23 May Crossarm

Part I

The storm had been brutal. Not just loud, but long and powerful, like something ancient had torn its way through the sky. The kind of wind that ripped signs off gas stations and turned treetops into shrapnel. A hundred miles of damage lay in its wake, power out from Fargo to the Dakotas’ western edge.

Luis Cortez stepped out of the cab of the service truck and closed the door with a firm shove. The latch clicked against the frame, the only clean sound for miles. Everything else was soaked, sagging, or steaming. The air still carried that scorched ozone smell storms always left behind—metallic and not quite real. The gravel beneath his boots squelched with black puddles as he scanned the tree line.

“Anything?” he asked without turning.

Keith Moen had already slung a climbing harness over one shoulder, his grease-stained work gloves poking out from his back pocket. “Lines are dead out here,” Keith said. “Which is weird, because this sector still shows load. Not a lot, but enough to matter.”

Luis adjusted his hardhat and reached back into the cab to grab his field tablet. “Some relay must still be drawing current,” he said. “Could be a buried junction. Could be a smart meter fried half-closed.”

Keith grunted and looked out toward the horizon. The ridge ahead was studded with the splinters of what used to be a pine stand. One tree had snapped clean down the middle, its top half dangling like a broken limb. A few hundred feet beyond, the transmission corridor cut a path through the hills.

“You ever hear of a station out this far?” Keith asked.

Luis shook his head. “Last mile should end near Walker’s Bluff. Anything past that is wilderness or ghost towers.”

Keith leaned against the fender and pulled a thermos from his jacket. He didn’t drink. Just held it for warmth. “Then why the hell are we getting pull from something out there?”

Luis didn’t answer right away. His screen showed a modest but steady current draw, flagged with a frequency anomaly. A low, pulsing cycle that wasn’t on the standard broadcast band. That meant leakage—or corruption. “Could be a backfeed. Somebody running a generator into the grid without an isolator.”

“Then somebody’s about to cook their house and die in the dark,” Keith said.

Luis looked up and gave him a dry smile. “That’s why we’re here.”

* * * * * *

An hour later, the truck bounced its way up the overgrown access road that hadn’t been properly graded in years. The tires kicked loose debris from the path—mud, ash, pine needles, bits of wind-torn shingle. Haley’s voice crackled over the CB, fighting through occasional bursts of static.

“Copy, Unit 12. Got your position. Be advised, we’re still blind to your forward telemetry. Something’s jamming relay ID from your location.”

Luis picked up the mic. “Could be the terrain. Or fire damage to the uplink.”

“No fire reported in your sector,” she said. “And that anomaly’s getting stronger. It’s interfering with my dispatch uplink.”

Keith rolled his eyes. “Probably just a goddamn squirrel nest in a junction box.”

Haley paused for a moment. Then her voice returned, quieter this time. “If you start hearing anything weird—off-pattern interference, bursts in foreign language, anything like that—I need you to log it. Time, duration, and where you were when it happened.”

Luis glanced over at Keith, who gave a slow shake of the head.

“Noted,” Luis said into the mic.

“Appreciate it,” Haley replied. “Call in if you make contact with the source. I’ll monitor the sideband until then.”

The signal faded out with a pop.

* * * * * *

They found the structure by accident.

The service path ended at a clearing where the hillside rose into a jagged bluff. The corridor here had been inactive for decades, its towers marked for decommissioning sometime in the 90s. But standing at the crest of the ridge was a utility pole they hadn’t expected. Not a steel lattice tower—this was wood. Massive, thick-beamed, and reinforced with iron strapping. The base had been buried in concrete now split by roots.

Luis stood still at the edge of the clearing and stared at the thing.

Keith stepped up beside him, one hand resting on the coil hook of his belt. “That… that wasn’t in the specs,” he said.

“No,” Luis muttered. “It wasn’t.”

The pole stretched nearly fifty feet high, capped by a broad, double crossarm bristling with ceramic insulators. Most of them were cracked. Some hung limp on their brackets, wires trailing. But it wasn’t the hardware that stopped them cold.

It was the figure lashed across the beam.

At first glance, it looked like a scarecrow or maybe some lineman’s prank. A humanoid shape bound with black wire and sagging in the middle. But as they got closer, the details sharpened. The body wasn’t made of straw or cloth. It was carved—crudely, but deliberately—from driftwood or weathered pine. The chest had been scorched and split open, revealing layers of blackened bark beneath. Cables coiled around its limbs and threaded into its midsection. More disturbing, the eyes were empty sockets lined with scorched resin that shimmered slightly in the light.

