The Atacama Desert was as quiet as deep space. Inside the monitoring station, the night shift was a river of caffeine and scrolling data. Ben stared at a fresh waveform, his eyes gritty from lack of sleep.

“You see that?” Maya asked, pointing a pen at his screen.

He squinted. It was a faint spike in the background noise from the Kepler-186 sector. A whisper buried in a hurricane of stellar noise. “Probably just a pulsar hitting some gas.”

“It’s patterned,” she said. “Look at the repetition. It’s too regular.”

That got his attention.

They spent weeks on it. Weeks of filtering, amplifying, running it through every algorithm they had. They isolated the source. It was coming from the debris field of the Odyssey, the ship that had gone dark years ago.

Finally, they cleaned it up enough to hear.

It wasn’t cosmic noise. It was a voice.

They ran it against the mission archives. The software spun, analyzed, and delivered its verdict. The voice print was a ninety-eight percent match for Dr. Aris Evans. A ghost, calling from her own grave.

It wasn’t a distress call. Not a warning. It was a single, repeating word. Damaged, warped by its long journey through the void, but it was there.

Ben put on the good headphones, closing his eyes to listen. The sound was a faint, electronic rasp. A dead woman’s voice, echoing across the solar system.

“What is it?” Maya asked, leaning closer. “What’s she saying?”

Ben took the headphones off slowly. He didn’t look at her. He stared at the screen, at the visual representation of that impossible sound.

“Ben?”

He swallowed, the sound loud in the quiet room.

“It’s my name.”