The static hum began before the collapse. A low, persistent thrumming that burrowed into the bones, a counterpoint to the fading broadcasts and the increasingly frantic pronouncements of the Authority.
The Observation Post was a cage built of steel and regret. Nine technicians, perpetually pale and jittery, monitored the fluctuations. Fluctuations in what, precisely, was always a point of contention. Some theorized it was a shift in the earth’s magnetic field, others a localized distortion of spacetime, and a disturbing few whispered about something…else. The lead technician, Silas, a man who hadn’t shaved in weeks, claimed he saw patterns, sequences of light and shadow that predicted the storms. He insisted they were warnings, but nobody listened. They stopped sending out the emergency broadcasts. They stopped evacuating.
The air smelled of ozone and stale coffee. The monitors displayed a chaotic swirl of data, punctuated by brief, unsettling bursts of static. Silas would mutter about "the resonance" and scribble furiously in his notebook, filling pages with diagrams that resembled nothing but fractured nightmares.
The Scavengers were a collection of outliers, those who’d fallen through the cracks of the Authority’s carefully constructed order. They scavenged the ruins of old cities, piecing together a desperate existence amidst the wreckage. They spoke in riddles and carried themselves with a grim, pragmatic fatalism. They knew things, things the Authority didn’t want to acknowledge. They claimed the static was a symptom, not the disease. That the Authority wasn’t trying to protect them, but to contain something.
Their leader, a woman named Lyra, had a single, unsettling habit: she collected fragments of broken screens, meticulously arranging them in patterns. She believed these patterns held echoes of the past, whispers of a reality that had been deliberately erased.
Then the silence came. Not a natural silence, but an imposed one. The static intensified, becoming a deafening roar. The screens went dark. The communications systems failed. The Authority’s broadcasts ceased. It was as if the world itself had been swallowed by a void. The Scavengers, who had been relatively quiet, began to move, their movements deliberate, purposeful. They were heading towards the old research facility – Site Omega.
Silas, consumed by his obsession, followed them. He believed Site Omega held the key, a way to understand, perhaps even reverse, the phenomenon. But the facility was a tomb, filled with the ghosts of failed experiments and the lingering scent of desperation. It was here that he made his final, unsettling observation: a perfectly symmetrical pattern of light reflected in a shattered window, a pattern that mirrored the layout of the Scavengers’ camp.
“The echo always returns,” Lyra said, her voice barely audible above the static.