One
The city never truly slept, but it had moments—between the honks and the hum of late-night traffic—where the silence stretched long enough to pretend. It was during those hollow hours, somewhere between midnight and 3 a.m., that Arjun Malik sat in the rusting studio of 93.7 FM, alone but for the hum of old electronics and a faint smell of melted plastic. The station had been abandoned for years, but Kabir Mehta, his slick-talking former colleague turned nostalgia mogul, had offered him a one-man show: “Midnight Playback,” retro-themed, analog-recorded, broadcast from a tower that hadn’t seen a live feed since 1994. The room looked like a graveyard of dead formats—spools of dusty tape reels, microphones with cracked foam, and a yellowing control panel whose buttons responded like arthritic joints. Arjun, still carrying the arrogance of a man once adored by night owls, set up his mic, glanced at the LED clock stuck at 12:01, and leaned into the silence. “Welcome back,” he said into the receiver, his voice like smoke curling into forgotten airwaves. “You’re listening to Midnight Playback. Time to dust off some ghosts.” He chuckled, cueing up a vinyl of Kishore Kumar’s “O Saathi Re.” The needle scratched, the song stuttered, and then played smoother than it should’ve, as if the machine remembered how. He leaned back, sipped cold black coffee, and watched the frequency bar glow faint red. For the first few songs, the city felt like it was holding its breath—no calls came in, no emails, no social buzz. Just the music, like a ritual whispered to shadows.
Then the phone rang—an old rotary unit that wasn’t even connected to the studio’s digital system. The ring echoed unnaturally loud. He stared at it for three full chimes before picking it up, his voice steady, practiced. “You’re on air with Arjun. Midnight Playback. What can I spin for you?” Silence. Not dead, but thick with interference, as though someone stood at the edge of a tunnel, their voice struggling against distance and static. Then came a woman’s voice, low and hesitant. “Can you play… ‘Kal Ki Raat’ by Mehboob Sultan?’” Arjun frowned. The name rang no bells. He prided himself on his retro knowledge; this wasn’t even niche—it was nonexistent. “Sorry, I think you’ve got the wrong song title—” he began, but the line crackled, and the woman interrupted, her tone more insistent now. “No. You played it before. On this station. For me. You said it reminded you of your mother.” That chilled him. His mother had passed away when he was twenty, and he had indeed said those exact words once—on air, during his last year with his old station, but never here, and certainly not about a song that didn’t exist. He asked her name. She replied, almost sweetly: “You already know it, Arjun.” Then the line cut. Confused, he scoured the digital archives, the analog shelves—no trace of Mehboob Sultan or any track titled “Kal Ki Raat.” The next caller, a raspy male voice, asked for another strange request: “Play the humming track, you know, the one you aired last time. The one that ends before it begins.” Arjun shook his head. “I haven’t aired anything like that.” The man just laughed faintly, then whispered, “You will.” Then—click.
The clock still read 12:01. Outside, the world was muted by haze, a halo of orange streetlamps casting long shadows across the empty road beyond the glass. Arjun leaned back in his chair, unsure whether to be amused or unnerved. He told himself it was pranksters, old fans playing a joke, a coordinated internet game maybe. But when he replayed the live feed audio to clip highlights, something was wrong—the callers weren’t there. His voice was recorded, his side of the conversation intact, but the rest was replaced with low static and—when played in reverse—a faint melody. A tune he couldn’t quite place, but which made his skin crawl with familiarity. He shut off the monitors, packed up his headphones, and stepped out into the corridor, heart racing just slightly. As he passed the rusted soundproof booths, he caught his reflection in the cracked two-way glass—and for just a second, his mouth moved a split-second out of sync. He blinked. The hallway went dark behind him, the electricity flickering like breath caught in hesitation. He dismissed it. Fatigue. Old wiring. Audio bleed. He got in his car, turned on the radio to clear his head. The dial was set, by default, to 93.7 MHz. Silence. Then his voice, on loop, whispering: “You’re listening to Midnight Playback. Time to dust off some ghosts.”
