The pulse came in on a frequency Dr. Kim had not listed as active on her survey. It repeated at 4.2-second intervals, which was not a natural interval for any phenomenon she could immediately name. She ran the standard checks: equipment fault, local interference, satellite reflection. She ran them twice. She sat with the data for six hours without telling anyone, which was a violation of the protocol she had helped write. The protocol existed because an anomaly like this had been reported twice before in the history of the search program and both times it had turned out to be instrumentation artifacts that required significant institutional resources to rule out. She did not want to rule this one out. She understood, sitting with that feeling, that she did not want it explained. She had spent nineteen years hoping for a signal and now that she had something that looked like a signal, the thing she most wanted to protect was the looking. She reported it on the seventh day, after running every test she could run alone. The senior team convened. The artifact was identified within two weeks: a previously undocumented reflection pattern from a new communications satellite that had not yet been added to the registry. Dr. Kim wrote the amendment to the protocol herself. She noted, in the protocol's comment field and nowhere else, that the two weeks had been the most focused work of her career.