Six months passed. The signal continued to arrive on schedule, unchanged, patient. Titan Station went about its business. The xenolinguistics team published three papers on the prime-number sequence, none of which said anything the team didn't already know, but the act of publishing felt necessary — a way of telling the rest of humanity that the waiting was not the same as nothing happening.
Solaris commanded two search-and-rescue operations, chaired seventeen administrative reviews, and attended her sister's wedding via holographic projection because she could not leave the station. She watched the ceremony from a small screen in her quarters, standing in her dress uniform because it seemed right, and felt the peculiar doubling of a person who is entirely present in one place and not present at all.
The mathematics team verified their transmission had been correctly formatted. They verified it again. They found three minor errors in the original encoding, corrected them in a second transmission, then spent two weeks debating whether the corrections might be misinterpreted as a retraction.
At month seven, Dr. Chen came to Solaris's office at 2200 and sat down without being invited. Her face had the expression of someone who has been holding a thought for a long time and has finally run out of patience with it.
"I keep thinking about something Vance said," Chen began. "About whether they might have solved the Riemann Hypothesis." She paused. "If they have... and if they answer... the proof would come through an alien transmission signal processed by our array's filtering software." Another pause. "I have not yet figured out if that's funny or terrifying."