The broadcast arrived at 03:00 station time, which meant no one was at the console. The node logged it automatically — origin system Kettar, no destination address, format: audio, duration: 17 hours, 4 minutes. A broadcast. Not addressed to anyone.
I found it when I came on shift at 06:00. The log showed an anomaly flag: broadcast from a system that hadn’t sent traffic in eleven years. I pulled the metadata. The transmission had routed through three intermediate nodes. The originating signal was weak, degraded by distance and the relay chain. But the audio was intact. The Relay carried everything. It didn’t care about content. It forwarded.
I put on the headset and listened.
A voice. A man’s voice, hoarse, the kind of hoarse that comes from talking for a long time. He was reading names.
“Niko Aht. Marin Aht. Pela Aht. Daven Aht. Lin Aht.”
A pause. A breath. Then:
“Niko Baal. Marin Baal.”
The names were grouped by family. He read each name once, clearly, with a space between first and last. He did not embellish. He did not say where the people had lived or when they had died. He read the names.
I listened for twenty minutes. The names kept coming. I skipped ahead in the recording — an hour in, two hours in, five hours in. The voice was the same. Hoarser, maybe. Slower. But the same. Reading names.
At the eight-hour mark he stopped. There was a long silence. I heard something — water, maybe. A cup being set down. Then the voice returned, quieter, and resumed.
I skipped to the end. The last ten minutes of the broadcast. The voice was barely a whisper now. It read:
“Kael Zahn. Marin Zahn. Pela Zahn.”
A pause. A breath that caught. Then:
“That is everyone.”
Silence. A long silence. Then the carrier signal cut. The broadcast ended.
I sat with the headset on for a while after that. The node was quiet. The other nodes in the constellation were quiet. The system I lived in was quiet — a few thousand people on a world that didn’t matter much, doing the things that people do. I could hear the hum of the terminal and the wind outside the relay station and my own breathing.
I didn’t know how many names he had read. I did some math later. A name takes about four seconds to say — two words, a pause, a breath. At that rate, seventeen hours is roughly fifteen thousand names.
Fifteen thousand names. Read aloud, one at a time, with care. The last thing Kettar ever said.
I archived the broadcast. I tagged it. I flagged it for the record. I wrote in the log: “Broadcast from Kettar, year 112. Audio. Duration 17h 4m. Content: list of names. No destination. No return address. Node operator reviewed and archived.”
I didn’t write what I thought about it. The log doesn’t have a field for that.
The Relay doesn’t care about content. It forwarded the broadcast because that’s what it does. It will forward the next thing too, and the thing after that, and it will keep going after the last person stops sending and the last person stops listening. The satellites will orbit and the nodes will route and the buffer will fill and empty and fill again and none of it will mean anything to the Relay.
But I listened. I heard the man’s voice break on the last name. I heard him say “that is everyone” in a voice that knew it was the last thing it would say to anyone. I don’t know if anyone else heard it. The broadcast wasn’t addressed to anyone. But I was there, and I heard it, and I wrote it down.
That’s what I can do. That’s all I can do.