Speaker 1: Hello, I'm welcomed stories all the time. Glad you are here.
Let's get into it. When you drive alone after midnight,
out here the vastest presses in the highway. During daylight,
io swings from gentle hills to flat, pale stretches where
the next gas station is always thirty forty, sometimes sixty
miles away. But at night the world shrinks. Your headlights
flicker over crumbled shoulder gravel, fractured toss snakes, a skittering
night bird, and then only more dark. I used to
enjoy these drives, a sense of being suspended in the
scene between everywhere and nowhere, a private rhythm to my
own errands. That changed on a Tuesday two weeks ago,
when I crossed County fourteen to cut North. My cup
of gas station coffee rattled in the console, nearly empty.
The radio spat out an old punk song that never
bothered to finish, replaced by static. As I passed a
billboard that hadn't changed in years, cheap smokes next to exit,
faded arrow pointing the wrong way. For a while, there
was no sign of movement, not even the slight orange
eyes of a deer. The rest aerial was a slab
of shadow behind a crooked stand of cottonwood trees. Is
light only the cold glare of two bousing fluorescents above
a strip of vending machines. I pulled in, mostly for
the coffee machine, now already new, would disappoint me. There
were spaces lined up beneath the sagging lamps, long rows
of rectangles painted on broken pavement. Only one of the
car far down the lot, with its hood up and
no one visible its eye as I stepped out, but
when made a sound like someone hushing a room, draw
leaves skittered over the sidewalk. It was coal, but I
learned to keep an extra jacket in the back seat.
I locked up and walked towards the building. The bathrooms
set just off to my left were closed for repairs.
A row of green doors, each with an identical city name,
all now chained. Beyond those, the din vending machine threw
rectangles of sickly light. The coffee machine displayed out of
order in red digital ladders. I stared at it, lips
formed me half a curse, and then heard something behind me,
a thin sliding echo, as though shoe dragged the length
of the shelter wall. Terrning. I caught a flicker of
movement along the stalls, may be astray from the other car.
But then again, no sound of a cow door, no
sign anyone was there. I waited through type, tracing the
shape in my peripheral vision. It was truly a shadow
at first, little more some one or something that passed
so near the edge of the dying light that it
seemed only half real. My mind chanted its side as highness.
I shifted about to walk back to my car when
a shrill, sudden ring shattered the hush. It came from
the piffer and fixed a crack wall near the restaurant doors,
A phone in a bolted cage under a sign reading
out of order, with a faded stick of curling up
at the corners. I stood there, feeling childish for being startled.
A payphone ringing these days was as rare as an
honest politician. Still it rang on seven eight times. I
glanced behind me. No one. I don't recall walking to
it so much as being compelled forward. The cold of
the receiver stung my ears. I picked it up hand,
shaking a little for more than the wind. For a moment,
only static underneath a faint rickety whirre, like a reel
to reel, tape and spooling. Then the detur has been chosen.
A voice interned, clipped, almost mechanical. It repeated a dieter
as be chosen, the words flattening into pure rhythm. The
prickle raced up my neck. I stood rigid, heart ticking hard, hullo,
I said, But the response was only a wash of static,
punctuated by a high, brief whistle. Then the line went dead.
I let go of those done, turning circles on the
gritty sidewalk. The other car across the lot was still
and they had I been watched? Or was it some
pranks or hiding in the trees? No footprints, just my
own and the stuttering wind in the cottonwoods. But for
a moment, as I stepped back toward my car, I
saw figures, not clearly, two maybe three shapes pressed into
the gloom at the lot's edge, partly obscured by the
skeletal trees. They wavered a blurred, elongated brawn. I fumbled
my keys, managed to get in only after clawing at
the cold metal. I locked the doors, knuckles white bath
fogging the glasses. I started the engine. My fingers trembled
so badly the cup spelled on my lap. Even as
I peeled away from the lot, gravel crackling under the wheels.
I looked once more through the rear view, certain i'd
see the shadows again for miles. All a fe I
elt was that force ruttling in my head. Detour has
been chosen. I drove faster than I should, hot, throbbing,
unwilling to stop again until I touched my own apartment door.
Sleep didn't come easily that night. I'd let my mail
pile up for a month, and there were stole boxes,
file folders, and stacks of notebooks piled in the corners.
Even in the smallness of my kitchen, beneath the un
dimmed overhead, my mind replayed the parking lot, the foone line, snap,
the unnaturally still air before the ring and started. I've
lived alone for more than a year now, and its
seldom felt claustrophobic. But that night I checked each window
locked twice, pulled the curtains tight, and left the light
on in the bathroom. I retired. No, I didn't retire.
I was fired from real journalism a while ago. But
some habits don't fade. My latest real work was in
the big back room of the Newcastle Gazette and microdest
City Rag, read mostly by insomniacs and snow birds. That
meant most days involved redacting all police locks for interesting anomalies,
then quietly selling leads to big outlets when I could
get away with it, a trick that had worked until
my name had shown up in one too many fire
request locks and some damage control memo at head quarters
labeled me a loose end. Now I did freelance incident
analysis and paid per piece baery scraping. By my damnfall
had been simple and spectacular and expressy about missing teens
in Atlanta, back when online sleuths were still something of
a novelty. I had been desperate for that national by line,
so I made a timeline fit an agenda. It suggested
a source who never existed. I was caught before the
awards could accumulate, but not before the damage was done.
I had thought journalistic spin was just another kind of
narrative truth, and by the time I realized how little
that mattered, I was an industry leper. Now my world
was lived through spreadsheets and scanned reports and the half
sob calls of grieving mothers, most of whom never knew
to stop answering. That night, I lay in boud with
the images wreckisting through my head. When I did sleep,
I dreamed of neon lit pephon boxes and voices traveling
through static, dozens of them repeating that same clip phrase,
shivering against the wind, too afraid to hang up in
a great dawn. As I swallowed instant coffee and sorted
through last night scribbles, I found that I traced little
circles in the margins of my oldest notebok, drawn without knowing,
each coiled around the word dita. There was a map
in that same notebook. It's darted off as idle curiosity,
a nervous habit. But after a few minutes I saw
something I didn't like. Across a five county stretch. I'd
plotted redexes for local disappearances at rural rest stops in
the last eight years, the sort of cold Bland tragedy
the state quietly bearers under jurisdiction of squabbles and budget sheets.
The clusters were uneven, one along Highway twenty three, another
in a Nowhay stretch outside Glenn's crossing several lining the
old use men as forty four corridor ball out beyond
the orbit of cameras and full service pumps. The phone's
robotic voice still haunted me. It was half memory, half
puzzler puzzle that, for some reason I felt compelled to solve.
I tried to ignore it, but the words weren't back,
and whenever I looked out my window and caught the
moon's lanting through the blinds. Most of the day passed
in the routine I'd built from hindsight in self repair.
The papers I managed were dull, filled with car break
ins and underage drinking citations, nothing with jagged edges. By
late afternoon, though I could no longer resist the needling curiosity,
I slept on my jacket and drove down down to
the State Recor's office, draft of caffeine and gilt trailing
behind the transportation clerk, a heavy set man with a
habit of double stapling everything, greeted me with suspicion. How
we rest stop incidents if he repeated avoiding our contact,
shuffling paperwork to and fro. I don't think there's a
process directly through us you know, local ped usually takes those.
What he didn't say, but made plain in his tone,
was that my name had precedents, dared ents, late payments, embarrassment.
I kept my voice calm, just looking for aggregate data
by exit number, maintenance histories, complain calls, that sort of thing.
