Speaker 1: Hello. I welcomed stories all the time. Glad you are here.
Let's get into it. The first time I realized something
was wrong with those recordings, I was sitting alone in
a quiet office, years after I had left the Despatch
Shanter for good. The county had finally upgraded the recording system,
and someone needed help my grading the old archives into
the new software. Most of the people who had worked
the overnight desk back then have long since moved on,
but my name was still on a lot of the
older files because I had spent more nights behind a
console than anyone else still around. They asked if I
could help sort through the recordings and identify anything important
before the system was wiped. It sounded simple enough, a
few hours of listening to old calls, making sure nothing
critical was lost in the transition. I hadn't thought about
those night shifts and years, But the moment I logged
into the archive server and saw my old operator our
da appear on the screen, something about it felt strangely familiar,
like opening a box of things he packed away a
long time ago and suddenly remembering details he didn't expect
to room. The despatch center back then had been a
narrow room tucked into the back of the sheriff's office.
Three consoles face a wall of monitors and radio equipment,
all of it humming quietly beneath fluorescent lights that never
seemed bright enough no matter how many bulbs they were placed.
The air always smelled faintly of stale coffee and warm electronics,
and there was always the sound of static. It wasn't loud,
just a constant whisper from the radio speakers, of softest
that blended into the background until you all must start
noticing it. After enough nights on the job, that sound
became part of the rhythm of the place. Most nights
were uneventful. Deputies patrolled the county roads, Truckers rolled through
the highways that cut across the farmland. Occasionally someone would
call in about a broken down vehicle or a suspicious
car sitting too long in a parking lot, But long
stretches of time past where nothing happened. All he would
sit there, watching a clock call forward, listening to the
quiet exchange of radio checks between patrol units Unit twelve,
status check ten four dispatch all quiet. It was a
kind of job where IROs of silence could suddenly breaking
to chaos without warning. But more often than not, the
silence held, and after a while you started to trust
that silence. You trusted the system too. Every call that
came through the despatch center was automatically recorded an arcove.
The software e lowered everything the incoming phone number, at
the time the call started, which operator answered it, and
every second of audio from both sides of the conversation.
It was a system designed to remove uncertainty. If a
call happened, the system new, If a despatcher answered it,
the system recorded it. That was the whole point, which
is why the recordings I discovered that afternoon felt so wrong.
The arcou software displayed every call that had ever passed
through the system, neatly organized into folders by year. An
operator I d as I scrolled through the recordings tied
to my name. The fan names looked exactly the way
I expected them to, dates, times, case numbers. Most of
them brought back vague memories. An accident on the highway,
a domestic dispute out near the county line, a late
night call from someone who had locked their keys in
their car. Routine things until I noticed a group of
recordings I didn't recognize there were seven of them. At first,
I assumed I had simply forgotten about those calls. After
working hundreds of overnight shifts, it wasn't unusual for the
details to blur together. But the more I looked at
the time stamps, the more certain I became that something
wasn't right. Each file had my operator idea attached to it.
According to the system logs, I personally handled every one
of those calls, and every one of them had been
recorded during overnight shifts that I remembered very clearly, because
they had been quiet nights, the kind where you drank
too much coffee just to stay awake, the kind where
the phone never rang. But according to the archive it had.
At first I assumed it was a labeling stake. The
old recording system had never been perfect. Files occasionally ended
up in the wrong folders after software updates or equipment failures.
Sometimes calls were duplicated or miss foul. When the server
re started, it happened. Still, curiosity got the better of me.
I clicked the first file. For a moment, there was
nothing but static. Then a voice came for the speaker,
faint distorted and breathing hard hallo, hallo, I need some
one out here. I think there's been an accident. The
signal crackled so badly that half the words dissolved into noise.
I leaned closer to the monitor, instinctively turning the volume up,
as if that might somehow make the audio clearer. The
caller sounded like they were outside. Wind brushed across the microphone.
