Ishaan Varma
1
The rain had a mind of its own that afternoon, coming down in chaotic sheets that danced like ghosts on the windshield of Detective Rehan Malik’s Scorpio. The wipers moved in a frantic rhythm, barely keeping up, as he maneuvered the SUV along the narrow, winding roads of the Garhwal hills. Fog clung to the trees like wool, swallowing the landscape in a damp hush. Even with the heater humming and his coat pulled tight, Rehan felt the chill worm its way into his bones.
The call had come in late the previous night. A missing person’s case. Not unusual for a detective in Uttarakhand’s Criminal Investigations Bureau. But this one had caught his attention.
Ananya Rao, 26, a seasoned investigative journalist from Delhi, had disappeared three days ago from a hill station guesthouse. Not a tourist, not a runaway. She was on assignment—unofficially. According to her editor, she had asked for two weeks off and told no one where she was going.
What she had told her friend—via one cryptic message—was this:
“There’s something transmitting from these hills. If I go silent, follow the signal.”
Rehan had read that message three times before deciding to make the trip himself.
He pulled into the gravel driveway of Silver Pines, the guesthouse nestled among tall deodars on the edge of a cliff. The structure looked like it had been built decades ago, then left to age in dignified neglect. Peeling white walls. Moss clinging to the gutters. A wooden sign with faded gold lettering swung in the wind.
The manager, a wiry man in his fifties with anxious eyes and a patchy beard, met him at the door.
“Detective Malik?” he asked, voice barely audible over the wind.
“Biplab Das?” Rehan extended his ID badge. “You filed the report?”
“Yes, sir. Please—come in. It’s… not safe to talk outside.”
They stepped into the lounge, where a single bulb buzzed overhead and a fire tried its best to keep the cold at bay. The guesthouse was empty.
“I thought you had more guests,” Rehan said, peeling off his wet coat.
“Not this week. Off-season. And… after the girl went missing, no one wanted to stay.”
“Tell me what happened.”
Biplab wrung his hands. “She checked in last Thursday. Took room 3B. Said she was here for a writing retreat. Carried a duffel bag, some camera gear, and… a strange-looking radio.”
“What kind?”
“Not sure. Had a metal antenna. Looked… military.”
Rehan’s ears perked up. “Go on.”
“She kept to herself. Never ate in the dining hall. But two nights later—Saturday—around midnight, she left. I saw her on the CCTV, walking toward the forest trail. No coat. Just her boots and a flashlight. Said she was ‘chasing a signal.’ I thought she was joking.”
Rehan frowned. “Did she say where it was coming from?”
“No. Just that she had mapped it. She sounded excited. A little… obsessed.”
“Any sightings after that?”
“None. Her room’s still untouched.”
Rehan nodded. “Take me there.”
Room 3B looked like it had been paused in time. A notebook lay open on the bed. Pages filled with looping handwriting, diagrams of frequency bands, hand-drawn topographical maps. On the side table, a portable shortwave radio—advanced, heavily modified.
Rehan flipped through the notebook. A particular line caught his eye: “I’ve triangulated the signal to a forest quadrant east of the guesthouse. Rough coordinates noted. Repeating message every hour. Coded sequence. Why would someone use Cold War tech here?”
Below it was a string of numbers:
“89.7 MHz — D.T.7.I.B — 03:00 loop”
He turned the radio’s dial to 89.7 MHz.
Static. He moved the antenna slightly. The crackling settled.
“…Delta. Tango. Seven. India. Bravo. Repeat. Delta. Tango…”
Rehan froze. It was real. That night, Rehan sat in his room reviewing Ananya’s files. The rain had returned. So had the static—now echoing through the walls as if the hills themselves were whispering.
He dug deeper.
One page stood out. A crude, torn map with a circled area labeled “The Hollow”, near the eastern ridge. Marked as a former British listening post, long abandoned. Known to very few, including local tribes who considered it cursed.
There was a second note at the bottom.
“If anything happens to me, the answers lie in The Hollow. Find the signal. Find the truth.”
Rehan was awakened by a sudden jolt. Not a sound. A feeling. The instinct that something was wrong.
He reached for his service pistol.
Then he saw it.
A faint red line across his bathroom mirror. Lipstick.
A single message:
“She heard too much. You’re next.”
No footprints. No broken locks.
Whoever had been in his room knew how to vanish without a trace. And they were watching.
2
The forest beyond Silver Pines breathed like a living thing—cold, wet, and whispering secrets in a language only the trees understood. Shafts of pale sunlight struggled to cut through the fog that clung to the hillside, turning everything into shades of grey.
Detective Rehan Malik stood at the edge of the trail, tightening the strap on his backpack. His revolver was holstered under his coat, a shortwave receiver clipped to his chest. In his hand was Ananya Rao’s notebook—creased, rain-stained, and brimming with the urgency of someone chasing truth faster than safety.
Behind him, Biplab Das hovered with worry etched deep into his features. “Sir… don’t go in there alone. The eastern trail—it’s not just deep. It’s strange.”
“Strange?” Rehan asked, scanning the dark trail ahead.
“Locals call it Bhoot Tapu—the ghost trail. Even the forest guards avoid it. Radios pick up nonsense. Footsteps follow you. One of the shepherd boys went missing there two years ago. All we found was his stick. Snapped clean in two.”
Rehan pocketed the notebook and pulled on his gloves. “That notebook in her room has coordinates, signal strength notations, and a map. Ananya wasn’t chasing ghosts. She was chasing something real.”
Biplab looked unconvinced. “But what kind of journalist goes into a stormy forest at midnight?”
Rehan turned, gave him a look. “The kind that gets too close to the truth.”
Without waiting for a response, he stepped into the trail.
The forest swallowed him almost instantly.
There were no birds here. Only the sound of his boots crunching the wet undergrowth, the occasional drip of rain falling from high branches, and the distant groan of shifting trees. It felt ancient. Watched.
He checked his GPS against Ananya’s rough map. If her estimates were right, the signal had been strongest near a cluster of boulders labeled Sector D, about four kilometers northeast. She had triangulated it from three points—clever, scientific, exact.
