The Last Signal

The observatory had been silent for three days.

Dr. Elena Rodriguez sat at her workstation, staring at the same flat line that had haunted her for seventy-two hours. In fifteen years of scanning the cosmos for signals, she had never seen anything like this. Not the promising blips that turned out to be pulsars. Not the false alarms from terrestrial interference. This was different.

This was everything going silent at once.

The coffee in her mug had gone cold hours ago, but she didn't notice. Her eyes traced the timeline display, watching the exact moment when every extraterrestrial signal they had been tracking—all 247 of them—simply stopped. Not faded. Not degraded. Stopped. As if someone had flipped a switch and turned off the universe.

Her hand trembled as she reached for the phone. There were protocols for this. Procedures. But how do you report the end of everything you've been searching for? How do you explain that the universe just held its breath and forgot to breathe out again?

The phone rang once before the director answered. His voice was rough, indicating he hadn't slept either.

"It's not just us," he said before she could speak. "Every observatory. Every radio telescope. Everyone is seeing the same thing. The universe went dark."

Elena closed her eyes. In the background, she could hear the familiar hum of the equipment, still faithfully recording the silence. Still waiting for something that might never come.

"Or," she said quietly, "we did."