“The Black Sky Incident”

Part I

The sky over the Pacific was clear that night—clear enough that the control tower at Haneda could see the last blinking lights of Flight 717 as it climbed to cruising altitude. A Boeing 747, call sign N734PA, bound for Los Angeles. 324 passengers, 17 crew. It vanished from radar at 11:47 p.m. Japan Standard Time, somewhere between the Ogasawara Trench and the dateline. No distress signal. No debris. No mayday. Just silence.

Dr. Elaine Marrow still remembers the first time she heard the playback from Tokyo Control. It wasn’t her case yet. She was working out of Montreal, reviewing meteorological anomalies for the International Civil Aviation Organization. Someone in Japan uploaded the final data burst from 717’s transponder—just static, punctuated by a rhythmic pulse every 4.6 seconds. It didn’t match any known system. It wasn’t weather. It wasn’t interference. It was something else.

The next morning, her supervisor called her in. The Japanese Civil Aviation Bureau wanted an outside consultant. Someone who could tell them if what they’d picked up—what looked like a wave pattern—was atmospheric or electromagnetic. By the time she boarded her flight to Tokyo, Flight 717’s disappearance had already become a global headline.

Theories flooded the networks: hijacking, catastrophic decompression, missile strike, alien abduction. Families begged for answers. Ocean currents drifted thousands of miles with nothing to show but a few unverified seat cushions and an oil slick so small it could’ve come from a fishing boat. The U.S. Navy, Japan Coast Guard, and Australia’s Joint Rescue Command all declared the same thing: no trace.

Elaine spent the first week analyzing radar spectrograms and cockpit communication logs. It all looked routine until 11:46:08, when the aircraft’s altitude data froze. The next second, the signal duplicated itself. Then tripled. Then vanished. As if three copies of the same plane had existed for less than a heartbeat before all of them were gone.

She took the anomaly to her contact at the National Research Institute for Earth Science, who ran it through a waveform filter. The output resembled whale song, but inverted and layered at frequencies humans shouldn’t be able to produce—or survive hearing for long. The technician played a few seconds through a subwoofer. The lights in the lab flickered. The technician’s nose started bleeding. Elaine stopped the playback immediately.

That was when she stopped believing it was just a systems error.

* * * * * *

On the twelfth day of the investigation, a diver named Commander Nikolai Petrov radioed from a salvage ship in international waters. He’d found a sealed titanium cylinder floating 400 nautical miles from the projected crash site. It was dented, heat-scarred, and humming faintly, though the Geiger counter read zero. Inside, wrapped in an aviation maintenance checklist, were two Hi-8 videotapes and a black-box data chip labeled: Flight 717 – Primary Cockpit CVR Extract.

Petrov’s transmission lasted only thirty-seven seconds before cutting out. His final words to the surface were, “You’ll want to hear this yourself.”

Two days later, the package arrived at Elaine’s Tokyo hotel. No return address. The envelope smelled faintly of seawater and diesel fuel. Inside was a flash drive containing digitized footage from the tapes.
A note, printed in Cyrillic, read only: “Do not watch alone.”

* * * * * *

Elaine didn’t listen to the warning.

She set up her laptop on the desk by the window. Outside, the Tokyo skyline was blurred with fog, sodium lamps glowing like stars beneath the clouds. She inserted the drive and opened the first file.

At first, there was nothing—just grain and faint hiss. Then a voice:
“Flight seven-one-seven, maintaining thirty-six thousand, clear skies ahead.”

Captain Hayes. Calm, professional. Another voice followed—Co-Pilot Amir Rahman. They were discussing airspeed corrections.

Then came the hum, low and distant, vibrating through the speakers as though the plane itself were groaning. The pilots noticed too.

“Do you hear that?” Hayes asked.

“Probably wind resonance,” Rahman replied.

But it grew louder. Deeper.

The altimeter began climbing even though the autopilot showed no change in throttle. Hayes tried to correct. The recording distorted. The sound pitched into something like a heartbeat under the roar of engines.

Then a scream. Metal stress.

The final words were fragments through static:
“Descending—no control—something’s—outside—”

The feed ended there.