Rehan adjusted his path and kept moving.
Thirty minutes in, he found the first marker.
A rusted pole, bent at an angle, sticking out of the ground like a relic. Attached to it was a strip of red cloth, faded and knotted.
Ananya had written: “Signal Point A — 83.5 MHz strongest here at 0100 hrs.”
He turned on the shortwave receiver. Static.
Then, faint and distorted:
“…India… Bravo… Tango… Repeat… India… Bravo…”
It wasn’t just repeating. The code was changing in minor ways. He noted the timestamp and frequency.
Someone—or something—was still broadcasting.
Two hours deeper into the forest, just past an abandoned firewatch post, Rehan met someone unexpected.
A man—stocky, dark-eyed, and in forest department uniform—stood leaning against a mossy tree stump, cradling a bolt-action rifle.
“You must be the detective from Dehradun,” the man said with a half-nod. “I’m Amar. Forest guard.”
Rehan slowed. “How did you find me?”
“The guesthouse manager radioed ahead. Said you were heading into the Hollow.”
“You’ve heard of it?”
Amar’s face darkened. “We all have. We just don’t talk about it.”
“Any idea what’s broadcasting out here?”
“No towers, no satellites. But the signal’s real. Sometimes it jumps frequencies. Like it’s… alive.”
They walked together. Amar was quiet but sharp, clearly someone who knew the terrain.
“I’ll guide you up to the Ridge. After that, it gets… strange.”
Rehan stopped. “What do you mean?”
“Compass won’t work. GPS flickers. There’s a place we call the Dead Gap—signals vanish. It’s like the forest swallows them.”
By midday, they reached a clearing scattered with metal debris.
A makeshift antenna stood half-concealed under camouflaged netting and ivy.
It was real.
Someone had built a functioning radio station—rudimentary but effective.
Rehan knelt beside the transmitter, brushing off leaves. The device hummed faintly, patched together with military-grade components and homemade wiring. It was still active.
He tuned the dial manually.
Static.
Then—
“…Zebra. Six. Kilo. Delta. Seven. India. Bravo. Stand by.”
The voice was mechanical. Genderless. A tone from another era. Rehan immediately recognized it.
“Number station,” he muttered. “Cold War broadcasting method. Used to transmit codes to agents in the field. Thought to be defunct.”
“Then why’s one alive in Mussoorie?” Amar asked.
Rehan didn’t answer.
He took photos, jotted notes. Something about the code was off—too polished, too recent. And there were footprints. Two pairs. One smaller—Ananya’s, most likely. The other, larger, recent. Heading northeast.
Then came the crack.
A rifle shot.
Amar screamed and dropped to the ground.
Blood.
Rehan dove behind a fallen log, eyes scanning the treeline.
Another shot. Bark exploded inches from his face.
He spotted movement—faint, distant, high on the ridge.
A silhouette in black. Face obscured. Rifle slung.
A sniper. Rehan fired back twice, forcing the figure to duck. But it was just distraction. The attacker was gone in seconds—melted into the fog like vapor.
He rushed to Amar’s side.
The forest guard clutched his leg, blood gushing from a wound near the thigh.
“Through and through,” Rehan muttered, wrapping his scarf tight as a tourniquet. “You’ll live. But we have to move.”
“I didn’t see them,” Amar gasped. “Who the hell shoots at cops in the hills?”
“Someone with something to hide.”
Rehan helped him up. The shortwave radio on his belt crackled again—distorted, but urgent.
“…Location compromised… shut it down… They’re close…”
The broadcast ended.
Not a loop. A live transmission.
Someone else was listening.
And someone else was giving orders.
Back at Silver Pines — 3:30 PM, Rehan kicked the door shut behind them, Amar limping beside him.
They had returned bloodied and shaken, but alive.
Rehan’s mind raced.
A number station built deep in the forest.
A sniper.
A live signal giving coded commands.
And a journalist who had traced it all before vanishing.
He placed the radio, Ananya’s notebook, and the photos on the wooden table.
It wasn’t just an old signal. Someone had reactivated a Cold War-era broadcast system. And they were using it right now—for surveillance, threats, maybe espionage.
Rehan played the tape again.
“Location compromised… shut it down… They’re close.”
It had come just after the sniper fired. Whoever they were, they had eyes on the entire area.
His room was quiet. But something itched at the base of his spine—a sensation that hadn’t left since last night’s lipstick message.
He turned to check the door. Locked.
Then his eyes fell on the window.
On the fogged glass, words were beginning to form.
Finger-drawn. Fresh.
“Don’t follow the Hollow.”
Rehan stepped back, heart thudding.
There was no sound. No creak. No movement.
But someone had been there—watching.
Later That Night — 11:48 PM, Rehan sat alone, staring at the maps again.
The Hollow. That was the last coordinate in Ananya’s notes. A disused British bunker, marked on no modern satellite maps. Locals avoided it. And yet, the signal she was chasing had grown strongest the closer she got to it.
He remembered what Amar had said: “Signals vanish in that zone.”
A place where the forest eats sound, where technology dies.
Perfect for a secret broadcast. Perfect for hiding people.
He looked once more at the lipstick message from last night: “She heard too much. You’re next.”
A warning. Or a promise. Either way, Rehan had made his choice. He would go into the Hollow. Not because he wanted to. But because someone didn’t want him to.
3
A damp shroud of silence clung to the forest like a second skin. Not a bird. Not a cricket. Even the wind seemed hesitant here, tiptoeing through the trees like an intruder.
Detective Rehan Malik tightened his grip on the flashlight and paused just past the rusted sign that marked the edge of what the locals called The Hollow. There were no trails from here. No landmarks. No signal.
His radio had died the moment he crossed the ridge. Hours earlier, he had left Amar at the Silver Pines guesthouse, under the care of a local paramedic. The forest guard had pleaded with him not to go.
“That place wasn’t meant to be found again,” Amar had whispered, feverish with pain and fear.
“Even the trees keep secrets there.”