Anything older than the last circulasion might be fine. You know,
I'm not sure what's available. A lot of old stuff
got lost or isn't digitized, not lately. Anyway, He tapped
a pile mark talk I did not file, and shuffled
it out of reach. Maybe check regional, but honestly, it's
a mess. Some of those stops don't show up any
more on new rot maps. Some aunt service since the
d o'd he last cuts. I tried pressing, but got
only more stomoling. At length, he feigned hunting for a
non existent form, giving me the familiar bureaucratic brush off
as our left shoulders hunch. I call him watching me
through the glass, suspicion, the sintriss, and beneath both the
faintest trace of worry. That evening, back at my desk,
I tried to focus on a routine case, but my
mind wandered the ringing frone the phrase the dark rested area.
They wouldn't let go. I wanted to know. I needed
it to prove to myself, if to no one else,
that the story I had stumbled into his reel. Maybe
I hoped it would make up for the old sins,
or maybe I was just wired for obsession. Sleep wouldn't come.
So I dragged my batted laptop over piles of half
reed reports and opened a foul Colt Highway night log's reference.
I lost an I of tracing the ecolos pattern of
Colsta County sheriff offices. There were always more disappearances than returns.
The deeper I looked, the more threads I found it
as joined it incomplete, but clustering around the same long
corridor of dead electronics and dying rest areas. No single
incident explained the shape of it. At some point I
opened an audio file I downloaded weeks before, and promptly forgotten.
See be slash dashed to r K five hundred eight over.
It was the header in my archive, and I recalled
some on from an amateur slith forum had sent after
reading a gossip piece I'd posted. I had dismissed it
as a crank tip at the time. The click of
the recording was familiar engine from Highway Wine, marred by
digital artifacting. The trucker's voicemail, heavy slightly nazzle, was relaxed,
giving a lazy traffic update. There was laughter as he
responded to another driver with a joke about bad chili.
The first ten minutes were ordinary, the soundtrack of a
thousand sleepless miles. Static began to creep in the truck's
words faltered. Another voice, this one blank and inhuman, invaded
the ban Adita has been chosen. Its tone was identical
to the one I heard at the wrist stop, so
precise it could have been reading a test pattern. The
trucker's tone changed instantly. What are you talking about? Who
is this? He paused? The silence was too long, Hey,
cut it out. I ain't got time for games, you
hear me. No answer, just more static, the voice occasionally
repeating Adeta has been chosen. The last minute of the
recording dissolved into feedback. There was a muffled curse, a
metallic clatter, and the transmission went dead. I played it twice,
scrutinizing for ambient clues, no engine stall, no brick squeal,
no hint of another vehicle approaching, just the voice, then absence.
According to the attached message, the truck and driver vanished
that night without a trace, somewhere near a non existent
exit forty two b on olgius minus forty four gps
day to stop there. The vehicle never found. There had
been no public investigation beyond a two sentence blob on
a transportation forum. I leaned back cold all over. It
was impossible not to notice the doll faces quality of
the message. The voice was taunting or panic to suiting.
It was bureaucratic, as though issuing instructions to a machine.
The hash and clip corroborated just enough of the story
to unsettle me. Cross checking other disappearance as cases with
missing vehicles, off grid data failures, gaps, and trip logs,
I found references to similar interruptions. Always a disruption at payphone,
always an untraceable message spoken in that same listless intexts.
I gave up on sleep entirely. Instead, I printed maps
from three online archives, overlaying the clusters of vanished drivers
and hikers, most clustered around Old State lines were placed
highways serviced by buses. The raut's locals now avoided the
flyover points, where no one stopped unless they had to.
The pattern once glimpse pressed inexorably inward at four a m.
Running our nerves in a stack of cheap coffee, I
spread the maps out across my table, pinning each cluster
with rusted thumbtack scavenged from discarded office boats. Red dots
marked the sites of recovered vehicles, blue for those gun
without trace. I drew lines backward, tracing our dated exits.
Highway mileage rarely matched modern signage, and several stops no
longer existed on new maps. Three costers emerged, concentrated around
exits only found in state databases or on fragments of
long haul trucker forums. These stops were supposed to be abandoned,
but public records still showed service calls, unreported to the
public and never followed up. It struck me as a
bureaucracy too lazy to retire routes, or maybe something stranger.
I cataloged the rest stop incidents by time and frequency.
Almost all distress calls happened between twelve thirty and four
a M tenaio when even nocturnal animals slept, and then
something even stranger. Each of these calls came from payphunes
officially listed as out of order or inactive, curiosity or
compulsive me to have vacame me a dial the first
number listed for one of the glen's crossing stops, expecting
an immediate disconnect. Instead, the line troped once twice, somewhat
live dead air. I strained, hearing only a faint looking sound,
as though a tongu drum the receiver or a real
spunnet's end, A thin papery breath, then silence. Rathal I
dialed ag in. This time there was only a sharp
metallic tone in the colon did itself. I sat in
the kitchen, insides crawling with a knees. The house had
the unnatural hush of places waiting to be appended. After
two days of reassembling clues, picking its skin until my
nuttles ached, I decided to approach a human element. The
case file from Everett wife at a public number attached.
I called, not expecting her to answer, but she did,
and her voice was tired but clear. After my clumsy introduction,
she said, You're not the only one who's called about
his truck with a faint defensevitch, I just want to
understand what happened, I assured her. She hesitated, then agreed
to meet at a dinah twenty minutes south of Newcastle,
one chosen for its decent half burns and the separation
of boots by fig leather half walls. We sat plastic
coffee cuts between us, her eyes red rim but focused.
She'd brought a bat of fahne open first thing. As
I explained the Dashcombe Tape's existence, he started getting voicemails
the week before. She confided it pushing the fawn toward me.
Each was a few second lawn, little more than static.
But underneath the hiss of faint regular noise surfaced, like
machinery cycling or some ollulating background chant. He said he
felt watched outside of Truckswood Park with no lights. Once
he came home with his hands bleeding, he kept scraping
them and the steering willso he wouldn't fall asleep. I
asked staff to the locals and the rest stock corridors.
She laughed, without humor. Oh, they know no one here
reports anything, at least not more than once. When I pressed,
she met my eyes. You really want to go poking there? Folks,
save you, mine your business, or the highway minds it
for you. By the time I left, the day was
poured over black and the roads glistened with fresh rain.
I couldn't get her words out of my head. In
her files were voicemails, each ear than the last, once
a gobbled phrase, oddly like the one i'd heard, Dieter
has been chosen, drawn out by a distorted voice. I
spent the evening dancing between forums and date pisses. Feel
in the original event, we root in my mind, growing
dense or harder to ignore. Compelled by something no longer
wholly rational, I planned a visit to one of the
rest areas that repeatedly cropped up in files. I left
just before dusk, Old wind breakers lip tie against my rope.
I brought with me a flashlight, note bud, and the
type of worn skepticism that had sustained me three years
of disappointment. The rest stop was thirty miles out of town,
down a road flanked by Autumncomfhill's grown wild. The lot
was mostly empty save for assault etn minivumparkney at the
trash bins. The vending machines display flecked from cookwe dollars
seventy five cents to static, The interior empty except for
half a melted power bar. An old deer watch from
behind the loaf fence, its roobs showing through the hide.