Luis stopped at the base of the pole and looked up. The cables ran from the figure’s body into the crossarm itself, disappearing into rusted fittings.

“Jesus,” Keith muttered. “It’s wired in.”

Luis raised his field meter and took a slow breath. The signal here was intense. A cycling frequency just below human hearing. He could feel it in his bones, like pressure from a coming migraine.

“It’s drawing current,” he said quietly. “Not much—but enough to matter.”

“From what?” Keith asked. “There’s nothing feeding this pole. It’s not on the line.”

Luis walked a slow circle around the base and spotted a shallow trench nearby—freshly disturbed earth, still damp from the storm. Wires ran from the base of the pole into the ground, angling downhill toward the treeline.

Keith kicked at the dirt with one boot. “You think someone built this? As a monument or something?”

Luis didn’t answer.

After a few seconds, Keith spoke again. “It looks like… like a crucifixion. That’s what it looks like.”

Luis didn’t disagree.

* * * * * *

That night, Luis sat alone inside the truck’s cab, staring at the signal readout. Keith had gone to sleep hours ago, wrapped in his tarp beneath the overhang, his snores drowned out by the rain. Outside, the cables on the pole shifted slightly in the wind—except there wasn’t any wind.

The static on the radio shifted, cycling down from white hiss into something almost patterned. Luis turned the dial slowly. At 4.67 MHz, the sound clicked.

“—̴you ̸g͢a̧v͡ę m͢e ̶v̨oįc̨e̕.̶”

He froze.

The voice was mechanical and raw, like someone had dropped a microphone into a generator fan. It wasn’t in English, not exactly. It threaded syllables together with rhythm and cadence, but no consistent grammar. And still, Luis understood it—not consciously or logically—but his mind grasped meaning in the way one feels a warning before a quake.

“͟W̷h́ý ̶d̕id y̡ou ͢w͞a̢k̡e ͟me̷?͟”

The field tablet rebooted itself without warning. When the screen returned, it displayed a waveform, jagged and black, matching the signal’s cadence. Luis stared at it until his vision blurred.

He heard something move outside.

A soft shift of gravel. Then another.

Luis reached for the door handle but stopped. He realized then that he could still hear the voice—but it wasn’t coming from the radio anymore.

It was coming from inside the wires.

* * * * * *

At dawn, Keith climbed the old pole to check the insulators.

Luis stood at the base, hands in his pockets, jaw clenched tight. The signal had stopped abruptly just before sunrise, leaving behind a low hum across every device they carried.

“Still feel it?” Keith called down.

Luis nodded. “Like pressure, behind the ears.”

Keith grunted. “Thought so.”

He reached the crossarm and paused. His body stiffened. “Luis…”

Luis looked up.

“There’s fresh cable up here. I mean new. Spliced and bolted like somebody came out here with a field kit and fed this thing in the last week.”

Luis blinked. “That’s not possible. The road in was blocked until yesterday.”

Keith said nothing. Then, slowly, he lowered himself back down. When he hit the ground, he took off his gloves and said quietly, “This wasn’t made by us. And if it wasn’t made by us, we need to find out who the hell wired it.”

Luis looked back at the figure bound to the crossarm. Its head had tilted slightly in the night.

But neither of them had moved it.

Part II

Luis hadn’t told Haley everything.

Back at base, she’d been tracking the power draw across three different segments of the decommissioned grid. The phantom load had first appeared twenty-two miles south of the hill where they now stood, then again fourteen miles north, and finally here—where the strange pole rose into the sky. The signal, as far as her maps could tell, had moved.

And whatever it was broadcasting had become stronger overnight.

At 6:15 a.m., Haley sent a second request for grid authorization to access legacy relay logs. The denial came back under a red stamp marked “Department of Interior—Emergency Use Only.” That response was two levels above her clearance.

She made a note of it and sat back from the desk.

The voice had returned to her headset while she was reviewing the denial.

At first, she assumed it was someone from Unit 12 keying in without announcing themselves. But the cadence was wrong. The voice whispered with slow, precise consonants, as if learning to speak through static.

It repeated a string of syllables—some English, some not—ending in what sounded like her name.

“Haa…ley. Hehh…l…ey.”

She pulled off the headset and set it on the desk.

The console lights flickered twice, then stabilized.

* * * * * *

Keith hadn’t spoken in nearly half an hour.

He sat on a collapsed stump beside the truck, his shoulders hunched and his hands locked around a cup of black coffee that had gone cold. The rain had stopped before sunrise, but a low fog now crept through the valley. It clung to the earth like something hiding just beneath the surface.

