We Looked

By Cedric Anthony

The Director was silent as he dialed from orbital mission control, hunched in the shock of it as the line rang.

The structure had been our last lead, a speck of hope on the satellite images. It’d taken forty life times to plan the mission alone.

They found the structure as predicted. Swarms of linguists and archaeologists spent decades to crack the code—thousands of hours devoted to saving us from the starvation our explorations had brought. The end of the frontier was before us, and now we had to make the final call.

In the entire universe, we were alone.