The first indication of contact was not biological.
It was a temporal fault.
Chronometers aboard Station Halcyon began to desynchronize by microseconds, then milliseconds, then whole seconds. No external relativistic event was detected. Gravitational fields remained stable. The only anomaly was acoustic: a persistent frequency logged by hydrophones that could not be isolated, muted, or triangulated.
The signal had no direction.
It existed in place.
Deep-field analysts classified it as a standing wave with no measurable source. When the array was recalibrated, the wave adjusted first—as if anticipating correction. That was the moment the event was reclassified from error to contact.
Seventy-three cycles later, the Xylogastr arrived.
It entered the system without crossing a boundary. No impact, no wake. It simply began feeding. Plankton blooms aged into collapse in seconds. Coral growth rings completed decades of mineralization instantaneously. Life did not die—it finished.
The Xylogastr was not hostile.
It was not aware.
It was an ecological inevitability, a consumption-pattern left behind by an intelligence no longer present. Its metabolism converted duration into usable energy. Time was the nutrient. Biology merely provided texture.
Standard protocols failed. There was nothing to negotiate with. Nothing to threaten. The entity could not perceive matter in the sense required for violence.
Then the wave localized.
At 8,421 meters, embedded in the shell of a single oyster, the frequency intensified. Internal biosensors showed the organism operating within survivable parameters while surrounding life collapsed into temporal exhaustion.
A technician suggested instrument failure.
The technician aged three years in six minutes.
The oyster did not evolve. It did not adapt. It reorganized. Its internal processes synchronized into a coherent resonance, producing a structure that occupied space without propagating energy. The wave was not broadcast. It refused transmission.
The Xylogastr approached.
For the first time since its documentation, the entity hesitated.
Contact occurred without touch.
The standing wave interfered with the Xylogastr’s metabolic gradient, causing its consumption-field to loop. Time stopped flowing forward within the affected volume. Past and future lost distinction. Feeding became impossible. Hunger lost orientation.
Observers described a sensation of pressure behind the eyes, a certainty that something had gone wrong with sequence. Events arrived out of order. Memories formed before actions. Some crew members reported hearing voices that did not speak, only maintained pitch.
The Xylogastr withdrew.
No defensive maneuver was recorded. No damage inflicted. The entity simply unraveled at the edges, as if incompatible with the conditions it had encountered.
Post-contact analysis failed to produce a model.
The oyster survived.
The wave persisted.
Attempts to replicate the resonance resulted in catastrophic failure. Artificial standing waves collapsed into noise. The phenomenon required biological accumulation, layered time, mineral memory. It could not be engineered. Only grown.
Then a new hypothesis emerged.
The wave was not a defense.
It was a presence.
Something had arrived earlier than the Xylogastr. Something that did not move, did not speak, did not consume. Something that embedded itself into matter and waited. The oyster was not the source. It was a host.
The frequency was a boundary condition—
a marker indicating where certain forms of existence could not proceed.
If the Xylogastr represented consumption without awareness, then the wave represented being without duration.
First contact had not been made with the predator.
It had been made with the environment it could not survive.
