I snap my head towards the leftmost monitor, certain I’ll catch it this time.  A flicker of form amongst noise.  A sigil, a signal, a decipherable something. 

 

All I see though is a snow of static and the blurry bleariness of late-night weariness.  

 

Maybe this whole thing is a bust.

 

I sip the dregs of an energy drink can and shove it into a huddle with four other empties.  Four days ago the excitement of reviewing a deep-space signal would have kept me up all night by itself.  But there’s nothing here.  Nothing but noise; wind among the rushes.  

 

Still, I can’t look away.  Not until I’ve determined for sure if the flicker is real.

 

My fingers pull themselves from underneath my waistband and wipe their stickiness on my exposed thigh.  They ache to return between my legs, to tease the wet, sensitive flesh there as my mind scrutinizes every pixel of static on the screen.  But I need two hands to type effectively, and I need to type effectively to change the codec in the way that just popped into my head.

 

I’ll crack this thing yet.

 

A few lines of configuration changes serve to tweak the processing pipeline and I restart the signal recording from scratch.  If intelligent life sent this to us then there is a way to decode it, to create order from the chaos.  I grin as the fuzziness on screen lessens this time around.  I grin wider as the fuzziness in my head increases.

 

My hands return to where they desire to go, working hard between my legs and over my breasts.  My eyes are glued to the screen, searching with rapt attention for anything that could be construed as meaningful.  I swear I can see symbols in the corners of my eyes, but they’re gone whenever I glance directly at them.  All that’s there is the static that’s starting to overrun my thoughts.

 

My thighs tighten around my hand, my body jerks.  Pleasure is singing along the wires of my nerves as my thumb and forefinger clamp around my nipple, twisting slightly.  A hollow sound gurgles out of my throat and my bulging eyes absorb the grainy instructions searing into my retinas.  

 

Everything goes white for a few minutes.  I can’t think at all.  My brain has switched off.  I drool mindlessly as symbols whir in my peripherals, reprogramming my still-masturbating body.  My hands work and my body jerks to the commands dancing at the edges of my vision.  I am just a puppet for this message from beyond the stars.

 

I wake only after the recording ends, soaked in sweat and wet.  My butt sticks to the chair as I lean forward, ripping against the pleather.  My panties slide down my leg and I kick them to the side; they were only getting in the way.

 

I know exactly what tweaks I need to make to the codec this time to extract the information I’ve been yearning for.  I smile absently to myself. Not only will this next round of tweaks make the image clearer, but I’ve realized I missed a crucial component of the signal.  

 

It’s not just video, there’s audio to decode too!

 

My hands finish typing the configuration changes and the left one dives directly into my crotch.  My eyes are already glazing over as I reach for my headphones and slide them over my ears.  The noise cancellation leaves me in absolute silence, a void waiting to be filled.  I click the button to replay the recording and slump back into my seat.

 

Static overwhelms my senses, wipes my mind of anything but The Message.  From either side it bores through my ears, scrambling every thought into ecstatic oblivion.  My body thrashes to its beats, my mind reorganizes to its whims.  

 

And I just can’t wait to share it with my coworkers tomorrow.