Elaine sat frozen for several minutes, hand trembling over the touchpad. When she looked down, the playback bar still crawled forward—black screen, white noise. And beneath the noise, faintly, she could hear the pulse again. 4.6 seconds apart. The same as the radar anomaly. Only now it wasn’t coming from the laptop speakers. It was resonating in the walls.

* * * * * *

The next morning, she requested authorization to fly home, citing exhaustion. But before leaving, she copied the entire contents of the flash drive to her encrypted drive, labeling it Project Theta.

She didn’t yet know about the second tape—the one with video.

That one wouldn’t surface until a week later, when a member of the search crew uploaded a blurred still frame to a dark web forum for aircraft disasters.

The image showed what looked like a hand—too long, too thin—grasping the wing of a Boeing midair, with clouds bending around it like water.

And that was the moment Elaine realized: Flight 717 hadn’t fallen. It had been taken.

Part II

The first tape begins without introduction—no timestamp, no pilot identification. Just the dull, rhythmic beep of cockpit instruments, layered beneath the constant hum of pressurized air and the muted thunder of four engines at cruising altitude.

Dr. Elaine Marrow had watched enough cockpit footage to recognize the routine comfort of those sounds. They usually meant everything was fine. But not here. Something about the way the sound carried felt wrong, as though the air itself inside the plane had thickened, swallowing frequencies it shouldn’t have.

The video feed flickered to life. Captain Roland Hayes sits at the controls, framed by the glow of instrument panels. Co-Pilot Amir Rahman adjusts the autopilot. They look calm. Hayes checks the horizon through the windshield—an endless stretch of starlit ocean and cloud.

[23:44:10] – COCKPIT AUDIO RECORDING

Hayes: “Smooth ride tonight.”
Rahman: “Yeah. Feels like silk. Tailwinds are good. ETA’s under ten hours.”
Hayes: “Copy that.”
(pause)
Rahman: “Did you feel that?”
Hayes: “What?”
Rahman: “Like…a vibration. Thought it was turbulence, but the readout’s clean.”

A soft tapping sound emerges in the background, subtle but steady, like knuckles brushing against the hull. Elaine rewound it several times. The frequency was nearly subsonic—twenty hertz, barely audible.

[23:45:06]
Hayes: “Check the radar.”
Rahman: “I’ve got one contact—small return, twelve o’clock high. Might be a flock of birds or another aircraft.”
Hayes: “No transponder?”
Rahman: “Negative. It’s…above us. That can’t be right.”
Hayes: “Altitude?”
Rahman: “Sixty-five thousand.”

The 747 could barely reach forty.

The tapping grew louder, migrating across the fuselage in a sweeping rhythm, as though something massive was feeling its way along the plane.

[23:45:39]
(Audio distortion. Background hum deepens.)
Rahman: “Weather radar’s ghosting. It’s painting something huge—size of a storm cell, but the sky’s clear.”
Hayes: “Is it moving?”
Rahman: “Descending.”
Hayes: “Christ…”

At this point, the flight data began to fluctuate. Airspeed dropped by forty knots; altitude rose without command input. The crew struggled to stabilize the autopilot.

A burst of static interrupts the dialogue. The tone that follows is unmistakable—a resonant, layered frequency, oscillating like a living pulse. It vibrates the cockpit’s microphones until the sound peaks in distortion.

[23:46:21]
Hayes: “Center, this is Flight Seven-One-Seven, requesting deviation to two-eight-zero to avoid unidentified traffic.”
(no response)
Hayes: “Center, do you read?”
(silence)
Rahman: “Communications down.”
Hayes: “Backup channel.”
(static)
Rahman: “Still nothing. That hum—sir, do you hear that?”

Elaine marked the waveform here. The hum wasn’t electronic. It pulsed irregularly—like breathing—alternating between subsonic and infrasonic frequencies.

The plane shuddered. Lights flickered. The video blurred for half a second, as though time itself skipped a frame. When the image stabilized, the windshield was pitch-black—no stars, no clouds, only void.

[23:46:50]
Hayes: “We’ve lost visual horizon.”
Rahman: “Instruments are looping, Captain. Everything’s repeating. Heading data’s frozen.”
Hayes: “Manual control.”
(hydraulic groan)
Rahman: “It’s like we’re caught in a draft.”

