The signal came in at 2:41 AM on a Tuesday, which is when Maria was on shift because no one else wanted Tuesday nights. She had been a radio operator for eleven years and had heard every kind of interference: solar, atmospheric, man-made, the occasional animal that had chewed through shielding on the exterior antenna array. This was none of those. It was structured. It repeated. She logged it, cross-checked the frequency, found nothing in the register, and then sat very still for four minutes. The protocol for anomalous signals was clear: document, timestamp, escalate to the senior researcher on call. Dr. Hendricks was on call. Dr. Hendricks had not been wrong about anything in Maria's eleven years and she did not want to be the person who made him wrong about this. She documented. She timestamped. She did not escalate. Instead she sat with the headphones on until the signal stopped at 4:17 AM and did not come back. She filed the log under Atmospheric Anomaly, closed it, and went home when her shift ended. The log sat unreviewed for six weeks. By the time anyone opened it, she had transferred to a different facility and left no forwarding contact.