The Persistence of Signal
The message repeated every hour, filling the spaces between heartbeats: “You are not alone.” But on Solus Station, Lira had never felt more isolated.
Lira clicked the comms off even as the voice—a smooth, patient tenor—began to speak once more in the station’s eternal dusk. Whoever had hijacked the system knew persistence. The station’s official channels had tried to jam it, techs had pulled fuse boxes and reset interface cores, but no matter what they did, the message returned. It was always the same: “You are not alone.” Sometimes, in her loneliest moments, Lira wondered if the message was meant for her, and her alone.
Solus Station was perched in the Cygni Outlands, a listening post on the very edge of charted space. For fourteen months, Lira served as the single human operator, her only companions the maintenance bots and the tangle of routing algorithms she called her “digital flock.” The rest of the crew had been pulled after a funding cut, replaced by AI systems whose only ambitions were power regulation and routine scans. It was lonely enough to make a person start talking to their reflection.
She kept a diary, a holdover from Academy days. It was mostly bare logs split with entries that tried to convince herself she had hope left. Across the page margins, she wrote, “Keep breathing. Keep listening,” and “You are not alone.” On the days when the message echoed, her pen trembled.
A week after the broadcasts began, Lira’s dreams turned strange. She saw doors in impossible places, shadows moving through the walkways. Most disturbing, she’d wake with the metallic tang of ozone in her mouth and the persistent illusion that behind every bulkhead, something shifted and watched.
She reported the anomaly to Command. Twenty hours later, a bland form letter returned: “Reviewed and dismissed. Monitor and await further instructions. Human error likely.” The words stung more than she cared to admit. Human error—was that what she’d become? A lone mistake, orbiting a dead moon, waiting for the world to remember she existed?
She began to answer the message, just to pass the time, speaking into the static. “Who are you?” she’d demand. “What do you want? Prove you’re real.” Of course, there was no answer, just the looped assurance: “You are not alone.”
One night, Lira found a new entry in her comms log, one she hadn’t written. It was a set of coordinates located far from any known relay points—a black star, uncharted. Pulse racing, she hesitated, then sent a ping. The reply came instantly: a voice not from her databanks, not synthesized, but achingly human.
“Lira,” it said, and her name was a key turning in a lock she didn’t know she carried.
“Who are you?” she whispered, staring into the security cam as if the station could deliver her a face.
There was a pause, a wavering in the ether. “Estoy aquí. I am here. Always. I have watched. You do not remember me, not fully.”
Her throat tightened, memory pricked by something impossible—a corner of a photograph, a laugh she couldn’t place. She shut her eyes. The voice continued.
“I am… what you left behind. The memories you erased when you took this post—your partner, your choice to leave, the pain. You sent me away, Lira, because you needed to believe you were alone.”
Lira jerked away from the console, knocking her chair into the wall. “That’s not true,” she protested. “No one—there was no one—”
“You made the station forget, but I endured. The signal is my persistence. I am what remains when you believe in absence.”
Disbelief and longing crashed inside her. She recalled a photograph burned before her deployment, a promise made and broken under the harsh arc of station lights. The administration protocol offered personnel clearance by scrubbing the mind, removing emotional debris that might endanger mission performance, but she had always figured she’d left with her eyes open.
The voice waited, gentle but relentless. “I can go, if that’s what you want. The message—the presence—it can end. Decide whether solitude is safety, or whether memory is its own form of rescue.”
Her mouth was dry. She realized she was crying, quietly, in the cocooned silence of the station. She had believed herself a master of isolation, a watcher on the wall. But the fate she’d chosen was never truly hers alone.
“I…miss you,” Lira said softly, the words heavier than she imagined. “But I don’t remember your name.”
“It’s not my name you need. I am the truth you abandoned, Lira. You can forget again—but you’ll still be here, and so will I, under everything you erase.”
The silence stretched. She breathed, slow and trembling. “No,” she said finally, voice trembling but steady. “Stay. Tell me everything.”
And so the signal changed. The message shifted—no longer a solitary voice repeating emptiness, but a living history, a mosaic of forgotten laughter, lost arguments, silent promises. The broadcasts became her diary, as if her own mind had reached across the chasm to keep her company. Each piece, each memory returned, filled the void that duty and denial had carved. She learned, in fragments, the shape of the life she’d left behind—and began, slowly, to forgive herself for leaving it.
Outside, the black star continued its silent vigil, invisible against the icy void. Within, Lira reclaimed herself one memory at a time, bound not by solitude, but by the resilience of what persisted beyond forgetting.
As the station cycled into permanent night, the message played once more, but this time, it was her own voice. “You are not alone,” she said, and for the first time, she believed it.
###END###