Then came the first scream—from the cabin. Faint, distant, muffled by the cockpit door. The microphones caught the sound of panic spreading aft through the plane. Something massive scraped along the fuselage—metal shrieked, followed by a hollow, percussive thud.

Elaine noted the moment frame by frame. Each thud coincided with spikes in the electromagnetic field readings captured by the black box.

[23:47:09]
Hayes: “Cabin pressure warning.”
Rahman: “We’re venting air. Source unknown.”
Hayes: “Descending—now.”
Rahman: “Autopilot unresponsive. Elevator’s locked.”

Another rumble. The instruments went dark, replaced by static bursts on the flight recorder—a chaotic mix of beeping, distortion, and something like wet cloth tearing.

[23:47:22]
Hayes: “It’s outside! It’s—”
(unintelligible scream)
Rahman: “What is that—”
(sound: metallic grinding, followed by bass resonance)

Elaine’s notes pause here. She described the sound as “organic thunder”—a low, rolling tone that fluctuated in pitch the way a living throat might. The hull microphone then captured a high-pressure implosion, though the altitude data recorded no sudden descent.

The last forty seconds of the tape were censored by Japanese authorities in their initial release. When Elaine decrypted her copy, the video showed nothing but static and distortion—except for one frame.

A single silhouette, shadowing the cockpit glass from outside.

It’s impossible to tell what it is—more an outline than a creature, formed from ripples of darkness rather than flesh. A shape both immense and thin, like a continent unfolding above the plane.

The frame lasted 0.2 seconds before the feed cut to black.

* * * * * *

When the audio resumed, all that remained was breathing and static. Then Captain Hayes spoke—barely audible, as though whispering through a failing radio.

Hayes: “We are not alone up here.”

The cabin pressure alarm screamed. The hum returned, louder than before, vibrating at such a frequency the speakers began to crackle. Then, abruptly, the sound reversed—an inverted tone that collapsed into silence.

Flight data ended at 23:47:48.
Altitude: 36,001 feet.
Speed: 452 knots.
Location: 23°N, 172°E.

That was the last transmission from Flight 717.

* * * * * *

Dr. Marrow shut the laptop and sat in the dark of her hotel room, the pulse still echoing in her skull. For a long time, she thought it was tinnitus, but as she sat there, she realized the room’s water glasses were trembling in rhythm.

Four-point-six seconds apart.

Somewhere in the deep silence between pulses, she could swear she heard something else.
Not a sound, exactly—more like the ghost of one. A suggestion of words in a language not meant for human throats.

She pressed her palms over her ears. It didn’t help.

When she opened her eyes, she noticed the pattern her breath had made on the windowpane—a faint spiral, widening outward into the fog beyond the glass.

And within the spiral, for just an instant, she thought she saw movement. Something shifting behind the clouds.

Then it was gone.

Part III

The second tape was labeled “SUTTON_CAM_02.”
No cockpit this time—just handheld footage. Shaky, low-light, the kind of image you’d expect from a frightened passenger trying to document something she didn’t understand.

Dr. Elaine Marrow hadn’t planned to watch it that night. She’d already spent hours transcribing the first tape, cataloguing the pitch of the hum, the exact timing of the frequency pulse. But curiosity has its own gravity. She couldn’t ignore the file sitting in her folder, waiting.

* * * * * *

The video begins with a woman’s voice—young, nervous, whispering in the dark.
“It’s still shaking. They said it’s just turbulence but—look at this.”

The camera tilts toward the window. City lights have long since vanished; outside is only cloud and reflected starlight. Lightning flashes briefly, revealing a horizon that shouldn’t exist—an uneven wall of vapor, curling like smoke around something darker at its center.

“There’s no thunder,” the woman murmurs. “Why is there no thunder?”

Elaine paused playback. She zoomed in on a single frame of the lightning flash. Within the clouds, a circular void—the eye of the storm, but inverted, like a tunnel carved into the night sky. Inside it, faint ridges, branching outward. The more she enhanced the contrast, the more it resembled fingers.

