Somewhere beneath a sky that felt a little too still, a lone astronomer stood in the chilled predawn air, watching the telemetry stagger like a tired heartbeat. 3I/ATLAS — the rogue interstellar wanderer — had just slipped behind the Sun’s violent halo, vanishing into a curtain of light as if the cosmos had swallowed it whole. Radios hissed with static. Satellite feeds fluttered like birds trapped behind glᴀss. Even the wind seemed to hold its breath.

He тιԍнтened his coat and stared upward, sensing the same uneasy tremor that had quietly threaded itself through cities, deserts, coastlines — a shared instinct that something had shifted, something subtle yet weighty, like the click of a lock turning in a faraway room. For days, the world had joked about doomsday headlines, but the laughter had thinned, stretched out, and finally frayed into silence. The instruments on his console flickered again, their readings drifting into impossible territory.

A faint vibration hummed beneath his feet — not an earthquake, not a machine — more like the planet clearing its throat before speaking. He exhaled, mist rising into the cold air like a forgotten promise. And then, almost too softly to hear, as if admitting it might summon the answer, he whispered to himself:
“If this is the moment the universe decides to rewrite us… I hope we notice.”

The screens dimmed. The sky brightened. And for one suspended heartbeat, Earth waited — listening for whatever came next.