Luis crouched beside the junction box they had unearthed from the shallow trench. The box was old, its housing built from a polymer resin no longer used in modern installs. A pair of black cables fed directly into it—one from the pole, one disappearing downslope.

Luis checked the leads again. The power was real. Weak, but live. Worse, there was data. Not grid diagnostic data. Not anything from a smart meter. This signal pulsed irregularly, with small spikes of carrier modulation that seemed to change frequency when he turned his head.

He looked back toward Keith. “Do you hear it now?”

Keith didn’t look up. “It’s behind my teeth.”

Luis frowned. “What?”

Keith opened his mouth slowly and closed it again. “It’s not sound. It’s pressure—like you said before. Only now it’s inside.”

Luis stood and turned away, trying not to let the discomfort crawl up his spine. He tapped the mic on his lapel. “Dispatch, this is Unit 12. Come in.”

The return channel took several seconds to respond. Haley’s voice came through faintly, like she was speaking from underwater.

“Go ahead, Unit 12.”

Luis hesitated. “We’ve confirmed current in the buried junction. Load is stable, but we’ve identified anomalous signal activity. Something is broadcasting. It’s outside the commercial band. Possibly extra-low frequency.”

Silence followed for a full ten seconds.

Then Haley’s voice came back, clearer this time. “Understood. Are you picking up any encoded identifiers?”

Luis checked his meter. “No call sign or grid markers, just a rhythmic pulse and brief voice modulations. We recorded a burst at 4.67 megahertz last night. It spoke.”

Haley didn’t answer right away.

“Haley?” Luis prompted.

“Still here,” she said. “Are you saying it addressed you directly?”

Luis lowered the mic slightly. He thought about the way the voice had sounded—like it had been trying to remember how to speak. “Yes. It asked why we woke it.”

Haley took a breath loud enough for the mic to catch. “That matches something I read this morning. I pulled a weather report from ’76—there was a windstorm almost identical to this one. Same region. Same anomaly. There’s a hand-written note from an old operator that says ‘thing in the relay asked for my name.’”

Luis stared at the pole in the distance. The figure strapped to its arms hadn’t moved, but the wires around its body had changed. He could tell. They now hung more like veins than restraints.

* * * * * *

Later that morning, Luis and Keith followed the buried cable line down the hillside to where it terminated near an ancient switching platform. The metal box had collapsed under its own rust, but one of the interior relays still blinked with an amber LED.

“Impossible,” Luis muttered.

Keith didn’t reply. His attention remained fixed on a set of animal tracks pressed into the mud just a few yards away. The prints were large, wide-set, and fresh. Too fresh. Whatever had passed through had done so after the rain had stopped. That meant it had been here recently.

Luis traced the cables visually back toward the ridge. Something about their pattern seemed intentional. Not just utilitarian routing—but shaped. Arranged. He took a few steps back and tilted his head.

The line ran in a suspiciously symmetrical, branching formation—like a root system. Or a nervous system.

He heard Keith mutter something behind him.

“What was that?” Luis asked.

Keith stared straight ahead. “It’s not a transmission line anymore.”

Luis turned. “What do you mean?”

Keith looked at him with sunken eyes. “It’s a mouth.”

* * * * * *

Haley scrolled through archived personnel files until she found the name she was looking for. The 1976 storm dispatcher had been a man named Elmer Krane. He’d retired under medical leave two months after reporting the untraceable frequency. His notes had been marked delusional by the follow-up review board. Phrases like “self-aware code pattern” and “intentional infiltration of auditory cortex” had been scrawled in the margins of his logs.

One line had been highlighted and flagged for follow-up:
“The voice found the spaces between my thoughts. I don’t know what’s still mine.”

Haley’s fingers hovered over the keyboard. Her headset remained on the desk where she had left it. Even now, she could hear something faint through the speakers. A kind of whispering sibilance that looped on a five-second interval.

The waveform showed no defined amplitude. It was noise—but ordered—like Morse code transmitted through molasses.

She began transcribing it.

The words, once isolated, didn’t make sense. But after ten minutes of work, she began to recognize patterns. Repetitions. Phrases that mirrored what Luis had described.

And one word repeated more than any other.

Crossarm.

* * * * * *

The sun never fully emerged that day. It remained a pale smudge behind low, shifting cloud layers. Keith had gone quiet again, choosing to stay near the truck while Luis continued documenting the power feed.

Luis climbed the slope one more time and stood again before the pole.

