Quoted By:
“We reach the shallows, and time slows. I trace it through the motion of the stars, and the pulse of my quickening heart.
Here, oscillating gravitational waves break against the shoals of a fading accretion disk. Here, Mizar’s event horizon bears down on us with patient, cyclopean attention.
MERRYGATE and I finalize our commitments beneath its watchful stare. I transliterate my journal and file my reports, converting soft parchment and stubborn ink into blocks of unadorned plaintext. We bundle it with schematics and code – system reports and compressed video – to form a tiny parcel of condensed data.
It is all we can afford. The final element of the alien megastructure is a relay - a single-use gravitational laser designed to thread information across kiloparsecs of radiation-strewn space. It sits above Mizar’s accretion disk in a tight polar orbit, having drunk deep from the gravitational rebound energy of stellar collapse. Under MERRYGATE’s direction, it slews its aster-faced antenna away from the Bootes void, and towards the blank space formerly occupied by a honey-yellow G-type star.
Somewhere inside the transmitter, an artificial singularity opens. It promises to hear us – clearly enough sing our message through somber gravity; faintly enough to keep it from nature’s prying eyes.
The gravitational emitter charges. It will receive until the RAIN crosses her final horizon - hear us until our words lengthen from age and redshift. And when it can hear us no longer, it will carry a small trace of us home, to a time long before our departure.”
- [UNSIGNED], EXECUTIVE AUDITOR, TRS NOVEMBER RAIN, AD. 2243, FEBRUARY 2nd [NOTE: MESSAGE BACKDATED/LORENTZ FACTOR: 1.3]
