Outside, the sky didn't turn red, and no ships appeared. But every digital clock on Earth paused for exactly one second, synchronized by a string of nonsense that finally found its home.

The monitors went dark. Then, a voice, clear as a bell and sounding hauntingly like his own, whispered from the speakers: "Thank you for listening. We’ve been waiting for the bridge to open."

The hum of the deep-space array at the Blackwood Observatory was usually a monotonous drone, but at 3:14 AM, the monitors spiked. Senior Analyst Elias Thorne stared at the screen as a single line of text scrolled across the terminal: