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"Jacob. You are the father."

Tinny gasps and "Ohh's" accompanied the shocked look on Jacob's face, right before Carrie flew into frame and started wailing on him like a crazy person. A chant of "Maury, Maury, Maury" started up as security guards broke the two up.

Eric, half watching, half asleep, chuckled. He loved this garbage, Dr. Stevens be damned.

The camera cut back to an ostensibly distraught Maury Povich just shaking his head like a disappointed father.

"Let's take a quick break."

Cut to a commercial for toilet paper with those cute bears who use toilets, just like us.

Eric muted the small cathode-ray tube TV. It was a 6 inch diagonal screen, and the only piece of outside electronics Dr. Stevens would allow within the facility. Even that had taken the whole damn staff filing a complaint.

Across from the once plush office chair Eric sat in a series of screens depicted several waveforms. There was the ever present Universal Background Radiation - that old familiar smoking gun leftover from the big bang. Then there was all the noise the sun was making - a loud mother fucker the sun. And then, not much of anything.

Most of the wave-forms never moved much at all. When they did, it was almost invariably some well known phenomenon or another. Eric could identify the landscape of the universe by waveform pattern alone. Here was a white dwarf, there a gas giant, now a quasar.

But finding these things wasn't the point. Eric's job, the purpose of the entire installation, was to listen for the sounds of intelligent life. So far, year 63 of the project, they'd heard precisely fuck all.

Eric took a sip of his Arnold Palmer. "Mmm, thank you Arnold." Countryside and Lipton's. Extra sugar.

Maury came back on the TV. Eric reached forward for the remote and accidentally nudged it off the edge of the console. He bent over to pick it up and brushed up against primary tuning dial, moving it an eighth of a degree to the right along the horizontal plane.

"Shit." Eric abandoned the remote and sat up straight. An eighth of a degree shift in the position of the receiving dishes was the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of parsecs. Generally the dishes scanned at a rate of 1/1000th of a degree per hour.

"Shit shit, Goddamn it." Eric started to panic. If he couldn't re-calibrate to the previous position, exactly, he would definitely be fired. But he had forgotten to update the paper log hourly, so he wasn't sure where the dishes were supposed to point.

He was about to eyeball the dial backward when he saw several of the wave-forms begin to fluctuate. The signals started normal enough - a consistent sine wave fluctuation indicative of a red dwarf star. But as the disks settled into their final position, each waveform took on a chaotic and changing structure.

"What the fuck?" Eric gaped at them, wide eyed and confused. After 20 seconds, he had the wherewithal to begin recording. Then, hands shaking like butterfly wings, he leaned forward and pressed the audio feed button on one of the most powerful signals.

Chaos spilled out of the main speakers and into the room. A cacophany of sounds, none of them familiar in the least, some wet and sloppy, other harsh and metallic, and changing at random time intervals. Some overlapped, were cut short, began of a sudden only to warp and morph explosively and dissipate to nothing. Eric could understand none of it.

A particularly loud, prolonged noise, a chain of explosions he realized, crescendoed, and cut off suddenly.

Eric heard in the chaos something unmistakable, but hard to define in a way that didn't scare the hell of out him. He heard pain, suffering, violence, fear.

War.

Eric couldn't stop shaking. Quickly, as though it were the door to a haunted basement, he leaned forward and muted the feed. The wave-forms continued their violent dance as Eric called Dr. Stevens.

On the muted TV Maury looked on helplessly as another batch of human parents threw an infantile tantrum. The sight of the show suddenly made Eric sick to his stomach with worry, and he kicked at the small TV, sending it crashing to the floor. In the death flickers of the cathode tubes Maury looked into the camera and shook his head.

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If you enjoyed this, check out my other shorts:

The Holy Signal Faits Accomplis Welcome Home Vassal Online The Interview Hard Reset Meerkat The Green Valley The Facility A Digital Temple The Doppelganger Caper NOTICE 23-126 Shortcut Trapped In Old New York Forever Soldier Deus Ex Deputy Underneath A Starless Sky BENEATH Part 1 - The Signal Beneath BENEATH Part 2 - The Expedition Incidental Superhero Personal Hell Devil's Bargain Roy BENEATH Part 3: The Response True == Love Born To Be Wild Forever Prison CASE FILE 20-2018

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[Photo Source]By mailer_diablo (Self-taken (Unmodified)) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

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The posts on this blog are mostly the results of my r/writingprompts responses. To view my other stories on Reddit check out my developing sub there r/LFTM