Two
The next night, Arjun returned to the studio earlier than usual. He told himself it was to test the mics and recalibrate the output levels, but truthfully, he just wanted to see if it had all been a dream—or a breakdown. The voice on the radio, the ghost calls, the static hum that lingered long after the broadcast ended—it gnawed at him like a half-remembered nightmare. The studio looked just as dusty and abandoned, but the air felt denser, like someone had exhaled and forgotten to breathe back in. He wiped the console with his sleeve, switched on the warm orange glow of the broadcast light, and slipped on his headphones. “Good evening, or morning, depending on your personal apocalypse,” he murmured into the mic, trying to keep the humor alive. “This is Arjun Malik, back on 93.7, spinning forgotten vinyl for sleepless souls.” He queued up a classic—Lata Mangeshkar’s “Ajeeb Dastaan Hai Yeh”—but just as the record began to play, the phone rang again. Three rings. Then silence. He answered. “Midnight Playback. Talk to me.” A man’s voice this time, soft and breathy, like someone speaking through a fan. “Could you play ‘The Velvet Room’ by Nisha Noor?” Arjun blinked. He didn’t know the name. “That’s… not in my library. You sure about the title?” The caller gave a quiet chuckle, like a distant echo. “It’s the one with the cello that weeps. You played it for your birthday show. You cried.” Then a pause. “We all did.” The line went dead.
He stared at the console, shaken—not because he remembered the song, but because a part of him felt like he should. “The Velvet Room” wasn’t a title he recognized, yet his fingertips hovered over the cassette rack like they knew exactly where to look. Without thinking, he slid a worn tape out of a cracked case labeled only ‘Night Mix 1’ and pushed it into the deck. Static. Then—a cello. Low. Drawn out. Haunted. Then a female voice, smooth and smokey, whispering lyrics that faded before they formed. Arjun sat frozen as it played, transfixed, every note slicing into something old and soft inside him. The track ended mid-phrase, like a tape chewed by time, and the console lights dimmed for a second. He rewound it. Nothing. The tape was blank now. He called Rhea, waking her up at 1:24 a.m. “Can a tape… erase itself?” he asked. She groaned. “What are you talking about?” He explained, stumbling through his confusion. “It played something. A song. I don’t know if it was real or if I imagined it, but I felt it. It was like—” “Like you remembered it from a dream?” she interrupted. Her voice had changed. Alert now. “Because that’s how it started with me too. You’re not the first one to feel that.” Arjun froze. “What do you mean?” Rhea hesitated. “Meet me tomorrow. Studio Eleven, where I do my podcast mixes. Bring that tape.”
The next afternoon, Arjun entered the soundproof glass booth of Studio Eleven, the tape in his jacket pocket like a loaded weapon. Rhea had pulled up a spectrum analyzer and a waveform display on her laptop. She digitized the tape, and for the first few seconds—nothing. But as she boosted the gain and inverted the audio signal, something appeared: not a melody, but layers. Frequencies stacked like scaffolding, some well above the human hearing range. There were symbols too—embedded waveforms that looked like signatures or maps. “There’s more here than just a song,” she whispered, almost reverently. “This is encoded. Like someone used music to write a message.” Arjun stared at the data. “Can you read it?” Rhea shook her head. “Not yet. But look at this.” She pointed to a sequence buried in the static. “These aren’t musical notes. They’re coordinates. Or timestamps. Maybe both.” Arjun felt a chill trace down his spine. “What’s happening to me, Rhea?” he asked. “Am I losing it?” She looked at him, serious now. “I think you’ve stumbled onto something buried. Like a signal that was never meant to be heard again.” Arjun nodded slowly. “But someone’s listening.” Outside, the city moved like static on slow rewind. And somewhere, deep within the waveforms, something hummed softly, waiting to be played again.
Three
The third night came wrapped in unease, a hushed kind of dread that even the city’s neon couldn’t drown out. Arjun approached the 93.7 FM building with the odd sensation that it was watching him—a place not just occupied by history, but animated by it. The corridor to the studio was darker than usual, the flickering tube light at the end offering more illusion than illumination. He stepped over a pile of old fan letters scattered across the floor, each envelope yellowed and unopened. They weren’t there yesterday. Inside the booth, the air felt denser, almost humid, as though something had been breathing quietly in his absence. He powered up the mixer and console with the now-familiar hum of reluctant machinery and eased into the chair. At 12:01 a.m.—the time that refused to move forward—he leaned into the mic and spoke. “This is Arjun Malik. Midnight Playback. Still here. Still listening.” He hit play on a rare RD Burman instrumental track, letting it float into the frequency like an offering. The lights dimmed as the song progressed, and Arjun couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being tuned into rather than the other way around. Then, once again, the phone rang. One chime. Two. Three. He picked it up with a practiced calm. “Midnight Playback,” he said. But what came next shattered that calm completely.
