Phase Shift (6 of 6)
Theology
On Saturday, May 3rd, 2082, Mira celebrated her 83rd birthday, surrounded by family and friends. Her daughter Alicia, now 56, lit the candles with practiced hands.
Mira was surrounded by thirty-nine descendants—all from a single, impossible night with Theo, the man she had loved and lost to time.
They were halfway through cake and ice cream when Mira’s comm device chimed.
“Grab my laptop, will you, dear?” she asked her granddaughter, Sylvia.
“Sure, Grammie.”
Her old fingers moved slowly, but she opened the call. A man in his forties appeared on-screen.
“Ms. Mira,” he said.
“Hi, Jacob. How are things at the volcano?”
“It’s chaos.”
“Really? Why?” she asked.
“When’s the last time you checked dispatches from the monitoring station?”
“Oh gosh,” Mira said, “maybe six months.”
“Check your messages from yesterday.”
She did. Her eyes narrowed. “What is this?”
“Remember that side carrier you told us never to touch?”
Mira’s voice sharpened. “Don’t tell me someone’s been screwing with it.”
“No, no—we haven’t. But we picked up a signal. Binary. Repeating. And you’re not gonna believe this—it converts cleanly to ASCII. Twelves groups of eight-bit characters, including spaces.”
Mira blinked. “What?”
“Scroll to the bottom of the message I just sent.”
She scrolled. Sylvia leaned in.
Three words appeared on the screen:
THEM IS HERE
Mira stared. “Good Lord.”
“It keeps looping,” Jacob said. “Is it a warning? An introduction? We don’t know. But it’s in our alphabet. Someone out there knows how to speak to us.”
“Did you send the raw data?”
“Yeah, full binary stream.”
Mira nodded. “I’ll take a look and call you back.”
Alicia stood behind her, voice low. “Do you think it’s aliens? A civilization eighty-seven light years away? Why now? Why would this just appear?”
Mira was already skimming the stream. “Couldn’t have always been there,” she muttered. “I’d have seen it. I studied this for years.”
Her finger hovered over a line of binary digits. She stopped when she found the error. That one binary digit flip changed the message.
“That’s not an M,” Mira whispered.
“What is it, Mom?”
She looked up slowly. “It's an O,” she said, her eyes wet It’s not THEM IS HERE. It says… THEO IS HERE.”
"Mom!" Alicia said. "Oh, momma!"
“He was right,” she smiles sadly. “He did send a message.”
“What are we going to do?” Alicia asked.
"You know what?" Mira said, tears flowing freely down her cheeks. "Let's not tell them anything. Eventually, they'll figure out the transcription error. And they'll never know what Theo means. Let's keep this our secret. Theo is ours—he's ours alone."
"Okay, momma. I promise," Alicia said.
After the party ended and people went home, Mira settled down in her comfy bed in the nursing home, sighing contentedly. She spent the evening watching old home movies. Her daughter as a toddler, her grandchildren. Her great-grandchildren. And she thought of that one night with Theo. The miracle that he was, and the miracles that came after.
At 11:04 p.m., on her birthday, at age 83, Mira Estrella passed away peacefully in her sleep.
But she wasn’t alone when it happened.
As her soul slipped from her body, it became light. Energy. A ripple on the spacetime sea. And that ripple found another like it—an energy stream that had been waiting fifty-seven years for her, just beyond the reach of time.
There was no fear or confusion, just existence. She was different and she knew it.
"Mira?" came a voice in her mind.
"Theo!" she cried, joy blooming light starlight. “I have missed you so!”
"And I missed you. But come with me," he said, "and I will show you things you never could have imagined."
"I am ready," she said. "I love you Theo. I never said it before you left."
"In your letters, you told me a thousand times before I ever saw your face. I remember every word you wrote."
"What now?" she asked.
"Want to go to Eden and form new bodies?"
"We can do that?" she asked in wonder.
"We're pure energy, my love," he said. And then with an enthusiasm he hadn't felt in a half-century, he said. "Let's go DO things."
They left Earth as two streams, joined as one, moving across the vastness of space, playing, cavorting, and loving for the rest of eternity.
Stephen B. Anthony is the author of Transmigrant, an epic science fiction thriller, available on both Amazon and Audible. The first seven chapters are available on this website for free.
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