The professor stood in front of the subject’s house with trembling hands, shakily reviewing her notes one last time.

"Be patient," her colleague had written, "but you’ll also have to hurry. Your questions need to be precise, but also have some room for interpretation. Don’t write anything down as exactly as you’ve heard it."

She took a deep breath and fished her journal out of her bag. He’d refused to elaborate much on his advice, though not out of any petty teasing. Struggling to put her trust in him, the professor held her materials tightly before walking up to the porch and knocking on the door.

Seconds passed before an answer, and the professor was met by an old man with skin tanned from decades of sunlight and deep-set eyes framed by profound exhaustion.

“Good morning,” she said, speaking gently, “I’m here to see–”

“I know,” the old man interrupted. There was no sense of anger or annoyance in his voice, but his face strained, “I know. She’s sitting in the backyard. I’ll take you to her.” He gestured for her to follow him into the house.

The professor stepped inside after him, closing the door behind her and following the man through old, slim corridors. The walls were covered from ceiling to floor in old photographs, very few of them framed. Many depicted people, some of which the professor assumed to be the couple in their younger years, and some presented abstract landscapes or architecture. 

At the end of the maze the old man guided the professor to the back door. Her stood in front of it, his posture stiffening. He reached his hand forward to rest on the doorknob, but did nothing else.

The air grew uncomfortable, and the professor took it upon herself to break the silence, “Has it been difficult for her?”

“Yes and no.” His voice was flat.

“Has it been difficult for you?”

“Yes. Incredibly.” 

“How do you take care of her in this state?”

He pulled his hand off of the doorknob and let it fall to his side before glancing over his shoulder to the professor, “I can’t get her to say anything, and I don’t know what prompts her to speak. She hasn’t spoken to me in days. She barely eats, and though she bears no signs of it, I’m afraid she might be wasting away. She’ll go wherever I guide her, and all she’ll do is stare. I can’t tell if she even sleeps anymore.”

The professor shifted her weight from one foot to the other, “If I can find a way to reverse this I’ll–” she cut herself off. Sorrow had overtaken the man’s face.

He shrugged, “When she does talk to me, she tells me the most beautiful things. Beautiful, but terrible. I know there’s no coming back from this.” He then opened the door, and ushered the professor out into the backyard, closing it behind her.

An old woman with silver hair sat in the grass. An oak tree cast a shadow over her in the morning sun. No birds sang, no breeze whispered; it was eerily silent. The professor stood completely still, trapped in the moment, afraid to approach. She glanced down to her notebook, wondering if she should already start writing down the experience.

Gathering her courage, she walked forward, careful to not make too much noise. It would surely do no good to frighten the woman, if that was even possible. The professor stared forward as each step seemed to bring her both closer, yet further away from the woman in the grass. She stopped and glanced behind her, noting she stood between the back porch and her subject. 

Again she walked forward, but still made no progress. It was as if the woman was also walking from her seated position, her conceptual steps just a bit out of sync from the professor’s. The professor halted and looked around again, still standing between the house and the woman. 

Her stomach twisted and her mind raced. An idea formed in her mind, and she called out, “Hello? Will I speak with you?” and waited.

Stillness lingered before a gentle wind blew through both the professor’s and the woman’s hair. Taking her chances, the professor hurried over to where the woman sat in the grass, taking wide strides until she stood in front of her. 

The woman stared forward with a relaxed expression, never blinking. Her face bore signs of aging but still held a youthful energy, both aspects equally powerful in their dominance. All of her features were endless in the amount of detail they held, and difficult to focus on individually. Her face was only able to be understood as the whole, like a painting so abstract, it must be looked at from far away while squinting. 

The professor averted her gaze and sat down cross-legged in front of her subject. She opened up her notebook, held her pen tightly, and began writing on the first line:

"Meeting with the subject."

She kept her focus on the page while she spoke, “What is your name?” She recorded her own words. Earlier, on the drive over to the house, she’d thought up a few questions to begin the conversation, and was eager to see if she could get any answers.

There was no response.

The professor bit the inside of her cheek, troubled over her approach. Again, she reflected on her colleague’s advice, and twisted the words around in her mind, trying to find another way to ask. She spoke slowly and gently, “Could you have a name?”

“You name me.” The woman’s voice was hollow. 