* * * * * *

The video resumes. The camera wobbles as the plane lurches. Passengers shout. The intercom buzzes but no one speaks through it. Oxygen masks deploy—half dangle uselessly. Children cry.

A deep, resonant thud echoes from somewhere below the fuselage. Overhead bins rattle. The camera swings back toward the window, catching a streak of condensation forming geometric spirals across the glass. Then the woman gasps.

Outside the plane, the clouds move sideways.

They don’t drift—they retract, folding away from the plane as though pulled by invisible strings.
For a brief instant, the stars are visible again, but they’re wrong—shifted, rearranged. A sky that doesn’t belong to Earth.

The hum from Tape 001 returns, faint at first, then rising into an impossible frequency. The sound bends the microphone into distortion. At the height of it, the plane banks sharply. Loose items and passengers lift slightly from their seats. Gravity feels uncertain.

Elaine studied this moment dozens of times. Every time the frequency peaked, individual frames warped, as if the camera lens had captured reality bending.

Then something touches the wing.

It enters the frame almost gently—an elongated, grayish structure tapering into multiple narrow prongs, like the branching limbs of coral or the fingers of a hand without skin. Each joint bends in two directions at once. The surface glistens wetly, covered in a film that reflects light in shifting colors.

When the limb connects with the aircraft’s metal, there’s no impact sound. Instead, the noise stops.
Engines, wind, screaming—all cut to dead silence.

For three seconds, the world is completely mute.

Then the wing flexes outward, metal bending as though made of clay. The camera shakes violently. The passengers begin to float—not fully airborne, but half-weightless. A man rises halfway from his seat, eyes wide, as his phone drifts from his hand.

The limb slides along the fuselage toward the cabin window. The closer it moves, the more the camera image fractures into digital snow. Patterns flicker—triangles, spirals, runes that form and vanish faster than the mind can register.

Then the woman whispers something. Elaine had to replay it multiple times to decipher the words:
“It’s looking at us.”

The window glass darkens from the outside. For a moment, the reflection shows her own terrified face. Then another reflection blooms behind her—a vertical slit of light, rimmed in shifting iridescence. Not an eye in any earthly sense, but a presence aware of being seen.

The slit dilates.

Light floods the cabin, pure white, washing over every surface until even the passengers become silhouettes. Their bodies distort in the glare, outlines stretching as though drawn toward the window. The camera shakes, angles wildly toward the ceiling, then the aisle, then the floor. A child’s stuffed animal drifts past the lens.

A sudden, concussive sound tears through the feed—neither explosion nor thunder, but the collapse of air itself.

The light vanishes.

For ten seconds, the screen is black. Audio records faint static, punctuated by irregular pops—like rain striking metal. Then, in one of the final frames before the battery dies, something enormous moves across the darkness outside the window. It’s almost shapeless, defined only by absence, as if carved from the void between stars.

At the edge of its outline, Elaine noticed a ripple—a slow, sinuous motion, like a vast body turning. And then, abruptly, the footage cuts off.

* * * * * *

Elaine sat back in her chair. The room’s silence pressed against her ears. Her laptop screen displayed the final frame: black, streaked with static lines and data corruption. She leaned closer, adjusting the brightness until faint shapes appeared in the noise.

The distortion wasn’t random. It formed a pattern—three concentric circles intersected by curved spokes. She recognized it. It matched the waveform from Tape 001’s infrasound pulse.

Coincidence was impossible.

She played the last few seconds of audio again, isolating the pops and hums. Slowed down, the rhythm wasn’t random at all—it carried cadence. Syllables. The faint impression of speech.

Her translation software rendered nothing meaningful, but one phrase recurred phonetically:
“Kal—seth—uhr.”

No language database recognized it. But the sound of it made the hair on her arms rise.

* * * * * *

The next morning, Elaine received an encrypted email from a Tokyo maritime liaison. Subject line: “Re: Missing Diver.”
Inside were photographs—grainy stills of Commander Petrov’s dive logs. The last image before his disappearance showed the same concentric circle symbol etched into the silt, directly beneath the location where the titanium cylinder had been found.

The timestamp on the photo read 02:14, the same minute Tape 002’s camera had gone dark.