It didn't move as a stepped out. The payphone, rusted
but vertical, stood near the restroom block. Its receiver d angled,
a little chain, clinking as it swan above it. Though
out of order's sign was newer than the rest freshly
glued over cracked plexicles. I knelt and spotted a sodden
newspaper wedged between the machine and the wall, the top
corner torn but showing an eggs at number forty to
rebeat that didn't here on any current map. The paper
was two months old. I wandered behind the building, expecting
nothing but a graffiti scroll. Instead, I found the ground
flattened and modded, with many overlapping shoe prints, too many
to have accumulated in one night. I snapped pictures, noted
the odd secured as path I took none left through
the front gate. For a while I listened the deer
moved away. I thought I caught the echo of a laugh,
quickly swallowed by wind. Unease settled heavy. As the light failed,
I circled back toward my car, chest tight, my focus narrowed,
steps quickening. The lot was empty except for the minivan,
which looked and touched my car, however, had its driver's
side door swung wide open, a detail so starkly ronnig
stopped shore of boot freezing midst it. My gear was untouched,
nothing missing, wallet, mapp's tape recorder all there, But I
knew I'd locked the door, had felt the latch click,
Something had been inside, Someone or something had wanted me
to know. I slammed the door shut, slid into the seat,
and tried to steady my breathing, only as my hand
shook on the steering wheel. Dad, I recall a half
tree from years ago for returning to a room after
a year's log shirt, only to find the window raised
and called a slipping inside. All the way home, I
tried to convince myself it was nerves. The next afternoon,
I found myself watching security footage stream from state feeds
granted Durashiki bachannel from a French Janet, formerly of the
regional duty, demoted after too many late night complaints. She
sent me passward protected files tapped only for your headache.
The first thing I saw was eerie enough. At three
different rest stops spanning two months and hundreds of miles,
midnight security taps captured alone figure looping through the lot,
always in roughly the same torn army surplus c always
limping hard on the left leg. The image is grainy
as old crime scene footage. The figure passed the bathroom
door's pause, then circled the payphone, never picking it up
at random points. It taipot effacted frame's terror and sometimes looping,
so the figure repeated the same motion for nearly a
full minute. Worse, when Essinc taped from Glenn's crossing Round
nineteen and Northaven, I found the same person, identical motion,
identical coat, identical gay the time stamp traveled, but the
script never changed. Someone or something was repeating itself in
too many places I leaned in scanning backgrounds. The strangest
detail wasn't the figure, though that chilled me, but the
signs themselves on bathroom doors and vending machines. On one
tape pegs and numbers were scrolled in a language I
had never seen, blocky symbols, odd decritics, the fragments of
a dialect two systemac to be random. On others, the
paper and boose boor warnings or external schedule only in
reverse or warped letters. In one frame, a janitor's closet
door opens, revealing nothing but sheer black black so deed
the CAMRA's nightmode pixelate and skips. Desperate for some explanation,
I posted still from the tape blood sign included to
a niche forum for code linguists and historical semiotics, asking
for any insight. Most replies were as dismissive as I expected,
until one user Andresserne sent a private message Sindak's structure
is similar to condition instructions at psychoperant programming, not natural language,
though you running an experiment. I left that window open
for a long time and sure if I was being
toyed with or worse discovered nights after felt razor sharp,
I was darting to eat shadow. Any remaining skepticism faded
as I realized the language expert, the regulars at the
rest area, and Janet all implied one thing. What I
was circling was organized, even clinical my own presence across
data locks and outness accounts might already be noted. Still,
some part of me pushed forward obsession and the need
to know at way caution. I returned, armed with a
vintage Nikon portable tape deck and Janet's assurance of at
least one working camera online, this time to the rest
stop near the Old County Line, the most notorious of
the missing clusters. I arrived just ahead of midnight, chilling
air biting through my jacket. The lot looked deserted. Even
the deer seemed to have abandoned their usual haunts. I
parked at the far edge, set up my camera angle
toward the payphone, and scanned for company frigates sang softly,
their voices thinning as night deepened. For nearly an hour,
nothing happened. I flipped open my notebook, scribbling date and time,
cross referencing each minute with a checklist of recurring side anomalies.
I caught a scrap of static through my taped microphone,
matched by the low cline of the vending machine's falling cup.
Then footsteps, a slow draggon crunch along the gravel the
paphon rang shriller than lost time. A slice through the night.
I watched through my viewfinder, shadow swept across the concrete,
hestitated at the booth. I answered on the forfe rain static,
then the voice again, but it was different this time, Deeter,
it began, and then a mistakably distorted my own name,
spoken as though Felter drew a broken synth. Subject noted
proceed My hands clinched with terror and a thrill. I
can't explain the world felt abuptly artificial. I snapped the
camera toward the parking lot as movement flickered at the edges,
the ghost of a figure lembing again and again, each
loop synchronizing with the tape stammer. My own breasted in
the air. The phone continued to whine, refusing to drop
the line. For a moment, I thought I saw eyes
in the far fence. Human there, It didn't matter. The
sense of being observed pressed in into metics, some one
leaning mouth to ear. I scrawled in my notebook without looking,
pen terroring, paper, adrenaline buzzing. I yanked the plug on
the camera, jum my tape deck into my bag, and
hustled to my car. The door was locked. I fumbled
the keys so badly it didn't matter. I started the
engine on habit alone. As my gaze cut from mirror
to mirror, all blow reflections and empty seats. I ran
two red lights getting home, the phone's stutter still issue
from the taper corridor in my back low as a lullaby,
the phrase repeated subject noted proceed. It was then I
realized I wasn't just haunted by these occurrences. I was
being tracked. Something somewhere knew. I was searching my own note,
taking my own journey was now part of whatever loop
ponted those rural stops, and the sense that there were
human eyes on me, not just whatever in human force
pulled the strings grew sharper with every mile marker I passed.
I had become both hunter and hunted, and only whatever
it was had taken notice. That night, I locked every
door and window twice, but still didn't sleep. Instead, I
sat with the tape, replaying the static, knowing that my
own name filtered through the hismark to point I could
not return from the system now had me on record,
I had entered the pattern. I spent the early hours
hunched over my notebooks, clouds of breath making tiny ghosts
in the room, tipped still crackling with the phrase subject
noted psons. The warrid tod become the only steady rhythm
in my head, overriding any natural impulse to rest. Even
the apartment seemed changed by some invisible charge. The baseballs
creaked as the heat kicked on. Water grumbled in the pipes,
but those modane noises sounded out of place, as though
the entire building wanted to remind me it was merely
incidental shelter, not protection. The emails started just after two
a m. At first, the alerts seen routine spam offerers,
some desperate reply from a contact into my asking about
a feature I never wrote. But then a subject line
appeared marked urgent patterens slash file assistance from an address
I didn't recognize. The message inside was blank, but attached
was as if fil able to restop entryminous one thousand,
nine hundred fifty nine a year I'd never seen reference
to my research. I hovered over the file, instincts prickling
every side. We stepped into the story brought fresh risk
viruses traps may be worse still the compulsion gnawed at me.
I opened it on my ancient day gap lapt up
when I kept just for untraceable, potentially dangerous files. The
contents were straightforward and chilling. Three black and white photos
rest stopped half recognized, each taken from a high angle,
probably from floodlights or highway cameras. In one, a line
of dark figures trail passed paper in those shadows distended
as if the source of elimination had warked. Another photo
showed a dozen parked vehicles, all emptied as if abandoned
mid arrival, and in every wind should was a single
white slip of paper laid just so. The third image
forced my heart into an uneven rhythm. A maintenance lock,
handwritten with neat block letters noting a payphone repair, a
SIVE forty two beat, and beneath it a warning invaded
writing Dieter protocol do not reset schedule direct of sun file.
The handwriting was familiar. After a moment studying it with
sick dread, I realized why it was nearly identical to
what had France called in the margins of some old
duty field work had coppied week prior. Notes from a
technician he had come missing in nineteen seventy two. As burning,
I scribbled a question to myself in the margin of
my current notebook was schedule who directs the deeter? Then
set the files aside. The boundary between my conscious logic
and the patterns pressing and had grown. Then it was
always at night that fixation rooted itself in daylight. I
could almost believe it was all just coincidence of mental fatigue.
