Anna

CHAPTER ONE

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say.

It's a little sad, but space really is silent. In space, there is no air, so sound has no way to travel.

No noisy mid morning traffic, no loud claps of thunder and no roaring waves crashing down on rocky shores.

There is only utter silence!

But this isn’t true for me.

Space is far from silent for me.

I listen to its sublime echo every day.

It’s like a celestial symphony made just for me. An ensemble, complete with pipes and brass and haunting woodwinds, held neatly together by what I jokingly like to call the “string theory”.

I hear it!

It's alive and expansive.

Some days, the great universe is abuzz with life and as chatty as a million chirping birds. Dazzling me with zaps like pretend laser guns shooting in every direction... with a pew-pew and a phwoo phwoo popping and crackling a million light years away.

There are also dark days! Heavy and intense. Bursting with the ferocious violence of a tidal wave or a dozen murderous wolves howling on the horizon.

When the abyss is asleep, it sprinkles shards of shattered ice gently into the rings of Saturn and they tinkle and chime as they slip into its belt. And with a yawn, it sometimes sends floating asteroids into a spin as they drift off forever.

Sadness is the worst. It bends my heart in agony with its painful hum. A dirge… low and morbid like the call of a whale. Or the cry of a dying Diplodocus with its long neck and enlarged syrinx as it weeps for sympathy in the lowest frequencies known to man. And then my soul yearns to reach out and soothe its broken cosmic heart.

There aren't really words to describe what I hear, as there’s nothing in our boxed world to truly compare it with. I would be lying if I didn't tell you that my account falls tremendously short of the transcendental experience I have every time those enigmatic sound waves travel through me.

Once in a while, I'm snapped out of the spell by an ear piercing crack that nearly deafens me. It's as though a ginormous space tree snapped in half and is about to crash and fall and knock the entire galaxy out of orbit. I launch backwards out of my chair every time this happens and stare at the VLR Receiver while my heart rate returns to normal. It feels like it might burst its frightened little way right out of my chest. Once I can breathe again, I usually end up making a cup of tea and curse the institution for hiring me, while I sip hot lavender tea and stare out at the night sky like normal people do. This normally grounds me and reminds me of the vast distance between me and those outlandish noises.

I genuinely resent being here sometimes. You see, I’m not actually an Astronomer and I don’t quite remember why I took this job. I’ve been stuck here for over a year now and my dream of being an Astrophysicist seems to be slipping away. Astrophysics was my major and I was supposed to get into the field as soon as I finished studying, but I have this memory blur of somehow being picked and pushed into this position and I can't seem to get away.

Astronomy requires acute perseverance. The watchful eye of an astronomer, over time, brings a patient understanding of the universe and is crucial in picking up minuscule changes that may have catastrophic reactions.

So, If like me, you struggle with certain levels of anxiety and a probable diagnosis of Attention Deficit, sitting here night after night doesn't come easy.

Don't get me wrong, I don't hate the job! I quickly developed a keen curiosity for the eerie space music that haunts me daily and sometimes it feels like the universe is actually talking to me. I sense its penetrating vibrations touching my soul and calling me to join it. I am intimately connected to it most nights, but then I remind myself that this is just a job... it’s just science and I’m just connected to a complicated electromagnetic device with a set of wires that allows me to eavesdrop, so to say, on the entire solar system...

Yes... Just electromagnetic fields that are picked up and bounced back by lasers, that are then recorded and transmitted by plasma wave antennae. The recorded sounds are complex interactions of charged particles from solar winds, ionospheres and planetary magnetospheres and NOT all of existence colluding with me.

It is wonderful to behold and truly a marvel, BUT… it’s just a job!

I need to keep a level head and not fall in love with the universe!?

And then everything changed.

I heard a scream.

A HUMAN scream!

This wasn't ethereal or whimsical like all the other space noise. It wasn’t otherworldly or devoid of humanism like the transmissions I usually hear which are beyond our three dimensional world. So there was absolutely no doubt in my mind, as I dropped my cup of tea in utter shock and sent it splashing to the ground with all its hot contents sloshing everywhere, that this was most definitely a sound I recognized.

