Chapter One – The Static
The desert had a way of swallowing sound.
At night, the world outside the listening station went dead quiet—no traffic, no voices, no rustle of trees. Just the faint groan of metal cooling after the day's heat and the endless hush of sand shifting with the wind. Clara had grown used to it. The silence was the whole point of this place: no interference, no distractions, just a clean sweep of the frequencies.
She sat hunched at her console, coffee mug warm in her hands, the glow of the monitors throwing shadows across her tired face. The routine was second nature by now—adjust dials, log readings, record anomalies. The console purred, lights blinking in steady rhythm, the green line of the waveform jittering lazily across the monitor.
She made notes in her logbook with her usual neat precision. Most of what she wrote would mean nothing to anyone—brief distortions, routine signals, the static of the world breathing in invisible wavelengths.
Still, she listened. Always, she listened.
Her eyes burned from the glow of the screens. It was past midnight, and fatigue was creeping up her spine. She leaned back in her chair, let her eyes close for just a second. The hum of the station filled her ears, steady and hypnotic.
She thought of her father then, as she often did on nights like this. His voice came back easily—deep, certain, always explaining the way the air itself was alive with messages. He'd been a Navy man, strict and methodical, but he had loved his radios with a kind of reverence. Clara remembered perching on his lap as a child, headphones too big for her head, while he guided her hand to the tuning dial.
"You hear that?" he'd said once, after a burst of static resolved into a faraway sailor's voice. "That's someone halfway across the world. Distance doesn't matter to a signal, Clara. Voices can travel farther than you'd ever believe."
He'd died when she was nineteen. A sudden heart attack. No warning, no chance to say goodbye. All she had left were his notebooks filled with coded shorthand and the battered radios in their garage. She hadn't been able to sell them. Maybe that was why she was here now, in the middle of nowhere, coaxing whispers out of the void.
Her coffee had gone cold. She took a small sip anyway, grimaced at the bitterness, and set it down. Her eyelids sagged. She told herself she would close them for just a moment.
The hum of the equipment blurred into the edge of dreaming.
She almost didn't notice the first distortion. A stutter in the static, quick and sharp, like a cough through the wires. Her eyes blinked open, bleary, and she marked the time in her log with a clumsy scrawl: 12:43. She rewound, replayed. Nothing unusual—probably a plane skimming the edge of radar coverage.
She leaned back again, telling herself not to drift too far.
But when the second distortion came, it pulled her up short.
This one wasn't a blip.
It was a voice.
"…Hello."
Clara's eyes snapped wide. She sat forward, headphones pressing hard against her ears. For a moment she thought she'd dreamed it, that she was still half-asleep. But the words were there, faint but distinct, buried under the static.
"…please. Can you hear me?"
Her heart thudded.
The voice was male. Strained. Desperate. Not a bleed from a trucker's CB, not a satellite echo. This was different.
Her hand hovered above the console. Replay. Once. Twice. Three times. Each repetition sent a shiver down her arms.
Then silence. The frequency collapsed back into static.
Clara sat very still, mug untouched at her side. The coffee was the only anchor, solid and real. Her fingers wrapped around it, gripping too tight, the ceramic biting into her skin.
She lifted it, forcing herself to swallow a mouthful. Cold. Bitter. Real. If the coffee was real, then so was the voice.
Her pulse hammered against her ribs.
The sensible thing to do was file it. Note the anomaly, leave it for her supervisor. Protocol existed for a reason.
But she didn't reach for the report forms. Instead, she adjusted the dials, nudged the sweep, listened harder. Her father's words echoed in her mind: Voices can travel farther than you'd ever believe.
The station hummed around her, indifferent, patient.
Then—
"…Hello?"
The sound burst into her headphones again, so sudden she almost dropped the mug.
Her chest tightened.
"…please… someone. Can you hear me?"
Her throat went dry.
She wanted to answer. God, she wanted to. But there was no microphone patched into this channel, no way to send anything back.
She pressed her palm against her mouth, as though the stranger might somehow hear her breathing through the wire.
The voice crackled once more, broken, then dissolved into silence.
For a long time she stayed frozen, staring at the jagged line on the monitor as if it might shift again.
Her notebook lay open, pen waiting. Finally she scrawled: Unidentified signal. Distinct human voice. Time: 1:07.
She underlined it twice, her hand shaking so badly the ink cut uneven.
At 3 a.m., she closed the binder and stacked her notes neatly, as if tidiness could disguise how rattled she felt. She shut down the console, lights dimming one by one, until the hum seemed to fade into the walls.
Outside, dawn was beginning to leak across the horizon. The desert air was already warming, dust sharp in her throat. She walked across the gravel lot toward her car, the silence pressing close.
But even as the sun bled into the sky, one thought clung to her chest like a weight.
Hello. Can you hear me?
She didn't know what unsettled her more—the fact that she'd heard the words… or the fact that she wanted to hear them again.