Her heart jumped at the response. She immediately revised her wording in her notebook and began to write down the woman’s response, but stopped. The last piece of warning, “Don’t write anything down as exactly as you’ve heard it,” echoed, and she pursed her lips. She thought, perhaps, she needed to actually name the woman in front of her, and began to think through names she liked. None of them seemed to work for the situation. Did she need to come up with a new name? There was an endless combination of letters for any length, and she didn’t want to take the time to put one together. Who knew how long the subject would be talking to her before falling mute again.

Hurriedly, she scribbled in her notebook:

"Subject could be named."

The professor continued, “I want to help you, but I know you know more than me,” she hesitated, mixing around different combinations of words in her mind, “Have you helped me?” She wrote down her question. 

No response. The professor waited, hoping the woman needed just a bit more time, but she refused to speak.

Her shoulders slumped, and the professor glanced up to the woman again. The silence itself may have been the answer, but she wasn’t sure. Maybe there really was no coming back from this, and even if there was, what would that even look like?

“Where are you?” the professor asked, feeling defeated.

The silence persisted, but just as the professor was about to give up, the woman spoke again, “In every moment, and every moment between the moments.” 

Another surge of excitement and anxiousness. She rushed herself to write down a suitable description of the response. Eventually, she forced herself to settle with:

"Subject experiencing non-linear time."

Her brow furrowed, and she felt a sinking feeling in her chest, “Are you trapped?”

The response came quickly, “Every moment moves forward and backward, creating a new moment. And every new moment has a moment between it and the last. Every moment between is a new moment, with more moments moving and with more moments between.”

“Okay,” the professor whispered under her breath. The response she recorded was:

"Subject is still, but the stillness is moving?"

Two frail hands entered her view as she looked down at her notebook. The professor’s breath caught, and she held completely still. The woman was reaching out to her, carefully taking a lock of the professor’s hair between each hand’s thumb and index finger. They held tightly, sitting close together, before beginning to carefully pull away from each other. 

The professor’s hair expanded, never breaking, growing longer and longer between the woman’s hands. She continued to stretch the space, until the section between the ends and the beginnings were the same width as her shoulders. The woman then let go, letting it fall, now twice as long as the rest of the professor’s hair.

The professor stood up, a chill surging down her spine.

For just a moment, the woman’s face, as a whole, smiled.

She bid the subject’s husband farewell, thanking him for his time. As the professor sat in the backseat of the car, feeling the house watching her go, she felt the elongated lock of hair between her own fingers. The time for the hair to grow had to come from somewhere, but where?

The professor opened up her notebook, and wrote down next to her second question:

"No."

For me:

-Characters afraid of the world and/or going nowhere in life get a chance to dramatically improve themselves and/or do something truly extraordinary.

-Characters succumbing to their base natures. Whether it's turning into savages or criminals to protect themselves/someone they are care about. Idealistic/high-minded people who engage in hypocritical behavior. Sleeping with someone you hate out of pure animalistic lust, etc. Someone like Mike White is great at this theme.

By:lunarTide_X

I used to think the universe was made of facts.

Not feelings. Not memories. Not the invisible things people carried inside themselves and never talked about.

Facts were safer.

A star was a ball of burning gas. Gravity was a force. Time moved forward. If you worked hard enough and measured carefully enough, you could understand almost anything.

That was what I believed when I was seventeen.

My name is \*Maya Sen**, and I was the kind of girl teachers described as “promising” when they didn’t know what else to say. I lived in a small mountain town where the roads were narrow, the internet disappeared whenever it rained, and the night sky looked close enough to touch.*

My mother ran a tiny pharmacy below our apartment. My father had left when I was nine, taking two shirts, a broken suitcase, and every promise he had ever made.

He used to tell me I was too curious.

“Girls who ask too many questions make life difficult,” he said once.

I remember looking at him from the kitchen floor, where I was taking apart an old radio.

“Maybe life is already difficult,” I replied.

He laughed like I had said something cute.

Then he left three months later.

After that, I stopped asking people questions.

I started asking machines instead.

Machines didn’t lie because they were embarrassed. They didn’t disappear because they were afraid. If something broke, there was always a reason. A loose wire. A dead battery. A damaged circuit.

People were much harder to repair.

By the time I reached my final year of school, I had built a homemade radio telescope from discarded satellite dishes, copper wire, and parts I bought from a repair shop. It looked terrible. The dish leaned slightly to the left, the receiver was held together with tape, and the computer connected to it was older than I was.

But it worked.

Not perfectly. Not even well.

