"Maya, my mother has become my target demographic," he said, covering the mic.
Maya mouthing.
Put her on speaker.
He did.
"Hi, Mrs. Varel," Maya said.
"Hi, Maya dear. You're too thin. Eat."
"I'm trying," Maya said.
Luis leaned in. "Do I get a hi?"
"You get stop eating chips at nine in the morning," she said.
Luis shrugged. "Fair."
Ethan said, "Mom, we're about to run an experiment. Can I call you after?"
"Be safe," she said. "I don't like your building. It hums."
He looked at the ring of speakers. "Yeah," he said softly. "Me too."
He hung up.
Dr. Chen tapped her watch. "Baseline."
They powered up the array.
The chamber lights dimmed automatically a cost-saving measure that made everything feel like a spaceship.
Ethan set the amplitude low and loaded the neutral syllables.
The waveform on the screen smoothed out like a calm lake.
"Baseline looks good," Maya said. "No artifacts."
"Proceed to E1," Dr. Chen said.
Ethan queued it.
The speakers whispered a soft, clipped sound.
The sensors lit up green.
"E1 stable," Maya said. "Minimal brain-tingle."
"That's not a metric," Dr. Chen said.
"It is," Maya said. "Just not NIH-approved."
E2 to E4 rolled by the same way clean, boring, safe.
E5 shivered the glass in its frame.
Ethan glanced at Dr. Chen.
"Within threshold," Maya said before Chen could panic. "No cracks. Nothing burst. We live."
"E6," Dr. Chen said.
E6 had teeth.
Everyone felt it.
A pressure behind the eyes, like a word on the tip of the tongue that refused to show up.
The hair on Ethan's forearms lifted.
Luis rubbed his temple. "God, I hate that one. It feels like a teacher glaring."
"Fascinating," Ethan said. "That's the command body response. We can..."
"No lectures," Dr. Chen said. "Run E7, then we stop."
E7 wasn't loud.
It was… personal. Like someone whispering stand when you were already standing, and you stood straighter anyway.
The sensors went yellow for half a second, then settled.
Maya exhaled. "E7 stable."
Luis clapped. "We didn't die. Now dumplings."
Ethan stared at the screen.
The spectrogram danced, layered with faint bands he'd been chasing for months.
There was a gap between E7 and the unanswered noise above it, like a door you didn't see until you knew where to look.
He said nothing.
Dr. Chen watched him not say it. "No."
"I'm not.."
"Ethan."
"I'm not running E8," he said. "I'm… going to run a half-amplitude sweep on the E7 tail."
"Fine," she said. "Half amplitude. Then we prep for the dean."
He typed.
Half amplitude. Sweep from 7.1 to 7.3 on the harmonic ladder.
The speakers whispered again.
The hair on his arms lifted again, then settled.
"Okay," Maya said. "That's enough foreplay."
Ethan's cursor hovered over the E8 file.
It was named stupidly: /e_series/e8_final_final_please_work.wav.
He felt a small stupid human thing curiosity weightless and absolute.
Months of dead ends.
Nights watching spectrograms until sunrise.
A shape in dreams he never told anyone about because it sounded unhinged.
Seven clean notes, and the unplayed eighth that itched under his ribs like a splinter.
"Ethan," Dr. Chen said, seeing the look.
He looked at her. "Half amplitude. One second. If it spikes, we kill it."
Maya groaned. "This is how every horror movie starts."
"Correction," Luis said. "This is how grants get cut."
"Fine," Chen said. "Half amplitude, one second, finger over kill switch. Maya, record everything. Luis, fire suppression on manual. If something sparks, you tackle it."
"Heroism is extra," Luis said. He still moved to the panel.
Ethan swallowed.
He clicked.
For the first quarter second, nothing happened.
Then the sound wasn't a sound.
It was an instruction.
Not loud.
Not bright.
Just true in a way his bones recognized.
He felt his jaw want to shape a syllable, like a yawn you can't un-feel.
The spectrogram spiked.
Yellow, then red.
"Kill it," Chen said.
Ethan hit the switch.
The speakers cut.
The chamber went too quiet the kind of quiet that has intention.
The big monitor flashed.
For a heartbeat there were letters where there should've been numbers.
Not English.
Not anything from the database.
Lines that bent like they remembered how.
Maya whispered, "What is that?"
Luis said, "It's not funny if you did this with After Effects."
"I didn't," Ethan said.
The letters faded.
The spectrogram normalized.
Alarms stayed silent.
The room held its breath.
Dr. Chen lifted her chin. "We're done. We have enough for the demo. Save logs. Reboot the array. And no one talks about that screen until we know what it was."
"Yes, boss," Maya said.
Luis nodded. "Copy."
Ethan's heart wouldn't slow down.
He saved the logs.
He didn't reboot.
He opened the E8 file in the editor and scrubbed across the waveform.
He stopped exactly in the middle and zoomed in.
There was a tiny notch, like a fingerprint.
His phone buzzed. Riya: You alive?
He typed: Define alive.
She called immediately. He answered.
"Hey," she said. "You okay? You usually use punctuation when you're cocky."
"I might have heard… something," he said.
"Like God?"
"Statistically unlikely."
"You sound weird," she said. A beat. "Hey, you know I rag on your thing because I like you, right? But be careful. If your brain starts hearing voices, maybe stop..."
"It wasn't a voice," he said. "It was… the shape behind a voice."
"Cool, so you're haunted by a vowel," she said. "I'm hanging up. Text me if you die."
"Not helpful."
"Love you, nerd," she said, and ended the call before he could react.
"Ten minutes," Dr. Chen said. "Dean's on his way. We will not mention haunted vowels."
"Copy," Ethan said.
They cleaned.
They organized.
Luis hid the chips like they were contraband. Maya rolled the chair to face the dean's favorite angle.
Dr. Chen practiced a smile that said fund us or I devour your soul politely.
"Okay," she said. "One more systems check. Ethan, reset the..."
The lights flickered.
Everyone froze.
Power dipped and came back.
A low noise rose in the floor, more felt than heard.
The ring of speakers lit in sequence around the chamber, one after another, like something counting.
Maya's fingers flew. "It's not me."
Luis slammed the main power. "Cutting."
The noise didn't care.
The speakers weren't on at least not from their power feed.
The ring pulsed again, and the glass wall trembled, not cracking, just very aware of being glass.
"Ethan," Dr. Chen said softly. "What did you do?"
"I… nothing," he said. He believed it for half a second.
The big monitor went black.
Then text scrolled in crisp white letters that weren't part of any UI they'd installed.
KER ONLINE…