Somewhere in the distance. I could hear what sounded like
a car engine idling. Every few seconds, the signal faded
and returned again, like some one talking through a weak
radio connection. But the strange part wasn't the caller. The
strange part was the silence on my side of the recording.
Despatch calls always recorded both ends of the conversation. That
was how the system worked. The caller spoke, the despatcher responded,
and the entire exchange was preserved in the archive. Except
in this file. In this according, the caller spoke into
the void. There was no reply, no dispatcher asking for
a location, no voice telling the caller to stay calm,
no instructions, just the frightened voice repeating the same question
again and again, Hello, is any one there? I checked
the time, stem The call had supposedly come in at
two fourteen a m. The time meant something to me immediately,
because I remembered that shift it had been unusually quiet.
I could picture the room exactly as it had looked
at night, the dim lights, the empty consoles beside mine,
soft tom of the radio equipment. No accidents, no emergency calls. Nothing.
Yet here was a recording suring that some one had
called despatch for help, and that the system had lobbed
me as the operator handling the call. I sat there,
staring at the screen for a long time. Then I
opened the second recording, and that was when things became
harder to explain. The second call started the same way
as the first, static when moving across the microphone. Then
a voice that sounded strained and breathless, But this time
the caller was different. A man's voice, older, speaking quickly,
as if he was trying to keep his composure. I
need some one out here, he said, there's a car
off the road. I think the driver's hut. Again, there
was no response from the spat much. I let the
recording play without touching anything. The man continued describing what
he saw, the way the vehicle had slid off the pavement,
the shallow ditch beside the road, a row of fence
post running along the shoulder. I knew that rode well
enough that I could picture the scene in my head,
but I still had no memory of that call. When
the recording ended, I checked the time stump again, different night,
same shift, and once again the system showed the call
had come through my console. According to the archive, I
had answered the phone. According to my memory, I never
had turned in the dark. But nothing that stood out,
nothing that should have left. Seven mysterious recordings bared in
the system archaves, and definitely nothing that should have been
connected to my console. The second recording started the same
way as the first. Static went across the microphone. Then
a voice that sounded strained and breathless, But this time
the caller was different, a man's voice, older and speaking quickly,
as if he was trying not to panic. I need
some one out here, he said, there's a car off
the road. I think the drivers her. I sat back
in my chair and let the recording platter without touching
anything again. There was no dispatch or response on the line,
no voice asking questions, no instructions to stay calm, or
provide a location, just the caller speaking into empty air.
The strange thing was how specific the details were. The
man described a curve in the road, a mile mark
near a line of old fence posts, the way the
car had slid halfway down into a shallow ditch. I
knew it roaded well enough that I could picture exactly
where he meant, but I still had no memory of
that call. When the recording ended, I checked the time samp,
the same way I had with the first one, different night,
same shift. Again, the system showed the call had come
from my console. Again I had no recollection of it happening.
That alone would have been unsettling enough. Despatches forget things sometimes,
especially after years of working overnight shifts, calls blur together,
details fade, But there are certain kinds of moments you
don't forget, especially not emergency calls as sound as urgent
as the one to those recordings, and yet I had
absolutely no memory of them. But as I kept listening
through the rest of the files, something else began to
stand out. At first it was just a small detail,
Then it became impossible to ignore. Every call mentioned the
same road, a two lane stretch of rural highway that
ran along the north edge of the county before dipping
into a long valley of farmland and trees locals just
called a county road. Date anyone who had worked dispatched
for more than a few months knew that road well.
It cut through a wide stretch of open land where
the farms were scattered far apart, and the cell signals
sometimes dropped without warning. During the day, it was quiet
enough that you could drive for miles without passing another vehicle.
