BEFORE THE FIRST SECOND

Marcus Cole is twenty-eight years old and already the most promising astrophysicist of his generation. In his first year aboard Helios-9, a solo research station orbiting four hundred kilometers above Earth, he detects a signal coming from the Boötes Void — the largest known empty region in the observable universe. Three hundred and thirty million light-years of absolute nothing.The signal has a pattern. It has rhythm. And when Marcus calculates its age, the numbers stop making sense: the signal has been transmitting since approximately 10⁻⁴³ seconds after the Big Bang. Before matter existed. Before the physical laws that would allow a signal to exist had any reason to exist.He tries to report it. No one believes him. He tries to ignore it. He can’t. He tries to understand it. And that’s where he makes the only mistake he can’t walk back from.Because there are things that have existed since before everything else, things that have remained silent for 13.8 billion years. And Marcus Cole, twenty-eight years old with his whole life ahead of him, just did the one thing he never should have done.He answered.