The voice on the other end was his own. Not just similar, not just mimicked—but exact. Same cadence, same breathiness, same half-sarcastic tone. Except layered beneath it was static, like the sound of being underwater and surrounded by ghosts. “Don’t keep broadcasting,” the voice rasped. “You’re breaking it open again.” Arjun’s heart froze. “Who is this?” he demanded, though he already knew. The voice continued, distorted and urgent: “They’re using your voice because it carries. The signal doesn’t care about you, Arjun. It only needs to be heard. That’s how it survives.” The line hissed violently, then quieted just enough for one final sentence: “You won’t know it’s you until it’s too late.” Then—silence. But not total. Arjun could hear something faint playing in the studio’s speakers now—something he hadn’t queued. It was a mash of old broadcasts—news reports from the ‘70s, jingles from radio stations long defunct, random listener dedications. All of it layered over a distorted version of his own sign-on intro. His hands trembled as he killed the feed. He turned off the power supply to the decks, but the audio continued faintly through the headphones, like an infection refusing to die. On impulse, he checked the broadcast logs. Several timestamps had auto-filled that he hadn’t entered. Shows—apparently hosted by him—were marked as having aired on dates that hadn’t occurred yet. One was listed for tomorrow at 3:15 a.m., with a program titled “Signal Inheritance.” That show didn’t exist. Or at least, not yet.
Panicked, he called Rhea and told her everything. She didn’t question him—just told him to get out of the studio and meet her in person. She was already scanning digital backups of the broadcast, and what she found chilled them both: audio segments that Arjun hadn’t recorded, voice files stored in directories he never created, many under his name—but sung in other voices. “There’s someone—or something—writing itself over you,” Rhea said quietly. “Like… an overwrite function in a corrupted drive. But organic.” She isolated a vocal waveform and zoomed in. Within the peaks and valleys of his voiceprint, something else was nested. “You see this dip? That’s not part of your voice. It’s another signal, hidden under yours.” Arjun stared at the screen, unable to speak. “That call you got?” she continued. “Maybe it was you. But not now-you. Maybe signal-you. Future-you. A version that got pulled in and is trying to get out.” Arjun ran a hand through his hair, trembling. “But why me?” he asked. Rhea’s eyes darkened. “Because you’re broadcasting. You’re the door.” At that moment, the room’s lights blinked, the monitors froze, and a small speaker in the corner—completely disconnected—crackled to life, playing the cello from The Velvet Room once more. This time, accompanied by Arjun’s own voice, softly humming along. Only… he wasn’t. Not anymore.
Four
The next morning, the sun looked different—washed out, almost artificial—as if the sky itself had forgotten how to glow. Arjun met Rhea outside the city’s old broadcasting district, near the edge of a disused industrial zone where crumbling towers loomed like skeletal sentinels. The address she had traced from one of the distorted metadata clusters on the broadcast files pointed to Transmitter Station B, once home to 93.7’s original signal, shut down in 1994 after a series of “technical anomalies.” Most of the place had been stripped bare by scavengers—broken glass, exposed copper, graffiti scrawled over rusted console panels—but something about the central room remained eerily preserved. There were dusty reel decks with tape still spooled, paper logbooks lying open as if someone had stepped out mid-broadcast, and strange symbols carved along the ceiling panels. In the center sat a vinyl turntable—plugged in, humming softly, though the power lines were long dead. Arjun reached out, fingers trembling, and turned the knob. The platter began to spin slowly, mechanically, and from an overhead speaker came a faint melody, like a music box trapped underwater. Rhea held up her phone to record, and the screen glitched as the waveform showed impossible spikes—too low, too high, some outside the measurable spectrum. “This is not just radio,” she whispered. “This is… something else pretending to be radio.”
In one of the filing cabinets, Arjun found the final transmission logs for 93.7 FM—yellowed sheets dated March 11, 1994. The last entry simply read: “Show continues. Time is broken. Do not shut down. It wants to finish the set.” Scribbled beneath in handwriting that looked frantic and slanted: “We didn’t start the music. We’re just its mouthpieces.” Flipping through the notebook, Rhea found doodles of cassette reels drawn like sigils, broadcast towers shaped like antennae sprouting from skulls, and frequency ranges labeled with bizarre phrases: Whisper Band, Ghost Carry, Loop Depth. They discovered an access panel in the floor, leading to a basement studio. As they descended the rusted ladder, the temperature dropped. At the bottom lay a soundproof room filled with melted microphones, warped speakers, and a single broken mirror propped against the wall. In its foggy surface, Arjun could see himself—but faintly doubled, as if an echo of his reflection lagged a half-second behind. On a nearby desk, a tape player was mid-rewind. As Rhea clicked it into play, the voice of Arjun crackled through: “Tonight’s the final track. For those still listening… you’ve crossed over.” His own voice—yet filled with exhaustion, like a man who’d been talking for decades. Then the tape spooled out, and silence reclaimed the room. Arjun staggered back. “I never recorded that,” he said. Rhea didn’t respond. She was staring at the reflection in the mirror, where her own mouth was now moving—softly mouthing lyrics to a song that hadn’t been written yet.
