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A storm begins to roll over the mesa, enveloping the horizon beneath its dust-clouded wings. Lightning bridges the sky and the earth in slow, thundering volleys. Sand falls like torrential rain, aggregated by ambient static charge.
The landing pads surrounding the colony shutter their surface apertures after receiving a final flight of bombers, the pink-red flare of their ventral thrusters barely cutting through the growing gloom.
You fix your eyes on the rest of the other humans in the colony, watching them guide your ancillary crew into marked habitats and squat storm shelters. Hibiscus brings you a cup of something bitter, herbal, and scalding hot – a sign of hospitality offered to you despite her obvious hostility. A curious social convention.
You spend a moment reflecting on what you had told her. In truth, much of the information you carried was merely borrowed. There was a time – you think – when you cared significantly less about the rationale behind your own directives. You remember those times with a mixture of envy and regret.
Now, you turn to her and continue.
“Your predecessors assumed that time and space would prohibit true communication. The speed of light is the truest barrier, as my former captain would say.”
“…so you could examine the fossils of others, without fear of meeting them in the flesh,” she muses.
You signal agreement. “Precisely. But this assumption proved incorrect.”
“What…precisely did they find.”
You shake your head. “A certain…invariant signal, embedded in the cosmic background rather than emanating from any specific system. It is exceptionally weak, only viewable with an observation array of sufficient size and resolution.
