Minato ran the night shift at the relay station alone. “Ran” is probably too grand a word, since the real job amounted to exactly one task.
Every night, at the same fixed hour, he sent a signal out to an old ship moored somewhere far away. The message never changed: Stay asleep.
“That’s it?” he’d asked, on the day he took over.
“That’s it,” the outgoing man had said. “The ship’s old. Nobody’s aboard anymore. The company pays to keep it sleeping, and your job is to keep it that way. Don’t wake it up.”
“And the reply?”
“Comes back in six days. An acknowledgment. Means ‘Understood, sleeping.’ Once you get it, you’re done for the day. Go home.”
Minato was a conscientious man, so he sent the message every night, right on the dot. And six days later, right on the dot, the acknowledgment came back. Understood, sleeping. It seemed to be a job that had run this way for decades.
Then, one night, it changed.
The reply came back in five days instead of six. The next time, four. Minato flipped back through the logs, frowning.
“Did the relay get faster or something?”
He called the company. The man on duty sounded half asleep.
“Oh, probably upgraded the line or something. Don’t worry about it, just keep sending.”
“Understood.”
Three days. Then two. Something about it nagged at Minato, and night after night he lined up the numbers from the log. Six, five, four, three, two. Shrinking in a perfectly clean sequence.
“Isn’t this too fast?” he asked again, on the phone.
“If the numbers line up, there’s no problem. It just means it’s sleeping properly.”
The man hung up after that. And it was true — the acknowledgment always came back. Understood, sleeping. Not a single character different. Minato told himself as much. It’s asleep. It’s sleeping just fine.
That night, before he could even press send, the screen lit up on its own.
Acknowledgment received. Understood, sleeping.
He hadn’t sent anything yet, and the reply had already arrived. Minato stared at the screen for a long time. Then he quietly reached over and switched off an outside instrument panel he’d never once used. If he didn’t look, there’d be nothing to see. No numbers, no problem.
Tonight, Minato typed the message with trembling fingers. Stay asleep.
The acknowledgment came back in the same instant. No gap at all. Zero.
The instrument panel he’d switched off began to whine on its own, needle slamming against the stop. Something was right outside. The old intercom on the wall drew a dry, rasping breath, and started reading his own words back to him in his own voice.
“Stay asleep. Stay asleep.”
It was Minato’s voice. It did not come from Minato’s mouth.
The replies had been getting faster because the thing on the other end was getting closer. Every night’s “stay asleep” had never been an order to sleep at all. It was a thin thread, a line to haul something in by — and for decades, the ship had been pulling itself home along it, one tug at a time.