Elaine’s hands trembled as she scrolled to the last page of the report. There was one line written in Russian, highlighted by investigators.
It translated to: “He said it’s still above us.”

* * * * * *

That night, she dreamed she was falling upward through clouds that glowed from within. The sound was all around her—a deep, liquid resonance that shook her bones. She saw the curvature of something enormous, extending beyond vision, each movement trailing vapor and light.

When she woke, she could still hear the hum—not from the dream, but from the walls again.

And as she sat there, staring at the ceiling, she realized the sound was no longer coming from her laptop or from any playback device. It was coming from the sky above the hotel—rising and falling in long, measured waves, four-point-six seconds apart.

She pressed her hands against the window. The glass vibrated.

Outside, Tokyo’s lights flickered once, then again. The clouds were rolling in from the bay—dark, spiraling, forming the same pattern she’d seen in the footage.

The same pattern etched into the seafloor.

The same pattern, she realized, that she had just drawn unconsciously into the condensation on the glass.

Part IV

The research vessel Korolevna drifted in international waters under a fractured moon. Commander Nikolai Petrov leaned over the rail, staring at the ocean’s surface as though it were watching him back. His log entries, later recovered from the ship’s onboard system, began normally—coordinates, water temperature, wind speed—but by the second day, his notes took a darker turn.

DIVE LOG – 19:12 UTC
“Equipment reading pulses. Depth sensors looping. Crew hearing sound through hull—like whales. But too rhythmic.”

The Korolevna had been contracted under the pretense of locating wreckage. But the ocean floor beneath their assigned coordinates held no debris, no impact field, no sign of an aircraft at all. Only a single disturbance in the silt—an impression two hundred meters wide, shaped like a ring.

Petrov’s divers descended with ROV cameras. Their footage showed an otherwise barren seabed, except for a faint glow emanating from the ring’s perimeter. At its center, something metallic reflected the light back. When they approached, their cameras briefly lost focus, as though the water itself had bent around the object.

The divers surfaced carrying the titanium cylinder. It was warm to the touch, vibrating faintly, and completely watertight. They pried it open to reveal the two tapes and a black-box chip, the same artifacts later sent to Dr. Marrow.

But there was one detail missing from official reports: the hum.
The moment the cylinder was brought aboard, the sound began—deep and low, rising through the deck plates like the thrum of an enormous engine.

* * * * * *

Elaine had only the surviving logs to go on when reconstructing what happened next.

DIVE LOG – 23:47 UTC
“Crew agitated. Hum constant, frequency 0.22 Hz. Cannot locate source. Water near hull darker—appears thicker. Radioman claims to hear voices in static.”

By dawn, one of the crewmen had locked himself in the engine room, refusing to come out. He was found hours later, catatonic, his palms pressed over his ears. He would only say, “It’s calling from below.”

Petrov himself recorded several voice memos. The first was calm—practical observations, cataloging frequencies and magnetic readings. The second, found on his personal recorder, was nearly incoherent.

AUDIO LOG:
“It moves beneath us. Not current, not storm. The sonar shows…arms? Not arms. Shapes. Like pillars. They reach for us when it hums.”

After that night, the Korolevna’s transmissions ceased.

When a Japanese coast guard patrol located the drifting vessel forty-eight hours later, they found it abandoned. No sign of struggle, no distress beacon, no lifeboats missing. Only the black box and the cylinder, sealed once more, sitting on the bridge table.

The onboard microphones, still recording, had captured the final minutes before silence.

[02:11:43] – BACKGROUND AUDIO
(Metal groan. Repeating pulse.)
Petrov: “Get back inside! Do not touch the railing—”
(splash)
Unidentified voice: “It’s in the water—”
(sudden distortion, followed by sustained low frequency rumble)
(Silence.)

The hum continues for another two minutes after the last voice is heard. Then the recording ends.

* * * * * *

When Elaine received the salvaged files, she played them through headphones. Her eyes watered instantly from the pressure of the sound—too deep, too physical. She felt it in her bones rather than her ears.

She pulled the headphones off. The hum didn’t stop.

