space slashers

Volume 13

signal
It began as a whisper in the static.

Dr. Elias Marsh was the first to notice it, hidden deep in the background radiation picked up by
the Atwood Array. A faint, pulsing rhythm buried within the cosmic white noise—regular,
deliberate, like a heartbeat pressed between frequencies. At first, he assumed it was nothing
more than an artifact, a remnant of some long-dead star murmuring its final vibrations into the
abyss. But the signal did not fade.

It grew.

Within days, it sharpened, its pattern resolving into something eerily structured. Not just pulses,
but sequences—fluctuations of frequency and amplitude that, when plotted on a graph, revealed
intricate, repeating shapes. Not human, not mathematical in any way known, yet distinctly
intentional.

“It’s talking,” Marsh muttered, staring at the waveform. The other researchers at the observatory
laughed it off, the way scientists dismiss anything that defies immediate classification.

Until the first one changed.

The observatory’s night technician, a man named Peter Varney, had been monitoring the
incoming data feeds when he fell unconscious at his desk. His colleague found him an hour
later, slumped over the keyboard, eyes wide open, pupils dilated so far that his irises had all but
disappeared. At first, they assumed a seizure, but when he awoke, he spoke in a voice that was
barely his own—flat, measured, and laced with a rhythmic undertone that sent a chill through
the room.

“It sees,” he whispered. “It is waiting.”

Varney recovered physically, but something was wrong. He moved more deliberately, his
expressions vacant, as if his mind were elsewhere. He no longer blinked unless reminded. He
stopped responding to his own name unless it was repeated twice. And at night, the others
heard him muttering in his sleep, his voice blending with the pulse of the signal still pouring in
from the Atwood Array.

Three days later, he vanished.

Security cameras showed him walking barefoot out of the facility at 3:13 AM, clad only in his lab
coat, into the frozen Colorado mountains. His body was never found.

Despite Varney’s disappearance, the signal was too tantalizing to ignore. Marsh continued his
research, even as his own sleep grew restless, filled with shifting geometric visions and echoes
of voices not his own.

And then the signal changed.

Marsh began experiencing strange lapses. He would find himself staring at the screen for hours,
his fingers poised over the keyboard but unable to recall what he had been about to type. He
caught glimpses of movement in the reflections of the lab’s monitors—shapes flickering in and
out of view, always just out of focus.

Most disturbingly, he started to hear the signal without instruments. At first, it was only when he
was near the transmission equipment. Then it followed him home. The soft, pulsing whisper was
there in the hum of his refrigerator, in the static between radio stations, in the wind rattling his
windowpanes.

Then it began speaking his name.

The others at the facility began showing signs soon after.

Dr. Lenora Patel stopped talking in complete sentences, her words breaking into staccato
rhythms, her syntax subtly shifting in ways no one could quite pinpoint. The janitor, Miguel,
began drawing fractal patterns on every surface he could find, weeping quietly as he worked,
unable to explain why.

One by one, they tuned in.

They no longer needed the transmission equipment. They could hear the signal inside their own
minds, vibrating beneath their thoughts, stretching unseen tendrils through their synapses.

And then came the changes.

Marsh noticed it first in his hands. His fingerprints had shifted. The whorls and ridges had
smoothed, restructured into something too perfect, too symmetrical. His skin had taken on an
odd translucency under certain lights, as if something beneath the surface was shifting, writhing.

Patel’s voice no longer carried emotion. She spoke only when necessary, her words clipped and
precise, her eyes reflecting too much light.

One of the technicians, Darren Holt, attempted to flee. He made it as far as the outer gate
before he collapsed, convulsing violently, his face twisted in an expression that was neither pain
nor fear, but something closer to ecstasy.

When he stood up, he no longer screamed. He no longer ran.

He simply walked back inside, humming the pulse of the signal.

By the time the outside world took notice, it was too late.
The Atwood Array’s feed went dark for a full day. When emergency responders arrived, they
found the facility empty—no bodies, no blood, only the lingering hum of the transmission
equipment, still broadcasting.

But something had changed.

The original signal was gone. In its place was a new pattern—one that matched, in near-perfect
resonance, the brainwave frequencies of human consciousness.

The entire team had been rewritten.

The search for Marsh and his colleagues extended for months, but none were ever found.
Rumors spread—stories of strange figures seen at the edges of small towns, their movements
just slightly off, their voices too smooth, too measured. There were whispers of people waking in
the middle of the night to find someone standing at the foot of their bed, humming in a slow,
rhythmic pulse.

But the real horror came later.

Months after the disappearance, observatories around the world picked up a new
transmission—broadcast not from the void, but from Earth itself.

It was the same signal.

Stronger.

And this time, it was transmitting outward.

They had not been taken. They had become.

The signal had rewritten them, stripped them down to something more efficient, more aligned
with the rhythm of the universe. Their bodies, their thoughts, their identities had been subsumed
into a greater pattern, a structure stretching beyond human comprehension.

And now, it was spreading.

Across airwaves. Across screens. Across the quiet hum of everyday life.

And those who listened too long—those who heard it in the spaces between dreams, in the
static between channels—began to hum along.

Just a whisper at first.

But soon, it would grow.