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 a minute. The lot is otherwise empty except for two staff vehicles parked near the facility entrance. The night shift is inside. The parking lot is washed in the sodium-yellow glow of three overhead lamps. This is the kind of light that makes everything look like surveillance footage. Then the door opens and DR. AISHA WEBB (44) gets out. She is tall, dark-complexioned, practical jacket over a1