“Hey… can anybody hear me?”

After ten years of picking up meaningless signals, it was the first real transmission that I would receive from outer space.

A friendly voice, weak and breaking up…barely coming through out of a steady wall of background noise. And yet it was enough to make us all jump out of our seats and look at one another in sheer wonder.

“Did you hear that? You heard that too?”

It was the first question we asked among ourselves after hearing the mysterious message; we could not believe that it was coming from millions of miles away.

The new radio telescope had become operational a month ago. In the brief period since then, it had managed to track down 5 major radio bursts, and then it picked up this mystifying transmission from deep into the galaxy…

By god, this telescope is exceptional.

The second question was asked by one of our younger recruits:

“But…how is this even possible? It speaks English!”

 He was right. It was impossible for a radio transmission itself to have traveled millions of miles from the depths of the unknown to earth… let alone be in English.

Something must have gone wrong. The transmission might as well have been caused by interfering radio waves, mechanical failure or just someone pulling a silly prank on us.

After skeptically going through our theories, we examined the message a dozen more times to locate its source. Finally, we came to the conclusion that the transmission could not have been simply caused by a radio malfunction.

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It was not sent from Earth; not by any means.

The source was far removed from the farthest point in the galaxies where man has successfully sent astronauts or even an unmanned spacecraft to. We were all stunned.

We responded briefly, and reservedly, in English:

“We have received your message.”

So we waited…

And then, three days later, the second greatest moment in human history came to be:

“That’s wonderful…we’re so glad you could hear our message.”

The third message came shortly after the second.

“You can’t believe how amazing this is.”

“What is?”

Truth is, we did not want to reveal how frightened and baffled we were by asking things like where do you came from or why do you speak our language. So out of hundreds of questions that we had in our heads, it finally came down to a short one. So we asked again:

 “What?”

And we waited another three days.

The next message came to us in exactly three days.

“Everyone’s here. You wouldn’t believe it. We’re all here!”

The sender’s friendly tone made us even more terrified. After hearing the latest transmission, a colleague asked fearfully:

“Do they know who we are?”

Immediately begging the next question, which he uttered himself:

“Do we know who they are?”

The next time, we built up the courage and asked:

 “Who are you?”

It was after three days that we realized the sender was indeed telling the truth, as we were bewildered yet again upon hearing the final message:

“I…I’ve been here ever since I died. I mean, everyone’s here; everyone who has died.”

We were in utter disbelief, deeply shocked after listening to this final transmission…the long period of heavy silence finally broke when the young recruit stuttered in a trembling voice:

“It…it could be that the Afterlife is just the name of another planet.”

                                                                                                                            To be not continued.