At night, it felt even more isolated. The road curve
gently along the edge of the valley, dipping down through
low patches of trees before climbing back toward up and
farmland again. There were only a handful street lights along
the entire stretch, and most of them were clustered near
the small intersections where gravel roads branched off toward the
surrounding fields. It wasn't a dangerous road exactly, but it
had a few sharp bends and lawn dark stretches where
drivers could eat drift off the shoulder if they weren't
paying attention. Every winter we'd get the occasional accident when
someone took the courst too fast. Of slid on ice
during the first cold nights of the season. Still, it
wasn't the kind of place that generated a string of
emergency calls like this. Most Knights of Road barely showed
up in the despatched logs at all. Yet every one
of the mysterious recordings came from somewhere along that same stretch,
and every one of them had been loged under my
operator ID. I started listening more carefully. The voices were
different in each recording, different callers, different situations, that the
tone was always the same, confused, frightened, urgent. One woman
sounded like she had stepped out of her car and
was trying to describe something she didn't quite understand. There's
another vehicle here, she said at one point, her voice
shaking slightly, But there's nobody inside it. The engine still
running in the background. I could hear when moving through
the microphone, and what sounded like gravel crunching under her
shoes as she walked closer to the vehicle. Another collar
described seeing headlights down in the trees beside the road,
as if a car had slid down the embankment and
come to rest somewhere below the shoulder. I can see
the lights, the mount said, breathlessly, but I don't know
how to get down there. A third recording captured someone
shouting over the sound of passing traffic, trying to make
themselves heard of the noise of trucks moving along the highway.
But in every single one the pattern repeated. The caller
spoke and no despatcher answer. The recordings ended the same
way too. The caller would say hello again, ask if
anyone was on the line. Sometimes their voice would grow
more nervous as the seconds passed. Then the recording would
stop just like that. No follow up, no response, no instructions,
and nothing in the system showing that deputies had been dispatched.
I leaned closer to the screens, crawling back and forth
through the coal logs connected to those files. The entries
were all there, the time stumps the operator I D
even the automated task shuring that the calls had been
captured and stored by the system exactly the same way
every other emergency call was archived. Everything about the rest
go to look legitimate. There was no indication that the
files had been altered or added later, no sign of
a serviglitch that might have misfiled the audior. According to
the system, the calls had happened exactly the way they appeared,
except for one problem. I couldn't remember a single one
of them, and the more I listened, the more strange
feeling began creeping in at the back of my mind,
because the details in their recordings started sounding familiar, not
from the calls themselves, but from incidents I remembered happening later.
I couldn't explain why the connection bothered me so much.
At first, it was more of a vague sense of recognition,
like hearing a story you've heard before but can't quite place.
So I pulled up the counties incident reports and began
comparing dates. The dispatch archive wasn't just a collection of
audio files. Every call that came through the system was
tied to a lodger web of reports, incident locks, officer notes,
time stamps, and despatch interest that documented what happened after
the phone rang. If those calls had been real, there
should have been followed up a port somewhere in the system.
So I began comparing the time stamps. The first recording
I'd played had been locked at two fourteen a m.
On a Tuesday night, I pulled up the incident reports
for that week and started scanning through them one by one,
looking for anything that had happened along County Road Eate.
At first, nothing strayed out. There were routine traffic stops,
a noise complained in town, a report of a loose
dog near the county line. Then I found it. Two
days after the recording's time stamp, a patrolled deputy had
responded to a single vehicle accident along that exact stretch
of road. I sit down and slid off the pavement
during a late night rainstorm and ended up halfway down
the ditch beside the highway. The location listed in the
report was only a few hundred yards from the mile
market a Colla had mentioned in the recording. I stared
at the screen for a while, telling myself it was
probably coincidence. County roads were long and accidents happened all
the time. It didn't mean anything. Still, the similarity narrowed
at me, so I checked the second recording. The man
who had called about the car in the ditch had
mentioned a curve in the road near a row of
all fence posts. I searched the incident locks again, and
found something that made my stomach tidan. Three days after
the recording's timestamp, deputies had responded to a call from
a passing driver reporting a disabled vehicle at the same curve.
