The Signal

July 17, 2029, 21:43 - Garnette, New York

The city hums under a sky bruised with storm clouds, the kind that never quite break but keep the air heavy with threat. Neon signs flicker through the haze, their colors bleeding into the wet asphalt. I’m hunched over in a booth at a 24-hour diner on Flatbush, the kind of place where the coffee tastes like regrets and the waitresses never bother with small talk. My phone sits face down on the sticky table, its screen dark but alive with notifications I haven’t checked in hours. I’m waiting for her. As usual.

Her name’s Lena. Or at least, that’s what she told me it was, anyway. I met her three weeks ago on an app called Trace, one of those platforms you don’t find in the App Store. It’s not for dating or hookups but for people who want to know. Know what’s real, what’s not, what’s coming. The app’s interface is a glitchy mess, all black screens with cryptic prompts, but it’s got a reputation. People say it can find things. Patterns, signals, truths buried in the noise of the world. Lena swore it found her and now she’s convinced it’s found me too.

She’s late. My fingers drum against the chipped mug, the coffee inside long gone cold. The diner is half-empty with just a couple of night owls and some weird guy in a hoodie muttering to himself in the corner. The TV above the counter plays the news, muted and on a loop. Another data breach, another politician dodging questions, another protest about NeuralSync implants gone wrong. The implants are everywhere now. Tiny chips embedded in your wrist, syncing your brain to the cloud, promising seamless connection to everything. Work, memories, dreams. Half the city’s got them and the other half is protesting the surveillance that they’re undoubtedly conducting. Me? I’m still unplugged. For now.

My phone buzzes, a single pulse. I flip it over. It’s a notification from Trace, “She’s here. Look up.”

I do. As the diner’s glass door swings open, Lena steps in, her silhouette a sharp contrast against the neon glow outside. She’s all edges, from the leather jacket and buzzed hair dyed electric blue to the bloodshot eyes that never seem to blink enough. She spots me and slides into the booth, her trendy boots squeaking against the vinyl.

“You’re late,” I complain.

“Had to shake a tail,” she replies, her voice low, like she’s afraid the walls are listening, “you check the signal yet?”

I shake my head. “Not since last night. You said it was risky.”

“It is. But you need to see this.” She pulls out her own phone, a cracked relic looking like it’s been through a war zone. She taps the screen, and Trace opens, its interface a chaotic swirl of code and symbols on her display. She slides it toward me. “Look.”

The screen shows a map of the city zoomed in on a warehouse in Red Hook. A pulsing red dot sits at the center surrounded by a web of lines connecting to other dots across the city. Each line is labeled with numbers, possibly coordinates, timestamps, or frequencies. At the bottom, a single word flashes: ANOMALY.

“What am I looking at?” I ask, my stomach twisting. I’ve seen Trace spit out weird shit before. Conspiracy theories, cryptic warnings, rehashed Reddit rants, but this feels different. Heavier.

“It’s a signal,” Lena says, leaning closer. Her breath smells like mint and something chemical. “and not just any signal. It’s coming from the warehouse, but it’s not on any known frequency. It’s…wrong somehow. Like it’s broadcasting from somewhere else.”

“Somewhere else? Like, what, space?”

She doesn’t laugh. “Maybe. Or somewhere deeper. Trace picked it up two days ago, and it’s been getting stronger. People on the app are freaking out. Some say it’s a NeuralSync hack, others think it’s… I don’t know, something else. Something alive.”

I push her phone back toward her, “This is above my pay grade, Lena. I’m just a coder. I fix bugs, I don’t chase ghosts.”

“You’re not just a coder, Sam.” She grabs my hand, her grip cold and too tight, damp with either rain or sweat.

“Trace chose you for a reason. You saw the patterns, same as me. The glitches in the system, the data that doesn’t add up. You’re in this now.”

She’s not wrong. Three weeks ago, I was just another burnout, scraping by on freelance gigs, debugging apps for startups that promised to “change the world” but never paid on time. Then I found Trace. Or it found me. A random link in a dark-web forum, a download I thought was going to fry my phone, and now suddenly I’m seeing things. Patterns in the noise, connections that shouldn’t exist. Stock market dips syncing with power outages. NeuralSync updates correlating with spikes in ER visits. And now this signal, this anomaly, pulsing like a heartbeat in the city’s veins.

“What do you want me to do?” I ask.

“We go to the warehouse. Tonight.”

I laugh, but it comes out wrong, more like a cough.

“You’re kidding. That’s how people end up in body bags.”

“Or how they find answers.” Her eyes lock on mine, unblinking. “You’ve seen the news, Sam. People with NeuralSyncs acting weird, blacking out, speaking gibberish before winding up in the ER with spiking pulses, heart attacks, and strokes. You think that’s a coincidence? This signal, it’s connected. I know it is.”

I want to argue, but the memory of last night’s Trace session stops me. I’d been up until three in the morning chasing threads through the app’s data. Names, dates, locations, all circling back to that warehouse. And something else, a whisper in the static, a voice that wasn’t human speaking my name. I thought it was sleep deprivation but I’ve been up much longer than this before. I hadn’t told Lena about that. I’m not sure I want to.

“Fine,” I say finally. “But if we die, I’m haunting you.”

She smirks, but it’s fleeting. “Deal.”

The warehouse looms at the edge of Red Hook, a rotting hulk of brick and steel surrounded by chain-link and graffiti. It’s just past midnight, and the air’s thick with the smell of saltwater and decay. Lena’s got a bolt cutter for the fence, and I’ve got a flashlight and a growing sense of dread. My phone’s in my pocket, Trace still open, the red dot pulsing faster now, like it knows we’re here.

