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Round 2 · open
Premise
The message arrived at 3:47 AM on a Tuesday, which seemed like an odd time for humanity's first contact with extraterrestrial intelligence. Dr. Mara Chen almost deleted it — the observatory's filters had been glitching all week, filling her inbox with noise artifacts that looked just like this. But something about the pattern made her pause. It wasn't random. It was structured. Repeating. And it was coming from a region of space that, according to every telescope pointed at it for the past sixty years, contained absolutely nothing. She ran the analysis twice, then three times, then called her colleague in Geneva. He picked up on the first ring, which meant he'd seen it too. 'Don't tell anyone yet,' he said, his voice strange and thin. 'I think it's been here before.'