“Hey Kate.”

Kate pulled her earphones off of one ear and looked up from her computer screen to see Matt’s goofy grin. He used his elbows to clear a space for a pair of paper plates overflowing with pizza. “You ran off before you got some food,” he admonished her. “Even grad students have to eat.”

She smiled and glanced at the time. Already seven. Well, that’s not too late.

“I thought we lived on caffeine and a bit of light,” she quipped, but she couldn’t help her stomach from rumbling as she looked at the pizza. “Oh, I am hungry.”

Matt scoffed. “Yeah, I’ll bet. You’ve been working nonstop to get that presentation ready for Mr. Highland.”

He grabbed a slice and took a large bite. “Rookie mistake though, leaving before you reaped the rewards of your labor.”

Kate had already stuffed her mouth with a slice of her own, so she shrugged helplessly back at her labmate. Then she attacked the pizza like a starving woman – to be fair, she really hadn’t been eating well the past week, and being free always made food taste better.

Kate felt her stress drain away as the much-needed calories finally made their way into her bloodstream, but a minute of eating in silence was too much for Matt. The moment he nibbled the last bit of sauce from his crust he used it to point at her screen. “Is that signal live? You’re still scanning?”

“Never stop,” Kate replied through her food.

She swallowed, and then cleared her throat with a gulp of cold coffee from a paper cup on her desk. “The system’s always online. I’ve started listening to the noise, too. For inspiration.”

She tapped her headphones.

“What’s it sound like?” Matt asked.

Kate grinned and rotated one of the ears of her headphones towards him. “Here, lean closer and give it a listen.”

She could have taken her heaphones off, or turned on her laptop’s speaker, but this way Matt would have to stick his head close to her own. She suppressed her grin as he grew flustered and finally worked up the nerve to get within kissing distance. If he doesn’t work up the nerve to ask me out before one of us defends, I’ll have to do it myself.

“Wow,” he said, “so that’s what music from another world sound like.”

Kate laughed. In truth, she could barely hear the noise coming from her headphones over the thumping of her heart, but it wasn’t like she was going to get a signal anyway. The thought made her sigh, ruining the perfect moment.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

Matt leaned back to look at her with concern.

“Everything okay?”

She shrugged. “Not really.”

She flicked her hand at the displays on her laptop. “I mean, my research is an absolute dead-end.”

“But it’s being funded, at least. I’m back to being a TA this semester. I wouldn’t mind if some rich guy decided to throw a bunch of money my way.”

“A rich, crazy guy,” Kate replied. “Signals from another dimension? Who spends their money on that?”

She clenched her fist with frustration and tore a chunk from his pizza crust. “Come on, Matt. I may have funding now, but what the hell am I going to do when I graduate? What, you think someone is going to try to sell 6G to interdimensional aliens or something?”

Matt blanched. “Uh, well, Mr. Highland seems pretty sure about it at least. Maybe he’s got friends somewhere.”

Kate rolled her eyes. “Bruce is an okay guy, I guess, once you get past how creepy he is. But c’mon Matt, his entire family and everyone he knew died in the Cascadia Disaster. He probably thinks he’s going to find messages from his dead wife in here somehow.”

Kate grit her teeth as she stared at the graphs that sprawled across her screen, their lines twitching like the legs of a thousand drugged centipedes. She snorted with frustration when she saw a background window flashing for her attention. She moved her hand to the mouse to see what nonsense had made it past her noise thresholding. “I mean, the best shot I’ve got is that I’ll come up with a really interesting way to filter noise from a channel, but–”

She stopped mid-sentence, mouth agape. The new graph was totally different. She flicked back and forth between her windows, trying to figure out what had changed.

Then she realized that what she was watching was live. Something, somewhere, was doing something new and different. Kate dove into the terminal in a panic, desperate to make sure the data was being logged properly.

It was.

She breathed a sigh of relief.

She looked at the signal information, muttering as she went. “Channel, channel, channel…”

She dashed her fingers against the keyboard, changing her audio over to her headphones. Then she plunged her hand to the volume key to save her eardrums. Her eyes widened as she listened to the confusing orchestra of noise that came out. It was noise, yes, but not the gentle hiss of anything Gaussian. There were patterns to this, signals that she could carefully pull apart, like a person teasing the threads from a knot.

“…music?” Matt asked.

She looked up, surprised that Matt was there. “Huh?”

“So is this alien music?” he repeated.

Kate realized that he’d been there the entire time. She looked at her clock and saw that half an hour had passed.

“Oh, sorry. Geez, this thing happened, and, uh, yeah.” She laughed. “Yeah, I guess this is alien music.”

She leaned back and smiled at him. “Or maybe I’m just picking up something totally different from what Mr. Highland predicted – the inter-planar dark matter CMB or something. Either way, I’ll definitely be able to publish something good out of this after all.”

She tapped her computer. “Now I’ve just got to make sure that someone didn’t mess with my data collection. The last thing I want to do is to publish data from some kids getting high and making out in my antenna array and call it aliens.”

Matt shrugged but couldn’t suppress a grin at her sudden giddiness. “Eh, I’m sure some people have published worse,” he joked.

“Anyway, forget about publishing for a minute. Are those noises saying anything interesting?”

He twitched his eyebrows suggestively. “Maybe they’d like to come visit?”