mesh around the asteroid, forming a magnetic “cage”. Magnetohydrodynamic grapplers pulled the body into controlled suspension. Tug ships aligned to adjust trajectory via gravitational cable interaction, avoiding damage to the ice. Then the object was covered with an ablative shield by mixing the outer 100 meters of an ice with carbon fiber-wrapped as if in a gleaming icy armor before the arduous journey of 700 million kilometers, roughly the distance from Earth to Jupiter in the Solar System. To create the effect of a magnetic thermal deflector, antimatter coils were fused into the ice layer. They activated a powerful artificial magnetic field that deflected the plasma of the red dwarf’s stellar wind around the asteroid, forming a protective magnetospheric “bubble”. Yet, to ensure this shield would not interfere with external communication, the Confederation’s engineers employed its cyclic pulsation, in which it operated only in short bursts, while in the microsecond pauses between them the antennas captured “snapshots” of the ether. Billions of such snapshots were later synchronized into a single audio or information message.

For active cryo‑cooling, thousands of kilometers of capillaries were laid inside the icy mass, through which liquid helium circulated. The heat that still seeped through the outer layers was intercepted by this network and transferred to the shadowed side of the asteroid, always turned away from the star. There, gigantic radiator panels were installed to shed the excess heat into the black sky.

The next stages - Transit and Construction - began simultaneously. As the object moved from the cold third planet toward the warmer second one, its body came alive. Antimatter engines delivered a sustained thrust, while gravitational tugs corrected its course. Inside, as the asteroid traveled through the void, nano‑robots and thermal storms, using focused neutrino beams, melted a cavern eight kilometers in diameter out of the ice and fused into it a geodesic cellular framework of ultra‑strong alloys that held back the pressure of the surrounding ice. Thus grew the skeleton of a future multi-tiered spherical city. The melted ice evaporated and was channeled outward through special conduits to the surface, where it refroze, forming an additional protective “shield” for the regular buildup of “armor” against cosmic radiation and providing the first reserves of water and oxygen for those who would settle here. Between the city’s interior and the ice, an active vacuum layer with a mirrored coating was installed, preventing the heat of the future city from melting the asteroid’s shell. The inner lining of the city was also reinforced with nanostructured graphene, creating a hermetic “bubble” in which atmosphere and pressure were maintained. The surrounding ice, several kilometers thick, served as a natural shield against radiation and cosmic rays.

The framework was gradually filled in: each tier added hundreds of square kilometers of area, and all fifteen tiers together provided more than four hundred square kilometers - more than enough for life and development. For the planned quarter of a million inhabitants, only a tenth of the construction was sufficient, comparable to a modern European city on Earth. The remaining space opened room for hydroponic farms, parks, and industrial sectors, as well as for the potential several-fold increase in the technopolis’s population. In weightlessness, assembly proceeded with perfect precision, without any disturbances. And on the outside, the asteroid gleamed like a mirror drop, almost invisible to the thermal scanners of other civilizations.

The towing of the celestial body from orbit to orbit took only 70 Skelorian years (3 Earth years). The Transit stage was completed, while the Construction stage continued. In parallel, the Fixation stage of the asteroid on the orbit of the second planet began, when at an altitude of 11,600 kilometers the systems of interaction with its magnetosphere were activated. With the help of powerful active electromagnetic stabilizers, the asteroid was fixed in equilibrium, like a levitating icy sphere. The balancing lasted another 47 Skelorian years (2 Earth years) and was adjusted by constant minor impulses of micro‑antimatter engines to compensate for the gravitational influence of other bodies.

