“We spent years trying to tease the signals out of the noise. We sent messages out to reassure them we were still listening, and to encourage them to focus their efforts on us so we could get a clearer, more complete signal, not just fragments. Sometimes the wormhole signals reacted to us, changing in response, intensifying. Sometimes they seemed to echo back traces of what we sent them, as if to confirm our message had been received. But it was tenuous, fragmentary at best—never enough to open clear communication. The quantum foam was too intermittent a medium for that. Everything we sent through, everything we got back, it was like it went through a blender in between. We could never quite build the right algorithms to reconstruct it, not with the way the quantum vacuum constantly shifted. But there were enough hints of progress that it inspired us to keep striving.”

Shastri fell silent for a moment. Then he smiled, blushed, and continued a bit more hesitantly. “It was just the two of us, meeting privately, having our little scientific trysts and hoping nobody would find out. It was exciting. Romantic. And as you tried to contact the plasma beings—well, you sang to them. You’d always thought of their signals as music, from the first time you picked up traces of them, so that was how you signaled back. And having such an extraordinary audience… it inspired you. You’d never sung so beautifully.

“As we kept up the research on and off for several years… well, I found my friendship for you turning into love. I had no idea if you felt the same way, though. And I didn’t want to risk ruining what we had—either the friendship or the research.”

He paused. “Finally, on Argelius, things came to a head. We made a breakthrough—finally, a coherent two-way communication with the plasma beings, signaling our presence and getting an acknowledgment beamed back, an unambiguous echo of the song you’d sung to them.”

He grinned, still blushing. “We were thrilled, overjoyed. After years of teasing and frustration, we finally had fulfillment. And… well, we were on a planet of free-love hedonists. When in Rome…” He cleared his throat. “We fell into each other’s arms and… well…” He finally met her eyes again, though his emotions remained guarded. “I discovered that my feelings for you were mutual. You told me you loved me too. That you could share things with me that you couldn’t with anyone else. By the time your leave ended… our friendship had become something more. You made it clear to me that you wanted it to continue.”