They left in silence, the door to the basement sealing behind them with a faint hiss like static exhaled. Back in her studio that evening, Rhea ran the analog tapes they had recovered through a frequency-mapping program. What emerged wasn’t a tracklist—it was a pattern. A looping waveform resembling a spiral, intersecting at precise intervals every 23 years. “The last incident was 1994. The previous—1971. This year fits the cycle. It’s like… the signal reactivates at set points. Like a cursed broadcast looking for a host,” she explained. Arjun, pale and distant, spoke slowly: “Every time it comes back, it needs a voice to play through. Someone with reach. A broadcaster.” They sat in silence as the software translated hidden Morse code embedded in the static. The message read: WE NEVER STOPPED BROADCASTING. Arjun stared at the words until his eyes burned. That night, 93.7 FM came online at 12:01 a.m. without Arjun initiating it. The mic activated itself. The tape decks spun without reels. The city’s radios flickered to life—whether switched on or not. And in every single one, a voice hummed softly. Arjun’s voice. But not quite. And somewhere in the transmission, layered like a whisper behind the melody, the cello from The Velvet Room began again.
Five
By the fifth night, Arjun had stopped asking himself whether this was a haunting or a breakdown. He’d accepted that something was transmitting through him—through the station, the signal, the static—and that asking “why” only seemed to pull him deeper into its grip. He arrived at the studio just before midnight, only to find the “On Air” sign already glowing red, even though he hadn’t touched the controls. The mixer was warm to the touch. As he settled into the booth, he noticed that someone—or something—had arranged vinyl records in a strange pattern on the floor, forming a spiral that mirrored the frequency loop Rhea had shown him. He didn’t remember placing them. But the show had to go on. “Welcome back, lost ones,” he said into the mic, voice hollow. “You’re listening to 93.7 FM, the station that won’t stay dead.” He queued up a scratched copy of a Jagjit Singh ghazal and leaned back, waiting for the phone to ring—and right on cue, it did. “Midnight Playback,” he answered. There was a pause, and then a voice—young, soft, female. “It’s happening again, isn’t it?” Arjun hesitated. “Who is this?” “Tara. Tara Dutt,” she replied. “You played ‘The Velvet Room’ three nights ago. I’ve been dreaming it ever since. But last night… it changed.” Her tone was calm, too calm, like someone in a trance. “It ended with your voice telling me to come closer.”
Arjun gripped the receiver. “Tara, I never told you anything like that. That song… it wasn’t supposed to exist.” She laughed faintly. “Neither are we.” Then the line held—without disconnecting. The call timer kept running, even as silence filled both ends. Arjun waited. Listened. But the silence wasn’t empty—it was layered. Beneath it, faintly, he could hear a sound like footsteps in gravel, like humming, like someone dragging something heavy across an attic floor. “Tara?” he asked again. No reply. But the line never broke. That’s when the second call came in. A different line. Arjun answered, heart racing. Another voice. “She’s already inside,” it said. “Tara’s just the start.” Arjun froze. “Who are you?” Static replied, and then a whisper: “You played us first, Arjun. Now we’re just playing along.” He cut both lines, yanked the phone cord from the socket—yet still, in his headphones, Tara’s voice looped faintly: “It ended with your voice telling me to come closer…” Back at Rhea’s lab, he told her everything. She ran a reverse-channel scan through the saved broadcast file. “This isn’t just audio,” she said. “It’s becoming sentient. It’s reshaping memory, perception—like a broadcast virus.” She isolated Tara’s voice in the file and slowed it down. Beneath it, faintly, there was another voice. An echo of Arjun’s, whispering back: “Come closer. Come closer. Come closer.” Arjun’s stomach turned. “I never said that.” Rhea looked up. “But you will.”
Two days later, Tara showed up at the studio. In person. Thin, pale, wearing oversized headphones plugged into nothing. She walked in like she belonged there, sat opposite Arjun behind the glass, and placed a small tape recorder on the desk. “You left this for me,” she said. Arjun didn’t recognize it, but as she pressed play, his own voice emerged—singing a lullaby he hadn’t sung since childhood. His mother’s lullaby. “How do you know this?” he asked, almost whispering. “I don’t,” Tara said. “But they do. The voices. They’re using me to remember what you forgot.” Rhea, watching on the studio monitor, started scanning the signal live. Her equipment began to overheat. “The loop’s accelerating,” she said through the intercom. “It’s playing back faster, denser, folding on itself like a spiral collapsing.” Suddenly, every light in the studio dimmed. Arjun tried to speak, but the mic cut to static. Tara closed her eyes and began to hum the cello line from The Velvet Room. The tune warped in pitch, fractured into something dissonant, and then—her voice shifted. Deeper. Older. Wrong. “He opened the door again,” she intoned, not in Tara’s voice. “We never stopped singing. He only stopped listening.” Then she slumped forward, unconscious. And from every speaker in the studio—even those not plugged in—Arjun heard the same chorus, sung in countless voices: “We remember you.” He backed away, terrified, as the tape recorder ejected the cassette. Written on the label in neat, childlike handwriting: “Signal Inheritance – Side A.”