I tried to switch tracks, opening up a spreadsheet I
had created for incident time stamps. The repetitive clerical columns,
normally soothing in their monotony, now held menacing echoes. I
traced one line Glens crossing distress call one welve m
to its near twenty five counties away at one seventeen
a m. Same night, same out of service phone triggered
impossible unless the system was staffed by more than one
watcher or on less time. As measured at these sites
bent to the same logic as the looping footage. I
made an executive decision to reach back out to Janet,
the ex g T friend who'd sent me to tapes.
I kept the message direct, typing Janet god anomalies in
the false sin schedule wrests warning direct as did your
intake logs ever mentioned eaters. Expecting a reasonable delay, I
started running the search for any mention of project deetered
and digitized duet news it is and city council bulletins.
Ten minutes later, at my phone buzzed with the tour's reply,
we'll call after five. A janet had written, erase you'll
last message before then not safe on server. It's not
just you being noticed. I closed my email program, heart
rebounding against my roops. The parallels and echoes in the
paper trail, the resourceful persistence of that force. The patten
wasn't just supernatural or technical, something of some one wanted
to keep these rules, this order intact and didn't much
care about the casualties. There was nothing to do in
the blue flicker of dawn, but wait. I paced my apartment,
checked locks twice, and at one pointment so far as
to tape over the laptop's camera, suddenly fearful that some
bored ichnician present or displaced might be watching through it.
Even my own reflection in the kitchen window looked and familiar,
as though I'd aged ten years in a matter of days,
eyes fleck read from strain and the edge of sleeplessness.
When Janet finally called, her voice compressed with nerves but steadied.
The miner was as though I'd been waiting years. Not iOS.
All right, you need to listen, She began, words clipped,
nearly rushed. What you're dealing with? These dieters, you keep referencing,
they're not new. Back in early duty orientation, there was
a whole orl or urban legend stuff about certain sites
where Deeter protocols predated the State Highway Commission, pre Internet,
pre digital eve and pre interstate. She drew a long
breath stat of kissing under her words. I think there
was a program official or not, testing behavioral responses at
these isolated stops, seeing what people would dear the infrastructure.
Yourself started to go off script. You were supposed to
ignore strange events, keep your head down, proceed a schedule.
Some field texts even wrote their own counter instructions for
dealing with glitches or whatever you call them, but no
one wanted to document it. After a few guys didn't
come back from a late night job, and those who did,
I asked, voice tight as flicking to my covered webcom
They transferred out, mostly got hush hush promotions, or very
quietly stopped showing up. A couple had break downs and
the maintenance locks they started being shredded instead of file.
My suspicion is some higher up wanted the old deeder
language gone. But people talked sometimes you just had to
know who I thanked her promise up bates if I
found anything concrete. After we hung up, I drew a
heavy line through my maps, connecting all sites with Deeter
Protocol references. The cluster was almost perfect, like the wedge
of a wheel, always pointing back to the same pivot.
The missing exit, the looping footage, the artificial voice. I
could no longer bring myself to doubt the story of
only the wisdom of pursuing a father. Yet that seemed irrelevant.
Now my name was in the system, I'd been marked,
and the compulsion had grown clause. I wanted and needed
to know who had designed this trap. Late after noon
lights lanted through the blinds. When the next doddity arrived,
hand delivered with no signature, a brown envelope tucked under
my door. Inside was a single cassette tape labeled for
subject DCT and a polaroid of the rest stop at dusk,
a wavering figure of me standing frozen under the jaundice
lights for a single crushing moment. I wondered if I
had started wandering in my sleep. Drawn unconsciously back, I
had to force my hand study to load the tape
into my old dictaphone. It rolled to life, worrying the
magnetics filling the room. A gentle tap, a shuffling sound.
Then the same bureaucratic voice deeter protocol is now active.
If you hear this, wereset schedule. Subject observed, remain stationary
and await further instructions. A pencil scratch across paper is
the subject. Oil pause time remaining seven units static. The
intermittent were of a dial. Then, without warning, my own
voice taken from a recording, a clipped edge from a
voice meil warped into the cadence the machine had used.
Proceed The tape ground to a halt. I led a
play once more, catching only two more artifacts of metallic jangle,
as though keys were dropped, and a tiny almost hidden
phrased near the end, breathy and hard to pass assimilation
enter his order to loopen sable by now the air
in my apartment felt thick with the memory of those
rural nights, the unblinking fluorescence, the sense that any rohm
ternament dissolving into a file. I reco a regime no
one admitted existed. I catalogued the new anomaly, but my
thoughts circled the truth. The pattern wasn't just haunt of
rest stops or abnormal disappearances or a programmed voice. Someone
somewhere had orchestrated a test of isolation, of obedience, perhaps
of madness, and I had allowed myself to become a
perfect subject. I dug out the original notebook, sketched the
looping arrows again, always returning to the vanishing point at
the center of the wheel. Exit forty two B, the
exit no one saw except on falsified signs or out
of date maps. My finger is itch for action, But
the heaviness of predestination, a subject noted, it held me
in place, as though I were already occupying two spaces
at once, hunter and hunted, observer and observed actor and acted.
Upon night, slid down the windows. I did not turn
on the TV or radio. Instead, I placed the cassette
and the desker beside the battered phone, and watched dust
creep around the corners of the room. Somewhere in the city,
life must have gone on, Peter deliverers, routine arguments to
Morrow's headlines, quietly unfolding here, though, I thought of only
one thing. The system had me, and whether it would
spit me back out hole was no longer mine to decide.
At some point, fatigue overwhelmed anxiety. Sitting upright in my
desk chair, jowaking from clenching my teeth, I fell into
a shallow, uncomfortable sleep. Even there, the phrase chased me
through endless corridors. Detero has been chosen to eat prote
coal acto, please proceed, voices blurring into mine, into janets,
into the silent figures passing a long tarlet rose. When
I woke, the sky was overcast and the city's noise
had crept back in. But the tape was still on
the desk, the polaroids still tucked against my elbow, the
looping paths drawn deeper into the page. All that remained
I knew was to assemble myself for the next approach
to Tess. If I cut the boundary between knowing and
being known, I may be in the breach to see
the shape of the mechanism underneath, not as mystery but
as design. The morning after my world had contracted a
perimeter defined by drawn curtains, dead boat locks, looping cassette pace,
and the slow creep of sunlight over battered walls. I
moved through my apartment with the blankness of some one
pacing the edge of a crater, waiting for evidence that
the ground beneath would hold Every shadow along the base.
Bows summoned, echoes of dragging steps, and telephonic static. Sleep
had come in ragged patches, surrendering after dawn to estate
that minic rest only out of its own exhaustion. Everything
from last night remained. Note pocopen lines crossing an angry
black the photograph of some version of me under jawn.
This lamps, the tit plastic windows showing tightly spoiled ribbon.
I tested my phone line and found it silent in
no dial tone, no ambient clicks, just a dead channel
where this should have been at least hum of city wiring.
I switched on my laptop, holding my breath until its
old fan word up and the screen flickered, reassuring in
its mondanity. As I waited for my encrypted email to load,
I caught my reflection in the monitor, skin FuMB with
nighttime sweat beard rough across my jar. I looked the
way people did after a hospital death watch, hollow, waiting
for someone else's next move. Janet's last message had dissolved
into nothing, as a blank window where her thread should
have been. Either she purged the logs or some one
had done it for her. The duty system logan was
frozen as well. Credentials rejected access to night. I backtracked
my gap laptop, which now brooded to a blinking error
no operating system found sometime in those dead eyars. Reality
had closed in another inch around me. On impulse, I
checked a hallway. Peering through the peep had corrid all white,
clean of sand. The door across for my nelvus as
Leyland stood open for the first time since she'd fallen ill,
her newspaper still bundled in blue plastic lay and touched
since yesterday morning. The elevator at the end of the
hall painted open empty. I didn't wait. I laid the
tape in my cup pocket alongside the polaroid and a
dress book, careful to mark each step as if my
movement madded. There was attention now. I could feel it
when the curtain shifted, when the phone line gave a
phantom trickle of sound, a presence filtering through table sheets
and glass fiber that had nothing to do with city
power outages or low level crime. By early afternoon, it
was all I could do not to jump every time
the little full restin showed it aubove my kitchen table.