The driver had apparently lost control on loose gravel and
ended up stuck on the shoulder, same road, same general location.
Just days later. For a while, I sat there, staring
at the report and the screen, trying to convince myself
it didn't mean anything. County road stretched for miles, and
accident happened all the time. If you look hard enough,
you can find connections between almost anything. But something about
the timing bothered me. Not just the location, the timing,
because the details in the report matched to callo his
description almost perfectly, the curve in the road, the fence
puss along the shoulder, even the direction the car had
slid off the pavement. I leaned back in my chair
and reaplay the recording again, listening to the caller's voice
with a kind of quiet dread I hadn't felt the
first time. The man's sounded genuinely panicked. He could hear
the confusion in the way he spoke, like someone who
had come around a blind curve and suddenly found himself
staring at something he didn't expect to see. And the
more I listened, the more certain I became that he
had been describing the exact same location listed in the
incident report. That was when I started to feel uneasy.
Once might be coincidents, twas felt different, so I kept going.
I went through the rest of the recordings, won by one.
Each time, I listened carefully to the caller's voice, jotting
down the details they mentioned, mal marker's landmarks, anything that
might help narrow down the location. Sometimes the callers was Pacific,
sometimes they weren't, but even the vague details started forming
a rough picture of the same stretch of road. Then
I searched the incident reports for the days that followed,
and every single time I found something, not always the
same exact event, but close enough to make the pattern
impossible to ignore. A stranded driver reported by a passing tracker,
a car discovered abandoned near the tree line, a missing
person report that began when someone's vical was found part
along the roads I had late at night, all of
them within days of the recordings, all of them along
the same stretch of road, and none of them connected
to any dispatch called that match the recordings. The more
I dug into the logs, the worse the feeling became.
Because if those recordings were real emergency calls, then deputy
should have been dispatched immediately, a troll unit should have
been sent to the scene. Someone should have written a
report about the call itself. But there was nothing, just
the later incidents, as if the recordings had described something
that hadn't happened yet. By the time I reached the
last file, the quiet office around me felt a lesser smaller.
The building was nearly emptied that afternoon. Most of the
staff had already gone home, leaving only the faint hum
of the server racks in the occasional sound of fist
up somewhere down the hallway. The despatch rocour system glowed
softly in front of me, its interface filled with rows
of time stamps and file names, and every one of
those seven recordings felt like it was pointing towards something
I didn't want to understand. I went back and listened
to the recordings again, this time paying closer attention to
the background sounds. At first, it had all blended together
a static and went but the more carefully I listened,
the more certain details began to stand out. In one recording,
there was a faint waiale in the distance that I
hadn't noticed, for it was barely audible, buried beneath the
caller's voice, a siren not loud enough to be close,
but there. In another file, the sound of an engine
idling somewhere near by faded in and out of the recording,
as to call this book. And in one particularly distorted clip,
I could hear something metallic scraping against payment in the background,
the kind of sound a car might make after sliding
off the road. None of those sons had meant anything
the first time I heard them, but now knowing what
I knew about the later incidents, they felt different, almost
like pieces of a puzzle. I didn't want to finish assembling,
because if the recordings really described those events, then the
calls had somehow been captured before the emergencies themselves ever happened.
And the deeper I dug into the logs, the harder
it became to convince myself that was impossible. By the
time I finished cross checking the last recording, I had
reached the point where I needed a second opinion, not
because I expected someone to confirm what I was starting
to suspect, but because I hoped they would prove I
was wrong. There had been a guy named Mark who
worked in the despatched center years earlier. Mark caused a dispature.
