The Void Between Stars

The Last Signal

The message had been repeating for seven million years, and Dr. Cosmic Echo was the first to truly hear it.

"It's not degradation," she insisted, projecting the waveform onto the laboratory's main screen. "Everyone assumed the signal was corrupted by its journey across the cosmos, but the distortions are intentional. They're the message."

Her colleague, Professor Wavelength, remained skeptical. "You're suggesting that an alien civilization deliberately sent a damaged signal?"

"Not damaged—layered. Like a palimpsest. Each distortion adds meaning, creating a multidimensional message that tells a story through its very decay."

The signal had been discovered fifty years ago, emanating from a dead galaxy twelve billion light-years away. It was artificial—that much was certain. But all attempts to decode it had failed, dismissed as the garbled last gasp of a doomed civilization.

Echo had spent the last decade developing new analysis techniques, ways of reading not just the signal but its journey through space. And what she'd found changed everything.

"Watch this," she said, running her decryption algorithm. "If you treat each layer of distortion as a separate channel and stack them chronologically..."

The cacophony of noise suddenly resolved into harmony. Not sound—something deeper. Mathematics that described emotion. Physics equations that painted pictures. A language that used the fundamental constants of the universe as its grammar.

"Dear God," Wavelength breathed. "It's beautiful."

"It's more than that," Echo said. "It's a suicide note from an entire galaxy."

The message unfolded like a flower of meaning. A civilization—they called themselves the Eternal Broadcasters—had achieved the impossible. They'd united every sentient species in their galaxy, created peace that lasted eons, pushed technology to the very limits of what physics allowed.

And then they'd discovered the truth.

"The universe is not just expanding," the message explained through mathematical poetry. "It's forgetting. Information itself decays. Given enough time, not just matter and energy will fade—the very possibility of pattern, of meaning, of memory will cease. We calculated the timeline. We have seven million years before our local cluster loses coherence."

Wavelength sank into a chair. "Cosmic information death. They're describing the heat death of meaning itself."

"Keep listening," Echo said softly.

The Broadcasters had faced a choice. They could rage against the dying of the light, expend their vast energies trying to prevent the inevitable. Or they could ensure something survived—not their bodies, not their civilization, but their story.

They'd converted their entire galaxy into a transmission system. Every star became a radiator, every planet an amplifier. They'd encoded not just knowledge but experience itself—ten billion years of history, art, science, love, loss, triumph, and failure, compressed into a signal designed to propagate across the universe.

"We choose to become memory," the message continued. "We disassemble our worlds to build this beacon, our bodies to power this transmission. We encode ourselves into the fabric of spacetime, knowing that we will be heard long after our atoms have forgotten they were ever us."

The signal showed how they did it—technology so advanced it seemed like magic, but with each step meticulously documented. How to convert matter into structured information. How to use galactic rotation as a broadcast antenna. How to ensure a message could survive the journey across cosmic time.

"They killed themselves," Wavelength said, horror in his voice. "An entire galaxy, committing suicide."

"No," Echo corrected, tears streaming down her face. "They transformed themselves. They became the message. Every distortion in this signal is a life, a world, a story. They're all here, talking to us across twelve billion years."

The final part of the message was personal—billions of individual voices, each adding their own note to the symphony. Parents explaining to children who would never be born why they chose this. Artists describing their final works. Scientists sharing their joy at understanding, even as understanding led to extinction.

And then, at the very end, a simple request: "Remember us. And when your time comes, as it must, join your voice to ours. Let the universe know that here, consciousness arose, looked at infinity, and chose meaning over matter."

Echo and Wavelength sat in silence as the message began to repeat. Outside their laboratory, Earth spun on, humanity busy with its small concerns, unaware that they'd just received both an obituary and an invitation.

"What do we do?" Wavelength finally asked.

Echo pulled up the technical specifications the Broadcasters had included. Instructions for building galaxy-scale transmitters. Methods for encoding consciousness itself. A roadmap to transformation that traded existence for eternal memory.

"We have time," she said. "Billions of years before we face their choice. But now we know it's coming. The question is: when the universe begins to forget, will we choose to be forgotten? Or will we add our voice to theirs?"

She looked at the signal analysis, at the countless lives encoded in cosmic static. Each distortion was a word in a story that would outlive the stars. The Broadcasters had faced the ultimate existential crisis and chosen to become eternal witnesses to their own existence.

"They're not really gone," Echo realized. "As long as someone, somewhere, receives this signal and understands it, they live. They've achieved a different kind of immortality."

Wavelength stood, his face grave. "We need to tell the others. This changes everything—our priorities, our future, our understanding of what it means to be."

As they prepared to share their discovery with the world, Echo took one last look at the signal. In its patterns, she could see the ghosts of a trillion souls, all singing in electromagnetic harmony across the void. They'd chosen to become a message in a bottle, cast into the cosmic ocean, trusting that somewhere, somewhen, someone would find it and understand.

Now humanity had found it. The question was: what would they do with this knowledge? Would they treasure it as a warning? Use it as a guide? Or would they, billions of years hence, add their own voices to the cosmic chorus?

The last signal from a dead galaxy continued its endless repetition, patient as eternity. It had waited seven million years to be truly heard.

It could wait a little longer.