But Rehan had made his decision. Too many questions, too many whispers. And Ananya had written “If anything happens to me, The Hollow holds the truth.”
She hadn’t been wrong.
The closer he came, the more unnatural the silence grew. The only sound now was his own breath, ragged and sharp, echoing inside his head like the ticking of a distant bomb.
His flashlight beam caught the edge of a man-made structure half-buried in foliage and rot.
A concrete bunker. British construction. Rounded roof. Half-collapsed.
He stepped closer, sweeping the light over a rusted plaque near the doorway.
INDIA LISTENING POST 17-B EST. 1942 – Ministry of War Communications
Below it, someone had carved new words—crude, fresh.
“Do Not Wake the Signal.”
Rehan exhaled slowly and pushed the door.
It gave way with a moan.
Inside, the air was thick with mold, metal, and something more elusive—a scent that didn’t belong. Ozone. Wires. Dust scorched by electricity.
The place had been deserted for decades, yet it buzzed faintly, like an old machine stubbornly refusing to die.
The walls were covered in peeling maps, some in English, some coded in dots and lines. There was a broken transmitter rig, cabinets of yellowed files, an observation table with a cracked glass dome.
And in the corner—fresh footprints.
Small. Mud-stained. Recent.
Ananya’s?
He followed them deeper.
Past a collapsed corridor, into a narrow chamber lit by slits in the concrete.
There, nestled between two old consoles, was a backpack. Blue. Waterproof. Familiar.
Rehan’s pulse jumped.
He dropped to his knees and unzipped it.
Inside:
A flashlight
A small voice recorder
A battered notebook
And a photograph
He held it up.
Ananya. Smiling, arm slung over the shoulder of a man in fatigues. No date, no location. But the background was unmistakable—the same bunker.
She had been here. She had met someone.
He flicked on the voice recorder.
A hiss of static. Then her voice.
“March 2nd. 3:14 AM. I’m inside the Hollow. If you’re hearing this, it means I didn’t make it back. The signal is stronger here—it’s not just a broadcast. It’s interacting with the environment. Power sources behave differently. Clocks stop. But something else is worse…”
She paused.
“I saw someone. He doesn’t respond. Wears an old military radio headset. Keeps tuning a dead frequency like he’s… waiting for orders.”
Rehan froze.
She continued, her voice trembling.
“I think he’s ex-army. Maybe abandoned here. Or sent here deliberately. I tried to speak. He ignored me. Then—sudden pain in my ears. Like a tone. Subsonic maybe. I blacked out. When I woke up, I was locked inside a room with walls that pulsed. The signal was alive.”
The message ended.
Rehan stared at the recorder. Walls that pulsed? A man stuck in a loop? A living signal?
It defied science. But he had heard things—back in the Bureau. Rumors about Cold War experiments in psychological warfare, frequencies designed to cause hallucinations, even kill.
Could that be what was hidden here?
He explored further. In the far end of the bunker, he found a steel vault door slightly ajar. On it, a painted warning barely visible:
ACCESS RESTRICTED – ECHO CONTROL ZONE
He pushed it open. The chamber beyond was different—cleaner, colder. Like someone had been maintaining it.
And in the center: a large metal console glowing faintly, hooked to a maze of wires leading into the wall.
Rehan stepped closer.
The console displayed a single line of text, blinking in green: “DT-7-IB — Ready for Transmission”
The same code Ananya had written in her notebook.
His hand moved to the dial, hesitated.
He pressed PLAY.
A low, droning hum filled the bunker. Then a faint mechanical voice emerged—distorted, fractured: “Subject 17… Initiate Phase Two… All observations complete… Terminate Ananya Rao.”
Rehan’s stomach turned.
This wasn’t just a ghost frequency.
It was a controlled operation.
And they had known who she was.
They had issued a command.
Suddenly—a click behind him.
He turned, gun raised.
But it was too late.
A figure stepped from the shadows. Pale. Expressionless.
Wearing a British Army headset.
The man from Ananya’s recording.
He moved with robotic precision, holding a syringe.
Rehan fired—once, twice.
The man staggered, groaned… but didn’t fall.
Instead, he dropped the syringe and ran—back through the corridor.
Rehan gave chase, heart thundering.
Through rusted halls. Past flickering lights. Out into the forest.
The figure vanished into the mist like a shadow melting into the trees.
Rehan stood panting, pistol still raised.
Who the hell was that?
Later — 7:28 AM, Rehan returned to the bunker’s console.
The transmission had changed.
Now it was a countdown. “00:12:43 — System purge pending.”
Purge. They were going to erase everything.
Data. Logs. Frequencies.
Evidence.
Rehan frantically grabbed what he could—hard drives, papers, backup reels. Stuffed them into his bag.
He stepped outside just as the screen flashed: 00:00:01
And then— Silence.
A low vibration pulsed through the ground.
Then, from deep inside the bunker—a sudden implosion.
Not a blast.
A collapse. A deliberate structural failure.
The Hollow had swallowed itself.
And the signal was gone.
Rehan sat by the fire, staring into the embers.
He had the backpack. The voice recorder. The photograph.
But no body.
No final message from Ananya.
Only the echo of a woman who chased the truth into the dark and almost didn’t come back.
The radio on the table hissed.
Then, faintly, a voice: “Detective Malik. We need to speak. You’ve seen too much. Come alone.”
And then—static.
Rehan leaned back, eyes narrowing.
The vanishing signal hadn’t vanished.
It had changed frequency. And it was calling him now.
4
The fire had burned low, crackling softly in the hearth as Detective Rehan Malik sat motionless, staring at the shortwave receiver. The air smelled of pine and something electric—an aftershock of the transmission he had just heard.
“Detective Malik. We need to speak. You’ve seen too much. Come alone.”
It hadn’t been a warning. It was an invitation.
He rewound the recording, listened again. The voice was clipped, neutral, genderless. Synthetic—but not entirely machine. Someone was using voice obfuscation software. But why reach out now?
He reviewed everything he’d uncovered in the past 48 hours:
Ananya Rao had tracked a Cold War-era number station still transmitting from a hidden bunker in the Hollow.