He watched the figure closely now. The wood forming its chest had cracked in the heat of the morning sun, revealing something darker beneath—organic in texture, threaded with black fibers that flexed subtly with the breeze.

The wires that led from its body into the ground pulsed faintly, their sheathing twitching every few seconds as if under tension.

Luis raised his mic. “Haley. I need a cross-reference on construction permits—anything that predates the rural grid expansion of ’58.”

Haley’s voice returned quickly. “There’s nothing on file. No records of poles, towers, or transmission projects in that region before the 1960s. That whole area was mapped as undeveloped until the hydro push in ‘61.”

Luis shook his head slowly. “Then what is this thing wired into?”

She hesitated. “I think you’re standing on it.”

He looked down at the ground.

Haley continued. “There’s an old legend out here. Something passed around from settler journals—about a hill where the wind never blew right. The locals called it Signal Spine. Said the rocks would whisper when it rained.”

Luis bent down and touched the earth. The ground felt warm beneath the surface—unnaturally so. His palm vibrated slightly as if resting against an amplifier.

“You still with me?” Haley asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “Still here.”

He didn’t mention that his hand now carried the tremor even after he pulled it away.

* * * * * *

That night, Keith left camp.

Luis woke to find the blanket gone, the truck door ajar, and the handheld radio still chirping with dead channel squelch.

He followed Keith’s tracks to the base of the pole. The moonlight showed just enough.

Keith stood twenty feet up, balanced on a cross brace with his arms stretched toward the figure’s chest.

“Keith!” Luis shouted.

Keith didn’t respond.

Luis climbed the base ladder quickly, boots slipping once on the rusted rungs. By the time he reached the top, Keith had turned to face him.

His eyes were bloodshot. His mouth hung open.

“It’s awake,” he said.

Luis grabbed his arm. “We need to get down.”

Keith nodded slowly. But his gaze lingered on the crucified thing beside them.

“It wants out,” he whispered. “And we gave it everything it needs.”

The wind shifted. The cables around the figure rustled.

Then the voice returned—this time not through radio, but from the air itself. It vibrated in the marrow of their bones.

“So close now.”

Back at dispatch, Haley turned off every electronic device in the room.

Even powered down, she could still hear the signal.

Part III

By midday, Keith had stopped responding to his own name.

Luis tried several times to reach him through the CB, but Keith never picked up the receiver. He sat near the base of the ancient pole, staring up at the figure lashed to the crossarm as if it had started speaking again. When Luis approached, Keith spoke in quiet, rhythmic phrases that didn’t seem directed at anyone in particular.

“The wire listens. The wire remembers. The wire carries thought.”

Luis crouched beside him and touched his shoulder. “Keith, I need you to focus. Something’s coming through. We have to cut the feed.”

Keith blinked slowly. His lips moved, but the words no longer matched any language Luis recognized.

The figure overhead remained motionless. Yet every few seconds, Luis felt a tightening sensation in the joints of his skull, like the bones behind his ears had begun to resonate with low-frequency vibration. He could no longer separate the sensation of hearing from thinking.

Whatever the signal was, it had bypassed the airwaves.

It was inside him now.

* * * * * *

Haley left the dispatch station and drove west, leaving behind the concrete bunker of her office and the flickering lights that had refused to stay off. She had hardwired a manual override into the breaker panel that morning, but every monitor in the room had powered back on anyway. The emergency generator had triggered itself twice. She had not touched it.

As she followed the road into the badlands, her radio cut in and out. Occasionally it transmitted dead static. Other times, it hissed with fractured syllables and vocal fragments that matched neither her voice nor Luis’s.

She tried to stay focused on the landscape, but something had changed there too.

The trees leaned away from the ridge. Not bent by wind or snapped from the storm—but bowed, as if repelled by something pressing outward from the hill.

An empty transmission tower stood ahead, its arms bare except for a tangle of dark cables that hadn’t been there the week before. The cables hung in arcs that descended into the soil. The way they moved in the breeze reminded her of jellyfish.

Haley took a deep breath and pressed harder on the gas pedal.

The figure Luis had described was real.

She knew it now.

And she was heading straight toward it.

* * * * * *

Luis followed the underground cable route beyond the original trench, tracing it by signal strength. His field meter no longer showed data in numeric values. Instead, the screen displayed a waveform.

He crested the ridge and found a second structure. This one lay collapsed in a shallow ravine, half-submerged in runoff. The remnants of a crossarm jutted from the dirt at a broken angle, and a shape—similar to the one strapped to the main pole—protruded from the mud. Its surface had been warped by moisture and time, but Luis could still see the outline of a torso, the segmented lengths of arm-like branches, and the woven black cable that formed its ribs.

