The first story in the An Author’s Voice narrated series is Signal Zero — the beginning of the Integration Era, and a good place to start if you’ve never read it.

Sergeant Voss has been guarding an archaeological dig on a frontier world for eleven weeks. His job is straightforward: keep the research team from touching things they shouldn’t. He’s been overruled every time. On day seventy-nine, they find the inner chamber.

What happens next doesn’t have good language. An alien system arrives — simultaneously, in every human being at once — and tells them, without warmth and without apology, exactly who it thinks they are. Voss gets his answer.

He’s not sure the system got it right. That question is the whole story.

Here’s Signal Zero.

The text of this story is available here.

Until next time, thanks for listening.