The first signal wasn't a message. It was silence.

Across the sky, beacons go dark. Pulsars miss a beat. Every 137 seconds, a perfect flat line moves through the bands?as if something is erasing the universe's noise on purpose.

Dr. Amara Sethi, a SETI analyst who reads patterns for a living, hears shape inside the hush. Major Eli Granz, tasked with keeping Earth calm, sees panic spreading faster than facts. And Kovu, the world's memory?an AI built to keep our past?begins to forget itself every time the flat line passes.

This isn't a call. It's a censor?a faster-than-light anti-signal that deletes complexity wherever it lands. Cities dim. Archives blink. Even the background hiss learns manners. If first contact has come, it isn't here to teach. It's here to turn things off.

But there is another way to answer.

From quiet rooms and small, human rites?shoes by a door, a leaf above a lamp, a bowl facing the hall?Amara and her circle find a reply that doesn't shout, doesn't pull, and might let us survive the idea that could break us.

Big-idea science fiction with a human heart, The First Signal Was Silence is a page-turning, eerily hopeful first-contact story about the courage to keep, not send?and the mercy of making space instead of making noise.

They didn't speak. They turned everything off.