"When a pattern appears across borders, we call it intelligence. When it repeats without cause, we call it coincidence. But when it remembers us first—we stop calling it anything at all."— Internal memo, Archive #4C, unclassified draft (withheld)
The lights in the sub-basement of the Geospatial Research Division stayed on all night.But only a few people were ever awake with them.
Miriam Reese leaned back from her monitor and pinched the bridge of her nose. The air in the room was too clean, too sterile. A place where even doubt felt filtered.
The data kept blinking.
Five locations.Four countries.One pattern.
And nothing—nothing in the archives to explain it.
She reached for her coffee. Cold. She didn't care.
On the left screen: a series of low-frequency hums extracted from ground-penetrating radar sweeps across Jerusalem, Ujjain, Mecca, and Kedarnath. On the right: metadata signatures. Seismic data overlaid with atmospheric interference filters.
They weren't supposed to line up.But they did.
Every seventy-one seconds, give or take a margin of two.Every site.Every pulse.
Even the drift was synchronized — like a choir that aged in tune.
She tapped her screen to open the fifth archive — the one from an abandoned site in Yemen, suppressed after a dig went cold in 1997. It, too, had the pulse. Fainter. Degraded. But present.
She zoomed in on the wave pattern, searching for origins. But every trace led inward.
There was no transmission point.No source.Just arrival.
Like the signal had not been sent.It had risen.
Her supervisor's voice crackled on the intercom. "You're still in there?"
She pressed the mic. "Yes."
"Take a break. The data's been sitting there twenty years. It'll sit one more."
She didn't reply.
She returned to the scan from Ujjain. The pulse was slightly stronger than the rest — embedded in what looked like shallow strata. But the frequency did something strange.
It spiraled inward.
Not outward, like a wave.
It wasn't broadcasting.It was converging.
She leaned forward, magnifying the data field. The spiral collapsed every five turns — resetting like a ritual. Like counting mala beads. She stared for another minute before opening a blank notepad and writing just one word:
Axis
Miriam sat back. Her eyes were tired. But her body was alert in a way she didn't like — a feeling she hadn't known since childhood, when she once walked into the wrong part of a cathedral during renovation and heard her footsteps echo in a chamber that hadn't been opened in fifty years.
She'd felt watched.
This felt the same.
She copied the waveform. Saved it to an external drive. Then paused.
It wasn't fear she felt.Not exactly.
It was the sense that she was looking at something that had never stopped being seen.
She closed the files. Powered down.And for the first time in a long time, she whispered a name she hadn't said since her grandmother's funeral:
"Elohim."
Above ground, Washington's skyline shimmered with indifferent light.But deep beneath its data vaults, the silence hummed.
It did not want to be decoded.It only wanted to be remembered.