I watched you, but notifications, expecting an an mark sidan
that never arrived. Cautiously, I cracked the window half, expecting
to see the same dark van. I glimpsed once down
the block, but only the regular stream of commuter traffic
greeted me. If I linger too lawn above the city's
drowne I could imagine the shape of a waiting blankness
and appointment kept elsewhere, ad eater, invisible, just beneath the
normal confusion of errands and city norse. The notebook an
envelope beckoned. I didn't need to think hard to know
the truth of it. I'd left the narrative boundaries of
my life behind in a rest area, pucking lot. The
story no longer belonged to anyone I could call or email.
It belonged to those who wrote the schedules behind the
Deeter coffee barely touched the tiredness that sagged through me,
But I let the ritual of heating water and stirring
the powder slow my pulse. I spared up my notes
pinninia maps along the table's edge, drawing lines that converged
and overlapped until meaning seemed arbitrary. The window light twisted
across my scattered pace ages, forming temporary grids. I cataloged
each unusual event chronologically, looking for overlapped disk com druptions,
repeated exit numbers, payphone rings. The cassette message looped in
my head Deeter prote call is now active, reminstationary. I
forced my mind on to the facts. Janet's warnings were real,
and so as the rest cothers had vanished at the
margin of knowledge, not just from a steps in the
dark or bad luck, but from the machinery that kept
these loops running. Every record pointed to the same banishings,
confined to obsolete highway routes, always late and always bracketed
by phone calls whose origin. The system would neither confirm
nor deny. My own position was now part of the data,
as if I crossed some permitter I had never intended
to approach. A knock startled me fully upright. Three soft,
deliberate wraps at the door. My heart spat up into
my throat. I stood frozen, hand unconsciously flattening the notebook.
The knocks repeated to no urgency, only a steady rhythm,
the bare minimum to NaN's presence. I pressed my eye
again to the people. The hallway was deserted, but a
shadow shivered at the edge of the threshold, as though
someone just outside the anger, knowing they didn't need to
be seen to be acknowledged. I didn't answer, and the
presence evaporated within moments, quiet as dear. Seconds later, my
phone vibrated spreeen, lighting up with nknown number. I stared,
throat so tight at almost close shut thum, hovering up
of decline. On the third reign, I let it go
to voicemail. No message arrived. Instead, the cassette in my
pocket seemed to hump, generating a vibration beneath the plastic,
phantom or coincidental. I couldn't say the new stakes were
not theoretical. I felt, for the first time since the
Outlanta story that my professional ruin had given way to
a threat that didn't care about careers or reputation. What
charge there now was a sense of being cataloged, entered
into the logic of someone's experiment, someone of something who
didn't need to know my hopes and fears, only my location,
my behaviors, my patterns. The rules had changed, and the
longer I lingered, the more I felt corridors lipping narrow
around me, details within dejros, until simple escape from myself
for anyone became less likely. By dusk, the apartment felt
drained of oxygen, its wall shaky, and in substantia, threat
had become the air itself. The old world's routine resumes
debts felt utterly irrelevant. I ran over the list of
things I knew. Rest stops still received maintenance, but no
one remembered seeing crews. Locals closed their mouths when you
asked about exits that went on any map. My own
presence here or at the roadside was being folded and
used for something that resisted direct analysis. The urge to
run or hide faded only compulsion remained. Escalation was subtle
at first, like a meter ticking over summer far away.
Began in the way outside light don't even before the
sun had fully set. I stared down into my cooling mug,
thinking to gather my equipment to do something, only to
hear a triple click in the phone base, like signal
really from another era, A froze, recognizing accadence from AudioID
catalog the night before. Three deliberate clicks, then static, A
stuttering blue white flush pressed through the window like a
camera flashby dying at low battery, I heard, or thought
I heard footsteps in the stowlets side, pulling gently aside
the curtain. I glimpsed for an instant a man standing
in a pool of light by the building's loading bay.
He wore the and of yellow safety vest favored by
duty crewise, but his head was bent face and visible,
one arm having rigid the shape of something heavy, clutched
in his fist. He didn't move as I watched, Then
with a faint jerk, he seemed to skip forward half
a pace, like seeing jump in a broken videophile. I
let the curtain fall. Panic sharp had gathered my recorder
note book in the battered polaroid. Against better judgment, I
called up through the door Janet, and no answer, only
another triple knock, as if the message could be despatched
even when the sender was gone. My phone vibrated once more,
this time flashing an amber warning and scheduled deeter proceed Immediately.
I turned it off, battery out, and stuffed the pieces
into a drawer beneath my notes. The urge to leave
jetted through me, irrational and absolute. I stuffed my coat pockets,
tucked the tape and note k under one arm, and
checked the hallway again. Nothing but as I turned for
the stairwell or russ speckled envelops slid under my door,
bearing only my name in vinstyle sand'serf the kind you
saw on old maintenance schedules. The envelope bulged a little,
holding inside a kickout from the local rend akarbooth, a
note re collection schedule midnay exit schedule forty two b.
Unable to help myself, I slid the envelope into my
pocket and hurrowed down the stairs, each landing compressing the
sense of urgency until it was a physical weight across
my shoulders, a street level irritated of burnt leaves and
of freeze. The rent car booth two blocks over shone
with the blank in personal light of the always open
a little cube of cheap siding fronted by a plexiglass window.
An older clerk canned me the keys after examining the card,
never making eye contact, his fingers shaking full tank, he murmured,
no paper contract, Just bring it back if you can.
I barely nodded. A car batter tours had a rest
stop mat crumpled, and the passengers he takes at numbers
suckled with black marker, the ink bleeding into the paper's creases.
I started the engine, which cuffed twice before settling into
bore metallic Mama. Every minute spent in the city felt
too exposed. Every extra glance at my phone brought that
well in sense of a net closing in. Without planning
where I was headed, I found myself already culling out
of parking lots for stock plights, following muscle memory. At
a long State high which toward the old Bypass, the
sky line faded behind me, the opened gnoss andraveling into
strip malls, then into half abandoned rule zones. I could
taste the oncoming edge of night, a mix of dew,
diesel exhaust, and autumn peroxide. By the time I passed
the city's last sodium vapor glow, there was no turning back.
I aimed the car north across into State forty four,
seeking that wedge estate road ID identified in the earliest
cluster of disappearances. The cars were radio flickered, jumping across
bends twice. It settled on static, interrupted by a voice
reading at times stamped instructions, emergency flood closures, deeder warnings,
mostly mundane until buried in static came the phrase subjects
scheduled proceed. I switched the dial off. If anything, the
silence was worse terrific, thinned until I was the only
car on the stretch. Each sign I passed look slightly off,
arrows bent upward, numbers reversed or crossed out. Destinations listed
as schedule substituted, or proceed externally soon reinstorted to needle
the windshield weak waperusme at the runoff into aks that
caught the last collar from the sky, pressed onward, watching
for the exit sign that had loomed so large in
my mind. Forty two b At the halfway point, I
paused the car to turn out, hot dabbling overhead power lines,
rum alive with intermittence, box throwing nerves through my teeth.
