The storm rolled in without warning — at least, without any warning the public was allowed to hear.
Up on the hill overlooking the old valley town, the radio tower flickered once… then twice… then went completely silent. No static. No hum. Just a dead, heavy quiet, the kind that presses on your chest like a weight.
People thought it was just bad weather. Power lines. Faulty cables. The usual excuses we repeat to ourselves so we can sleep at night.
But the truth? It started long before the storm.
Mara Devlin wasn’t supposed to be on shift that night.
She was a junior technician, barely three months into her job at the regional communications hub — a skeleton-like compound that carried every emergency broadcast, weather alert, and government signal for hundreds of kilometers.
Her supervisor had called her in early.
Said it was important.
Said she needed to see something.
Said it quietly, like someone else might be listening.
When she arrived, the entire top floor was sealed off.
Guards she didn’t recognize.
Badges that didn’t belong to any department she knew.
And her supervisor — pale as paper — standing beside a monitor full of red warnings.
“Mara,” he whispered, “we’re intercepting a transmission.”
She blinked.
“From who?”
He swallowed hard.
“That’s the problem. We don’t know.”
The signal wasn’t in any language.
At least not any language spoken today.
It pulsed in strange patterns — rhythmic, almost musical — but layered with something else beneath it. Something that made Mara’s skin tighten, like it was vibrating inside her bones.
Engineers tried to decode it. Analysts tried to map it. Linguists insisted it was digital noise.
But deep down, everyone in that room felt it:
This wasn’t noise.
This was a message.
And it wasn’t meant for us.
As the storm crept closer, the signal grew stronger — louder — clearer.
One symbol repeated inside the waveform, like a warning drawn in sound:
A circle split into three jagged pieces.
Mara zoomed in.
Her supervisor grabbed her wrist.
“Don’t touch it.”
“Why not?” she whispered.
“Because every time we interact with it… it adapts.”
She froze.
“Adapts how?”
He pointed to the window overlooking the hill.
The tower’s lights were flickering again.
Only now, the patterns weren’t random.
They were matching the transmission.
Like the tower wasn’t just receiving the message…
…but responding to it.
At 9:17 PM, everything went dark.
Every monitor.
Every emergency channel.
Every line of communication.
The storm split the sky with a violent flash of lightning — and the tower lit up one last time, bright enough to turn the clouds white.
Then the transmission ended.
Instantly.
Cleanly.
Like someone had pulled a cord from the other side.
Mara looked around the room.
Nobody breathed.
Nobody spoke.
Some signals don’t want to be decoded.
Some only want to see if you’re listening.
The next morning, officials blamed it on “a minor electrical fault.”
The tower was repaired.
Staff were reassigned.
The public never learned a thing.
But Mara did.
And every night since, when the world gets quiet…
…the signal taps once inside her skull.
Just a single pulse.
Repeating.
A reminder:
It wasn’t a malfunction.
It was a handshake.
And the next time the tower lights up…
…it won’t be listening for us.
It’ll be calling something back.
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