He handled the technical side of things, maintaining the radio equipment,
the recording systems, and the server that locked every call
that came through the center. If any one could explain
what I was seeing, it would be him. It took
a little digging to find his number. The county had
gone through several staffing changes since I had left, and
Mark had moved on to a private communications company a
few towns over. I almost didn't call. Part of me
still wanted the whole thing to be a mistake, a
miss Valdokove, a glitch in the system, something ordinary that
I had somehow misunderstood. But the pattern in those recordings
was too precise to ignore, so I called him. When
I finally reached him and explained that I was helping
with the archaevagration, he agreed to take a look at
the files with me. A few days later, we met
at the despatch Center. The building looked almost the same
as I remember, but the equipment had changed, new monitors,
new radio consoles, new recording software. The old system, the
one we'd used during those overnight shifts, had already been
disconnected and boxed up in the back room, but the
archived data was still there. Matt pulled up the system
logs tied to the recordings out and unlike the audio files,
the locks showed the technical side of what had happened
when each call was captured as signal routing system time
stamps and the hard repust the calls had traveled through
before they were stored. At first, everything looked ordinary. The
files had been created automatically by the recording server. Each
one was tied to my console. The system recognized them
as incoming emergency calls and archived in the same way
had archived every other call. So the recordings themselves were real.
They hadn't been added later, They hadn't been misfiled from
somewhere else. The system believed this cause had comes through
my station. Mark Lee and closer to the screen, scrolling
through the deeper diagnostic logs at most despatches never saw.
After a minute or two, he frowned, that's strange, he said,
what I asked, These signal packets, he said, pointing to
a column of numbers in the log. They're incomplete. I
didn't know much about the technical side of radio systems,
but even I could see that something looked unusual. Normally,
incoming calls generated a clean stream of data as the
signal move through the network, but the interest tied to
those recordings looked fragmented. Chunks of data were missing, certain
identifiers were corrupted, a cut off half way through. It's
like the system caught the signal in the middle of something,
Mark said, not a full coal connection Kadak caused the
despatcher side of the audio to disappear. I asked, maybe,
he said, if the system grabbed the signal before the
line fully opened. That explanation might have made sense, except
for one problem. The time stems. Mark opened another section
of the log and compared the data with the incident
repulse I had already pulled up. At first, he didn't
say anything. He just stared at the numbers. Then he
leaned back in his chair and rubbed his forehead. Okay,
he said, slowly, That part doesn't make sense. What part
these signals? He said, tapping the screen again, according to
the server clock, they were captured before the events and
the incident reports. I felt a chill creep up the
back of my neck. How much before I asked Mark?
Click through the logs, lining up the time side by side.
In some cases he said two days. He looked back
at me. In one case, almost for a moment, neither
of us said anything, because if the system logs were correct,
then the calls hadn't just been incomplete. They had been
recorded before the emergencies themselves had ever happened. For a moment,
neither of us said anything, because if the system logs
were correct, then the calls hadn't just been incomplete. They
had been recorded before the emergencies themselves had ever happened.
After Mark pointed out the Tiinsdowne problem, neither of us
spoke for a while. The numbers were still on the
screen in front of us. The system logs didn't look
dramatic or mysterious. They were just rows of digger time stamps,
routing paths. Signal identifies exactly a kind of information dispatched
technicians looked at every day without thinking twice. But when
you compared them to the incident reports, the pattern was
impossible to ignore. The signals had arrived first, the real
emergencies had happened later. It didn't look dramatic on the screen.
Nothing about those logs jumped out the way of life.
Rushing warning light might It was just quiet data sitting
there in neat columns. But once you saw it, you
couldn't and see it. Mark eventually broke the silence. If
the system actually captured those calls, he said, slowly, then
they had to come through the radio network somehow. I
nodded that much seemed obvious. Emergency calls didn't just appear
in the archive system out of nowhere. They had to
pass through several layers of infrastructure before they ever reached
the despatch console. But our despatch center didn't receive calls
directly from the road. Most emergency calls were routed through
the regional network before they reached our station. Along the way,
they passed through several towers and repeaters that boosted signals
across the rural parts of the county. Mark started tracing
that path through the old infrastructure diagrams. The software displayed
a map of the communications network, towers, relay stations, signal
paths that branched across the countryside like a web of
invisible for it. At first the verts looked normal, Then
one location started appearing again and again in the locks.
