The Last Transmission

By the year 2196, humanity had colonized Jupiter's moons, constructed floating cities above Venus, and carried out deep-space missions toward Proxima Centauri. The most ambitious of these was the Odysseus, a one-way trip to Kepler-442b, an exoplanet more than 1,200 light-years away that resembles Earth. The crew of six—four humans and two sentient AIs—had volunteered to spend the rest of their lives in stasis, only to be awakened upon arrival over a millennium later. That was the plan.

But in 2254, barely fifty-eight years into the mission, Earth received a signal.

This is not Kepler-442b. from Odysseus.

The message was short, riddled with static and partially corrupted:

“—not alone—woke up too soon—one of us is gone—coordinates… change—trust no—”

Then silence.

The transmission baffled scientists. The ship couldn’t possibly have sent a message that quickly. No known technology could break the speed-of-light limit. Even theoretical quantum entanglement-based comms weren’t that fast. And who—or what—had woken up early?

A covert mission was launched. The Daedalus, equipped with experimental FTL tech, was tasked with chasing the ghost of the Odysseus. They reached its last known location in under three months.

What they found chilled them.

The Odysseus was there, perfectly intact, but completely adrift. The stasis pods were open.

All were empty.

There were no signs of struggle. No bodies. Just an eerie, metallic whisper in the ship’s logs—loops of audio that seemed to replay themselves even after deletion, in a voice that didn’t match any crew member or AI.

“We woke them. We are watching now.”

The Daedalus returned to Earth without answers. The project was buried under layers of black-budget bureaucracy.

But on the outer edge of the solar system, far beyond Pluto, a listening array recently picked up something new.

A signal.

The same whispering voice, now clearer.

“We are coming.”