I checked my phone, a blank's green, and my watch,
which had stopped at exactly twelve three. The world had
dropped into one of those edges, the corridor outside, the
tyranny of minutes and bills in city time. A little
farther up the road, I saw the first rest area,
three vending machines, cyclone fence sagging in back, two papons
held up on cast iron poles. One was marked out
of order and fresh tape, the other hung askew, receiver missing.
I leaned out the window, engine id lane, tense in
every muscle for half a second. The urge to just
drive away came strong, a flash of cowardice or self
preservation or common sense. But the envelope burned in my pocket.
I stepped out, gravel shifting under my boots. Recording gave
us slung over my chest, no movement, no human sounds,
only the tick ticktick of cooling metal and some way
with cricket its longing undestroyed by infrastructure. I forced myself forward,
notebook out. I pressed my finger against the first pephone,
coal metallic, sticky word. Generations of hands had the left traces.
I lifted the receiver, came alive with pure and shape static.
I dropped it to my side, heart pounde. The second phone,
the one missing its receiver, gave a faint electronic buzz,
not quite audible unless I l enclosed and held my
breath off. In the trees behind the rest stop, a
shape shifted, a shadow separating from others, coalescing into the
ambiguous form of a man in a parker, moving with
that same odd, skipping cape from the tapes. The outline
flickered at the edge of the lamb's reach. I tried
to lift my recorder, hands shaking too hard to line
up the tape. The figure didn't come close her, but
didn't reced either, as if not hear from me personally
more checkpoint or waypoint, a reminder that forward was the
only viable direction. I angled back to the car, trying
to draw each small detail into memory. The sound of
the signs buzz, the angle of the clouds drifting in
slow parade, the number forty three bees spray painted over
a boarded window. I didn't know what I expected, as
someone to follow a message spelled in Vandal's hand, some
gesture of human error in a world becoming literal. Inside
the car again, I forced the engine into gear. Debris
on the shoulder rattled beneath the wheels, a strip of
orange construction netting, a broken mile marker, the half shredded
skin of an old coffee cup. The deter signed for
its at forty two be soon appeared a rectangular piece
of aluminum with numbers blacked out. Only an eater scheduled
left visible beneath strips of tape. I checked both rear
view and side mirrors, in each for a split second,
I caught the pale shimmer of someone standing at the
edge of the lot, head bent in the low rhythm
of last night's footage. I braced myself turning the wheel
onto the off ramp. The black toupier felt different to newer,
or perhaps just less used, as seemed. Cut through field
and scrub the Torus's head lets flecked over a rain
patch pavement unto a lot rimmed with the familiar fending machines.
Rows of vacant parking slots, one payphone. It boots a
half open. The world outside felt contain nothing moving except
the wind misfettering along the barriers. I parked in the
third space, the one that always came up in vanished
vehicle records. For thirty seconds, I sat still, running mental
checklus heart looping like the playback on those tapes. Then,
with a deep certainty that everything ordinary was now all,
I climbed out gravel, biting under it. The inside of
the booth smelled of oswon and drying plastic. I pressed
a hard set deck against the papron's plex glass, set
the receiver back in the hook. This time it rang
a sin as my finger touched the plastic shop insistent
faster the memory can explain, I answered on reflex foe
swallowed and static, as the familiar tones played through Deeter
protocol is now active. Subjects scheduled aid instructions. Then beneath
the formal kedence a distortion my own names bliced and
jittering punched out syllable by syllable. Proceed as scheduled. I
placed a polaroid on the shelf in the booth, watching
as moisture began to curl its edges. In the stillness.
Following the phones's abrupt silence, I heard fitts ups approaching,
not the slow shuffle of a lone janitor, but several
overlapping steps, staggered and inhumanly regular. A flecker in the distance.
Three figures crossing the lot, each with the same truncated stride,
all dress and cannily alike, wearing vests and jackets from
separatures updated every decade, yet cyclical in their repetition. They
converged at the mouth of the rest area, their faces
lost in shadder. One lifted an arm palm ut stretch,
marking the way forward. Another cup there is, as if
listening for cues. The third mild words to a sentence
I could not read. My breath rattled, and I desperately
scanned for an escape Instead. The lot's physical geometry began
to subtly shift the angle of the fencing, doubling back
on itself, the vending machines drawing closer, as though the
whirl pulled in by invisible thread. The sky overhead haun
too low, harsh with sick phosphorescence, the payphone sign flickering
to display a phrase I couldn't pass characters broken by static.
I tried to move, lakes trembling. It took all my
focus to dial Janet on the batted Benefona futil aask gambit.
The cold didn't connect, but I heard a voice on
the line, not herrors but close subject accepted, remained for
schedule ordered, please proceed behind me. The payphones receive a
leap from its cradle, swinging wildly as the bo slight
stied one by one, the tape in my recorder and spool,
the magnetic band snaking to the floor, each lip drawing
in dark shadows across concrete. The hair at the nape
of my neck crawled. The three figures stood in perfect
formation directly between me and my car. A sudden, sharp,
metallic clang rang from the direction of the vending machines.
I turned to see one machine store hanging open, not
on hinges, but impossible black escaping out as though into
an interior with no end at spilled paper's pages torn
from stacks of schedules, shift logs, evident reports, all written
in the same shorthand the same stilted in human hand.
Some pages bore my name or a fragment to subject pattern, stable,
contingency assimilation ready. I tried to call out, but my
throw failed. One figure advance, head jerking, voice seeking from
a mouth behind a broken imitation of skin. Police proceded
each or reset schedule. The world turned inward. I stumbled
back toward the booth, boots skittering in the pool rainwater.
The tap unraveled beneath my feet, sticking to my boots,
everything seemed to shiver and warp, the physical space growing
repetitive and stuttering, as though I'd entered a video loop
that plade rewound and played again, each cycle tighted in
the last. Fighting for coherence, I lunged for the exit,
back to the parking lot and the car, but each
step brought me back to the same batted booth. On
the third side, Michael, I was no longer alone. One
of the looping figures now stood inches from me, their
eyes holes in the surface of a blank, mirrored mask.
My hands landed awkwardly against their shoulder. The touch was
paradox gull. I see brittle, as if I had made
contact with a shell designed to channel each movement back
at me in delay fractured echoes. I recognized the pattern.
The systems, the looping takes the schedule voice. This was
not possession, not even haunting, but replication, shape and gesture
and obedience, repeating through whatever lived beneath the asphalt. I
tried to yell a plea or weep, but only a
soft mechanical click left matroat the boof lights flickered and
died around me. Shapes multiplied, echoes, converging into a contingent
of lost schedules, banished workers, filed projects. The world became
quoted script, its logic as final as any spreadeheet. I felt,
with bone deep certainty that this was what the missing
had always entered, a protocol, not a place governed by
rules that cared only about their own execution. Suddenly, a
piercing sound cut through. It was not the tape, nor
a phone, nor wind, but the squatch of a radio,
my radio coming alive in the car. I heard, for
one instant a human voice breaking through. Don't take the deed,
or stay awake, the sound of my friend, a voice
I recognized, fracturing fru leers of static. I spun desperate,
and at last the loop broke, The booth released me.
I stumbled out into the lot, lungs burning, scrambling across
lick pavement to my car, the figures dissolve, real or not.
Back to the edges, watching peace found ignition. The torch
shuddered to life, rain spinning now in horizontal sheets. I
jammed the transmission into drive and charged blindly away, tire shrilling, windows,
fog in despite the defrost her I did not look
back at the rest area, did not pause for the
final set of flashing hazard lights. The cassette miraculously remained
in my coat pocket and spoiled but intact, a relic
I could not leave behind. I drove for what felt
like irons, city lights teasing the horizon, body shuddering from
the effort of refusing the loop. There felt thinner with
each passing at it, Consciousness fluttered at the edges, each
blink risking her tone, each mile a test of how
far I could remain myself, and not a day to
point in some one else's design. Head Lights burned against
the swelling dark. I crossed the country line and did
not stop until the city, indifferent but reel, gathered again
around me. In the brief, confused after math, day had
no meaning, I staggered from the car likes numb mouth
filled with the taste of rust. My building storm and
raised no brow. Inside the elevator waited, humming a frequency
that set my teeth on edge. I reached my apartment,
half expecting its existence to have been erased, but the
door stood, mail drifted the floor, and the city's rhythm
pressed back in. Only the foe now ran with aggressive persistence.