One tower in particular kept showing up or a repeat,
a station that sat at the edge of the valley
north of County Road eight. I remembered that tower vaguely.
It had been installed decades earlier, back when the county
expanded emergency radio coverage into the more remote farming areas.
The terrain there dipped into a long bowl of lines
surrounded by low ridges, which sometimes blocked signals from region
and despatched center directly. The repeater tower solved that problem.
It received transmissions from radios or cel relays in a
valley and bunced them back toward the main networks so
despatch could hear them clearly. In theory, it was just
another piece of infrastructure quietly doing its job, the kind
of equipment nobody thought about unless it stopped working. But
when Mark opened the maintenance records for that tower, the
history attached to it was longer than I expected. The
equipment had been serviced dozens of times over the years.
Most of the notes were routine battery replacements and tenor adjustments,
signal calibration checks. Technicians had swapped up cables, replaced all transmitters,
repaired storm damage. Nothing unusual, but scattered among those entries
were a handful of remarks that felt different, not serious
enough to triggers, just hadd signal distortion during cold weather,
unexpected transmission echoes, possible atmospheric interference affecting reception. Mark scrolled
slowly through the record, stopping occasionally to read alder interests
more carefully. These go back years, he said, quietly. How
many I asked? More than a decade. He kept scrolling
until he stopped on a report from nearly fifteen years earlier.
Look at this, he said. The technician who had written
the report described unusual signal reflections currying during winter nights
when the temperature dropped rapidly after sunset. According to the note,
a phenomenon cold temperature version could rap radio waves and
layers of cold air, causing the inter bunced cross long
distances instead of dissipating normally. It was the kind of
thing that sometimes let people pick up radio stations hundreds
of miles away. Truck drivers occasionally talked about it over
the radio hearing distant broadcast late at night that normally
wouldn't reach the far but the technician had added something else.
Under certain conditions, those reflected signals could arrive at the
terror in fragments. Signals might overlap. Pieces of transmissions might
arrive sickens or minutes apart. Sometimes signals from completely different
areas could bleed into the same frequency. Basically Mark's ed
leaning back from the screen. Radio waves can behave strangely
when the atmosphere cooperates, strange enough to show up days hurry,
I asked. He gave a short laugh. No, he said,
that part still makes no sense. But the more we
studied the signal pass connected to the recordings, the clearer
the pattern became. Every one of the mysterious coals had
passed through the same repeata tower. Every one of them
had originated somewhere along county Rodate, and every one of
them had arrived in the system as a damaged and
complete signal, as if the tower had caught only part
of the transmission was something that wasn't supposed to reach
it at all. I leaned back in my chair and
looked at the map of the network displayed in the monitor.
The repeata tower sat alone on a small ridge overlooking
the valley, just a small blinking icon on the screen,
a quiet piece of infrastructure that most people in the
county probably didn't even no existed. Farmers drove past it
every day without realizing what it was. Travelers passed through
the valley beneath it without ever seeing it. But if
the recordings had come through there, then that tower might
have been listening to something none of us had ever
intended to hear. Mark and I didn't say it out
loud at first, but we were both thinking the same thing.