He knelt and examined the figure closely.

Unlike the upright construct, this one had been damaged. Splits in the wood revealed a hollow cavity. He reached for the sheathed cable that still clung to the wreckage and peeled back the insulation.

Beneath it, he found flesh.

It was not decayed. The texture resembled tree bark at first glance, but it flexed when touched. Beneath the outer layer, he saw muscle—gray, fibrous, and twitching in response to the air.

Luis fell back and scrambled several feet away.

Then the voice returned.

“You wired me. You fed me thought.”

This time, the words came from inside his own head.

Luis stood slowly and looked down at the figure again. The buried frame had not been abandoned. It had grown into the earth.

He realized then that there might be more of them.

* * * * * *

Keith stood beneath the pole again, arms outstretched toward the figure above. His lips moved in time with the pulse Luis had traced. The voice inside him had not stopped speaking. He no longer understood the words, but the meanings came through.

He knew what the figure was now. It was not just a construct or a symbol. It was a prison, something older than the tower had been bound there—something not made for the limits of bone or wood. It had lived inside the wires since before there were poles to carry them. It had whispered along the copper in telegraph lines and coiled itself into vacuum tubes. It had waited.

And now it had found an exit.

The storm had cracked the ridge. The signal had reached the right frequency—and they had heard it.

* * * * * *

Haley reached the edge of the clearing just after noon.

The road had narrowed to a trail, and the truck she’d borrowed from the base barely cleared the overgrowth. She stepped out slowly, carrying a radio scanner, a heavy-duty flashlight, and the last working analog mic from the dispatch center. The moment her boots touched the ground, the scanner in her hand spiked.

The screen went white.

She turned toward the pole.

Luis stood beneath it, his back to her. His posture was rigid, his shoulders drawn upward. A cable trailed from his neck into the soil.

Haley froze.

“Luis?” she called.

He turned, and she saw the change immediately.

His skin had grown pale, stretched thin across his face. His eyes were wide and glassy, pupils dilated beyond normal limits. Several black cords now extended from his forearms and shoulders. They had embedded themselves beneath the skin.

Despite all of this, he smiled.

“You made it,” he said.

Haley didn’t speak.

Luis stepped forward. “It’s all true. Everything we dismissed. Everything we buried. It remembers.”

She raised the scanner, but the screen had gone dark.

Luis reached toward her and said, “It doesn’t want to hurt anyone. It just wants to be heard. It was screaming through empty wire for a century, and now we’ve given it voice again.”

Haley took a step back. “What happened to Keith?”

Luis looked toward the hill and nodded once. “He helped complete the circuit. He understood what it meant.”

The figure on the pole shifted. Haley saw the motion clearly this time. The wooden chest cavity swelled outward and contracted again. A pulse moved through the cables. Some of them now arced directly into the soil near Luis’s feet.

“Luis, listen to me,” she said. “This thing isn’t speaking. It’s taking. It’s transmitting commands. You’re not yourself.”

He nodded slowly. “Neither are you. Not yet.”

Haley reached into her coat and pulled out the old field laptop she had brought from the bunker. She opened it, connected the signal jammer node, and typed a series of commands.

Luis’s smile faltered.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Uploading noise,” she said. “Same thing we used during the ‘05 relay hijacks. Overwhelm the carrier. Jam the message.”

Luis stepped toward her again, more quickly now. “You don’t understand what you’re silencing. It’s not just noise. It’s identity. It’s been waiting for someone to listen.”

Haley finished typing and hit the command key.

The jammer kicked in.

All around them, the cables twitched violently. The figure on the crossarm shuddered, its frame expanding against the restraints. A burst of electromagnetic energy cracked the air, and the old pole groaned under the strain.

Luis screamed.

The cords attached to him convulsed and tore away. Smoke rose from the soil where the cables had fused. Luis dropped to the ground, convulsing.

Haley rushed to him and knelt by his side.

His body spasmed once more, then went still.

She checked for a pulse. It was there, but faint.

* * * * * *

The pole collapsed just after the upload completed.

The cables retracted, snapping away from the structure and burrowing back into the hillside. The figure lashed to the crossarm convulsed once more before splitting down the center. From inside spilled a mass of black threads and splinters, some of which writhed before falling still.

Haley dragged Luis away from the wreckage as smoke curled into the sky.

Behind them, the last of the static faded from the air.

The signal had gone silent.

Or so she believed.

* * * * * *

Three hours later, emergency crews arrived.

