THE LISTENING SPHERE

The first calls came in just before two in the morning. Residents near the old limestone quarry on Fifth Line reported an otherworldly hum that seemed to vibrate through drywall and bone, and a hard, bluish light that turned the August night into a scene from midwinter. Frost formed in the grass along the roadside as Detective Sergeant A. R. Kavanagh stepped from his unmarked car, and his breath hung in front of him like smoke. He’d worked scenes in every season; the air shouldn’t bite like this in late summer. It bit anyway.

The gates were locked from the outside, chain taut and padlock bright with fresh oil. No footprints in the dust of the access road, no tire tracks except for the responding patrol unit and Kavanagh’s own. The hum was louder at the fence, a pressure in the sinuses, a sound more felt than heard. He radioed in, and the reply came back fractured with a jittering static that made each word stutter. Officers cut the chain and moved carefully down the switchback path to the quarry floor, lights sweeping over rubble and scrub until they found the circle.

It looked like a coin pressed into stone by a god’s thumb. Eight metres across, perfectly smooth, the quarry limestone around it melted and glassed into a black, reflective platter. At its center sat a metallic sphere about two metres in diameter, perfectly matte, turning slowly without the whisper of a motor. The hum radiated from it and from everywhere; whenever Kavanagh tried to triangulate the noise, it slipped a few degrees like a trick of the ear. He held out a gloved hand over the glassed rock and felt residual warmth seeping up into the cold air. He’d read about fulgurites once—sand fused into glass by lightning. This didn’t look like lightning. It looked intentional.

He began cataloging the scene with methodical precision. The perimeter was marked with cones and tape, and he ordered the forensic team to begin a sweep for trace evidence. Nothing came up. No fibers, no prints, no signs of combustion. The sphere’s surface was inert to touch, but the hum persisted, vibrating faintly through the soles of their boots. One officer described it as “standing inside a tuning fork.” Another vomited quietly behind a boulder and asked to be reassigned.

Neighbors began to cluster along the ridge path behind the tape. A man in a bathrobe kept insisting the thing had come up from the ground like a bubble surfacing in a pond. A teenage girl swore she saw silhouettes inside the sphere itself that didn’t move like people. It was the kind of adrenaline gossip that attaches itself to impossible sights. Still, the girl didn’t blink as she said it. Kavanagh logged her name: Priya.

He sent a tech to set up a Faraday cage around the sphere’s perimeter to see if it’d quiet the interference. Before the tech finished, the hum pitched into a thin, keening whine and a headache lanced behind Kavanagh’s right eye. The sphere rose three metres, slow as if considering its own weight, then vanished. No flash, no bang, no heat. One frame it was present; the next it was absence. The hum went with it. The cold stayed.

Back at the station, the noise seemed to echo inside him, and he caught himself reaching to rub a ringing from his ear that wasn’t there. He called Priya in for an interview. She arrived alone, hair damp as if she’d showered simply to have something to do with her hands. In Interview B, the fluorescent light hummed with a lesser cousin of the quarry sound, a mundane, nervous electricity. She kept her eyes on the tabletop.

“You said they were pretending to be people,” he began. The camera light winked red.

She nodded. “They moved wrong. Like they were learning how to be human.”

“Did they see you?”

She glanced at the camera and then leaned forward into the shadow beneath it. “Detective… can you keep a secret?”

“This is an official investigation,” he said, and it wasn’t only reflex; he needed the tether of procedure.

“If I tell you, you’ll either lock me up… or they’ll come for you too.”

“Who’s ‘they’?” he asked, but her gaze slid past him as if she were watching something over his shoulder, something still moving.

“The sphere wasn’t arriving,” she said. “It was leaving. And it took someone with it. Someone you know.”

He kept his face still, a trick he’d learned when grief had come for him once before. “Who?”

She didn’t say. Silence thickened until the light in the camera seemed louder than the room, and then she asked for a lawyer and the moment was gone.

He should have filed, should have gone home, should have slept. Instead he pulled up the personnel logs and watched Officer Daniel R.’s check-ins through the night. Daniel had been first on scene. No sign of him now. His cruiser sat idling near the south access spur, driver’s door open to the quiet, dome light painting a weak circle on gravel. The radio hissed with the same stutter he’d heard at the fence, and every thirty seconds it coughed a burst that felt patterned. The depot tech on duty couldn’t get it to repeat. “Probably weather,” the man said, as if weather had opinions.

Kavanagh took Daniel’s bodycam footage into the viewing room and clicked play. He watched the familiar shoulder-high perspective jog toward the quarry floor, the hard beam of the helmet light cutting through the blue. The sphere sat in the center of the fused glass. Daniel said something under his breath—Kavanagh had to turn the volume up and press his finger hard against the speaker to make it out. “It’s listening,” Daniel whispered to no one, or to someone not visible. His camera angle tilted as he moved closer. The sphere’s surface looked like velvet metal, absorbing light.

Kavanagh paused the footage and stared at the frozen frame. The sphere, mid-turn. Daniel, just out of view. The quarry, silent and glassed. He rewound and played it again. Same whisper. Same tilt. Same hum. He tried to scrub forward, but the footage glitched—frames skipped, audio warped. The timestamp jumped ahead by twenty-three seconds, and when it resumed, Daniel was gone.

He checked the metadata. No edits. No corruption. Just a gap. A clean, surgical absence.

He leaned back in the chair, the hum still echoing faintly in his skull. He didn’t know what the sphere had taken. But he knew it wasn’t done listening.