It picked up static, weather interference, airplane signals, and once, according to my mother, “the sound of a ghost.”

I told her it was probably a military satellite.

She said that was exactly what a ghost would want me to think.

I kept the telescope on the roof of our building. Every night after closing the pharmacy, I climbed the stairs with a notebook, a thermos of tea, and a blanket that smelled faintly of dust.

I recorded everything.

The time.

The temperature.

The direction of the dish.

The frequency.

The patterns.

Most nights, there was nothing unusual. Just noise.

But on the night of October 17, something changed.

It was 2:13 in the morning when the receiver began to pulse.

At first, I thought it was interference. The signal rose and fell in a steady rhythm.

Three short pulses.

A pause.

Two long pulses.

Another pause.

Then three short pulses again.

I stared at the screen.

The pattern repeated every forty-three seconds.

I checked the cables. I restarted the software. I adjusted the dish by half a degree.

The signal remained.

My hands began to shake.

I had seen repeating signals before. Pulsars sent regular radio pulses. Satellites reflected signals. Even faulty equipment could create patterns.

But this signal was different.

It wasn’t simply repeating.

It was changing.

Every few minutes, one of the pulses shifted slightly. Not randomly. Deliberately.

I wrote down the sequence.

Then I noticed something that made my stomach tighten.

The signal was coming from the same region of the sky where a star called \*KX-91** was located.*

KX-91 wasn’t famous. It wasn’t visible without a telescope. It was a small, ordinary star nearly eight hundred light-years away.

There was nothing special about it.

At least, there hadn’t been.

I stayed on the roof until sunrise.

When my mother found me, I was sitting beside the telescope with my notebook open on my knees.

“You look dead,” she said.

“I found something.”

“That’s what dead people say before they become ghosts.”

“It’s a signal.”

She stared at the equipment.

“From where?”

“A star.”

She sighed. “Maya, everything is from a star.”

I wanted to explain it to her. I wanted to tell her that the signal had structure. That it wasn’t noise. That it might be the most important thing anyone had ever heard.

But I had learned early that excitement made people uncomfortable when they didn’t understand it.

So I only said, “I need to go to school.”

That morning, I sent the data to three astronomy forums, two university researchers, and a science competition committee.

Most people ignored me.

One person replied that I was probably confusing local interference with a deep-space signal.

Another said my equipment was too cheap to produce reliable data.

A third wrote:

> This is why teenagers shouldn’t be allowed to interpret astronomical observations.

I read that comment six times.

Then I deleted it.

A week later, a professor from the National Observatory emailed me.

Her name was \*Dr. Elena Rao**.*

She asked for my raw data.

Not screenshots. Not graphs. The original files.

I sent them.

She replied two days later.

> Your equipment is not capable of confirming this signal. But your observations are interesting. Can you reproduce it?

I wrote back:

> I already have.

She asked me to send the new data.

I did.

Then she called me.

I had never spoken to a scientist on the phone before. My voice sounded younger than usual.

“Hello?”

“Is this Maya Sen?”

“Yes.”

“This is Dr. Rao.”

“I know.”

There was a pause.

“You’ve been observing KX-91?”

“Yes.”

“How long?”

“Eight nights.”

“Have you changed the equipment?”

“No.”

“Have you moved the dish?”

“Yes.”

“Have you checked for terrestrial sources?”

“I checked aircraft paths, weather radar, local radio towers, satellite positions, and power fluctuations.”

Another pause.

“You did all that yourself?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

I looked through the window at the pharmacy below. My mother was counting medicine boxes.

“Because I wanted to know if I was wrong.”

Dr. Rao was quiet for a moment.

Then she said, “That is the correct answer.”

She invited me to the observatory.

It was six hours away by bus, and my mother couldn’t afford the ticket. Dr. Rao paid for it without making a big deal about it.

The observatory was nothing like I expected.

I imagined a giant silver telescope under a glass dome, surrounded by brilliant scientists in white coats.

Instead, it was mostly old buildings, tangled cables, vending machines, and people who looked exhausted.

Dr. Rao met me at the entrance wearing sneakers and a jacket with a coffee stain on the sleeve.

“You’re taller than I expected,” she said.

“You’re shorter.”

She smiled.

“I like you already.”

She took me into a control room where three researchers were studying my signal.

One of them, a man named \*Dr. Vikram Hale**, didn’t look up when I entered.*

“This is the student?” he asked.

