A Signal from Tomorrow

In the year 2086, Earth had long stopped listening to the stars.

After decades of failed attempts to contact intelligent life, the world moved on. Space programs were defunded, satellites turned inward, and our skies became mirrors of human ego rather than windows to the cosmos.

But at Station Epsilon, orbiting a cold fragment of Jupiter’s third moon, a lone technician named Kael still listened.

He wasn’t supposed to. The Listening Post had been decommissioned years ago, but Kael stayed—volunteering to maintain its final systems, officially cataloging deep space noise for archival purposes. Unofficially, he still believed.

It was on the 12,442nd day of silence that something changed.

A pulse.

Just three seconds long, buried in static, encoded in a pattern that no natural phenomenon could explain. It repeated once every 108 minutes, perfectly timed. And each repetition ended with a sound unmistakable to any human ear:

A voice.

"Kael."

His own name. Spoken clearly. Unmistakably human. And then silence again.

He replayed it. Again. Again. Again. The voice didn’t change. Male, mid-thirties, slightly breathless—as if running. It wasn’t synthetic, and it wasn’t a glitch.

Someone out there knew him.

Kael filed a report with Earth Command. It was flagged as a Class D anomaly—meaning interesting, but probably irrelevant. A glitch, a hoax, maybe a cruel joke played by the system’s decaying AIs.

But Kael knew better. He triangulated the signal’s origin. Not from deep space. Not even from outside the solar system.

It came from Earth.

Or rather—an Earth.

Using the old wormhole relay logs and experimental time-loop models from the pre-AI research archives, Kael ran the numbers. The data was impossible. The origin point sat in Earth’s exact coordinates, but phased—slightly to the left of reality, like a ghost hiding behind a curtain of time.

It was Earth... in the future.

The signal was a loop. A distress call caught in temporal orbit, bending through wormholes like light through broken glass.

And the voice? It was Kael’s.

He isolated a second layer beneath the original voice. Faint but growing. Another message was buried in the static:

"Don’t come back."

He froze.

What had he done? What future was trying to warn the past? What had he become that he needed to tell himself to stop?

He checked the timeline projections. The signal originated exactly 23 years into the future—on the date he was scheduled to return to Earth.

He stared at the return module for hours. It blinked patiently, ready to fire thrusters at his command.

Then he looked back at the console.

"Kael." The voice again. Just his name, repeated like a prayer or a warning.

He deleted the return coordinates.

And began listening again.

Because some futures aren’t meant to be escaped.

They’re meant to be rewritten.

In the days that followed, Kael documented every anomaly in the signal. The voice began to change—inflections shifting, fragments of emotion slipping through. Sometimes it laughed. Sometimes it wept. Once, it screamed.

He started recording his own responses and feeding them into the same signal frequency, launching them into the loop. He didn’t know if they would reach his future self—or if they already had. But he had to try.

At night, he dreamed of fire. Cities crumbling. The sky turning red. Earth crying out through a thousand broken timelines. And always, the voice—his voice—echoing: "Don’t come back."

Kael stayed.

Not to survive.

But to send hope back through the noise.

Because maybe, just maybe, if he listened long enough…

He could find a way to answer himself.

Or save the world he once called home.