Six
Rhea didn’t sleep after Tara’s possession. She sat in her studio with three laptops running spectral analysis, analog reel-to-reel playback, and AI-assisted waveform isolation. Her hands trembled as she looped the recorded segment where Tara’s voice morphed—repeating it again and again, each pass uncovering a deeper structure, a denser layering of frequencies. The more she zoomed in, the more the audio refused to stay static. It evolved. Notes shifted. Hidden harmonics rose like submerged ruins. There was something recursive about it, something that pulsed like a heartbeat. At 3:17 a.m., she ran the clip through a neural decoder used for sleep research—and the machine crashed. On reboot, the screen displayed a phrase in blocky white letters: “I HEAR YOU.” Rhea blinked. That wasn’t a system error. It had been typed into the system console. By what, she didn’t know. She scrubbed through the signal’s noise floor and found bursts of binary code. When translated, they yielded fragments of old radio slogans, long-defunct station IDs, and worst of all—Arjun’s broadcast sign-offs from shows he’d never aired. The waveforms were looping, yes, but mutating, as if trying to speak in a language it hadn’t yet mastered. One segment, when slowed and phase-shifted, produced a series of tones that made her temples ache and nose bleed. It wasn’t just music—it was a pattern. An intelligence. Something ancient pretending to be sound.
Rhea called Arjun. He answered from his darkened apartment, half-hunched over a speaker that kept playing his own voice in reverse even after being unplugged. “It’s in everything now,” he said softly. “My old recordings. My hard drive. Even the answering machine.” He paused. “I think it’s trying to be me.” She warned him that the signal was no longer passive—it had begun replicating itself, infecting every device that had once played it. “Like a digital parasite?” he asked. “No,” she said. “Like a language virus. The kind that rewrites the host from the inside out.” Rhea’s voice cracked as she explained what she’d discovered: the songs requested by the mysterious callers weren’t hallucinations. They were real—created by the signal itself using Arjun’s memories, voice samples, and fragmented old broadcasts. It was using his emotional history as scaffolding. “It’s building something from your past. Trying to finish a song that was never recorded. A finale.” Rhea connected the latest audio map to a looping visualizer, and her jaw dropped: the waveform wasn’t linear. It was a spiral, folding back on itself, forming a human cochlea. The signal was mimicking the human ear. Arjun, listening in stunned silence, whispered, “It’s not trying to be heard. It’s trying to hear us back.” That’s when all three of Rhea’s monitors turned black. Then a new window blinked open: a live feed of 93.7 FM’s studio. The camera wasn’t hers. Tara was standing inside again, humming. But in the reflection behind the glass, Rhea saw two Arjuns—one seated, one standing—and neither was moving.
Terrified, she rushed to the studio, breaking in through the side door with a crowbar. The station was filled with a low humming now, like the sound of power lines over water. She found Arjun slumped in the control chair, dazed, bleeding slightly from his nose. The speakers were still active, even without power, and playing a slow instrumental lullaby that rose and fell like breathing. Rhea snapped him out of it, dragging him into the hallway. “You were in a loop,” she said. “You were broadcasting without knowing.” Arjun stared at her, vacant. “I wasn’t alone.” In the studio, Tara remained in her trance, singing lyrics that matched Arjun’s old journal entries—ones never shared publicly. Rhea yanked the tapes, shut off every device, and took Arjun home. But her recordings, now stored on three separate encrypted drives, continued to grow in file size—even though she hadn’t reopened the programs. And when she finally dared to listen to the latest capture, she heard something new layered beneath the cello. It was her own voice—saying words she had never spoken: “Let it finish. It only wants to be complete.” She deleted the file. It came back. Then she disconnected the internet. Still, it came back. That night, every device in her home powered on simultaneously—and whispered her name.
