The Signal

The signal answers 3.9 milliseconds before anyone calls it.

A dead channel on a diplomatic ship. A garden array that was never built to receive. A silence between prime numbers that turns out not to be silence.

Nine crews, nine worlds, one narrow band of the spectrum. Every instrument returns the same reading, and the same impossible line: no direction. Every observer is acknowledged.

Nine Edenroot Press authors each take the transmission somewhere different, into first contact, quiet horror, a cover-up nobody will sign, and the kind of hope that costs something to hold.

Between the stories, the record itself: extracts from the long array, counting one, one, two, three, five, waiting for the twenty-first tick. By the final transmission, 6,918 nodes have been detected. Thirty-one are active. The network requires one more.

Nine complete stories by nine Edenroot Press authors, each set in its own universe and each readable on its own. An Edenroot Press anthology.