Elias's apartment was like a frozen laboratory.
Nothing moved inside it - no ticking clock, no music, not even the breath of another human being.
White walls. Shelves stacked with binders.
And at the center of the room - a desk buried under papers, sketches, and a long-forgotten cup of coffee.
A single window looked out over a lifeless city neon lights and the distant growl of engines.
There was nothing human there, except for one small photograph in a cracked glass frame: Lian.
He approached it every evening.
Not out of habit out of ritual.
His fingertips brushed the glass, lingering a second too long.
"Just a little longer," he whispered. "I'm almost there."
Lian had once been his research partner brilliant, fearless, no less gifted than he was.
She was the first to believe that the human brain was not the destination, only the gate.
That consciousness continued beyond it.
They had called it back then The Spark Hypothesis.
She used to tell him,
"If we can measure the moment when the soul departs, we'll prove that death isn't the end it's a transition."
He used to smile not because he believed, but because she did.
She illuminated everything around her, even the coldest science.
And then came that day the day she insisted on activating the prototype herself.
"It's not stable yet," he told her.
"If we don't try, we'll never know," she replied.
"It's too dangerous, Lian."
"You're forgetting why we do this, Elias. To know. To cross the line."
"And death?" he asked.
"Death," she said, "is just the other side of the equation."
That was the last thing she ever said to him.
A minute later, the experiment collapsed
a burst of white light
and she was gone.
No body. No ashes. No trace.
Only one frequency remained, recorded by the monitor: 11.7 hertz.
From that day forward, it was the only number that mattered.
At night, he would return home and replay the recordings again and again.
On the screen, electronic waves flickered colored lines in motion.
He knew every tremor, every instability, the way one knows a lover's breath.
But that night something changed.
On the thousandth replay, the signal began to behave differently.
Between the waves appeared a pattern almost symmetrical - like a human heartbeat.
He froze.
"Lian…" he whispered. "Is that you?"
The signal pulsed as if in response
two short beats, one long.
Exactly how she used to tap his shoulder when she teased him: "I'm here."
From that night on, Elias stopped sleeping.
He began keeping a new journal not scientific, but personal.
Inside, he wrote sentences that sounded more like prayers:
"If she's beyond the line, I'll cross it."
"If frequency is a language, I'll learn to speak it."
"If light is the gate, I'll walk through."
He stole equipment from the main lab resonance modules, quantum cables, energy sensors.
At night, he moved everything into the old basement of his building a place where the cameras no longer worked.
There, beneath a flickering bulb, he rebuilt a smaller version of the Gate.
He didn't want attention.
He only wanted an answer.
One night, while connecting the cables, he felt a faint tremor beneath his feet.
The bulb flickered.
A small monitor lit up.
One word appeared: CONNECTED.
He stopped breathing.
"Lian?"
No voice only a soft hiss, like air through water.
Then a woman's voice, distorted through static, almost unintelligible:
"Don't… come… after…"
He froze.
The sound cut off. The screen went dark.
And he stood there, alone, feeling the air vanish from his lungs.
But it was already too late.
Something inside him already knew he would come.
In the days that followed, he lied to his supervisors, reported that his equipment was "under maintenance," disappeared for hours, and returned at night with haunted eyes.
He began to see her in his dreams standing in white light, wearing her lab coat, gazing at him silently.
Each time he woke, the frequency 11.7 still hummed in his mind, as if the world itself now vibrated on that wavelength.
At the end of that week, he opened his journal and wrote:
"They say love is an emotion, not evidence. But maybe it's the ultimate proof that souls don't die because I can still feel her."
He looked again at the photograph on his desk and whispered:
"Tonight, I'll activate the Gate. Not for science this time but for love."