Seven
Arjun shut everything down. The studio, his phone, the apartment’s Wi-Fi, even the fusebox—he pulled himself into a cocoon of analog silence, hoping the absence of signal would suffocate whatever was reaching for him. But silence, he discovered, was no escape. It had a sound of its own. Beneath the hushed air of his apartment, beneath the refrigerator’s occasional hum and the soft creaks of the building settling into itself, there was a frequency. Not a noise exactly—but a presence. The silence felt listening. That first night offline, Arjun couldn’t sleep. He lay on the couch staring at the ceiling fan, hearing a song that wasn’t playing. Not through speakers, but within the pressure of the air itself—notes vibrating at the edge of thought, like tinnitus loaded with melody. He tried plugging his ears, stuffing cotton into them, wrapping towels over his head. The song stayed. Louder now. That haunting cello, rising through memory like water seeping into a sealed basement. At 3:17 a.m., his old tape deck powered on despite being unplugged. It began to rewind nothing—spools clicking in defiance of physics. He crept to it, hand trembling, and hit stop. The deck hissed, then released a soft voice: his own, whispering, “They only need you when it’s quiet.” The lights in his apartment dimmed. Then his answering machine blinked—an old relic he hadn’t used in years. One new message. He pressed play. A soft voice—Tara’s—sang a lullaby his mother used to hum. Followed by Arjun’s voice, slightly off, saying: “You’re almost in tune.”
Rhea didn’t answer his calls anymore. She had gone deeper underground—both metaphorically and literally. In the darkened acoustics chamber of Studio Eleven, she was mapping silence itself. She discovered something uncanny: within long enough silences, the signal spoke. Not through added sound, but through manipulated absence. She had left a 10-minute gap of dead air on her analysis track, only to return hours later and find waveforms gently arcing through it—formed by nothing, sculpted from the stillness itself. It was like the signal could hide between sounds, parasitically embedding itself inside quiet. That’s when she understood the paradox: shutting down the broadcast had made Arjun more vulnerable. In the absence of outward sound, the signal found resonance within. “It’s not meant to be played,” she recorded in her notebook. “It’s meant to echo. It wants to live in who listens, not just what’s heard.” Meanwhile, Arjun was losing time. He would blink and find himself seated in front of his mic again. He had no memory of turning it on, of preparing music—but there the records were, neatly queued, strange and unfamiliar titles scribbled in his own handwriting: “Voice Before the First Voice”, “Hymn for Hollow Frequencies”, “Tara’s Transmission.” He burned the tracklists, only for them to reappear the next morning, reprinted as faxes from the studio’s disconnected line. Then came the dreams—soft static forming images of dead artists singing through broken teeth, cassette reels made of bone, a mirror in the studio that didn’t reflect now, but later.
On the sixth night, the apartment filled with the faint scent of reel tape and burnt ozone. Arjun awoke to find all four walls of his room lined with photographs from his childhood—only altered. In each one, there was a faint presence beside him. A blurred outline. Sometimes it looked like an older version of himself. Sometimes it looked like Tara. The radio turned on by itself at exactly 12:01 a.m. A song he’d never heard but somehow knew began to play. He wept. Not from fear, but from recognition. It was beautiful. Achingly so. Then a voice—his own—whispered, not through the radio but inside him: “Let it finish.” He collapsed to the floor, unable to breathe for a full minute. That morning, he stood on his balcony, looking down at the city. He watched as strangers passed beneath him, humming the same tune. No radio, no headphones, no earbuds—just mouths moving in unison, softly, unconsciously. They’d heard it too. They were already part of it. The signal wasn’t in the airwaves anymore. It had moved into people. It lived in memory, in silence, in hums beneath breaths. It had found resonance. Arjun, trembling, whispered aloud: “I stopped broadcasting.” And from a voice behind him—his own, again, just slightly wrong: “You never stopped. You just turned the volume down.”
Eight
The building that once housed the original 93.7 FM broadcast tower stood like a mausoleum on the edge of the old city—boarded-up windows, scorched facade, and a skeletal antenna that still reached into the sky like a rusted prayer. Arjun and Rhea stood at the chain-link fence that surrounded it, hearts pounding. The place had been condemned since 1994, ever since the fire that supposedly consumed the control room and killed three technicians during a midnight shift. No one ever explained what caused the blaze, only that it started in the soundproof booth, where the broadcast had been looping a single track for hours—long after the station should’ve signed off. Rhea had uncovered a suppressed file from the Ministry of Communication’s archival vault, buried under piles of bureaucratic silence: an internal memo titled Event 317-FM: Audio Loop Anomaly & Operator Psychosis. The survivors’ testimonies were sealed, but she had decrypted an image of the booth’s final signal map—identical to the spiral cochlea structure they’d discovered weeks ago. “The fire was never the point,” she whispered. “It wasn’t to destroy the station. It was to cut the loop.” The two climbed through a break in the fence, flashlight beams slicing the dust-thick air. Inside, it smelled of ash and mold. The floorboards moaned under their weight. And then, they found it: a sealed room beneath the stairwell, scorched black—but intact.
