by AJ Marlowe
When Sam left, I didn’t fight her.
I didn’t say the right thing. I didn’t say anything at all. Just nodded, arms crossed, like I was letting her go. Like I wasn’t breaking underneath.
After that, I mostly lived in my apartment. I didn’t have a job anymore — not a real one. Just freelance code work and old debt. I burned through my savings pretending I was fine. Drank cheap coffee. Tore through old hard drives. Looked for patterns where no one had left any.
Until I found one.
*****
The hard drive came from a thrift shop in Red Hook. It was an old enterprise-grade backup drive — scratched, dusty, heavy as sin. I plugged it in and watched garbage files flicker across the screen like static ghosts.
Except one.
A nested file too deep to make sense, hidden behind five layers of dummy partitions. Inside: a sequence.
Not text. Not data. Just numbers, fractals, spirals.
Iris — my AI — decrypted it over eleven hours.
“This is not a file,” she said. “It is a signal.”
Coordinates. Jungle. And something else: a string of symbols I didn’t recognize, but couldn’t stop staring at.
My rent was overdue. My fridge was empty. And something deep in me whispered, Go.
But first, I needed cash.
*****
That’s where Antoine came in.
He owed me a favor. Which, in Antoine terms, meant he’d let me owe him something bigger in the future. But when I told him I needed a few thousand fast, he didn’t flinch.
“You still good with network security?” he asked.
“Depends how illegal.”
He grinned. “Let’s say… morally flexible.”
We met in an alley in Long Island City, like it was 1999 and we were still pretending to be cool. Antoine had a job for some clients — the kind that didn’t shake hands or sign NDAs. A small biotech firm running simulations they shouldn’t be. My job: get in, lift the data, get out.
Easy.
Except it wasn’t.
I broke in remotely through a cracked VPN, rewrote a few access keys, then tunneled into their server while sitting in a storage unit with a burner laptop and a protein bar.
Halfway through the download, alarms tripped.
“Did you trigger anything physical?” Antoine barked over comms.
“No. But someone’s watching.”
We cut the link. I left with half the files and my hands shaking.
Antoine paid me anyway. Five grand. Cash.
“Whatever you’re doing,” he said, “don’t die doing it.”
*****
I bought a one-way ticket to Brazil.
*****
Before I left, I messaged Sam.
ELLEN: I found something. I’m leaving the country.
SAM: Define “something.”
ELLEN: A signal. Coordinates. It’s not just code, Sam. It’s… calling.
SAM: Where are you going?
ELLEN: Somewhere I’m not supposed to be.
She asked to meet.
*****
We sat in the courtyard near her lab, MIT students rushing past with laptops and coffee. She looked exhausted. Beautiful. The same and not the same.
I showed her what I’d found. The math. The recursion. The code. The vision.
She was skeptical, of course — until she wasn’t.
“This doesn’t follow standard logic,” she said. “It behaves like it’s trying to talk.”
I told her about the dream — a dark shape in the jungle, a voice that wasn’t a voice, whispering through the roots of the Earth.
“We called to someone who listens.”
I didn’t tell her about the job with Antoine. I didn’t want to see that look in her eyes.
“You could get hurt,” she said softly.
“I’ve already been hurt,” I said.
That shut her up.
*****
I watched Boston disappear from a dirty plane window and landed in Miami with four hours to kill and too much static in my head.
Airports have a weird rhythm. Everyone’s going somewhere, no one wants to talk, and time bends in this strange way where twenty minutes feels like forever and three hours disappear in a blink.
I wandered through Terminal C in a fog, backpack tight against my shoulders, the signal drive tucked inside a padded case like it was something sacred. Maybe it was.
The money from Antoine was still in my sock, in a heat-sealed roll. I’d never carried that much cash before. It made me feel weirdly heavier. More real.
I bought bad coffee and sat by a window near Gate 37. The sky outside was blazing blue, but I felt cold.
Everyone around me looked like they knew where they were going.
I kept thinking about Sam. The way she’d looked at me — like she wasn’t sure if I was brilliant or just broken. Maybe I was both. I wanted to tell her everything I hadn’t said when it mattered: I was sorry. I was afraid. I never knew how to need someone without losing myself.
But she already knew that.