If the recordings had passed through that repeated tower, then
the only way to understand what was happening was to
hear the signal from the tower itself. Unfortunately, the tower
wasn't somewhere you could just walk into an examine. It
sat on a low ridge about fifteen miles north of ten,
surrounded by fencing and a locked equipment shed. Most of
the time it ran and at hand it Technicians only
visited it when something broke. But there was another way
to listen. Every repeater in the county transmitted on a
known frequency. Dispatch consoles could monitor those frequencies if necessary,
especially when technicians were troubleshooting signal problems. The equipment in
the despatch center had changed over the years, but the
frequencies themselves hadn't. Mark pulled up the old channel list
and found the one tie to the repeat o overlooking
County Road day He stared at it for a moment,
then he clicked a monitor button. Let's just see what
it sounds like, he said. It was already late afternoon
by the time we started monitoring the signal. The despatch
center was quieter than usual, and the day shift operators
didn't pay much attention to what we were doing in
a corner. Most of them assumed we were just running
diagnostics on old equipment, which technically wasn't far from the truth.
The speaker filled with a soft tess of radio static.
Mark adjusted the gain slightly, filtering out some of the interference.
For a long time, nothing happened, but neither of us
turned the speaker off faintly. The tower wasn't somewhere you
could just walk into and examine. It sat on a
low ridge about fifteen miles north of town, surrounded by
fencing and the locked equipment. Chad Most of the time
it ran unattended. Technicians only visited it when something broke.
But there was another way to listen. Every repeater in
the county transmitted on a known frequency. Dispatch consoles could
monitor those frequencies if necessary, especially when technicians were troubleshooting
signal problems. The equipment in the despatched enter had changed
over the years, but the frequencies themselves hadn't. Mark pulled
at the old channel list and found the one tied
to the repeater overlooking County Road eight. Let's just see
what it sounds like, he said. It was already late
afternoon by the time we started monitoring the signal. The
despatch center was quieter than usual, and the day shift
operators didn't pay much attention to what we were doing
in the corner. It was subtle at first, so subtle
I wasn't sure i'd heard it. The static and the
speaker shifted slightly, as though a distant transmission had begun
to bleed into the frequency. Mark leaned forward immediately, his
hand moving toward the dial. Wait, he said, quietly. The
noise and the speaker wavered again. For a moment, it
almost sounded like wind. Then the signal sharpened. A faint
voice emerged from the noise. Hollo. The whove was so
quiet I almost thought I'd imagined it. Mark rose beside me.
Neither of us moved. Then it came again, Hello, can
anyone hear me? The voice sounded exactly like the callers,
and the recording strain distorted, as if character a weak
signal struggling to reach its destination. Mark's hand hovered over
the controls, but he didn't touch them. We birth knew
that if we changed the settings too much, we might
lose the signal entirely. The voice continued, I'm on County Roads,
near the old fence line, my cargesta. The transmission cut
off in a burst of static. For several seconds, the
room was silent again, just the softest of radio noise
filling the speaker. I checked the clock on the wall,
eight forty seven p M. Did you catch that, Mark
ask quietly. I nodded. The description the caller had started
to give was painfully familiar. A cost sliding off the road,
a fence line, the same stretch of highway that appeared
in every one of the recordings. The difference was that
this time we were hearing the signal live, or at
least it sounded live. MAK started according the frequency, immediately
wrote in the signal through the despatch arc HAVE system,
the same way in coming calls were normally captured the
recording time. I began counting upward in the monitor. We waited.
Ten minutes, passed, twenty. The signal never returned. Eventually the
room filled again with the steady whisper of static. Mark
leaned back in his chair and exhaled slowly. If that's real,
he said, someone out there might need help. But there's
no report, I said. He checked the call logs. Nothing.
No emergency calls had come in from that area, No
deputies had been dispatched, just the two of us sitting
there with the recording of a voice asking for help
on a roadway. According to the system, nothing had happened yet.
And that was when I finally understood what those earlier
recordings might have been. They weren't echoes, they weren't corrupted calls.
They were something much stranger. The repeater tower wasn't just
catching signals somehow under the right conditions, It was hearing
them before they happened. For a long moment after the transmission, faded.
Neither of us moved. The recording system continued running quietly
beside us, capturing nothing but static. Mark eventually saved the
file and leaned back in his chair, staring at the
monitor as if he expected the voice to come back
at any second, but the channel remained silent. If that
call was real, he sa said, after a while, someone's
going to report it. We both knew how the system worked.