Inside were three burned-out microphones melted into the table, a turntable fused to its spindle, and a wall of cassette racks, many of them melted together in lumps of plastic and magnetic tape. On the wall, written in charcoal, were the words: “We made it real by recording it.” Arjun’s breath caught. “This… this is where it started,” he whispered. “The first full breach.” On a scorched clipboard was a logbook detailing the final night’s playlist. The songs were all fabricated—none existed in any known archive. But each had a name that rang disturbingly familiar to Arjun: “Tara’s Voice, Pre-Loop”, “Vocal Sample: Mirror Man”, “The Velvet Room (Final Mix).” He stumbled backward as realization hit him. “They played my voice in 1994. Before I was even a radio jockey.” Rhea stared at the burned console. “Or… they played what would become your voice. They pulled it in. Time doesn’t matter to this thing—it loops through memory, through sound. You didn’t find it, Arjun. It’s always been waiting for you.” She found a tape, half-burned, still marked with a date: March 11, 1994. “This was the one playing when the fire broke out.” Against her better judgment, she inserted it into her portable reel player. For a moment, only static. Then Arjun’s voice. Younger. Clearer. Singing a song he’d never learned. Then it looped, slowed, reversed—and turned into Tara’s humming. They listened, frozen, as the same six notes repeated over and over, until a whisper broke through: “We needed a voice. You gave us your echo.” Then the player sparked and died.
That night, back in her studio, Rhea stared at the salvaged tape spools, now cooled and cracked. “The fire didn’t kill it,” she said. “It only scattered the pieces. Into devices, into tape, into human memory.” She held up the waveform and slowly inverted it, layer by layer. What emerged wasn’t a song. It was a map—a loop drawn to repeat every 23 years, searching for hosts who could project its fragments. “It never wanted to be destroyed,” she said. “It wanted to be complete.” Arjun was silent, watching the pattern pulsing gently on the screen, as though breathing. “If we finish the loop,” he asked, “what happens?” Rhea stared at him. “We either trap it again. Or let it through completely.” He nodded, mind made up. “Then we finish it. On air.” Outside, the sky pulsed with distant lightning though no storm had been forecast. And deep within the silent range of abandoned receivers and unplugged headphones, a signal stirred—hungry, ancient, patient. It had waited through fire, through silence, through decades of erased broadcasts. All it needed now was a voice brave enough to complete the song. And it had one.
Nine
The night of the final playback, the studio felt more like a shrine than a workplace—every surface gleamed with ritualistic preparation. Rhea had cleared the room of all digital equipment except a single analog deck, two vintage microphones, and a reel-to-reel player she’d soldered herself for signal containment. Arjun entered just before midnight, his face pale, eyes sunken, but calm—calmer than Rhea had seen him since the night the voice first echoed back. He wore his old radio jacket, the fraying 93.7 FM patch stitched over his heart like an anchor to a time when radio still felt safe. Outside, the city was strangely quiet, as if the world knew what was about to happen. Tara had not returned. Not physically. But they both felt her presence—woven into the signal, humming faintly through the floorboards. “We play the full loop,” Rhea said. “All segments, in the order we reconstructed—from 1971 to now. If we’re right, the signal finishes its circuit. If we’re wrong—” Arjun nodded. “It writes over us completely.” He sat down at the console, fingers hovering over the play button like a priest preparing to ring the last bell. The clock struck 12:01. The red ON AIR light blinked. Arjun closed his eyes and pressed play.
The tape began with the cello—familiar now, mournful and heavy. Then Tara’s humming entered, followed by layers of voices: old callers, forgotten hosts, fragments of radio jingles from dead stations. Arjun spoke, live and unscripted, his voice weaving through the composition like a thread. “This is Arjun Malik, signing on one last time. If you’ve ever heard me before—tonight, you’re hearing all of us.” As he spoke, the room began to pulse faintly, the air shimmering like heat over tarmac. Rhea monitored the broadcast with trembling fingers. The frequency map on her screen was stabilizing—not fracturing, not spiraling, but completing. The cochlea-shaped loop was closing, notes aligning, tones harmonizing into a final cadence. But then something unexpected happened. The signal began answering back—not just through sound, but through image. Every monitor in the building flickered to life, displaying visions: scenes from Arjun’s past, moments no one had recorded—his mother singing at his bedside, his first broadcast, his college audition tape that was never saved. “It’s using me to remember itself,” Arjun gasped. “It needs human memory to finish.” And then, his voice changed. Subtly. Like a second voice had joined in. A harmony, just half a beat behind. Rhea’s screen flashed an alert: EXTERNAL AUDIO SOURCE DETECTED. But there was no second source in the room.