Then, to ensure the communication reach of the outpost, large matte “windows” of radio‑transparent ceramics were made in the asteroid’s mirrored coating. These reflected thermal infrared radiation but allowed radio waves to pass through for communication. A second communication layer was provided by cryo‑antennas buried as deep as two kilometers. The ice itself was an excellent dielectric: its thickness filtered out minor cosmic interference and thermal noise from the planet itself, and since the temperature around the antennas was maintained close to absolute zero, they became superconducting, which allowed them to capture even incredibly faint signals from tens of light‑years away. To prevent protective magnetic fields from distorting the signals, a third communication layer was used - a network of thousands of tiny, almost invisible external detector drones drifting hundreds of kilometers around the asteroid, collecting signals in “clean” space and relaying them to the outpost’s sentinels through narrow‑beam laser communication channels that easily pierced any protective layer. This created the effect of a giant antenna thousands of kilometers in diameter, making signal interception extremely precise.

The internal development continued further. Finally, after another 234 Skelorian years (10 Earth years), when the technopolis’s framework was fully completed, the first settlers of the Confederation began to descend here from the surrounding transport ships. They entered the ready residential and service modules. The guard outpost officially went on duty, transformed into a giant antenna capable of capturing the faintest echoes of the cosmos. From that moment, the chronology of Crionet began. Since the distance from it to the Confederation’s core planet – Skelora - was 10.5 Earth light‑years, the first synchronization of time for a full signal cycle in both directions required covering twice that distance, which took 21 Earth years. Subsequent time adjustments occurred once every 10.5 Earth years…

In this epoch, having mastered post‑biologism, corresponding to the combined Kardashev–Sagan–Barrow civilization development index of 2.10 Z Ω⁻, the Skelorians were no longer organic beings in the pure sense, but rather programmable matter-sets of quantum nodes that merely imitated organics. Practically no limitations on lifespan existed for them. Some individuals, weary after millennia, consciously deactivated themselves and “departed into silence”, transferring their experience into the collective neural network. Others simply perished as a result of catastrophic destruction of the body, which was difficult to restore and thus suitable only for advanced experimentation. Most, however, every 300–400 years underwent a procedure of quantum renewal, not merely updating organs but restructuring their biological matrix, erasing accumulated genetic errors.

However, the active individuals continued to preserve their traditional appearance - a slender build (due to the need for rapid cooling), standing 2.2 meters tall, with a light yet durable skeleton resembling a framework of porous bones, and long limbs. Their skin was smooth and pale, almost translucent with a pearlescent sheen, adapted to the intense radiation on Skelora and programmed to instantly change shade and density in less favorable surface or artificial provinces, as well as in environments with vacuum or differing pressure, without the need for spacesuits. They had four thin, highly sensitive fingers, reminiscent of the hands of an Earth pianist, serving as interface manipulators capable of splitting into thousands of nanofibers for direct molecular‑level control. Their large eyes, designed to capture the faint light of the red sun Wolf 1069 (by Earth registry), were protected by a double eyelid and ranged in color from silvery‑blue to deep violet depending on age and experience. Functionally, these eyes acted as sensors capable of perceiving the full electromagnetic spectrum and calculating probabilistic vectors of events in the immediate temporal loop, effectively seeing through matter and predicting particle motion at the micro‑level several minutes ahead.

#

In the hierarchy of the Confederation, Rnmoarch, who held the position of Sentinel at a remote outpost, was a provincial officer of level 3. His eyes, pulsing with a silvery‑blue shimmer, radiated calm and balance. Having nourished himself with the jelly‑like porridge made from the fruits of the Radiant Spiral of Skelora, reproduced on Kryonet by molecular printers, he proceeded to a service meeting.

The Pillar of the Subdomain of Reconnaissance was located in one of the most fortified multi‑tiered blocks in the administrative sector of the Confederation’s structures. The Sentinel’s service compartment on the fifteenth, uppermost tier was separated from the leadership premises on the central eighth tier only by the brief flight of an internal inter‑tier capsule.

Not every regular report of the Sentinel led to the convening of a meeting of such a high level as a Strategem, and therefore the event went beyond routine. The Curator, as head of the Subdomain and a level 4 officer, convened it when a simple remote consultation through the neural network was insufficient. The problem required special consideration, and for this the presence of key specialists in an isolated meeting chamber was necessary.