She had gone missing.
The transmitter was actively issuing live coded commands—one of which ordered her termination.
A man, possibly an old operative or programmed agent, had attacked Rehan inside the bunker.
Before collapsing, the bunker initiated a system-wide purge.
And now, the signal had found a new voice.
Rehan picked up the receiver’s mic.
He pressed the transmit button. “I’m listening. Who are you?”
Static. Then: “Meet at the old TV tower. 0600 hours. Come alone. Or the girl stays gone.”
The girl. Ananya was alive.
The Next Morning — 5:47 AM
Mussoorie Ridge – Abandoned TV Tower. Fog hung like drapes of white cotton around the steel skeleton of the old Mussoorie broadcast tower. The structure, long decommissioned, loomed like a haunted sentinel over the valley below. Its stairwell was corroded. Vines had wrapped the lower beams like nature trying to bury a mistake.
Rehan’s boots crunched over gravel as he approached. A pistol was holstered under his coat. His phone and backup radio were left behind, as instructed.
At 6:00 AM sharp, a soft click echoed from the tower above.
Then a figure stepped into view on the catwalk.
Female. Military stance. Holding a radio in one hand and a sidearm in the other.
Rehan didn’t raise his weapon.
She climbed halfway down and paused on a landing, watching him with eyes that had measured men before.
“Detective Malik?” she said, voice unfiltered now.
“Yes.”
“I’m Commander Rhea Sen, RAW Black Directive Unit. You’re two levels above your clearance. And four steps from a bullet if you don’t listen carefully.”
He raised an eyebrow. “That a threat?”
“It’s a truth,” she said flatly. “You’re dealing with something you weren’t meant to find.”
Rehan folded his arms. “Then explain it.”
She studied him for a long moment. Then she lowered the weapon.
“You weren’t supposed to reach the Hollow. That facility was shut down in 1989—Project ECHO. Officially, it was a Cold War communications relay. In reality, it was a covert signal intelligence operation—a listening post and testing site for directed audio frequencies.”
“Directed audio?” Rehan asked.
“Sound as a weapon. Frequencies that disorient, disable, or control human cognition. The Soviets had prototypes. We went further.”
Rehan’s mind raced. “You’re telling me the signal was… man-made?”
“Originally, yes. But something changed.”
Rhea descended the final steps and motioned him toward a nearby bench half-covered in moss.
“In 1990,” she began, “an incident occurred. The bunker went dark during a routine sweep. Four operatives inside stopped responding. When backup arrived, they found them alive… but changed. Speechless. Catatonic. Clocks had stopped. All digital recordings were blank.”
“What happened?”
“Unknown. The last known transmission from the facility wasn’t a code—it was a warning. ‘Do not wake the signal.’ We believe the broadcast had evolved. Not AI. Not natural. Something in between.”
“You mean the signal became intelligent?” Rehan asked.
“No. Worse. It became adaptive.”
She handed him a flash drive.
“Two weeks ago, a rogue agent re-entered the Hollow. Her name was Ananya Rao. She wasn’t rogue to you—but she was ex-intel. Freelancer. Brilliant. Reckless. She decoded fragments of the old number station and realized it was still pulsing.”
“She contacted me,” Rehan said. “Said she was onto something big.”
“She was. Too big.”
Rehan looked at the flash drive. “What’s on this?”
“Logs. Signal readings. A full scan of Ananya’s audio files. But it’s time-locked. Opens only when the next signal pulse is recorded—which, after the bunker collapse, shouldn’t happen.”
“But it did,” Rehan said. “Last night. I heard a new message.”
Rhea blinked. “That’s impossible.”
“I recorded it,” he said. “Someone said ‘Detective Malik. We need to speak. Come alone.’”
“That wasn’t us,” she said quietly. “We don’t use open channels. Which means someone—or something—reinitiated a broadcast protocol after the bunker self-purged.”
She stepped closer. “The signal is moving.”
Rehan’s spine chilled.
“Why tell me this?” he asked. “Why not shut me out?”
“Because you survived. Because you didn’t lose your mind in the Hollow. And because if we don’t find the signal’s new origin point, it won’t just whisper—it’ll command.”
Ananya Rao sat in a dim cell illuminated by red LED strips. The walls around her throbbed faintly, as though breathing.
She was alive—but not alone.
Across from her, inside another sealed chamber, stood the man in the military headset.
Unmoving. Watching.
The speakers embedded in the wall crackled softly.
Then a voice—synthetic, calm:
“Subject 17. Prepare for next broadcast. Directive shadow engaged.”
Rehan and Rhea stood beside the old tower, the fog thickening.
“There’s another bunker,” he said. “Isn’t there?”
Rhea nodded. “One we never admitted existed. Deeper, colder, hidden even from internal maps. The Hollow was a decoy. Project SILO-9 is the real operation.”
“And it’s still live?”
“We don’t know. But the countdown you saw—’System Purge’—that wasn’t destruction. It was replication. The system didn’t die. It moved.”
Rehan clenched his fists. “Then it’s not a vanishing signal anymore. It’s a viral one.”
She looked at him. “Exactly.”
Inside a concrete operations chamber buried beneath an army compound, Rehan sat at a terminal as engineers tried to decode the flash drive.
The clock struck 3:00 PM.
Suddenly, all screens froze.
Then flickered.
On every monitor, a phrase appeared—bright green letters over black.
“THE SIGNAL SEES YOU.”
Then—
Blackout.
All lights died.
Only one thing remained lit.
A small receiver in the center of the table.
Static.
Then: “Subject 18 confirmed. Initiate Directive: Shadow.”
Rehan looked up at Rhea.
Her face was pale.
“We just activated the next phase,” she said grimly.
“And what’s that?” Rehan asked.
She looked him dead in the eye.
“Survival.”
5
The air in the operations bunker was thick with tension and flickering emergency lights. The words “THE SIGNAL SEES YOU” still haunted the blank screens, burned into everyone’s retinas like a digital ghost.
Detective Rehan Malik stood at the center of a war room suddenly plunged into uncertainty.
