We didn’t notice it at first. That is to say, we heard it, but no one believed it was new. People in the observatories heard many things: pulsars, quasars, fast radio bursts. The universe was noisy in the way a sea is noisy when you’re drowning in it. You don’t listen for specific waves. You just try not to go under.
Carlos Dávila, the man who found the signal, was a radio technician at Cerro Tololo in Northern Chile. He wasn’t a scientist, not really. He was a technician with thick knuckles and a love of poetry, the kind of man who would quote Neruda while re-soldering a control board. His shift began at 3:00 p.m. and ended when the desert night fell. On the fourth Thursday of April, during the southern autumn, he logged a signal with a sequence that sounded like a joke. A broadcast pattern no one had heard before. High modulation. Repetitive. Rhythmic. Almost cheerful.
He called it una canción sin alma. A soulless song.
The waveform didn’t match anything from known satellites. No standard pulsar rotation. No signature from Earth. Yet the cadence, repetitive and inflected, almost like speech, felt familiar. Like something made by us, but long forgotten, an old commercial jingle hummed in the dark.
When he played it back, it stuttered through a spectrum of languages and tones, none complete. A whisper of French. A tinny echo in Mandarin. A static-punched American drawl:
“Sale ends soon… Don’t miss it…”
Then, nothing.
The official response was slow. The observatory logged the event and sent it up the chain to the international registry. A month passed. Then came the second signal.
This time it wasn’t just Carlos. Eight observatories picked it up: the Canadian array, a dish in Johannesburg, the Vatican’s own facility in Castel Gandolfo. All at once, and all hearing the same impossible broadcast, somehow simultaneous across hemispheres, despite latency., each message different.
“Act now…”
“Limited time only…”
“Your opportunity is almost here…”
The pattern of signals was unlike anything we’d seen. It was as though someone had mined Earth’s radio archives, extracted every piece of commercial propaganda we had ever launched into the heavens, and began stitching it back together with uncanny cheer. Somewhere in the sky, we were being sold something. But no one knew by whom.
The world took notice. We were in New York then. I remember because I saw the ticker crawl across the bottom of the television at the bagel shop on 8th and 27th. MYSTERY SIGNAL FROM DEEP SPACE MIMICS HUMAN ADS. A woman in a parka spilled her coffee and didn’t notice.
The President didn’t comment at first. The Pope did. He called it the echo of Babel and suggested prayer. The internet pulsed with speculation. Elon Musk tweeted a meme of an alien swiping a credit card. Half a million people joined a Facebook group called “The Blowout from Beyond.”
Then came the third signal. And the fourth. And so on. Each clearer and stranger than the last, each wrapped in the same manic pitchman energy that once pushed razors, cologne, and powdered drink mixes to a generation that couldn’t yet mute the ads. It was the music of our species reflected back at us.
A remix of us.