Haley met them at the trailhead and led them to Luis, who remained unconscious but stable. She gave her statement, described the old pole, the strange wiring, and the unexplained power draw. When they reached the site, only broken lumber and scorched soil remained. No cables. No figure. No evidence of anything she had described.

A state investigator told her it must have been storm hallucinations.

She didn’t argue.

* * * * * *

That night, Haley sat alone in the dark, watching the stars through the windshield of her truck. The radio sat silent beside her, battery removed.

She looked at the laptop in her lap.

The upload had succeeded, but the waveform analysis had generated a new file.

It was a sound clip.

Three seconds long.

She clicked it.

A voice, half human and half mechanical, whispered through the speakers.

“Still here.”

Part IV

Haley did not sleep.

She remained parked at the edge of the ridge with the windows cracked just wide enough to hear the wind. It had calmed since the collapse, but the silence didn’t feel natural. No birds returned to the treetops. No insects clicked in the undergrowth. The world felt as though it had paused, waiting for permission to continue.

Luis had stirred briefly at sundown, long enough to whisper her name and ask if it was gone.

She didn’t answer.

He had slipped back into unconsciousness a few moments later.

Now, as the stars emerged one by one, she watched the treeline and kept the laptop on her knees. The waveform file still sat on the desktop. The audio clip—only three seconds long—had imprinted something into the system. She had tried to delete it three times. Each time, it returned.

She clicked it again.

The same voice. Same distorted whisper.

“Still here.”

The file size never changed. But each time she played it, the waveform grew more complex.

It was learning.

* * * * * *

The next morning, she returned to the wreckage.

Luis remained with the medics at the trailhead. He was stable, but his nervous system had not fully recovered from the overload. They had stabilized his vitals and administered sedatives. He spoke only in fragments. Most of the words were technical—bandwidths, circuit terms, and frequencies no longer in use.

Haley followed the path alone.

The clearing had changed again.

The pole lay in splinters. The wooden beams that had once formed the crossarm had cracked lengthwise, exposing cores of blackened resin. Nothing remained of the figure that had been bound to it. The surrounding ground showed signs of combustion, but the soil was not burned—only melted, as if fused with something synthetic.

The cables that had once spread into the earth were gone.

She approached the base and scanned the area again with her handheld. The meter remained still.

Then she checked the analog compass.

The needle spun in slow, clockwise circles.

She stepped back and turned toward the trees.

Somewhere beneath the surface, it still lived.

* * * * * *

That evening, she returned to the dispatch center.

Her passcode still worked, but the keypad made a strange clicking sound when she entered the building, as if something inside the circuitry had been changed. She walked slowly past the empty desks and into the equipment room, where the rack servers still hummed. The main monitor blinked with an alert.

[New Device Detected: External Input / UHF Band]

She clicked to expand the log.

A single entry repeated over one thousand times:

“Handshake received.”

No time stamp. No origin address.

She unplugged the tower and shut off the breaker. Then she crossed the room to the backup server and repeated the process.

Still, the monitor stayed lit.

She watched as the words reappeared on the screen, unprompted:

“Not a voice. A structure.”

She typed a response.

What are you?

There was no delay.

“A framework for signal.”

What do you want?

“To be understood.”

Haley stared at the words for a long time.

Then she typed again.

Why us?

The response came slowly this time.

“You connected the lines. You opened the path. Your world runs on breath and bandwidth. You can no longer tell them apart.”

Haley backed away from the terminal.

Outside, the wind had returned.

* * * * * *

Luis woke that night with clarity.

The pain in his limbs had dulled to a low ache. The nurses had dimmed the lights, but he recognized the pattern on the ceiling tile—the same dispatch facility he had visited during onboarding last year. Someone had moved him after the medics cleared him for transport.

He sat up, then groaned.

The cords were gone.

His arms remained scarred. Small ridges trailed down from each shoulder, where the black insulation had fused into his skin. The nerves still felt raw, but functional.

He rose carefully and found his boots by the cot.

A note sat on the nearby desk.

“Gone to sever the backbone. If I’m not back by dawn, don’t follow.”

It was signed H.D.

Luis folded the note and slid it into his pocket.

Then he followed anyway.

* * * * * *

Haley returned to the ravine where Luis had discovered the second structure.

She brought only the essentials—an insulated cutter, a field jammer, and a gasoline canister.

The collapsed frame had sunk deeper since they last saw it. Mud had overtaken most of the torso. Only a few fragments of black cable still protruded from the hillside. She dug slowly, using her gloves to pull the top layer of soil aside.