At first, she thought it was an aftereffect, phantom noise like ringing in the ears. But as she stood there in her apartment, she realized it was coming from outside, bleeding through the walls like distant thunder.

Her phone buzzed. It was an encrypted message from an anonymous number:
“Turn off your devices. It tracks signal resonance.”

She froze. Before she could respond, the message deleted itself.

* * * * * *

The official investigation concluded that the Korolevna had succumbed to a methane eruption or freak mechanical failure. Elaine knew better. She’d reviewed the sonar files. The frequency that supposedly marked the eruption matched, down to the decimal, the same 4.6-second pulse embedded in Flight 717’s final transmission.

She compiled her findings into a report she called THE THETA CORRELATION. The analysis cross-referenced the aircraft data, Petrov’s recordings, and atmospheric readings from the night of the disappearance. Every set showed the same synchronized pulse—air, water, radar.

Something had moved through the upper atmosphere and the ocean simultaneously.
Something vast enough to disturb both at once.

* * * * * *

The following week, an emergency meeting was held at the ICAO headquarters in Montreal. Elaine presented her report to a closed committee. She expected skepticism; she was prepared for ridicule. What she wasn’t prepared for was fear.

Halfway through her presentation, the room’s lights dimmed as the projector flickered. The hum filled the speakers again—unprompted, unconnected to any device. The technicians scrambled to shut down the system. The walls vibrated. One of the delegates clutched his chest and collapsed.

Elaine fled the building before the paramedics arrived.

That night, she began receiving recordings from amateur radio operators across the Pacific—each one describing the same phenomenon: faint infrasound pulses interfering with transmissions. Mariners reported instruments failing when flying fish leapt from the sea in synchronized arcs. Air traffic controllers near Guam and Honolulu logged transient radar echoes shaped like rings or hands.

The hum was spreading.

* * * * * *

In her final recorded memo before going off-grid, Elaine spoke directly into her dictaphone. Her voice was calm, steady, but drained of sleep.

“It’s not a storm. It’s not weather or magnetism. It’s something alive.

“I think it exists between mediums—air, water, maybe more.
When it touched the 747, it didn’t destroy it. It phased it out. Like a finger through fog.

“Petrov heard it. I’ve heard it too. It’s using resonance as a bridge.
The same frequency is appearing everywhere—underwater microphones, meteorological sensors, even seismographs.

“If sound can be a language, maybe it’s speaking.
Or maybe it’s calling back.”

She exhaled shakily, and for a moment, there’s silence. Then faint, beneath her voice, the hum returns—low, patient, pulsing at 4.6-second intervals.

“If anyone finds this,” she says, “stay away from the open sky when it’s quiet.
The silence isn’t empty. It’s listening.”

* * * * * *

When investigators later searched her apartment, they found no sign of struggle. Her laptop was still running, displaying the waveform of her last recording. At its end, the frequency abruptly inverts—ascending instead of descending.

The audio cuts off mid-pulse.

On the final frame of her webcam feed, her chair sits empty.
The reflection in the window shows something vast and indistinct—an arc of darkness curving downward, blotting out the clouds above Montreal.

Part V

The final report from Dr. Elaine Marrow was never officially submitted. What survives is a partially decrypted document found on a secure ICAO server three months after her disappearance. It contains no salutation, no sign-off, only a heading:

“PROJECT THETA: PHASE INVERSION EVENT.”

* * * * * *

The first pages are clinical. Charts, spectrograms, annotated timelines. Elaine had cross-referenced radar signatures from over thirty civilian and military stations across the Pacific. The data formed a repeating wave—rising in perfect intervals every 4.6 seconds, stretching across eight hundred nautical miles of open airspace.

Each pulse was strong enough to refract light. Satellite imagery showed clouds bending inward at the moment of each wave, as though the sky were flexing around something invisible. The curvature pointed toward a single location—the same coordinates where Flight 717 vanished.

Her notes read: “Resonance origin is neither fixed nor directional. Suggests a living mechanism of massive scale—possibly atmospheric in nature, or partially extradimensional.”

* * * * * *

The next section is written in fragments, her sentences unraveling as the text goes on.

“The clouds are a membrane. A veil. The entity uses vibration to manipulate density and permeability. When the frequency peaks, space loses rigidity. That’s how it took the plane.