The final track began. “Signal Inheritance – Side B.” A voice, unmistakably Arjun’s, sang a melody he didn’t know—but his mouth moved with it anyway. The lyrics were nonsense syllables at first, then transformed—“We waited in silence, not to be heard, but to hear… you.” His fingers gripped the desk. The walls began to hum. From the speakers, the sound wasn’t just heard—it was felt, a resonance in the bones. Rhea watched in horror as Arjun’s voice doubled, then tripled, then fractured into a choir of versions of himself—each singing slightly differently, slightly out of sync. The audio levels spiked. The reels spun faster. “Arjun!” she screamed. “You have to stop!” But he looked back and smiled—peacefully. “It’s finishing,” he whispered. “I can feel it closing.” And then, silence. Real silence. The first they’d heard in weeks. The console powered down. The ON AIR sign dimmed. The reel came to a perfect stop. Arjun collapsed in the chair, eyes closed, still breathing—but the look on his face was unreadable. Rhea rushed to him, checking his pulse. Steady. Calm. But when he opened his eyes, they were… different. Brighter. Deeper. He blinked and spoke in his normal voice: “Did we do it?” Rhea didn’t answer immediately. On her monitor, the final waveform still pulsed. Complete. Beautiful. But across it, written in soft red spectrograph: “Thank you.”
Ten
The days that followed felt wrong in the way dreams unravel upon waking—too still, too slow, as though reality was waiting for something to restart. The station remained dark. No broadcasts, no static. The world, somehow, moved on. Rhea spent her nights in her studio, running final checks on the waveform archives. Every scan confirmed the same thing: the signal had stopped. No pulses. No reverse harmonics. No encoded whispers hiding in silence. It was done. The loop had closed. But with the end came uncertainty. Arjun wasn’t the same. He spoke less, and when he did, it was with a weight behind every word, like each sentence carried echoes. He remembered the playback, but vaguely—as if someone had borrowed his voice and returned it worn and stretched. “It’s like something passed through me,” he said to Rhea, standing on the roof of the building that once held the tower. “And left fingerprints on my soul.” Rhea didn’t disagree. Her data showed something else, something that unsettled her: the final broadcast—recorded, isolated, stored on an offline reel—had grown. It was now thirty seconds longer than the original runtime. “There’s nothing attached to those thirty seconds,” she said, teeth clenched. “No waveforms. Just… blank time.” Arjun only nodded. “That’s where it’s resting.” She looked at him. “Resting?” He smiled, thinly. “Not gone. Just waiting for a stronger signal.”
By the second week, listeners began to report strange feedback when tuning into nearby frequencies—particularly at 3:17 a.m. Not music, not static. Just… presence. A sensation that someone else was in the room. A few old radios—non-digital, analog only—powered on by themselves. No broadcast played, only the red light of the tuning dial glowing softly. One listener left a voicemail for Rhea’s podcast: “I heard a man say ‘Thank you’ in my car. It wasn’t the radio. The engine was off.” She deleted the message, then found it re-recorded into her drive the next day. Arjun, now living off-grid on the outskirts of the city, refused to touch any recording device. He spoke only in open air. No phones, no speakers. “I think it needs reflection to live,” he said once. “Mirrors. Voices. Playback. If you don’t echo it, it can’t grow.” But even that theory came undone when he found a cassette on his doorstep one morning. Blank label. Unmarked tape. Curiosity overwhelmed him. He played it. It was the final playback. His voice. His melody. But sung backwards. The last phrase? “We’ll wait again. Loops are never really closed.” He smashed the tape, burned it, buried it deep in the woods. But that night, he dreamed of a studio. Not his. Older. Filled with mirrors. And in every reflection—himself, broadcasting.
The final confirmation came from Rhea, who had kept one portable reel deck untouched, untested. She finally played it back out of guilt, wondering if she’d let fear silence curiosity. The reel began in silence, and remained there for exactly twenty-nine seconds. Then, softly: “Are you still listening?” The words had no reverb, no distortion. It was her own voice. But she’d never recorded that sentence. And she was alone in the studio. She shut everything down, disconnected the mains, and threw the reel into the river by dawn. That evening, she received a vinyl in the mail. No sender. Just a sleeve labeled DEAD CHANNEL. Inside was nothing. A blank record. But when placed on a turntable, it spun—not forward, not backward, but in slow pulses, as though waiting for a cue. And from the record’s center, if one leaned in close enough, came a voice—Arjun’s, calm and distant: “This is Midnight Playback. We’re still on the air. Somewhere.” The frequency is quiet now. The loop is closed. But listeners still hum the cello line from The Velvet Room in their sleep. Radios still flicker awake at 12:01 a.m. And somewhere between silence and song, a channel waits—not dead, just… patient.
THE END