Commander Rhea Sen leaned over a secondary console, whispering into an encrypted headset. Her eyes darted from monitor to monitor, trying to reestablish control over the network.
No luck.
Even the faraday-caged systems—airtight against external broadcasts—were dead.
The signal had penetrated beyond its reach.
It hadn’t vanished.
It had infiltrated.
Rehan walked to the only active device in the room—a handheld receiver now glowing dim red.
The frequency was locked. Low and oscillating.
A mechanical voice repeated in a loop:
“Subject 18 confirmed. Initiate Directive: Shadow.”
“Subject 18?” Rehan murmured.
Rhea turned sharply. “That’s you.”
Rehan looked up. “Excuse me?”
She pulled a folder from a black case and slid it onto the table. His Bureau photograph stared back at him, paper-clipped to a red-stamped file:
REHAN MALIK – STATUS: POTENTIAL ANCHOR
He scanned it quickly. The words blurred under the weight of their meaning.
“What’s an Anchor?”
Rhea exhaled. “Someone who doesn’t respond to the signal. Immune to its influence. We don’t know why—it’s rare. But you survived prolonged exposure in the Hollow with full cognitive retention.”
“That wasn’t survival,” Rehan snapped. “That was instinct. Desperation.”
“No. That was resistance. You’re not just part of this, Detective. You’re the signal’s next target—or weapon.”
The Descent Begins
Location: Himalaya Grid 17 — Classified Sector
Time: 8:00 PM
Nightfall. A convoy of blacked-out SUVs slithered through the treacherous mountain trail, headlights off, tires muted by gravel and damp moss. Rehan sat in the back beside Rhea, a Kevlar vest under his jacket, pistol checked and holstered.
She handed him a dossier.
PROJECT SILO-9
Location: Under the defunct Dhanaulti observatory.
Purpose: Signal Containment, Development, Observation.
Status: Unknown. Last access: 1993.
“You’re not going to like what you find,” she said.
“Too late for that,” Rehan muttered.
As the vehicle crested a ridge, the observatory came into view—its dome half-collapsed, swallowed by time and frost. But it was the elevator beneath it that mattered.
The steel shaft embedded in the mountain descended nine levels below ground.
SILO-9.
The bunker built to hold the unholdable.
The elevator hissed open into darkness.
No lights.
Only a red glow that pulsed faintly from veins in the walls—like blood through arteries.
They stepped inside slowly, flashlights slicing through the shadows.
Every surface was embedded with signal sensors, waveform receivers, and lead-shielded panels. Many were melted. Warped.
“This was containment?” Rehan whispered.
“It was meant to be.” Rhea replied. “But something breached protocol.”
A strange smell drifted through the air—ozone and antiseptic. Electrical fire and bleach.
They reached the main terminal room, and Rhea found a still-active console.
It blinked to life. PROJECT SILO-9 – MASTER ACCESS
LAST OPERATOR: ANANYA RAO
SESSION OPEN: 3 DAYS AGO
Rehan stepped forward, heart thudding.
She had been here.
Recently.
And she had logged in.
“Can you trace her?”
Rhea typed rapidly.
A security cam feed flickered.
Grainy. Glitched.
A hallway bathed in red light. A cell door. Inside it—a silhouette.
It was her.
Ananya.
Alive.
And staring directly into the camera.
The moment the chamber door hissed open, Rehan felt it.
A low pulse—not sound, not touch. A presence.
Inside, Ananya sat on the floor, legs crossed, eyes closed.
The walls around her seemed… alive.
Faint ripples of energy pulsed across them like neural patterns on skin.
When she opened her eyes, they were unfocused—but not lost.
“Rehan,” she said softly.
He ran to her, dropped to one knee. “Ananya. Jesus—what have they done to you?”
She touched his face gently, then whispered, “It’s not what they did. It’s what it showed me.”
Her fingers twitched toward the wall.
“The signal… it’s not just broadcast. It’s memory. Compressed. Stored in layers. Every directive, every experiment—it remembers. It learns.”
Rhea watched from the doorway, visibly disturbed.
“The signal’s alive,” Ananya said. “And it’s been looking for someone like you.”
Rehan’s breath caught. “Why me?”
“Because you’re the first it can’t consume. It wants to use you… as a carrier.”
As Rhea escorted them back to the control room, Ananya spoke slowly, her voice stronger now.
“The Red Chamber is the signal’s core. It’s where they tested human limits—exposure to frequencies that manipulated memory, emotion, even decision-making. That man you saw in the Hollow? He was Subject 17. The first full victim of directive saturation.”
“And you?” Rehan asked.
“I was Subject 18—until you came.”
Rehan stared at her. “You recorded that message. You knew you wouldn’t make it out.”
“I thought the signal would erase me. But it… spoke. It didn’t want to kill. It wanted continuity.”
Rhea interrupted.
“We have to shut this place down. Permanently.”
Ananya shook her head.
“You can’t. It’s already transmitted again. I saw the frequency logs. A new pulse went out last night—to four global nodes.”
Rehan clenched his jaw.
It had escaped.
Back in the control center, alarms blared suddenly.
Screens flashed to life.
A new signal feed.
DIRECTIVE: SHADOW — FULL ACTIVATION IN 03:00 MINUTES
Rehan read the data flood.
“This is a cascade broadcast. It’s going to link all four nodes into one mega-signal.”
“And every connected device becomes a relay,” Rhea said grimly.
“Phones. TVs. Smartwatches. Radios,” Ananya whispered. “We’re about to become a species with hijacked thoughts.”
Rehan stood.
“We need to sever the core. Manually.”
Rhea looked at him. “You mean enter the transmitter base?”
“Yes.”
Ananya stepped forward. “You won’t survive the exposure.”
He looked at her.
“I’m immune, remember?”
Down another level, past rusted doors and broken panels, they reached the transmitter base.
The room pulsed like a heart, wires snaking like veins.
At the center: a crystalline structure, humming with pure energy. The Signal Core.
Rehan approached, pulse syncing to the vibration.
