The city was quiet in the way only broken places ever were.
Not peaceful. Not asleep. Just holding its breath.
Elias Rowe sat alone in the monitoring room beneath Tower Seven, eyes fixed on a screen most people believed was useless. The room smelled faintly of dust and overheated metal, a scent he had long stopped noticing. The hum of aging equipment filled the air, uneven and imperfect, like a tired animal struggling to stay awake.
02:17 a.m.
That was when the noise changed.
At first, it was subtle enough to pass for imagination. Static was static. It had no rhythm, no intention. Elias had listened to it for years, filtering through dead bands and abandoned frequencies that no longer connected to anything beyond the city walls.
But this was different.
The static bent.
Not louder. Not quieter. It shifted, like pressure moving through water. Elias straightened in his chair before he fully understood why. His fingers hovered over the console, instincts waking up after years of disuse.
Static did not bend.
He adjusted the frequency slightly, rotating the dial with practiced care. The screen flickered once, then stabilized. Lines of meaningless data scrolled past before freezing altogether.
A timestamp appeared.
Elias leaned closer.
The date was wrong.
Not corrupted. Not garbled. Clean and precise, down to the second.
Three days into the future.
His first thought was that the system clock had failed. His second was that someone was playing a joke that required access no one else had. His third thought came with a tightness in his chest that had nothing to do with logic.
The city had not synchronized time with the outside world since the blackout. Every sector ran on its own local systems, drifting slowly apart. A future timestamp was not just impossible.
It was forbidden by physics.
Elias reached for the manual override, hesitated, then stopped. The static deepened, no longer random. A low distortion rolled through the speakers, followed by something that made his pulse spike.
A voice.
Faint at first. Strained. Buried under layers of interference.
"… if you are hearing this…"
Elias froze.
The voice cleared slightly, like someone forcing words through damaged equipment.
"… then you already ignored the first warning."
His breath caught.
The voice was his.
Not similar. Not close.
Identical.
The room seemed to shrink around him. His reflection stared back from the darkened screen, pale and tense. He had never liked the sound of his own voice recorded, but this was worse. This voice carried something he did not recognize.
Fear.
Elias swallowed and leaned closer to the speaker, heart pounding hard enough to feel in his throat.
"What warning?" he whispered.
The voice on the transmission continued, unaware or uncaring.
"You are going to want proof. I did too. You will think this is a malfunction or a trap. It is neither."
The signal distorted again, warping the words.
"At 06:40 tomorrow morning, the western transit rail will fail. Not an accident. Do not be on it."
Elias stood up so fast his chair scraped loudly across the floor.
Tomorrow.
The western rail carried thousands of people every morning. A failure would cripple half the city. He reached for the controls to replay the message, but the screen flickered violently.
"No," he muttered. "No, no, no."
The voice continued.
"You cannot save everyone. Do not try. If you intervene too early, they will notice."
A sharp tone cut through the transmission. The screen went black.
Silence flooded the room.
Elias stood there, breathing hard, hands trembling at his sides. The equipment returned to its normal hum, indifferent to what had just happened.
He replayed the logs.
Nothing.
No record of the transmission. No anomaly. No trace it had ever existed.
For several long minutes, Elias did not move.
He had spent years convincing himself that the blackout was just history, something that happened to other people. Something finished. The city taught its citizens to accept the loss. Communication beyond the walls was dangerous. Curiosity was wasteful. The past was buried for a reason.
But the past had just spoken to him.
And it had done so using his own mouth.
Elias shut down the station and left the tower before dawn, the warning echoing in his mind. The streets outside were dimly lit, the glow of old lamps reflecting off damp concrete. Vendors were beginning to stir, setting up stalls with the same routine precision as always.
Life went on.
At 06:20 a.m., Elias stood near the western rail platform, hood pulled low, heart racing. He had not told anyone. He did not know how.
Every instinct screamed that this was wrong. That he was chasing a ghost born of exhaustion and isolation. But the timestamp. The voice. The certainty in the warning.
06:35.
Commuters crowded the platform. Conversations overlapped in a dull roar. Children clung to parents. Guards watched from their posts, bored and alert in equal measure.
06:39.
Elias stepped back.
06:40.
The rail screamed.
Metal shrieked against metal as the lead car derailed violently, slamming into the platform barrier. The impact threw bodies through the air. Glass exploded. Screams replaced the hum of morning routine.
The explosion that followed was brief and brutal.
Elias staggered back, ears ringing, vision blurred. Smoke filled the station, thick and choking. Alarms wailed too late to matter.
People lay everywhere.
Some moving.
Some not.
Elias dropped to his knees, stomach twisting violently. He had believed the warning. He had listened.
And still, people were dead.
Later, authorities would call it a mechanical failure. Sabotage, maybe. The investigation would be sealed within hours.
Elias slipped away before anyone noticed him, his mind numb.
That night, alone in his apartment, the transmission returned.
This time, the voice sounded calmer.
Colder.
"I told you not to try to save them," it said. "Next time, listen better."
Elias stared at the darkened screen, horror creeping up his spine.
"There should not be a next time," he said aloud.
The voice paused.
"There is always a next time," it replied.