A stranded driver, an accident, anything serious enough to make
someone reach for their phone would eventually appear in the
dispatch cue. But the coal logs stayed empty. The night
shift Dispatrick glanced over at us once or twice, probably
wondering why two people were sitting there monitoring an old
repeat of frequency, But no alarms went off and no
new coals appeared. Eventually the shift ended. Mark exported the
recording and attached it to the diagnostic ORPAWT. He started
writing about the old tower. He tried to explain the
situation in technical language signal anomala's atmospheric conditions, unusual timing irregularities.
It sounded reasonable enough on paper, but neither of us
really believed it. A week later, the county completed the
communications upgrade they had already planned. The all repeated tower
overlooking the valley was taken off line and replaced with
new equipment that used a completely different RULAE system. Mark
told me that when the technicians dismantled the original hardware,
most of it was scrapped. The tower itself remained standing,
but the equipment that had been installed decade EARLA was gone.
After that, the strange recordings stopped appearing in the archive system.
No more partial calls, no more disordid voices from County Rhodate.
The despatch center returned to a quiet rhythm I remembered
from my years working over night shifts, throteen traffic stops,
the occasional roadside accident, the steady exchange of radio chatter
between deputies and dispatch. On the surface, everything went back
to normal. Matt moved on to other projects and eventually
stopped talking about the recordings altogether, and I tried to
convince myself that whatever we'd heard that evening had been
nothing more than a technical quirk, a rare combination of
signal interference and bad timing, the kind of thing that
could happen once had never happen again. But every so
often I still find myself thinking about that voice we
heard through the static, because if our theory had been correct,
if the repeat a tar had really been catching fragments
of emergency calls before they happened, then those early recordings
might not have been mistakes. They might have been warnings,
and we had never answered a single one of them.
For a long time, I managed not to think about
those recordings. Life moved in the way it had always does.
Jobs change, buildings get remodeled, New equipment replaces the old systems.
Nobody remembers any more. The despatch center kept operating, the
deputies kept patrolling the roads, and County Roadate stayed as
quiet as it had always been. Eventually, the archive project ended,
the old recordings were moved to a back up server,
and most of the staff who had worked with that
systems stopped thinking about them altogether. For a while, I
did the same, But every now and then something would
pull me back to it, usually late at night. Sometimes
I'd remember the way that for sounded coming through the
repeat of frequency to panic in it, the confusion, the
way the caller kept asking if anyone could hear them,
and I would think about the seven recordings we had
found in the archive seven calls for help, Seven times
someone had spoken into the line expecting an answer, and
seven times the system had recorded the call without any
one responding. The worst part wasn't the idea that the
tower might have been hearing those calls ali. The worst
part was the possibility that those people had been real.
At somewhere along that stretch of road, someone had reached
out for help when the signal had arrived in the
system days before. The event itself, ever, occurred long enough
for someone to have done something, long enough for someone
to answer, but no one had ever heard them in time.
Years later, while cleaning out some old files on a
hard drive from the arch of Migration, I came across
a folder I didn't recognize it contained a single audiophile.
The time SEMP attached to it caught my attention immediately because,
according to the system clock embedded in the file metadata,
the recording had been created nearly three weeks after the
day I was looking at it. At first, I assumed
the date was corrupted, but the rest of the file
information looked normal. The routing pathmatched the old repeated tower.
The operator idea listed in the metadata was mine. I
stared at the file for a long time before finally
opening it. For a moment, there was only the familiar hissystatic.
Then a voice came through the speaker, distorted, reading hard,
and it hollo. The sound made the hair on the
back of my neck stand up because the voice on
that recording wasn't the stranger's. It was mine. And in
the background, just beneath the static, I could hear the
distant wail of a siren that hadn't started yet. And
that is the end. Thank you for listening, and I
will see you in the next one.