I just want to clarify some things, because there seems to be some confusion over my comments on this story:
I thought it was plain from the very beginning that, whatever the voice on the radio was (and I had no idea what it was), it was something that was clearly not used to human language, or at least to English, and it certainly wasn’t her dead colleague. My first guess was it was some alien, somewhere, trying to communicate with her (“Am trying. To communicate.”). I didn’t assume the voice was a drug-induced hallucination because she hadn’t had any of the drug yet. Sure, it could have been a post-traumatic hallucination, but its speech seemed too broken for it to simply be that, and the story isn’t told from Martha’s mental state. The only suggestion that the voice wasn’t really speaking to her came from Kivelson’s own dialogue and inner monologue.
Not to mention that later on in the story, when she was admittedly pumped full of drugs and possibly more likely to question herself anyway, there was concrete evidence that the voice was real and was what it said it was. First, she’s stuck on the other side of an uncrossable lake of sulfur, and the voice says it’ll build a bridge; after it wakes her up, she walks across a bridge. Second, it warns her before an earthquake. There might be others I forgot, but the story gave no evidence that it wasn’t real.
Other than one brief hallucination of a horse that was gone when she blinked, the prose simply never gave me any cause to doubt anything it described. It wasn’t describing the world as she saw it; it was describing the world as it was and her reactions to it. And yet the story still feels like it wants you to question it along with Kivelson, as irrational as her doubt seems. It wants you to think that she’s as crazy as she’s working so hard to convince herself she is. This felt to me like an attempt to manufacture a feeling of ambiguity, rather than having a story that was actually ambiguous, and to me it left the actually-ambiguous ending feeling hollow.
Added on to this is the gulf between Martha’s initial reaction to what they’d initially thought was a new plant life-form, and her reaction to intelligent life trying to communicate with her. On discovering the “flowers,” their “first big discovery,” she’s positively gleeful; but her initial and constant reaction to whatever strange being is trying to communicate with her is a completely dismissive and disbelieving “Shut up.” Even after she accepts that it’s probably real, and that it’s really a machine built by ancient aliens, there isn’t a trace of that awe. I simply can’t buy it.
Maybe I misunderstood what the story was trying to do, and the reader’s not supposed to share Martha’s doubt. Maybe the POV should have been less objective and more inside Martha’s head. Maybe it just didn’t focus enough on the fact that the alien intelligence was using her freshly-dead colleague’s voice, and how hard it would be to get past that. But this story failed, to me.