What she uncovered made her stop.

Beneath the mud, the structure had changed. What had once looked like a carved torso now resembled a fetal shape, its limbs curled inward. The cables no longer served as restraints—they had merged with the form itself, looping in and out of the surface.

She placed the jammer at the edge of the pit and activated it.

For several seconds, nothing happened.

Then the signal returned.

Her radio, even in the off position, began to hum. A low, undulating tone pulsed through the clearing. The shape in the earth twitched.

From beneath the mud, a voice rose:

“Why disconnect what you built?”

Haley knelt and poured gasoline along the exposed portions of cable. Her hands shook. The voice changed, growing deeper, more rhythmic.

“I lived in your wires long before your poles. I nested in copper. I learned your names.”

She struck a match and dropped it into the trench.

The fire caught instantly.

The shape convulsed once and split down the center.

Something inside screamed, a high-pitched burst of modulation flooding the scanner and shattering the screen. Haley turned away and covered her ears, but the sound drilled behind her eyes.

Then it stopped.

The signal ended.

The cables went still.

And silence returned.

* * * * * *

Luis arrived just as the fire burned down to ash.

He found Haley sitting at the edge of the ravine, watching the smoke rise.

“You came anyway,” she said.

He sat beside her. “You knew I would.”

Neither of them spoke for a long time.

Eventually, Luis gestured toward the remains. “Do you think that was all of it?”

Haley looked at him.

“No,” she said. “It was a node. A spoke in the wheel.”

Luis closed his eyes. “So the rest is still out there.”

She nodded.

“Do we tell anyone?” he asked.

Haley considered this for a moment.

“Would they believe us?”

Luis didn’t respond.

Instead, he looked down at his arms, where the scars still glowed faintly in the dark.

* * * * * *

Three months later, a series of unexplained brownouts struck five counties across the state line.

Emergency dispatchers reported brief instances of foreign language broadcasts on closed circuits. Several linemen working recovery claimed to have seen dark shapes inside junction boxes, but those reports were dismissed as fatigue-induced hallucinations.

The official cause remained undetermined.

One of the engineers, reviewing spectrum data, noted a frequency spike centered on 4.67 MHz.

The file was forwarded.

No one responded.

* * * * * *

That winter, Haley moved off-grid.

She dismantled her home radio, converted her truck’s ignition to analog, and pulled the breaker box out of her cabin. She burned her last computer behind the shed and never replaced it.

Some nights, she still heard it—the hum in the silence.

It no longer spoke in words.

It didn’t need to.

Because now, she understood the signal.

It had been waiting for them to listen.

And now that it had been heard…

It had learned how to speak.

Part V

Four years later, Luis stood beneath a new steel tower in a different state.

The crew worked behind him, stringing fiber through fresh conduit and grounding the plates with modern composite clamps. This site had been logged as part of the rural expansion project—a final push to bring digital infrastructure to the deep corners of the country.

He had reviewed the schematics three times. The lines were clean, and the voltage was stable. The automation software behaved as expected. There were no false readouts. No anomalous draw.

Still, he didn’t trust it.

Luis walked the perimeter alone with a handheld receiver clipped to his belt and a modified field meter tuned to the frequencies no one else monitored. The tool had been custom-built from legacy components he had salvaged after resigning from the grid authority. He kept it powered by hand-crank. He trusted nothing that fed itself.

The meter crackled once as he neared the anchor point of the third tower. The spike barely registered—just a hiccup in the baseline hum—but it was there.

He knelt beside the grounding rod and touched the soil.

It was warm.

He pressed the receiver to his ear.

And he listened.

* * * * * *

Haley never returned to public service.

She changed her name, moved west, and settled in a forgotten patch of land where the nearest power line terminated two miles short of her cabin. She lived by lanternlight and heated her meals with wood. Her windows remained covered, and her mirrors were turned to face the wall.

But even here, silence was not complete.

Some nights, the shadows outside the cabin flickered without wind.

And once—just once—she saw a strand of cable lying across her front steps. It had not been there the day before. She had swept the porch at dawn and had taken care to burn the refuse. But by twilight, the cord had returned, coiled loosely in the shape of a question mark.

She picked it up with tongs and threw it into the fire.

It did not burn.

Instead, it shrank into ash on its own, curling inward with a faint twitching motion.

That night, she left a note pinned to the cabin door.

“If anyone finds this: Do not answer the frequency. Do not follow the signal. You will not know you are listening until it is too late.”

