The Last Broadcast

The Andromeda Relay-9 was launched in 2075 — a deep-space satellite designed to explore interstellar frequencies and black hole echoes from beyond the Milky Way. Two years after its deployment, it went dark. All signals lost. It was presumed destroyed.

Until 2107.

Out of nowhere, a faint signal reached Earth’s Orbital Command.

At first, it sounded like static.

Then words emerged.

“Still watching. Still listening. Still… hungry.”

The source was confirmed: Relay-9.

Only it had returned to our solar system — and it wasn’t alone.

A small recovery team aboard the ship Helios Shade was dispatched to intercept the satellite. Onboard were Dr. Clara Mendez (exolinguist), Commander Idris Vale, AI engineer Yun Tao, and cryptographer Eva Lys.

When they docked with Relay-9, they expected a cold, dead relic. What they found was something else entirely.

The satellite was pulsing.

Literally.

Its surface had changed—no longer metal, but some kind of dark organic alloy that flexed under touch, as if breathing. It hummed, not like a machine, but like a heart.

Clara ran a linguistic analysis on the returning transmission. It wasn’t a message. It was a voice. One speaking across time, frequency, and thought.

“It’s not from the satellite,” she whispered. “The satellite is just… the mouth.”

Yun attempted to interface with Relay-9. The moment his neural port connected, he screamed—and collapsed. When he awoke, he was blind… but said he could see everything.

He scribbled symbols across the walls of the Helios. Circular. Pulsing. Alive.

“What’s it saying?” Eva asked.

Yun smiled. “It’s not saying anything. It’s waiting.”

That night, Idris vanished.

The logs showed him walking toward the satellite, smiling, helmet off.

No human could survive in deep space like that.

But his body never floated away.

It was taken.

Then the whispers began.

At first, only Clara could hear them. Then Eva. Then Yun. The satellite was transmitting straight into their minds—dreams of stars collapsing, galaxies screaming, and something ancient rising from a rift in space… looking back.

“We opened a door,” Clara said, “and it saw us.”

Eva wanted to escape. The shuttle systems were dead.

“Relay-9 is interfacing with the ship,” Yun said. “We’re inside its body now.”

The hull began to shift.

Wires turned to tendrils. Metal panels became soft, veined flesh. Lights dimmed, replaced by a bioluminescent glow—pulsing like a heartbeat.

Clara decoded more of the message.

It was a warning. Not from the creature. From the universe.

“It sleeps beneath time. When seen, it awakens. When named, it hungers.”

Yun died the next morning. He simply… stopped. No wounds. No trauma. Just an expression of awe frozen on his face.

Eva locked herself in the emergency pod. The ship was changing too fast—becoming something no longer human-made.

She made a final transmission to Earth:

“Do not retrieve us. Do not listen to the signal.

Do not name it.

It feeds on awareness.”

But Earth never received it.

Because the signal had already reached the ground.

Back on Earth, children began hearing whispers in their dreams.

A black sun rose in the minds of those who studied space.

And in the deepest frequencies, where only silence should exist, the universe itself trembled.

The Relay returned home.

But the thing it carried...

never left.

sci-fi horror, space thriller, deep space, cosmic horror, alien signal