In the year 2037, Earth received a burst of light from Proxima b, a rocky exoplanet orbiting the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri, just 4.25 light years away. What began as a scientific anomaly soon turned into the greatest mystery of the century.
At first, astronomers believed it was a flare from Proxima Centauri, which was known for its violent solar activity. But as they studied the light patterns, they noticed something impossible — a precise sequence of flashes, following prime number intervals: 2, 3, 5, 7, 11...
"This is no natural phenomenon," said Dr. Eliza Tran, head of the SETI Optical Array Team. “This is a signal.”
It came once every 27 Earth days, always at the same brightness, and always in the same sequence. It wasn’t radio — it was visible light. A narrow, focused laser-like beam — white-hot and unwavering — traveling across interstellar space. It could not have been an accident.
Governments, agencies, and private space companies scrambled. What did it mean? Was it a beacon? A message? A warning?
By 2040, a multinational mission named Aurora-1 was greenlit. The idea: to send a compact probe, the fastest ever built, using solar sails propelled by powerful Earth-based lasers, racing toward Proxima b at 20% the speed of light. It would still take over 20 years to arrive.
But Earth couldn’t wait.
Then came the second anomaly.
In 2042, two telescopes — one in Chile and another in Antarctica — recorded a brief eclipse of the light, as if something massive had passed in front of it. When the data was reconstructed, it showed a hexagonal silhouette — sharp, mechanical. Not a moon. Not a planet. Something artificial.
The public exploded with theories. Was Proxima b harboring a megastructure? A Dyson Swarm? Were we seeing the edge of an alien civilization?
Then, in 2045, something even stranger happened.
The light changed color.
From stark white to a deep indigo, still pulsing in prime intervals. When broken down into a spectrogram, it displayed a pattern of hydrogen lines modified to mimic a waveform — not sound, but music. Simple, haunting, rhythmic tones, mimicking Earth’s most basic lullabies and classical progressions.
"It's like someone studied our broadcasts and mirrored them back at us," whispered Eliza during a United Nations address. "Not in our language. But in the universal language — mathematics and melody."
Earth responded.
A concentrated beam of light was sent from the largest laser array in orbit, modulating a similar signal: prime flashes, musical tones, and binary sequences encoding simple shapes — triangles, circles, the golden ratio, the periodic table.
Then, the waiting began.
Years passed. Nothing changed — until 2053.
The beam from Proxima b pulsed once. Then went completely dark.
No more sequences. No more music. Just void.
Global panic rose. Had we offended them? Had they moved on? Were we too primitive to deserve their attention?
Dr. Eliza, now old and revered, remained calm. She believed it was a test — or perhaps a countdown.
Then, on August 1, 2054, every radio telescope on Earth picked up a massive, repeating signal from Proxima b. Not light — radio this time — carrying a single image: a map of Earth. Dated 2025.
The message was clear: “We saw you before you saw us.”
A final image followed: a child’s hand reaching out to touch a glowing sphere.
Then silence.
The light from Proxima b never returned.
But on some nights, when the sky is perfectly clear and the interference low, a single, silent pulse of white light can still be seen — like a heartbeat in the darkness, reminding us that something — or someone — once looked back.
And for the first time, Earth was no longer alone in the universe.