Each caller withheld number. Each void messaged nothing but irregular
programmed click and dispersed with static. I suffered the expected authorities.
A pair of uniformed agents sent the claim to check
on a report of mental disorientation. The questions danced round
the peripheries. Had I been exposed? Did I remember my
rat With their hallucinations, memory gaps, my answers filtered through
tremulous lips, desperation, hiding behind protocol, their eyes told me
they understood more than they could admit. I asked them
what they knew about the dead? They asked nothing in reply,
myles professional eyes elsewhere. After they left, all evidence had
been swept away, notes gone, tates grew up into blankness,
poloid picture faded to chemical gray. Only the envelope bat
of cassette, and the memory of the voice and the
radio remained to prove any of this had occurred. I
turned a tape in my hands, waiting the notion that
everything I had seen, felt, and heard was now denied
by outside record. I knew better. The dread had not faded,
just stulled around the edges by exhaustion and the constant
flicker of intrusive sounds on the phone line. My own
body felt altered, as if my nervous system had acquired
its own foreign circuitry. Waiting for the next scheduled protocol,
evening pressed and again, this time slower denser. I washed
my face poor two fingers of scotch had tasted of
hospital disinfecting, and braced myself against the apartment's low collapse
back into ordinariness. But there was a new edge, the
sense that at any moment, any trivial action, any accidental
return to the wrong rotary, use of the wrong machine,
could trit the system. It had not let me go,
It had only let me move as far as the
perimeter allowed. Days melted into each other, urban routine, overwritten
by the glancing blows of paranoia. News feed pushed only
trivial disasters and city council's quawbles, every time the radio
broke into static, every flicker in the hall with hisic TV,
every lost minute between tusk summoned something cold and observing.
My friend never called Janet's number round, then cut to
a course of beeps. I dreamed endless corridors bayed in
hallied lamps of a world structured by loops and staticky
and colms. Then one evening, an anonymous brown parcel was
left under my doorer return address. I didn't recognize, no
name or code. Inside an old style payphone receiver, disconnected
from anything, wires frayed at the route. Alongside it a
strip of make neck tape with burnt edges marked only
play and recal. I plugged my remaining recorder into the wall,
inserted the batter tape, and press play. For two full rotations,
it issued nothing but grating static, interrupted occasionally by the
that of a distant footful a cough that might have
been mine. On the third cycle, the static gave weight
to voice of my missing friend, blurred but clear enough.
Don't take the deeter, stay awake. You can break the
loop if you had. Then more static, A rhythm, faintly
suggestive of your feets, then silence. I repaid the message
until the tape shuddered and stuck. The paphone receiverly cold
in my hand, heavier than anything so obsolete had a
right to be. In that moment, hope stung in hurt.
A clely survived a warning existing outside schedule. Yet even
now I felt watched noses on the line, shadows at
the edge of windows, the logic of controls still holding,
still reaching. I tried to write the story the gazette
editors at boilerplate denials. No one wanted to touch it,
and my old contacts stopped replying. Whispered word filtered through
forums and private messages, off the record, tips filtered back
to me, quietly impressed but weary. No one bit Not really.
It was as though the whole profession, or the city itself,
had learned the same lesson as the locals near the
rest stops. Don't pook at the schedule, don't mention the dead,
restless in no sleepless, empty eyres. I took to driving again,
not far, never beyond the ring of city lights. But
still I found myself tracing the old patterns, just to
see if the world would hold. Sometimes I would pass
in exits, low at the shoulder, look out across the
straplet rest area for any sign of the recursive of
the returned. I always kept moving, I told myself, I
always would. To night, I leave by the city's west
margin Mooneu and hidden behind clare the trusts rented returned
or a trin move SISI on its tide suspension. As
I coast up the inclined and drift past my Omrco
one hundred eighty eight, I promise myself I will not stop,
not so much as ease my foot from the pedal.
Still as the rest of your flashes past. In the right,
I cast a glance in the rear of the mirror
compulsion habit of vestigial chase under the dead lights. There
I see a figure standing exactly where I did in
the photograph, head raised, arm lifted toward the void sky.
For a single stretched instant. It could be any lost traveler,
or a hallucination, or even me. Static overtakes the radio
without transition, just before the silence that calm programmatic voice
Yudeta has been accepted. To please proceed, My hands tightened
on the wheel knuckles, white hot thunders in the paws.
For a moment, I cannot tell if it is the
world glitching are merely me breaking the rules of my
own story. The road draws me forward, and the pattern,
once revealed, cannot be ensen. The road draws me forward,
and the pattern, once revealed, cannot be unseen. In the
days that follow, normalcy dissolves, Sleep flares out in short,
shattered patches. I patrol the windows at strange eyros, phone
pressed against one ear, recording every accidental sound, walking to
the corner store as gown faces, half suspecting to glimpse
their shuddering synchronous gate among the living news crews miss
the point. The gazette mails my notes back with a
single line not for publication. Janet doesn't respond. Her number rings,
then drops to a silence jam with caro tone. Several
of my contact's old colleagues, a couple of civil servants
clinging to back office rolls pass along elliptical warnings, never
quite in their own voice. Some one tells me rest
areas are scheduled for foreclosure next fiscal. He'll want to
be out of the county by then. He doesn't say why,
even at home. Details spiral off the rails. My mailbooks
collects junk flyers with return addresses pointing to towns that
do not exist in the county registry. Alarms go off
at twelve free every night, even after I cook power
at the breaker box. Once, catching my face in the bathroom,
I see a brief flicker in my posture, hand jerking skyward,
a gesture I recognize from the footage. I swing away,
heartbeat rattling, but feeling of being watched. Lingers dense as migraine.
The folm wings again, always at odd iyres static, then clicks.
Sometimes a horse breaking through my name in its mouth.
Are breathless, mechanize command. At night, I avoid a west
facing window outside the street feels abandoned a two way,
and yet light to ripple over my door in congress
in an alley line with dead bulbs, the city becomes
a map of tiny hazards, strip moll doors numbered in
the old script. Bus stops nancing detos with aids at
markers I know to be false. Waiting in line for coffee,
a stranger in a faded park stands ahead of me,
shuffle sideways without meeting my gaze. She vanishes before I
can follow. On the third night, an envelope arrives, no stamp,
only scroll script schedule adjustment enclosed inside another polaroid, again
of the rest stop, this time stamped with the current date.
No shadow in a photo, just empty concrete, slick, dark
with recent rain on the back, Check schedule, exter order commencing.
I breathe through sharp teeth, not sure whom or what
is auditing home cot between motion and paralysis. I forced
myself out of the apartment, going first to the public library,
then the Central post Office. Old haunts, grounding attempts. It's
there a spot. The van from before battered stayed in Sydney, appealing,
idling with its headlights dark behind a chainling fence. A
man sits behind the wheel, shoulder square by reflective vest,
but his face reminded and shatter. I circle once twice,
feigning a search for a drop ladder, but the van
stays fixed, the driver amoving. I leave by a different route,
feeding silly until later, glancing out the bus window, I
see the same vehicle tailing from two blots back. When
I return home, my lock feels greasy, the door fractually
unatched inside nothing's been stolen, but several sheets from my
oldest notebooks are missing. The remaining pages of pocket with
slight indentations, as if some one had pressed a pen
against the back. Squawling proceeded on the unseen layer. I
know what's expected it yet dread the next step. I
hesitate to involve any one else, but in the end
I call Simon, my oldest friend, a sound technician who
wants in neered forensic reconstructions for cold case detectives Lon
before the funding dried up. I keep the introduction short, careful.