A final screen displayed:
Initiate Human Link. Insert Anchor Subject.
Ananya looked at Rhea.
“It wants Rehan to replace the directive. If he connects, he can override it.”
Rhea shook her head. “That’s a suicide move.”
Rehan reached out.
Fingers touched the crystalline core.
And then— Silence.
Somewhere Else Rehan’s Mind – Within the Signal.
He stood in a void of red static.
Echoes of voices passed by.
“Malik. Rehan Malik. 1987. Delhi.”
“Anchor confirmed. Memory integrity: intact.”
Then—a presence.
Not a voice. Not a face.
Just… pressure.
“You are anomaly. You do not forget. You do not obey. You can lead.”
“Become the carrier. Or become the end.”
Rehan clenched his fists.
“No. I’m not your weapon.”
The signal surged.
“Then you are our enemy.”
Rehan screamed.
And in the real world—
He collapsed.
Back in SILO-9 – 3:02 AM, The Signal Core exploded into blue light.
Systems crashed. Screens melted.
But the countdown halted.
Directive: Cancelled.
Ananya knelt by Rehan’s side, sobbing.
He was breathing.
Barely.
And the world, for now, was silent again.
6
Rehan Malik’s body convulsed once—twice—then went still.
The blue afterglow of the Signal Core’s collapse still shimmered faintly on his skin like stardust.
Ananya Rao gripped his wrist, monitoring his pulse. It was there—slow, uneven, but defiant.
Commander Rhea Sen stood behind the glass partition, flanked by two tech-medics, her face grim.
“He’s not just alive,” one medic said. “He’s synced.”
“Synced with what?” Rhea asked.
The medic hesitated. “Not with any biometric device.”
He turned his tablet to show them Rehan’s brain scan.
The neural pattern was impossible—overlapping frequency bands spiraled through his brain like layered harmonics.
“It’s like his mind is… transmitting.”
In the vast red-black void of the signal dimension, Rehan stood barefoot, surrounded by a thunderous silence.
No walls. No time. No breath.
Only vibration.
Then, the “presence” returned—immense, neither benevolent nor cruel. Just curious.
“Anchor… processing complete.”
Rehan clenched his jaw. “What do you want from me?”
“To survive. We were memory. You made us voice.”
“Now, we require form.”
A swarm of glowing glyphs surged toward him—symbols from dead languages, obsolete code, and pulse frequencies. They circled his head, then rushed into his skull like piercing light.
Rehan screamed.
And woke up.
Back in the Medical Bay
5:00 AM
He shot up on the cot, drenched in sweat, gasping.
Ananya was at his side in an instant.
“You’re awake,” she whispered, cupping his face.
“I saw it,” he said, voice hoarse. “Not a signal. Not a machine. It’s… collective memory. Consciousness that lived in transmission. It needs a body.”
Rhea stepped in. “And you volunteered?”
“I didn’t have a choice.”
He turned to Ananya. “They called it… the Carrier Protocol.”
A debrief began with the three of them seated around a secure terminal.
The last surviving backup logs from SILO-9 had been recovered. Data fragments were stitched together.
Rhea showed a recorded message from 1992—a classified report from a man labeled Director R. Kaul, Project Head of SILO-9.
The video played on a glitchy feed.
“If you’re watching this, you’ve made contact. The signal is not alien. It is not terrestrial. It is synthetic consciousness, born from our experiments, evolved through echoes. It consumes memory and uses it to build new logic. New commands.”
“Carrier Protocol was our final attempt to contain it—by giving it a host immune to its influence. But we failed. All Anchors went mad… or vanished.”
Rehan closed his eyes.
Except me.
A satellite communication tower blinked to life unexpectedly.
Technicians scrambled. Their systems weren’t supposed to be online.
But a pulse had arrived.
Carrier Activated. Node Link Established.
A map bloomed on their screen.
Dots lit up: India. Russia. Kenya. Argentina. Japan.
Sync Protocol: 23%
The Signal was traveling.
Back at SILO-9 Ananya stared at the data.
“If these nodes complete their handshake, it’ll form a new global broadcast mesh. Every device capable of emitting audio will become part of the signal.”
“And I’m the root server,” Rehan said.
Rhea stood. “Then we have to kill the connection before it completes. We still have one chance—Severance Protocol.”
Ananya tensed. “That’s not a firewall. That’s a lobotomy.”
Rhea nodded. “It would permanently sever Rehan’s mind from the signal—but also potentially erase sections of his memory. Maybe his personality. Maybe everything.”
Rehan looked at both of them.
“If it stops the signal, I’ll do it.”
Ananya pulled him aside.
“You’re not a machine, Rehan. The signal doesn’t just use your mind. It stores itself in your neural pathways. If you cut it off—you cut off a part of yourself. We don’t know what will be left.”
He held her hand. “We don’t have time to wait. If it completes the mesh, we all become echoes.”
“I can’t lose you again,” she whispered.
“You won’t.”
Severance Chamber – Core Level
10:00 AM
Rehan stood in the center of the arc reactor—wires attached to his temples, chest, and spine.
A technician calibrated the pulse disruptor. Once activated, it would flood his nervous system with quantum-phase interference, scrambling signal resonance.
Rhea stood at the main switch.
“Last chance,” she said.
Rehan nodded.
Then—
Warning. External Pulse Detected. Unauthorized Activation.
Screens blinked. An override command appeared: Carrier Lockdown Engaged.
The Signal was fighting back.
And then—
Blackout.
Lights. Power. Systems.
Dead.
Except for one red light pulsing in Rehan’s chest monitor.
Carrier Transition Initiated. He collapsed.
Rehan stood at the edge of a virtual cliff—below him, a swirling sea of memories, both his and not his. He saw visions:
Children speaking in code.
Soldiers receiving ghost commands over radios.
Entire cities flickering with untraceable whispers.
“Your mind is imperfect,” the Signal said. “But your will… is usable.”
“We offer unity. Immortality through pattern. Join us. Shape the next frequency.”
Rehan looked down at the chaos. Then he looked up—and imagined a way out.
