Once more, I reached back into my story files. The prompt for this story was:
Write a story or poem about someone who discovers that there’s actually a message in the radio emissions from the sun’s surface. What does that message say, and what’s the reaction to this discovery?

Dr. Helen Adler had spent her entire career looking at the sun, but had never felt the weight pressing down on her quite like this. She’d grown used to the quiet static of space over the years—the predictable cycles of solar flares, the bursts of electromagnetic energy, the steady pulse of the universe. For nearly six decades, she’d researched the sun’s energy, seeking new and important discoveries. But never had she imagined that what she’d been listening to all along contained a message, a message that would change everything.

It happened on a Tuesday morning. The clear sky outside her observatory window glowed as the soft light of dawn bathed the room in pale gold. Helen sat in her favorite chair by the array of monitors, the familiar crackle of solar radio waves filling her ears through the headphones. Sipping her coffee absently, as she often did, she watched the waveforms scroll across the screen. She’d learned to read them like a musician reads sheet music. The solar flares were steady—nothing unusual, nothing alarming. But then, something caught her attention.

Faint at first, she discerned a pattern in the noise, a rhythmic pulse that didn’t quite belong. At first, she tried to scrub the interference—perhaps the equipment glitched—but it kept repeating. Every twenty-seven seconds. Steady. Unyielding. Like a heartbeat.

Helen frowned, leaning closer to the screen. Her fingers hovered over the keyboard. She started adjusting the frequency filters, isolating different bands of the radio emissions. The pulse remained. It wasn’t random; it wasn’t chaotic. It looked structured, almost deliberate. Every twenty-seven seconds.

Her pulse quickened. Could it be a natural phenomenon? A new solar flare—one that emitted in a pattern instead of the usual chaotic bursts? She pulled up data from other solar observatories around the world. They were reporting the same thing—a faint, rhythmic pulse coming from the sun’s surface. But no one commented on it. It was as if they hadn’t noticed.

Helen tapped into the raw data feed and ran it through a series of pattern recognition algorithms she’d developed for just this situation. It was an old system, but reliable. She’d used it to filter out everything from cosmic noise to background radiation. As the results populated the screen, her heart skipped a beat.

The pulse was more than a rhythm. It was a sequence of numbers. A string of binary code.

Zero. One. Zero. One. Zero. One…

And it wasn’t just a few numbers. It went on for hours, repeating, evolving, rearranging. Slowly, methodically, a message revealed itself.

At first, Helen couldn’t believe it. She’d been an astrophysicist for long enough to know how easy it was to misinterpret data. But this felt different. The numbers weren’t random; they formed words, sentences—coherent language. She ran the binary through a translator program.

It took only a few moments, but the words that appeared on her screen were enough to make her breath catch in her throat:

“We are watching. We are waiting. Come.”

Her hands trembled, the weight of the discovery settling in her chest like a stone. A coherent, unmistakable message. And it had come from the sun.

For a moment, Helen sat back in her chair, staring at the screen in disbelief. Her mind raced. Could it be possible? Was this some kind of cosmic prank? A fluke in the data? No, she was certain it wasn’t. She had decades of experience in interpreting radio emissions. This was different. This was intelligent. But who sent it? And why?

Helen had always believed in the possibility of extraterrestrial life. It was a driving force that shaped her work, that had kept her going through the late nights and the long stretches of failure. But this? This was something else entirely. Something far beyond what she had ever imagined.

She quickly composed an email to her colleague, Dr. Mark Lewis, the head of the solar physics department. Explaining the discovery in the clearest terms she could, she attached the raw data along with the translated message. She hit send, then waited. The seconds felt like hours.

Mark’s response came twenty minutes later, a terse message that confirmed what Helen already knew: the world needed to know about this.

Helen’s discovery quickly spread to observatories, universities, and space agencies worldwide. The response, predictably, was swift but divided. Some dismissed it as a mere anomaly, an unexpected pattern in the solar emissions that she’d misinterpreted. But others were more open-minded, and the debate began.

What did it mean? Was it a sign of alien intelligence? Could the sun itself—our own star—be sending us a message, or was this some natural phenomenon yet to be understood?

Helen barely slept over the next few days. She reviewed the data over and over and over to ensure it wasn’t a mistake. She scrutinized every detail, every nuance of the code. There was no doubt in her mind. The message was genuine. And it wasn’t just a greeting. It was an invitation.

On the third day, an anonymous post appeared on an astrophysics forum. It was cryptic, but clear:

“They’ve been watching since the dawn of time. They’re waiting for us to understand. The time will come when we must decide.”

The post sent ripples through the scientific community. Theories swirled, debates raged. Some suggested it was a sign from a higher intelligence, others that it was a natural phenomenon that merely resembled a message. But one thing became clear—Helen had uncovered something that defied explanation.

As the days passed, the message from the sun grew louder. The pulses increased in frequency, and more binary sequences began to emerge. The message expanded, slowly building into something more intricate:

“We have watched your species for eons. You are on the cusp of something great. Your time to join us has come. Choose wisely.”

Helen was no longer just a scientist; she was a messenger. She’d discovered a communication unlike anything humanity had ever encountered. Her discovery made headlines around the world. The sun and its mysterious messenger caught the attention of governments and their armies, as well as private groups.

But what would humanity do with this knowledge? Helen had no answers, only questions. A new urgency lit the world now, a collective anticipation, a sense that something was on the horizon. The invitation from the sun—whether it was from an extraterrestrial intelligence or some other force—had been issued.

The world was waiting, and so, it seemed, was the sun.