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A week has passed today since I sent out my first radio message. Since then, every noise and burst of static out of my transmitter’s speaker sounds to me like the desperate cry of someone yearning to make contact. And yet, it always turns out to be a simple illusion. I have even begun to doubt whether any of this is real. I no longer remember the smell of the trees in the woods around the НЖТИ transmitting station. I miss the time when everything seemed terribly dull and, at the same time, profoundly real. We only truly value life when it begins to feel like a distant mirage.

Not everything was routine at НЖТИ. When there was no urgency, messages were declared “ordinary” (обыкновенная). Otherwise, there were four standard urgency levels, in ascending order:

Level Voice Morse 1 Самолет (Samolet) SML 2 Ракета (Raketa) RKT 3 Воздух (Vozdukh) WZD 4 Монолит (Monolit) XXX XXX

Right now, I find myself in Monolit mode, waiting for someone to make their presence known near Lagrange L73. I still hold out hope of receiving one of those messages, here, in the SOL system.

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