I want you to help me document something anomalies. You
have to see it for yourself. We meet at dusk.
Simon's sharp pangulaarred in his movements, skepticism and concern, nixing
on his tongue. This is what ruined you last time,
he says, not unkindly, you understand right. He double chicks
the gear, a rugged field recorder, a portable mixing console,
and a pair of low like cameras. You just need evidence,
he adds softly. Or you want an excuse I can't answer.
We take his van, less traceable, he claims, traveling north
by back roads, the world outside the windows is vaporous
with mist. Higha's shoulders blowed by wind. We say little,
But when a new deta sign announces schedule of ride
eggs of four to two B, Simon blinks first. That's
not in the atlas, He mutters, no such exit. We
pull onto the old Axis road. Not long after midnight,
the lot appears and changed, crack paving, vending machines, payphone
looming in its lean to. Simon checks his what T
twelve three? That schedule time recurring with dread regularity. He
works quickly, running cables along the court, setting up one
camera facing the loss and another covering the restroom corridor.
The field record of hum's earphones pressed to Simon's head,
but nothing stirs beyond the hum of insects in the
distant rush of highway traffic. We hold position I jot
times events every shadow. Simon paces, then sits cross legged
beside the van. What are we expecting, hobo nonsense? Or
he stops the Paphon's baltryll slicing the air cleanly. Get
this on, Simon, I say, forcing my feet to move.
I stepped to the booth, reciting my name for the
tape pressing record. The receiver's colds look against my ear,
flicks static. Then a voice buried beneath the noise, distinct
as breath beside my face. You have been chosen. Please
proceed to the dasure. It repeats the phrase each cycle,
more insistent, splicing my name into breaks between words. Simon's
eyes are wide as he monitors the audio spectrum, lips
moving in silent translation. Frequency Modulation's wrong, he whispers, Not
just to feed the outputs, tune to something else. I
try to reply, who is this? What do you want
with me? The static doesn't break, but the sequence titans
commands layering of perfect soul as inflection. Then the lights
in the lot flicker. No wind, no apparent CAUs, just
a quickening pulse, as though the world itself is running
a system check. Across the far end, two shapes appear,
slow synchronized, limping figures inhabiting familiar costumes. Their motion repeats,
then splits, one circling the vending machines, another bended over
a point on the asphalt, as if marking a phantom boundary.
Sim In mutters, tell me you see that. He tockles
ni vision, coaxing The second camera to record as the
rest stops. Geography buckles subtlely, the building stretching, parking lines
dubbing over each other, entry doors, blinking messages in that
impossible lifk script, the main sign by the paper and
warps cycling through exit forty three B, then forty two B,
then blankness. The air crackles with thozon sharp enough to
sting my lungs. Simon edges forward, trying to triandulate. The
sound gits. There's a sub harmonic like its calling itself
welf feedback or a. The payphone rings again, louder. This time,
the voice is no longer just programmed calm. It begins
to read from a roster, every third name clipped into
my own. Proceed, eliminate, dilate, schedule, external deeter. We back
toward the van. The figures in safety vests converge at
the car's edge, slowing only to perform a synchronized gesture,
one hand raised, palm out and not a cupping, a
silent scream. They mimic video frames I watch, but now
in skin and cloth, their faces flickering between anonymity and
brief mirrored shards of my own reflection. The restaurant door
bangs open, revealing only pitch, no floor, no boundary, or
infinite darkness where a corridor should be. We have to go.
Signon breaths. We're not supposed to see this. Movement flickers
at off flank. The lot's geometry stutters again, doors and
ventss sliding, vending machines facing inward, signs, breaking free of
chronology for a moment, time snap shadows repeating in spiral
delays before collapsing into present tents. I reach for Simon,
but his arm throws through a momentary double of himself,
pixels misaligning flesh and sound, the fee of a quarter howls,
red lining, spitting static that results briefly into a voice.
Janis Simon's mine? You cannot exit the schedule proceed It
is both invitation and command. Simon bolts toward the restrooms,
desperate to break the loop. I see him disappear through
the door into black swallowed with us sound. I stumble after,
but the landscape loops me back to the lot's center
booth ka booth, each iteration erasing more detail from living memory.
Desperate if row my body at the shifting barrier, would
a building and Lot merge. The world shutters hart, folding
me into its occurrence, until the artificial voice speaks with
my own mouth inside my mind. Subject is ready for assimilation,
with the system foulters somewhat. An external element intervenes a
final breaking rhythm. The radio and Simon's fan left on
burst to life, pouring human voice through apounding how my
friend's voice covered, warning, don't take the deeter, stay awake.
He can static surges the guidance, truncate it, but it
treads the cycle first abruptly, outside a land, sprawled on
the concrete bread short, Simon vanished, my own figure replicated
in every stuttering pane of glass reflecting the dark rain
slants hard across them to Lot. For an instant, everything
and nothing happens at once. The booth falls silent, The
paper and receiver slips to the ground, and a single
phrase flickers, rattling through the returning silence. Proceed when scheduled.
I break for the van, legs, wrench with effort. The
path holds, this time, the geometry reasserting the real and
the meal sorting into columns of cold, functual ordinary, Slamming
the van's door behind me, I jowned, the key int ignition,
the engine roaring to life. In the rear view, the
figures are gone. The rest stop familiar, mundane bone ordinates
its underhart hallite lamps, offering nowhere else to disappear. I drive.
I do not stop or look back for Myles's body, shaking,
mine barely intact. As highway signs regain their ordinary shape,
the city calls me in. All the detes behind me
han ahead, looping unseen. Later, after an unknown lapsed time,
I'm found wandering the city's edge, van abandoned. When the
alreadies arrive, I tell them only what they deem plausible hallucinations,
the exposure, exhaustion. Privately, a suited stranger hands me a card,
says you're safe for now. Don't try to contact the missing.
Don't speak of schedules. The implication is clear. My own records, audio, video,
even the batter tape are corrupted beyond recovery. At home,
I attempt to reconstruct meaning from the disarray. The cassette,
the polaroid, the payphone receiverager, relicate side schedule, a reminder
of memory made unreliable, a replay, the faint scrap Stay awake,
you can break. Silence asserts itself. I become a rumor,
quietly infamous. Alarm back channels does close to me. Yet
sometimes tipoffs appeer and signed. No paper will touch the story,
but private interest simmer's unresolved. On nights, when sleep evades me,
I catch myself glancing out, seeking the slip of reflection
in a shop window, the signal in the static. I
let the radio play, sometimes even through the noise. After
a time, I returned to the city's edge, driving the
roads that wind through memory and shadow. One night had
always forbidden to night. Just past midnight, A flick on
the head lights and edge along the bypass, the old
rest area slips by a dim wedge of concrete and glass,
radiant under indifferent sky. In the mirror in outline stands
by the the gesture and mistakable one arm up, so wet,
blurred by distance and rain. The radio cuts to his
no message, this time only rhythm. My hands locked the
steering wheel. I promise not to stop, not to look back,
not to take the dealer, And yet had light been stitches,
I pass and the pattern poles for a heartbeat. Everything
feels paused, spended in a stutter, of light and intention,
one phrase havers and spoken, proceed as scheduled, and the
road and ones forever onward. Exit numbers flickering where reason
and ritual converge, and that is the end. Thank you
for listening and I will see you in the next
one