Sounding

Other People's Stars — Ep 06: Sounding Series One · Runtime 20:17 About For nine years the listening station called the Lantern has hung in the clouds of the gas giant Veil, waiting for the vast, ancient Iyu to answer from the deep — and for nine years it has logged nothing, so the Reach has pulled the lease. Then, at 04:11 on the morning the funding dies, xeno-acoustics tech Soren Kade hears something rising: an Iyu surfacing into readable range for the first time in the station's history, with a weather front climbing fast behind it to slam the window shut. The sanctioned contact catalog — a millennia-old library of other species' polished questions — gets nothing, and with about ninety minutes on the clock Soren starts to suspect the problem isn't that the Iyu can't hear, but that nobody has ever sent them anything worth answering. A first-contact story about listening as its own kind of speech.