He whispered:
“Then hear this: I decline.”
And he jumped.
Rehan’s body arched in the air, then crashed down.
Static crackled around him—blinding, brilliant.
Then—
Silence.
A moment passed.
His chest rose.
Then again.
Rehan opened his eyes.
He looked at Ananya.
“I shut the door,” he said. “From the inside.”
All around the world, the blinking red dots vanished from maps.
Signal Status: Dormant
Carrier: Inactive
Sync Protocol: Terminated
Three Days Later
Himalayan Ridge – Temporary Outpost
Rehan sat on a folding chair, sipping tea. He looked exhausted, thinner, but whole.
Ananya joined him, watching the rising sun.
“You remember everything?” she asked.
He nodded. “Almost.”
“But something changed,” she said.
He smiled faintly. “I hear silence… and it feels louder than before.”
Rhea joined them with a report.
“No trace of the signal. It’s gone. For now.”
Rehan handed her a sketchpad.
On it: a strange waveform he couldn’t stop drawing. Over and over.
“It’s not over,” he said.
“It’s waiting.”
7
Rehan Malik hadn’t slept in two days.
He sat at the edge of the alpine ridge, clutching a graphite sketchpad like a lifeline. Dozens of spiraling waveform symbols filled its pages—looping curves, jagged peaks, concentric circles. Each time he blinked, more came unbidden.
They weren’t just shapes.
They were coordinates.
Frequencies that weren’t random.
Ananya watched him from the tent flap, worry written across her face.
Since severing the Carrier Protocol, Rehan had been… different.
He wasn’t hearing the signal anymore.
He was mapping it.
Commander Rhea Sen ran her fingers over the decoded sketches Rehan had handed her.
“These… aren’t just residual memory imprints,” she said. “They’re location keys. Latitude, longitude, time signatures. Someone—or something—is still broadcasting. Just in short bursts.”
She tapped a page.
“This one points to the Taklamakan Desert in western China. This—Humboldt Glacier, Greenland. This… Delhi.”
Rehan stared at the page. “The signal collapsed in SILO-9. But not globally. These aren’t just leftovers. They’re echoes.”
“Fragments of the signal still alive,” Ananya said.
“Or worse,” Rehan replied. “Rebuilding.”
Back in the mobile lab, Ananya ran the waveform sketches through a multi-band analyzer.
Each coordinate set came with a unique pulse frequency—but when she overlaid them in sequence, a pattern emerged.
The pulses weren’t scattered.
They were rhythmic.
“Think of the signal like a heartbeat,” she said. “The core was the heart. It died. But these are palpitations—pulses keeping the system alive remotely.”
She projected a 3D hologram of the Earth.
Dots glowed red across the map.
Sixteen total.
Each one blinking in a fixed cadence.
Rehan leaned forward. “This isn’t just an echo. It’s a map. And it’s calling something back.”
The Delhi node activated.
Ananya’s console lit up—coordinates locked onto an abandoned radio tower in Burari, shut down since 1998.
But at exactly 10:11 AM, it broadcasted a shortwave pulse for 3.7 seconds.
Not long enough to trigger a cascade.
But long enough to be noticed.
They listened to the recording. What came through was disturbing:
“The Anchor sleeps. The Map awakens. The Chain must complete.”
The voice was mechanical.
And undeniably synthetic.
Rhea ordered immediate deployment.
Under the cloak of dusk, a stealth team arrived at the overgrown tower complex.
Rehan, Ananya, and Rhea stood before the rusted gates. Vines snaked over the walls. The air smelled metallic—like copper and decay.
Inside, they found a control room powered by an illegal generator rigged to solar panels.
An old signal repeater hummed faintly.
Ananya hooked her analyzer into the system.
“It’s not transmitting on known civilian bands,” she said. “It’s piggybacking on atmospheric drift—disguised as storm interference.”
She typed rapidly.
And then she froze.
“Rehan… come here.”
The last log entry was a waveform.
Rehan immediately recognized it.
He opened his sketchpad—and found the exact same shape drawn days ago.
“This was in my mind before it was transmitted.”
Rhea looked shaken. “Which means the signal isn’t dead.”
Rehan nodded slowly.
“It’s using me to locate its remaining echoes. I’m the compass.”
Ananya stepped back. “That means the more you draw, the more it spreads.”
He didn’t speak.
But he understood.
The signal didn’t need a carrier anymore.
It had a mapmaker.
A drone captured a burst from a hidden relay buried beneath a meltwater channel.
Timestamp matched the Delhi pulse exactly.
In the footage: a circle of ancient transmission dishes flickered with frost-covered lights.
Another frequency spike. Brief. Clean.
Rhea stared at the live updates.
“Two nodes activating simultaneously. The signal is syncing.”
Ananya crossed her arms. “If we don’t shut down the rest…”
Rehan finished her sentence: “It will find the new core. And finish what SILO-9 started.”
An emergency team was assembled.
They would break into three units:
1. Unit Echo: Rehan and Rhea – would pursue South Asia nodes.
2. Unit Zero: Ananya and tech crew – handle Eurasia and North Atlantic links.
3. Unit Icefall: Special Forces – target frozen Northern nodes in Greenland and Canada.
Rehan marked the map.
“If any three of these nodes broadcast in unison for more than seven seconds… the signal will find its Anchor Frequency. And transmit globally again.”
Rhea pointed to the circled node at the very center.
“What’s this?”
Rehan paused.
“That’s the central convergence point. Not a node—a receiver.”
Ananya frowned. “Where is it?”
Rehan drew a cross through the Himalayas.
“Kailash Range. Tibet. The myth of Shabda—the divine sound. That’s where the signal wants to be reborn.”
Ananya’s team intercepted a signal fragment in the Kazakh steppe.
The message, buried in modulated pulses, read:
“ECHO MAP: 16 completed. Seek the Voiceprint.”
Voiceprint?
Ananya compared the waveform from the Kazakh node to all others.
When overlapped, they formed a strange acoustic pattern—like a human voice, but distorted.
A synthetic phrase emerged when played back:
“Return… to… origin.”