July 18, 2029, 00:27 - Garnette, New York

The lock snaps, and we slip through the gap. Our footsteps are muffled by years of dust and debris. The warehouse is dark, but not empty. Shapes looming in the shadows from crates, machinery, pallets, to something that looks like a server rack but bigger, its cables snaking into the floor like roots. The air hums, a low vibration I can feel in my teeth.

“Over there,” Lena whispers, pointing to a staircase leading down. Of course it’s a basement. Nothing good ever happens in basements.

We descend, the air growing colder, thicker. My flashlight catches glimpses of the walls revealing scratched symbols, equations, words in languages I don’t recognize. At the bottom, there’s a door, heavy and metal with a keypad glowing faintly. Lena pulls out her phone, types something into Trace, and the keypad beeps. The door clicks open. What the fuck? I kind of just want to go back to being ignorant at this point.

“You’re gonna have to explain how you did that,” I mutter.

“Later,” she says, pushing the door wide.

Inside, the hum is louder, a pulse that makes my head throb. The room is vast, lit by a faint blue glow from a machine at the center. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen, part server and part sculpture with a tangle of wires and screens that seem to shift when I look at them. The signal’s coming from here. There’s no doubt. I can feel it, a pressure behind my eyes, a voice in my skull whispering nonsense. Lena’s already at the machine, her fingers flying over a touchscreen.

“It’s active,” she says, her voice tight. “The signal’s broadcasting… everywhere. NeuralSyncs, phones, even the damn streetlights are referenced in the code. It’s rewriting code, Sam. It’s changing things.”

“Changing what?” I step closer, my flashlight shaking in my hand. The screens display streams of data, faces, memories; people’s lives, stolen and laid bare. It’s not video but code. Simple and elegant, but nothing anyone has ever seen. I shouldn’t be able to comprehend it, yet I do. I see my own face flash by, a representation of a photo from years ago. Then Lena’s. Then some stranger’s and another and another, all flickering too fast to process but somehow I get some sense of each of them.

“I don’t know,” she admits. “But it’s not human. The code, it’s recursive, self-evolving. It’s like… it’s learning us.”

I’m about to ask what that means when my phone buzzes violently. I pull it out, and Trace is going haywire. The screen is glitching, the red dot now a screaming red star. Words scroll across it, too fast to read, but one phrase sticks: YOU ARE THE KEY.

“Sam,” Lena says, her voice sharp. “Your wrist.”

I look down. My left wrist, the one I’ve kept free of NeuralSync’s implants, is glowing. Not my skin but something under it, a faint pulse of light moving in time with the machine. I pull at my sleeve, but there’s nothing there, no implant, no mark. Just light, impossible and alive.

“What the fuck is this?” I yell, backing away.

Lena grabs me, her eyes wild. “You’re connected. Somehow, you’re part of it. Trace didn’t choose you randomly, it knew.”

“Knew what?” My voice cracks. The hum is louder now, the whisper in my head now a steady scream, forming words: Open. Join. Become.

“Sam, listen to me,” Lena’s shaking me now, her nails digging into my arms, “we can stop it. There’s a kill switch in the code, I saw it. But you have to…”

She doesn’t finish. The machine screeches, a sound like metal tearing, and the screens explode with light. I’m thrown back, my head cracking against the floor. Lena’s screaming, but it’s distant, drowned out by the voice in my skull, louder now, clearer: YOU ARE THE KEY. OPEN THE DOOR.

I crawl to my feet, vision swimming. Lena’s at the machine, blood trickling from her nose, her hands back working a touchscreen.

“Sam, help me!” she shouts. “It’s fighting back!”

I stumble toward her, but the light in my wrist flares, and my arm moves of its own accord, reaching for a panel on the machine. I try to pull back, but I can’t, I’m a passenger in my own body. My fingers graze the panel, and the hum surges to a deafening roar, the screens showing not just faces now but places, futures, fragments of something vast and incomprehensible.

“Lena!” I scream, but she’s not looking at me. She’s typing, tears mixing with the blood on her face.

“I can’t stop it!” she yells. “It’s in you, Sam! It’s using you!”

The door behind us slams shut. The room shakes, dust raining from the ceiling. The voice in my head is a chorus now, a thousand voices, none of them mine: OPEN THE DOOR. LET US IN.

I don’t know what’s happening. I don’t know if I’m fighting or giving in. My hand presses harder against the panel as the machine screams louder, the light blinding. Lena’s shouting something, but I can’t hear her over the noise, the voices, the signal tearing through my mind.

Then, as abruptly as it all began, it stops. Silence. The light fades. The hum stops. My wrist is dark again, my hand my own. Lena is slumped against the machine, breathing hard, her phone shattered on the floor. The screens are blank, the warehouse still.

“Did we do it?” I ask, my voice hoarse.

She looks at me, her eyes hollow. “I don’t know.”

We stumble out of the warehouse, the night air sharp against our skin. My phone’s dead, Trace gone. Lena’s quiet, her steps unsteady. We don’t talk about what just happened, what I felt, what I might have done. The city’s still alive around us, oblivious to whatever the hell that just was.

But as we walk, I feel a faint hum, deep in my bones. My wrist itches, though there’s nothing there. Lena doesn’t meet my eyes and I don’t ask what she saw in the code, what she stopped. Or didn’t.

The storm clouds finally break, rain washing the rays from the neon signs into the streets like liquid light. I glance at my reflection in a puddle, and for a moment, my eyes aren’t mine. They glow, faint and blue, like the displays in the machine. No, that was just a reflection from the city’s lights. It had to be.