“The hum isn’t noise. It’s pressure. Each pulse thins the barrier. When it finds the right resonance, it opens—like a gill.”

The report continues with comparisons to deep-sea fauna, to jellyfish and siphonophores that communicate through light and vibration. She theorized that the same principle could apply on an atmospheric scale—an organism that lived in layers of the sky too high for conventional radar, feeding not on matter, but on resonance.

Her handwriting in the margins grows uneven:
“Maybe it doesn’t eat us. Maybe it absorbs us—like data.”

* * * * * *

Later entries describe symptoms she’d begun experiencing. Headaches, nosebleeds, distorted hearing. She complained that reflections no longer matched movement, that mirrors seemed “a second behind.” She wrote that she sometimes caught glimpses of “strange weather” from her apartment window—cloud formations spiraling against prevailing winds, flickering as though lit from within.

Her final note before the text breaks into corrupted code reads:
“It’s not gone. It’s waiting for the right frequency. The sky remembers.”

* * * * * *

The rest of what happened must be pieced together from external sources.

At 02:14 on the morning of September 17th, Montreal’s weather radar recorded an anomaly over the St. Lawrence River: a circular distortion ten kilometers wide, rotating counter to all wind patterns. Witnesses along the shoreline reported a faint humming sound, “like a power transformer mixed with a heartbeat.”

Security footage from the ICAO building captured a brief blackout at the same moment. When power returned, several monitors across the facility were displaying the same symbol from Elaine’s research—the concentric circles with curved spokes. The image was not part of any program or system; it appeared spontaneously and could not be removed until the network was physically shut down.

Fifteen minutes later, a cargo pilot flying toward Toronto reported what he described as “a storm that wasn’t a storm.” He claimed the clouds above him folded inward, revealing a hollow void threaded with light. His final transmission was garbled by interference but contained two words that investigators later enhanced:
“It’s opening.”

* * * * * *

Elaine’s audio log ends there. The waveform display on her laptop shows a sharp escalation in amplitude—each pulse closer and closer together until the pattern becomes a continuous tone.

When the signal peaks, the recording distorts into a rush of wind and metal. Then comes a brief, high-frequency shriek—so short it registers as a click to the human ear—and finally silence.

The next frame of video shows her office empty. A glass of water on her desk ripples once, then steadies. Behind the glass, the window reflects nothing.

* * * * * *

Weeks later, fishermen off the coast of Newfoundland discovered a large section of aircraft fuselage washed ashore, its registration number partially intact: N734PA.
Testing revealed the metal to be chemically unchanged, yet the structure itself exhibited microfractures consistent with exposure to extreme pressure—both inward and outward.

Inside the torn metal, investigators found traces of a crystalline residue resembling sea salt.
Under a microscope, each crystal contained minuscule air bubbles that moved slowly, as if alive.

The report was sealed. The wreckage was transferred to a private hangar in Alaska under defense contract.

No remains were ever recovered.

* * * * * *

A final addendum, unsigned, appeared appended to Elaine’s report on the secure server two weeks later. The formatting matched her previous files, but the language did not.

“Do not attempt to locate what was in the sky.
It does not travel—it unfolds.
It is the space between things.
When the pulse returns, it will not be above us or below us.

It will be everywhere.”

No author name, no timestamp.

But embedded in the file’s metadata was an audio snippet—seven seconds of low-frequency hum, repeating precisely every 4.6 seconds.

When analysts filtered the signal, they found that it carried a faint undercurrent of human speech, modulated beyond recognition.

After spectrum inversion and playback, one phrase emerged with startling clarity, whispered beneath the static:
“We are still here.”

* * * * * *

The hum has since been detected intermittently by oceanic research stations and stratospheric sensors worldwide. Each time it manifests, instruments flicker, compasses drift, and communications momentarily fail.

Governments have dismissed the anomalies as technical faults.

But among those who have heard the recordings—the ones who study the pattern late into the night—there’s a shared superstition.

Every 4.6 seconds, they say, when the world pauses between pulses, the silence isn’t empty at all.
It’s the sound of something vast turning its attention back toward us.

And waiting.