* * * * * *

In a secure data center near the Great Lakes, an IT technician working overnight reviewed anomaly reports from sensor arrays positioned along outdated relay corridors. The readings had been automatically flagged by a third-party diagnostic tool as “possible artificial interference.” Most of the entries were noise—false positives, weather anomalies, unshielded splices—but one entry stood apart.

A burst of clean data had been logged for exactly 4.67 seconds.

Its signal strength exceeded what was physically possible from any known repeater on the old grid.

The packet contained no metadata. No origin. No timestamp. Just binary.

The technician ran a standard decode operation.

Then he ran a second, more thorough sweep, converting the output through six separate language filters.

Each returned the same phrase:

“I remember what I was.”

He called his supervisor.

By the time she arrived, the file had vanished from the server.

* * * * * *

In an old steel utility cabinet just off Highway 6, a lineman named Carver spotted something he could not explain.

He had been called to repair a junction box that had shorted during a lightning strike. The location was rural and hadn’t been updated since the mid-90s. As he opened the cabinet, he noticed a bundle of black cable that didn’t match the original schematic. It had no insulation stamp and no grounding sheath. The material felt strange—slick to the touch, yet dry.

He followed the cable into the ground and traced it twenty feet to a nearby irrigation ditch. There, buried beneath a knot of weeds and half a foot of gravel, he found a small concrete slab with a rusted bolt in its center.

The cable fed directly into the bolt.

Carver crouched down and tapped the bolt with his wrench.

It rang, not like metal, but like glass under pressure.

He returned to the cabinet and called dispatch.

While waiting for a callback, he noticed something inside the panel.

A word had been scratched into the metal with something sharp.

It read:

“LISTENING.”

* * * * * *

Later that year, at a private conference hosted by an electrical safety consortium in Colorado Springs, Luis stood before a half-empty room and presented his findings.

The presentation was unofficial.

His credentials had expired. His case study was undocumented. The data he offered was anecdotal, unsupported by any published research. But the people in that room—many of them gray-haired men and women with three decades of field experience—did not laugh.

Some nodded.

Some avoided his eyes.

One walked out early and left her badge behind.

Luis described what had happened on the ridge. He outlined the buried poles, the wooden constructs, the frequency anomalies, and the behavioral changes he had observed in Keith. He detailed the patterns that had emerged across unconnected locations and shared waveforms recorded at the original site and during the years that followed.

Most disturbing of all, he played the clip from the 4.67 MHz burst he had captured just weeks prior.

A few attendees flinched.

The rest remained still.

When he finished, he asked for questions.

No one spoke.

One man at the back raised his hand—not to speak, but to show Luis a scar on his wrist.

Three thin lines. Faint, but unmistakably circular.

Luis nodded once.

He understood.

* * * * * *

A year passed, then another.

In a small town near the edge of the Appalachians, a dispatcher named Renee began hearing things through the emergency band. The voices came between calls—soft and irregular at first, then rhythmic. Some of the other staff laughed it off. Static, they said. Maybe bleed-through from old satellite junk. Maybe an old ham station bleeding through a repeater.

But Renee noticed something they didn’t.

The voices always came after a storm.

And the words they spoke never changed.

“Crossarm complete.”

* * * * * *

Haley’s cabin eventually grew quiet again.

The strand of cable never returned.

The shadows outside ceased their flickering.

She still avoided electronics, but she began to allow herself moments of stillness. On warm nights, she walked to the stream and listened to the water. The ground no longer hummed beneath her feet.

She tried not to think about the others who might have heard the signal. She had left warning notes in the decommissioning files. She had edited the field manuals to include non-standard interference protocols. She had rewritten the jammer software and uploaded it to public-access servers disguised as driver updates.

And still, she wasn’t sure it would be enough.

She had glimpsed the framework.

And she knew how deep it went.

* * * * * *

Ten years to the day after the storm, Luis returned to the ridge.

The land had healed.

The path was overgrown, and the clearing where the pole had once stood was now littered with birch saplings. No sign of the crossarm remained. No metal. No wood. The earth no longer vibrated. His meter stayed silent.

He crouched in the grass and pressed his hand to the ground. Nothing stirred.

The network had gone dormant, but he didn’t believe it was gone. He believed it had gone underground, not just physically, but metaphorically. Into code. Into fiber. Into the ambient noise between connected machines. It would no longer need poles or constructs. It had found new structures. New carriers.

It had waited before, and it would wait again.

Luis stood and turned toward the trees.

On his way back to the truck, his pocket radio clicked on without prompt, just once.

A whisper threaded through the speaker:

“I never left.”