This was a person!

I am taught what to do in this situation. If ANYTHING new or uncharacteristic comes through, I first need to write the exact time so we know where to access it in the recording, and then I must locate which satellite picked it up and take down the coordinates.

My fingers feel fat as I fumble and drop the pen. Adrenalin sabotages me and everything is jittery as I scribble down the time stamp. I notice I’m holding my breath, so I suck in deeply through my nose and close my eyes as my inhale turns into a yawn. My eyes water, but I feel a bit calmer and start clicking on the number patterns that scroll down the dark blue screen. I try to match the time with the coordinates…

Time: 03h00

Coordinates: 03 h 47 m 24 s, +24° 07′ 00

It’s a match! I wait for my screen to open a new tab with the details of the coordinates and stare at the little cursor flashing its pointer. It burns a little dot onto my retina and I blink tightly to get rid of it.

Location: The Pleiades

It says and waits for my prompt. I take off the headphones and hang them round my neck and type quickly as I key in all sorts of code that I learned at Uni. I was asking for it to find the recording and replay it in high definition…

searching…

searching…

blue circle spinning round and round and round…

Sometimes it seems to spin in time, but then out of nowhere - or it could just be tricking me - it goes a spin or two faster and then back to its original slower rhythm.

Come on...

Hurry up….

I just stare at it.

Then out of the deathly silence, a full volume blood curdling scream!

It reverbs from wall to wall and window to floor and freezes my bones in terror. My heart pounds behind my rib cage and I snap out of my stupor and turn down the sound clumsily.

I play it again.

I get click clacking again and open a few programs side by side. First, the Mel Frequency program to decode the wavelengths. I select and drag the file across and it happily gets to work, scanning and separating the little soundwaves that are not much unlike tightly packed heartbeats on an ECG, except this would probably be split seconds before a flatline if it were an actual measurement.

Next I open SPACE… a whitebox cryptography cipher program, to determine the algorithms in the galaxy and decode that particular sound from the timestamp that just scared the bejeezus out of me. This works off the Mel Frequency, so I wait for the wavelengths to be decoded and then drag that across to SPACE, which will convert the waves into a digital representation of the audio. A neural network will be able to understand the sound better and hopefully identify it from the database.

I also have to notify the institution, but first... I need to be sure!

SPACE has a bright yellow “DECODING” sign flashing in large font across a black screen as I wait for the result. Soft muffled beeps make their way from the hardrive as it thinks its way through this baffling dilemma. For the first time since I heard the scream, I am able to process the strangeness of it all. It could be a mistake. Maybe the transmitter picked up the wrong frequency or the signals got crossed. I tapped my lips with my finger, trying to think. My finger was actually quite cold. I realized it had gotten chilly, so I slipped my jumper on.

With the word DECODING still flashing black and yellow on the screen, I lean back a bit more relaxed and almost confident it's just an error, but my assurance is quickly shattered by an obtrusive…

“EMERGENCY!”

“EMERGENCY!”

“EMERGENCY!”

…announcement, spoken in a sensual robotic voice.

Human Match

...pops up on my screen.

And then more words appeared as though a living being in my monitor is sounding the alarm.

Female voice Identified: Anna Valencia Korotkova, 33 years old.

Date of birth: 26th November 1989.

Declared Missing since 2017 from her home town in Saratov Russia.

Location found: Constellation of Pleiades.

I stared at the now unchanging computer screen - except for that tiny flashing cursor awaiting my command. I looked back over my right shoulder out the large observatory window. It's a one-way window that I could see out of, giving me a first class view of the night sky in the desert.

The sky is particularly perfect tonight. The stars are displaying their brilliance in all their glory, without a cloud in the sky and framed by infinite beauty.

And out there somewhere… is Anna Valencia Korotkova!

The stark ring ring of the vintage black telephone on my desk needles through the air and makes me jump. The official government phoneline for emergencies only. I stare at it for a second, then pick it up with uncertainty.

“Hello!?”