10.16. 100. 244 ✓

Mira felt the air change. The desert night had always felt vast and empty, but now the silence felt watched.

The dots weren't decimal points. They were separators. Like coordinates. Or a countdown.

"100," she whispered. "244."

"Run it through the standard filters," she told her junior, Leo. He tapped away, frowning. "No source. No reflection pattern. It’s like the signal started inside the mainframe itself."

"Why? What is it?"

Dr. Mira Vasquez had seen plenty of strange data in her fifteen years at the Array—a sprawling deep-space listening post buried in the Atacama Desert. But this was different. The numbers weren't random noise. They were precise. Encoded.

"Check the Array’s own logs for 10:16 UTC," she said. Leo’s face went pale. "That’s… now. The message arrived the same second we received it. No propagation delay. It didn’t come from space, Mira. It came through the Array—as if something used our own dish to talk to us." 10.16. 100. 244

She looked at the numbers one last time. They weren't a message anymore. They were a key.