Dave Folsom
ASIN: B01BWT9YUE
Publisher: Scaling Tall Timber Press
Pages: 400
On a quiet, warm summer evening, just after the midnight chimes rang at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, a young researcher scans the night sky, listening to its melody of background sound and documenting any anomalies. He hears a constant stream of routine space noise while the huge telescope slowly pans the observable universe. His efforts are mind numbing, tedious, and wearisome to a point that he is fighting to stay awake. On the edge of a catnap his trained mind hears an incongruity of beeps; a resonance foreign to the environment he is monitoring, but he knows the familiar code. The message is simple and he easily decodes it in his head. The source is what chills him deep into the marrow of his bones.