Lian couldn't sleep that night. The blinking light stayed in his mind. The next evening, he returned to the hill with a small radio. It wasn't fancy, just something he had built from old parts. He had read that radios could sometimes catch strange signals from space.
He turned the radio dial slowly, listening to the static. Then—click. Something changed. A soft sound came through. It was like a hum, low and smooth. Then came a series of beeps.
Beep... Beep-Beep... Beep... Beep-Beep-Beep.
Lian froze. "It's a pattern," he whispered.
He grabbed his notebook and copied the sounds. He listened for hours. The same pattern repeated. Then, just before midnight, it stopped.
The light in the sky blinked again—three times. Then it vanished.
The next day, Lian went to the town library. He found books about space signals, codes, and aliens. One book showed how some scientists used binary code to talk to machines. Lian compared it to the beeps.
Beep (1), silence (0). It was a message in binary!
He spent all day trying to decode it. Slowly, he made out a word.
H-E-L-L-O
Lian dropped the pencil. "Someone… or something… is saying hello.