"We have gathered to review the report of Sentinel Rnmoarch. By the imposition of my signature, it has been assigned the status of “Highest” importance, and therefore we must prepare a Résumé on this matter for the central Domain of Reconnaissance at the Core," softly radiated his auditory greeting Curator Skneodr in the official Skelorian language of the current standard.

"Thanks to the fact that the source of the Signal, the Kryonet outpost, and the target aligned in space in such a way that the scattered edge of the radio beam touched our stellar system, and the Signal itself underwent a conical expansion, we managed to capture its lateral “noise”," began the Sentinel, after which he unfolded the technical log of Kryonet’s interception system:

“[LOG_STATION: KRYONET-OUTPOST]

[STATUS: AUTOMATED_MONITORING]

[ORBITAL_REF: GJ 433 d / ASTEROID_BELT]

[EVENT: ELECTROMAGNETIC PULSE INTERCEPTION]

Source: Sector 11-Alpha of the Sagittarius Contours galaxy, star system of the Light (autonym: Sun), Third planet – Bioceanica (autonym: Earth), orbital cycle – 365 days, axial cycle – 24 hours

Target vector by Bioceanica’s signature: 19h 07m 06s / +04° 49′ (star HD 178428, constellation Aquila)

Target in the Confederation Register: Province “Eloise-Sentarch” (Sector 12-Gamma of the Sagittarius Contours galaxy)

Transmission device: radio telescope model RT-70, power – 152 kW (location: Yevpatoria, Ukraine)

Signal type: Cosmic Call 1999 (Modulated radio signal, frequency 5.01 GHz)

Travel time from source to interception: 29.6 Bioceanica years; 301 Kryonet years; 694 Skelora years; (Speed: 1.0 light)

Distance from source: ~280 trillion kilometers (~29.6 light-years)”

“[SYNCHRONIZATION OF SENDING TIME]

Local equivalent of source (Bioceanica): Year 1999, June 30, axial time: 16:45:00 UTC

Kryonet: Year 714, Harmonic 26, axial time: [not synchronized]

Skelora: Year 351,231, Harmonic 4, axial time: [not synchronized]”

“[SYNCHRONIZATION OF INTERCEPTION TIME]

Local equivalent of source (Bioceanica): Year 2029 (+29.6 years), February 14, axial time: 10:00:02 UTC

Kryonet: Year 1015 (+301 years), Harmonic 3, axial time: Quarter 2

Skelora: Year 351,923 (+692 years), Harmonic 1, axial time: [not synchronized]”

The attendees listened to the Sentinel, who presented convincing evidence that the received Signal was not false and indeed originated from a distance of 29.6 light‑years, where Bioceanica - the third planet in the system of the yellow dwarf Light - was located. According to the signature data, the message was intended for another planet, which, however, also belonged to the Confederation, but the calculated time of the Signal’s arrival there was twice as long.

Next, Analyst Ktorps took the floor and presented his clarifications:

“[ANALYSIS OF VECTOR AND TARGETING]

Source status: intelligent civilization, development level [undefined]

Target status: Eloise-Sentarch – inhabited province of the Confederation, development level 2.05 (vassal colony of Skelora)

Distance from source to target: 68.3 light-years

Predicted time of Signal reception by the target: Year 2069 (+40.3 Bioceanica years); Year 1423 (+409 Kryonet years); Year 352,867 (+943 Skelora years).”

Summarizing, the Analyst added:

"The planet Bioceanica, which is located in Sector 11-Alpha of the neighboring, eleventh, inner contour of our galaxy[3], is listed in the Confederation Register, but its contact status was changed to “Irrelevant” by the latest Decree of the Archon. My current level 3 does not allow me to disclose the details of this change."

"That is correct, my level 4 does not allow it either," interrupted the curator, "but what can we state at this moment?"

