Scene 67: Playback
Reaves returned from the subway site with nothing but the recording.
She played it again in her apartment. No voice. No words. Just a low thrum-like the world exhaling under pressure. But when she played it backward, something emerged.
A distorted voice.
Hers.
> "It's not in the mine."
> "It is the mine."
> "And now... it's everywhere."
She hadn't said those words. Not out loud. Not yet.
---
Scene 68: The Broadcast
Two hundred miles south, a college radio station received an anonymous USB stick in a plain envelope.
No return address. No message.
Inside: a single .wav file named "listen.wav"
The DJ-an undergrad named Kelsey-played it as a late-night filler.
Dead air.
Then a pulse. Rhythmic. Like a heartbeat. Then, layered murmurs.
She turned up the gain.
Then her ears began to bleed.
So did the listeners'.
Dozens of ER visits. Broken hearing aids. Five people driven to mutism.
The radio station was shut down.
But the audio had already been ripped and uploaded.
It began to spread.
---
Scene 69: Unlisted Echoes
Online forums reported anomalies:
"My phone recorded me sleeping. I didn't press record."
"The voicemail from my mom-I heard myself replying before I picked up."
"My baby monitor is talking to me. In my voice."
Tech forums tried to explain it away-feedback loops, corrupted memory, RF bleed.
But one user, posting under the name Below_17, wrote something that froze Reaves when she read it:
> "There are places on Earth where sound doesn't bounce."
> "They're mouths."
> "And now that we've listened... they've learned how to speak back."
The account vanished an hour later.
---
Scene 70: Reaves' Decision
She gathered what she could-notes, recordings, maps, Carter's scribbled ravings-and uploaded them all to a secure server with one note:
> "If I don't come back, don't go looking. Just listen."
She took a last look at the map.
Three mouths still untouched.
One of them pulsed faintly on the screen.
A sonar lab in Alaska. Abandoned after unexplained "vibrational events."
She booked her flight.
And packed noise-cancelling headphones.
---
Scene 71: Infrasonic
The lab was buried in snow and silence. The winds didn't whistle. They just stopped at the entrance.
Inside: rows of metal desks, static-filled monitors, cables like veins across the floor.
She powered up the mainframe.
One drive remained intact. Playback engaged.
A voice, mangled by time and distortion:
> "We tried to chart the infrasound range. But the signal wasn't natural. It wasn't a frequency-it was a pattern."
> "It changed depending on who was listening."
> "It became us."
The tape ended with a scream-drawn out, metallic.
But not human.
It sounded like a building weeping.
---
Scene 72: Reaves' Reflection
She stood before a mirror near the lab's old dorm wing.
Her reflection moved a half-second too late.
When she turned to walk away, her reflection didn't.
It watched her.
Then it whispered.
Not in her voice.
Not in English.
But she understood it.
> "We remember you."
She shattered the mirror with a flare casing and fled into the snow.
But the silence followed.
She could feel it watching now.
From behind the snowflakes.
From beneath the wind.
---
Scene 73: Viral Silence
Back home, more cities reported "echo blackouts."
Public fountains stopped splashing.
Libraries emptied of sound-not just talking, but page turning, footsteps, breathing.
Podcasts recorded full episodes, only to find nothing but silence on playback.
Digital assistants responded to commands never spoken.
Governments denied involvement. Denied everything.
But leaked internal memos told a different story:
"Sound-based contagion"
"Auditory possession through mimicry"
"Quarantine protocols for 'resonant individuals'"
The silence was spreading faster than they could trace it.
It didn't need wires.
It just needed ears.
---
Scene 74: The Signal Calls Back
Reaves woke one night to every device in her apartment playing the same tone.
Laptop.
Phone.
Even her old cassette recorder, long dead.
The waveform danced on every screen-a spiral.
Inside the spiral: a shape. Black and open.
A mouth.
Her speakers popped. Then hissed.
Then her own voice:
> "It's not coming for us."
> "It's already inside."
The lights blew out.
And she was alone in the dark.
Only she wasn't.
Because the silence had finally found its voice.