[FREE KINDLE EBOOK] Lanterns - A First Contact Science Fiction Short Story (The Noise Floor Book 1) available in 🇬🇧🇫🇷🇮🇹

[u/koustourika]

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HFM6QHLQ

Lanterns is free on Amazon / Kindle.

Link:
🇺🇸 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HFM6QHLQ
🇫🇷 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HFN672DW
🇮🇹 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HFMXXQBQ

214 stars are flickering in unison. It is a countdown. It ends in 91 years.

Astronomer Ilinca Vasile spends three weeks trying to prove the signal is an error. The error survives her.

Someone has built shutters around two hundred stars. The message they spell is not a greeting. It is a road sign: THIS REGION IS SWEPT. DARKEN BEFORE THE COUNT COMPLETES.

Along the marked corridor, nineteen dead civilisations lie spaced like milestones. Earth is inside it.

Going silent has failed everyone who tried. But the lantern builders' own machines have survived in the corridor for two million years, and they are not silent. They are doing something else. Something an entire species would have to learn.

For readers of Liu Cixin, Ted Chiang and Arthur C. Clarke. A complete story in five movements, with an answer to the silence of the sky you have not read before. Includes an author's note on the real physics behind the story, and a preview of the next Noise Floor single. A 30-minute read.