The lab was silent except for the low hum of the servers. Dr. Elara Vance stared at the string on her terminal: .

On October 14, 1998, a radio telescope in Arecibo had recorded a single, anomalous blip from the direction of Proxima Centauri. The signal-to-noise ratio was so low that the automated system had flagged it as a microwave oven. But the raw timestamp, converted from sidereal seconds into a truncated integer, was .

Not a code. A call.

Elara's coffee cup froze halfway to her lips.

She looked at the number again.

The simulator wasn't generating noise. It was receiving .

The screen flickered. Then, line by line, 389339 expanded into a sequence of primes, then a crude diagram of a carbon atom, then a string of base pairs. Not DNA as she knew it—a different grammar, a different alphabet of life.