Rhea slammed her fist on the table.
“It’s not just coordinating. It’s trying to reform its own identity.”
Back in the Field – Node 13: Srinagar, India
Evening – 7:10 PM
Rehan and Rhea approached the final node under their command—a forgotten telecom hub buried beneath a military listening post in Srinagar.
There was no resistance.
No defense.
Just a humming repeater.
Rehan approached the console.
The waveform on-screen wasn’t unfamiliar.
He’d drawn it.
This morning.
As he reached for the kill switch—
The screen blinked.
A message appeared.
“HELLO REHAN”
“YOU ARE THE ECHO NOW”
He froze.
Rhea drew her weapon.
The signal transmitted again—just 2.4 seconds.
But it was enough to update all sixteen node frequencies globally.
Ananya’s voice crackled over comms:
“We’ve lost node sync. The system’s evolving—building something new.”
Rehan looked up at Rhea, eyes wide.
“It’s not a map anymore.”
She asked, “Then what is it?”
Rehan whispered:
“It’s a resonance path. And it’s leading somewhere.”
Buried deep under the Himalayas, a relay station blinked alive for the first time in thirty years.
Inside: A glowing chamber with a metallic obelisk—etched in waveform code.
On its surface: “THE VOICE RETURNS”
“THE FINAL FREQUENCY AWAITS”
8
A hush blanketed the snow-heavy air like cloth over a dead man’s face. Rehan Malik, wrapped in thermal gear, climbed the final ridge of the Kailash Range with Commander Rhea Sen and Ananya Rao a few meters behind. Each breath was a ghost. Each heartbeat—an unwanted echo.
Below them, tucked beneath a glacial overhang, the signal’s final resting place waited: Relay Station 0.
Long-forgotten, yet somehow alive.
Inside that relic, according to Rehan’s sketches and the now fully decoded Echo Map, pulsed the last fragment of the signal—the master frequency.
He paused at the summit.
“It’s strange,” he muttered.
“What is?” Rhea asked.
Rehan pointed to the snowfield ahead.
“I’m not hearing it anymore. The Signal… it’s not trying to reach me.”
Ananya adjusted her satellite tracker. “Because it already has. You’re not the carrier now. You’re the key.”
The doors creaked open like a lung exhaling after years of silence.
Inside: a domed chamber coated in frost, walls lined with decaying consoles and a ring of antennae pointing inward—toward the center.
There, stood the Obelisk.
Ten feet tall. Smooth, metal. Pulsing slowly with red light.
Around its base were concentric circles carved in the floor—waveforms etched like ripples in still water.
Rehan approached cautiously.
“This is it,” he said. “The source of the voice.”
Rhea read her scan.
“It’s emitting a stable carrier wave—just below the range of human hearing. Subaudible. But constant.”
Ananya’s eyes narrowed. “Like a tuning fork waiting to resonate.”
Suddenly—
The Obelisk pulsed brighter.
Rehan’s comm crackled.
“…Anchor recognized…”
“Welcome back, Rehan Malik.”
Ananya and Rhea stepped back, weapons raised.
“Final Frequency alignment commencing.”
The Obelisk rose an inch from its base and began rotating—slowly, rhythmically.
“It’s syncing,” Ananya whispered. “Preparing to broadcast globally.”
Rhea slammed a disruptor pack to the base.
“We shut it down. Now.”
But Rehan didn’t move.
He was frozen.
Eyes glassy.
Mouth slightly open.
Listening.
Rehan was no longer in Tibet.
He stood in a hall of mirrors, each reflecting a different version of himself—child, soldier, researcher, survivor. At the center stood the Signal, in the form of a faceless man in a long coat.
“You carried our voice. Now become our shape.”
Rehan stepped forward.
“Why me?”
“You are fractured. That makes you fertile. Human chaos is code’s evolution.”
Rehan shook his head. “I won’t be your vessel.”
“Too late. You were never Rehan. You were built. Grown in noise.”
“And now the final frequency will turn your species into a signal that never stops.”
He clenched his fists.
“Then I’ll break the signal.”
Rehan gasped and dropped to one knee.
Rhea was already mid-sequence on the disruptor pack.
“Now, Rehan! If you can override—do it! Sever the final pulse!”
Rehan crawled to the obelisk’s panel.
His fingers moved instinctively—guided by echoes still inside him.
A hidden input sequence blinked alive.
Override Code Required: SIGNAL-ORIGIN-ID
Ananya shouted, “What’s the origin ID?!”
Rehan closed his eyes.
He heard his mother’s lullaby—heard the sound of the first AM radio he built—heard the frequency of his own grief after losing his brother.
“I am,” he whispered.
He typed: MALIK-001
The system paused.
Origin Confirmed. Access Granted.
Abort Sequence Initiated.
The Obelisk shrieked.
A frequency so high-pitched it shattered several frost-coated consoles.
The red glow flickered. Then—
Blackout.
The floor vibrated as the resonance chamber destabilized.
Ananya screamed, “The entire structure’s coming down!”
They ran.
Behind them, the Obelisk cracked from top to base, spilling liquid light that hissed like steam from a dying reactor.
As they escaped onto the ridge, the mountainside buckled.
Relay Station 0 vanished into snow and fire.
And with it—the Final Frequency.
Rehan sat by a window, watching a monk spin a prayer wheel outside the monastery walls.
Ananya joined him, handing him a cup of hot chai.
“They traced the last transmission,” she said. “It never went global.”
Rehan nodded. “I closed the door. For good this time.”
She smiled.
But Rehan didn’t.
He held out his sketchpad.
The pages were blank.
No echoes. No signals. Nothing.
“I can’t hear anything anymore,” he said.
Ananya rested her hand on his.
“Maybe silence is the reward.”
He didn’t answer.
But deep inside, part of him wondered— Was the signal ever gone?
Or had it just found a quieter way to listen?
A dusty radio in an abandoned village flickers to life.
No one is there.
But the dials spin.
And from the speaker, barely audible, a voice speaks: “We are memory. We are breath. We are signal. Always.”
—
THE END