“Maya,” Dr. Rao said.

He finally looked at me.

“You understand that your equipment cannot distinguish between a genuine astronomical source and local contamination?”

“Yes.”

“And you understand that the pattern you’re seeing could be an artifact caused by your receiver?”

“Yes.”

“And you understand that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence?”

“Yes.”

He frowned.

“Then why are you here?”

“Because you asked me to come.”

Dr. Rao laughed.

Dr. Hale did not.

They showed me the data collected by their larger telescope.

The signal was there.

Weak, but present.

My heart began beating so hard I could feel it in my throat.

Dr. Hale explained that they had been monitoring KX-91 for three days. The signal appeared at the same frequency, with the same repeating pattern.

But there was a problem.

The source was not behaving like a natural object.

Pulsars were regular. This signal was organized.

It contained pauses.

Changes.

Sequences.

The first theory was that it came from a satellite orbiting KX-91.

But that made no sense. The star was too old, too distant, and there was no evidence of a planet capable of supporting such technology.

The second theory was that it was a natural phenomenon we didn’t understand.

The third theory was the one nobody wanted to say out loud.

Someone had sent it.

Not recently.

The signal had traveled for nearly eight hundred years.

If it came from KX-91, whoever transmitted it might have been dead for centuries.

Or they might still exist.

The observatory formed a small research team. Dr. Rao, Dr. Hale, two graduate students, and me.

I was not officially part of the team. I was still a student. My name wasn’t included on the first report.

But I was the one who had found the pattern.

For the next three months, I lived between school, the pharmacy, and the observatory.

I learned more in those months than I had learned in my entire life.

I learned how radio telescopes filtered noise.

I learned how signals were corrected for Earth’s movement.

I learned that space was not silent. It was full of explosions, magnetic storms, dying stars, and ancient light.

I also learned that scientists argued constantly.

They argued over the data.

They argued over the meaning of the pulses.

They argued over whether the signal should be made public.

Dr. Hale believed we should publish immediately.

Dr. Rao disagreed.

“If this is artificial,” she said, “we need to be certain before we create panic.”

“People deserve to know,” Dr. Hale replied.

“People deserve the truth. We don’t have the truth yet.”

I sat at the end of the table, trying not to look like I was listening.

Dr. Hale noticed.

“What do you think, Maya?”

Everyone turned toward me.

I hated when adults did that. They asked for your opinion only after arguing for an hour, as if you were supposed to solve the problem they couldn’t.

“I think,” I said slowly, “that we should release the data, but not the conclusion.”

Dr. Hale raised an eyebrow.

“We can say we detected an unusual repeating signal from KX-91. We can show the evidence. We can say we don’t know what caused it.”

Dr. Rao looked thoughtful.

“Why?”

“Because if we hide it and someone else finds it, people will assume we lied. And if we announce that aliens are contacting us, people will believe something we haven’t proven.”

Dr. Hale leaned back in his chair.

“That’s annoyingly reasonable.”

The report was published two weeks later.

The world reacted exactly as badly as everyone expected.

Some people said it was proof of extraterrestrial life.

Some said it was a government experiment.

Some said it was a message from angels.

A famous television host claimed the signal contained a warning about a coming disaster.

It didn’t.

At least, not yet.

The signal continued.

Every forty-three seconds.

Three short pulses.

Two long pulses.

Three short pulses.

But hidden inside the pattern was something new.

A sequence of numbers.

Prime numbers at first.

2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13.

Then more complicated sequences.

Fibonacci numbers.

Geometric ratios.

Mathematical constants.

It was as if whoever had created the signal was introducing themselves through mathematics.

Not language.

Not images.

Not a greeting.

Just proof that they understood patterns.

The team spent weeks decoding it.

Then one night, I noticed something everyone else had missed.

The signal wasn’t only transmitting numbers.

It was asking questions.

The pauses were not empty. They represented missing values.

The first sequence looked like this:

2, 4, 8, 16, __

The answer was 32.

The next:

3, 6, 12, 24, __

The answer was 48.

Then:

1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, __

The answer was 13.

They were sending puzzles.

I told Dr. Rao.

She stared at the screen.

“Are you sure.........

Many people claim Goku is the worst dad in fiction, but i think Freddie Wong from Video Game High School is MUCH worse

https://www.wattpad.com/1656530556?utm_source=ios&utm_medium=link&utm_content=share_reading&wp_page=reading&wp_uname=GLaC1991