"None," she said. But then she flipped the sequence. She tried it backwards. M-y-t-r-s. Still nonsense. She tried a Caesar cipher, shifting each letter by one. T-s-u-z-n. Nothing.
"No," Elara whispered, her eyes wide. "Look at the pattern. It's not random. The letters aren't repeating in a natural way. And the frequency spacing… it's too perfect." "None," she said
S (ring finger), R (middle finger), T (index finger), Y (thumb?), M (pinky?). M-y-t-r-s
The screen flickered. And in the blackness of space, at the coordinates of the non-existent "M," a star winked into being where no star had ever been before. T-s-u-z-n
She pulled up the raw data. The signal wasn't a continuous stream. It was a rhythmic pulse, like a heartbeat. Each pulse varied slightly in duration and intensity. When she mapped those variations to a simple 26-character alphabet, she got the same sequence every time: S-R-T-Y-M.
"S-R-T-Y-M," she said into the void, her voice trembling. "We see your map. But what's at the 'M'?"
Her breath caught. She wrote the coordinates of each key on a piece of paper. S (2,1), R (3,2), T (4,1), Y (5,2), M (4,0). She plotted them.