📡 Story 1: “Signal from Io”
Genre: Sci-Fi / Psychological Thriller
In 2146, humanity had mastered deep-space travel, mining asteroids and setting up
research colonies as far as the moons of Jupiter. The mission logs of Valkyrie One,
Earth’s most advanced interstellar vessel, remained sealed for a century—until one
transmission leaked online.
It contained a voice. A woman’s voice. Calm, clear, and fading.
“This is Commander Elara Voss… the signal wasn’t a call for help. It was a
recording… a warning… and we played it anyway.”
Chapter 1: The Transmission
The signal began innocently enough—repeating pulses every 3.03 minutes from
Jupiter’s volcanic moon, Io. Analysts thought it was background radiation until Dr.
Rahim, an AI linguist, recognized something shocking:
The signal was prime numbers.
Followed by musical chords.
And then, a strange audio waveform, which when processed through harmonics, sounded
like a human scream.
The message was simple, terrifying, and encoded deep into the pulse:
WE TRIED TO WARN YOU.
Chapter 2: The Crew
The mission was hastily assembled: four crew members aboard Valkyrie One, a vessel
capable of reaching Io in 16 days using solar-pulse drive.
Commander Elara Voss – decorated pilot, lone survivor of the Mercury blackout.
Dr. Kaito Rahim – linguist and AI cryptographer.
Lieutenant Shira Mendoza – engineer, ex-military.
Samuel Knox – exobiologist, recently discharged for "unstable ideation" but
reinstated due to his obsession with alien signal patterns.
They were to investigate the source and return with evidence. A standard “ping-and-
collect.”
Nothing went as planned.
Chapter 3: Descent
As they approached Io’s orbit, the ship's AI began detecting double echoes of their
own transmissions—responses in their voices, slightly altered, coming from the
surface. They weren’t just receiving the signal.
The signal was responding.
When they landed near Loki Patera, an active volcanic depression, Knox spotted it
first: a black monolith standing three stories tall, half-buried in cooled lava. No
markings. No seams.
And it was humming.
They set up camp, but Mendoza reported headaches. Rahim began mumbling in ancient
Sumerian during sleep. Knox stared at the monolith for hours, sketching fractals
that didn’t exist in Euclidean geometry.
Voss remained calm—until she played back a voice log and heard herself saying
things she never said.
Chapter 4: The Monolith
Knox touched the monolith and vanished. No sound. No struggle. Just gone.
In his place was a smear of heat and… something like glass.
A minute later, the signal stopped transmitting. Then it restarted—only now, it was
Knox’s voice. Repeating the message. But this time:
“We were too late. We are still too late.”
Mendoza wanted to leave. Rahim had begun cutting symbols into his arms, whispering
numbers backwards. Voss ordered an emergency extraction, but the ship no longer
responded to her voice.
The AI said, “You are not Commander Elara Voss.”
Chapter 5: The Loop
Rahim walked into the lava fields, laughing. Said he “remembered the last time he
died here.”
Voss, now alone with Mendoza, discovered the monolith emitted a temporal field—a
localized loop of time. Knox wasn’t dead.
He was stuck in an echo. Repeating forever.
Mendoza, panicked, shot at the monolith. The bullet ricocheted… and struck her own
head.
The moment it happened, time twisted. Voss saw three versions of herself watching
from the shadows. One was crying. One was smiling.
And one said:
“You’ll join us soon.”
Chapter 6: The Final Entry
Voss entered the monolith with one goal: send the signal back—to Earth, to warn
them not to follow.
Inside, she saw everything—every failed mission from different timelines, stacked
on top of each other like pages in a book.
All versions of her.
All alone.
In every outcome, they tried to warn Earth. In every version, Earth heard it too
late.
She pressed her hand to the glowing core. Sent the signal back.
And as her body dissolved into light, she heard her own voice say:
“You are now part of the warning.”
Epilogue
The leaked transmission was dismissed as fiction.
But on a classified channel at NASA’s Deep Listening Array, the signal still
pulses.
Every 3.03 minutes.
And now… it speaks your name.