She’d waited. Longer than she should have.
And now I was boarding a plane to South America with stolen money and an impossible message inside a hard drive that spoke in prime numbers and longing.
Was I running away? Maybe.
But I also felt — for the first time in months — like I was moving toward something.
I watched a couple argue by the charging station. A dad tried to wrangle two toddlers and a smoothie. A woman with a guitar case leaned her head on her own shoulder and fell asleep mid-scroll.
All of us, in motion.
I closed my eyes, breathed deep, and thought: This is where it started.
Not in the jungle. Not in the cave. Not in the signal.
Here. In the waiting.
*****
The jungle didn’t feel real for the first two days.
I was just hiking — heat, bugs, GPS pings on a cracked screen. But on the third day, I ran out of trail.
I followed a thin stream inland, hacking through foliage, until I stumbled into a clearing.
And they were there.
A handful of homes raised on stilts. Smoke curling from a fire pit. Two children chasing a dog that looked half-wolf. An older woman squatted by the water’s edge, washing something with steady hands.
I froze.
A man stepped out from one of the structures and studied me — not hostile, just… curious. Like he’d seen strangers before, but never this far in. I raised my hands, tried the only word I could remember.
“Amiga?”
He said something I didn’t understand, but waved me forward.
I spent one night with them.
I shared dried fruit and water, and one of the older women touched the symbol on my wrist like she recognized it. But she didn’t say anything.
They asked me no questions. I offered no explanation.
That night, I sat by the fire with the children. One of them drew a spiral in the dirt and pointed at the stars.
The man from earlier sat beside me.
“You dream?” he asked in broken English, tapping his own temple.
I nodded.
He tapped the dirt spiral again.
“Dream tell you come here?”
My throat tightened. “Yes.”
He nodded slowly.
“Be careful. Old things live here. Not bad. Just… not ours.”
I didn’t sleep much that night.
Before I left, they gave me a bundle of herbs wrapped in cloth. I didn’t know the word for “thank you,” but I bowed and meant it.
As I left the clearing, the older woman called after me.
“Listen good,” she said. “Some things don’t want to be found. Some things want to be remembered.”
*****
I found the cave three days in.
It was half-swallowed by the earth, covered in moss and silence. Inside, the air was cold. Ancient. The walls shimmered with impossible geometry — spirals within spirals, etched with tools I couldn’t imagine.
And at the center of the cavern: a ship.
Black. Seamless. Alive.
When I touched it, the air changed.
Lights bloomed. The floor pulsed. And then, from hidden chambers, they came.
*****
Three figures.
Luminous, tall, graceful. Not human, not monstrous — just alien in the truest sense.
They looked at me, and I felt something shift in my mind. Not fear. Not awe.
Recognition.
“You heard the pattern.”
They offered me a vessel. Clear, humming.
I drank.
*****
The drink opened me.
I saw gravity like threads. I saw time like fabric. I saw Sam’s face when she left me. Not angry. Just disappointed. Like she’d expected more. Like she still loved me, but couldn’t wait for me to love myself.
I felt the weight of choices I hadn’t made — the conversations I dodged, the ways I held her at arm’s length because I was afraid of needing anyone.
The drink showed me what I could be — if I stopped running.
I cried harder than I thought possible.
They let me cry.
*****
They took me with them.
Between stars. Through rings of ice. Into cities built on sound and thought.
They weren’t teachers. They were witnesses. Record-keepers of the cosmos. Their signal had been a seed.
I had answered.
Not because I was chosen. But because I was listening.
*****
They brought me home.
No time had passed. I woke in my bed. The cash was gone. The mark on my wrist glowed faintly, pulsing like a quiet question.
I called Sam.
*****
We met again. I told her everything.
She stared at me like she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
“You’re different,” she said.
“I am.”
We didn’t fix everything. But we didn’t need to. I made tea. She stayed late. We sat in silence and it felt like something opening, not closing.
*****
Now, I’m writing again — physics, mostly. Theoretical. Wild. My papers get rejected, then passed around like samizdat. The formulas hum when I touch them.
I’m waiting, but I’m not lost.
Some nights, the symbol on my wrist warms. And I know they’re out there, watching.
Waiting for the next one who listens.