FADE IN: EXT. DEEP SPACE COMMUNICATIONS CENTER, ANTENNA FARM, FLAGSTAFF, 4:47 AM Fifty-three dish antennas aimed at the sky. They range from twelve meters to thirty-four meters in diameter. Each one points at a slightly different coordinate. Together they constitute a listening posture: the whole facility leaning outward, ears trained on the dark. The desert air is cold and still. The concrete equipment pads between the dishes are lit by low-mounted utility lamps that cast no shadows worth mentioning. The building behind the antenna field is a long institutional rectangle, two stories, lit from within. A radio telescope observatory that has not slept since 1994. The desert night at this elevation: genuinely cold, the kind of cold that comes off the ground after a day without cloud cover. The distant sound of a highway somewhere south of here. Nothing else. The facility operates in this quiet, its machines turning the silence into data. A single set of headlights comes down the access road and pulls into the staff parking lot. The car stops. The engine cuts. Nothing happens for almost