“The Signal from Bioceanica,” continued the Analyst, “is a direct address to one of our provinces, and, being disseminated over a long distance, carries several risks.”

"[RISK 1]

The Signal can be interpreted as a cry for help from a civilization that has faced a catastrophe.

Probability: 28%."

"[RISK 2]

The Signal can be interpreted as a disguise of the true intentions of a civilization whose level of development is undefined.

Probability: 60%."

"[RISK 3]

The Signal may be intercepted by the Xarqar Syndicate.

Probability: 98%."

"In view of the above, I recommend deepening the study of this matter," concluded the Analyst.

"Strategist Mdarst, the floor is yours," continued the Curator.

"The level of development of Bioceanica’s civilization," Strategist began, "I estimate in the range from 0.72 to 1.15. The lower boundary corresponds to the ability to generate such a stable beam, for which the civilization must fully control the resources of its planet, but has not yet reached the level of harnessing the entire energy of its star. The upper boundary allows for the possibility that the Bioceanians possess the energy of the entire planetary system, including the colonization of other planets, which would make them a dangerous competitor for the Xarqar Syndicate, whose development level, I remind you, is 1.25. Yet compared to our development level of 2.10, Bioceanica poses no strategic threat to the Confederation even under the most pessimistic scenario. The Analyst’s risks I consider appropriate with the following adjustments: first, there is an informational paradox - the primitive binary arithmetic and simple biology presented by the Bioceanians to demonstrate their intellectual abilities do not correlate with the ability to transmit across such a distance, which requires a higher energy threshold. Second, the technology of an archaic noise they used for the Signal’s transmission may mask their true quantum communication channels. And third, the transmission of their DNA to an unfamiliar civilization is suspiciously candid, behind which a viral code or disinformation may be concealed. In view of the above, I raise the probability of Risk 2 to 75%. That is all," concluded the Strategist.

"Thank you all," summarized the Curator. "Thus, we stand between the pressure of risks on one side and the limitation of our levels 3 and 4 on the other. We will send our Résumé to the Domain of Reconnaissance: Skelora for further study of the problem at a higher level. Assistant," he called.

"Assistant Unit of the Curator, level 4‑01," spoke the android, "already executing."

The neutrino collimator immediately launched the encrypted data packet containing the Résumé of the Strategem of the Subdomain of Reconnaissance: Kryonet, directed toward Skelora…

---

[1] A light‑year is the distance that light travels in one Earth year in a vacuum (approximately 9.46 trillion kilometers). It is not a measure of time, but specifically a measure of distance.

[2] In the novel, speed is calculated on the basis of a universal constant - the speed of light c (from Latin celeritas, “speed”): 300,000 kilometers per second. Accordingly, the fleet’s cruising speed of 0.2c amounted to 60,000 km/s, or 20% of the speed of light.

[3] Сontours of a galaxy are calculated radii measured from its center. In the case of our galaxy – the Milky Way – the center is a supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A* (Sagittarius A-star), which explains the Skelorian name of the galaxy – the Contours of Sagittarius. According to this scale, Bioceanica-Earth (Sector 11-Alpha) and Xarqar (Sector 11-Beta) are located on the eleventh contour, one level closer to the center than Skelora. At the same time, the planets of all three civilizations are separated from the galactic center by 26 thousand light years. In terms of distance, this is only halfway to the visible edge of the galactic disk, and the conventional contours from the 13th to 50+ cover an immense space up to 50 thousand light years from the center (according to NASA data). However, Skelora on the twelfth contour (Sector 12-Gamma) is considered the Boundary, beyond which lie the outer territories where the gravity of Sagittarius A* weakens, stars become rare loners, the low metallicity of the environment slows the formation of rocky planets, and the conductivity of communication signals disappears into the noise of relic radiation. In fact, these outer contours are poorly explored and may well be regarded as the Great Void.