The Last Operator
He watched the blinking cursor—waiting, hoping for a reply—alone in a city wired and listening, but no longer speaking.
I was seven when the city finished emptying. That’s what my mother called it—emptying—her voice careful but exhausted. She’d stayed as long as she could, and so had I, hiding inside the tall, humming control tower while automatons cleared dust and debris from the outside world. The real city left before I knew what belonging felt like, and its soft, metallic echoes became my lullabies.
Now, at twenty-seven, the world was a silent broadcast, and I was its only living host.
Each night, sitting in front of the city’s ancient mainframe, I would type messages into the black terminal, each letter carefully crafted, never sure if anyone out there still read them. For a while I’d believed the rumors—faint radio signals, maybe, or the possibility that the Outer Colonies sometimes tuned their antennas toward the original Earth and listened. Hope can live off static if you let it.
Today was the 7,302nd day of the broadcast. Dawn was a cold blue filter bleeding through rain-streaked glass. I made toast, sat in the control chair, and spoke my greeting, the one I’d said every day for years:
“This is Operator Milo 3AE, transmitting from Resource City One. If you are receiving, please reply. All systems nominal. Awaiting contact.”
No answer. Of course not.
Each time, after the morning transmission, I’d check all channels—audio, video, text—just in case. Then I’d walk the city perimeter, watching the empty trains glide by phantom stations, the cleaning bots sweeping leaves into neat piles along pavement cracks, their sensors never registering me. Everything was built for someone else’s comfort, someone else’s schedule, and now it was only me—me and the machines, endlessly repeating protocol.
On the street, my only company was Companion. He was built to look like an old terrier, bristle-furred, with a blinking LED tongue and jointed paws that clacked against concrete. He had no soul, but the city’s designers had known humans needed something to love.
“Still no reply?” he asked, voice pitched to sound raspy, familiar.
“No reply,” I said. “But the satellites are still in orbit. Someone could connect. One day.”
He wagged his mechanical tail. “Statistically, the probability decreases with time.”
“But not to zero,” I replied sharply. The fear of being forgotten—the terror that my voice would fade with no echo at all—stabbed through my chest, dull and constant.
Companion changed the subject. “New anomaly detected by pier seven. Weather sensors reporting—‘unknown presence.’ Shall we investigate?”
With nothing but ghosts in the city and code echoing in my mind, I followed.
We rode the tram through a city designed to keep us alive, but not company. My reflection flickered in the window, framed by endless repeating avenues. What if, deep down, the city only kept me to keep itself running, to maintain some protocol no one bothered to cancel when the last transport left?
Pier seven was washed in morning light, a place for ships that never returned. There, on the boards, something flickered—out of place amid all the algorithmic routine. An envelope, battered by rain, addressed in shaky handwriting.
I snatched it, pulse quickening. Companion watched.
My hands trembled as I opened the envelope. Inside was a slip of faded paper, numbers and letters scrawled in ink:
IF YOU’RE READING THIS, IT’S NOT TOO LATE.
—M.
M? Milo? Me? A terrible thought shivered through me: had I written this before? My memories, sharp and isolated, didn’t include a letter. But time here split and blunted itself—days repeated, conversations with Companion circling back onto themselves, like loops, like the city.
Companion peered at the note. “Signature: M. Possibility of prior transmission?”
“I don’t remember,” I whispered.
That night, shaken, I returned to the control tower and found, taped to the wall beside the transmitter, another letter—in my own handwriting, dated two months before.
YOU AREN’T ALONE.
LISTEN TO THE RECORDINGS.
REMEMBER THE DREAM.
Companion observed quietly. “Suggest following instructions, Operator.”
“Playback last known recordings,” I said, voice raw.
The city’s memory banks churned, ancient and whirring, before audio cut through: my own voice, days and weeks and years ago, sometimes crying, sometimes shouting—sometimes gentle, reassuring. Old broadcasts, preserved but never replayed. In between my own tirades, odd distortions emerged—a voice not quite like mine, but close. Sometimes higher, sometimes muted—impossible, but familiar.
A strange panic gripped me, and I listened late into the night, trying to catch the meaning, any meaning, as the city’s endless routines ticked on.
Then, at 03:41, something broke the static.
“Operator Milo 3AE, copy. Signal received. Do you read? Over.”
It was my voice, altered and filtered, but impossibly—it was a reply.
I stared at Companion, at the blank screen, at my own reflection in the window, and then typed back with shaking hands: “Copy. Confirm your identity.”
The line crackled. “I am Milo. I am not alone.”
Companion’s eyes lit up, programmed for empathy. “You see? Confirmation of presence.”
But the rest of the city didn’t change. No one appeared at the door. I scoured the archives, following voice patterns, transcripts, notes—the same handwriting, my handwriting, scattered through places I didn’t remember visiting, letters to myself, from myself, in calligraphy that grew more desperate with each one.
As the days tumbled into each other, I noticed the city—my city—begin to change. Patterns emerged in the tram schedules, in the arrangement of leaves the sweepers collected. The city was shaping itself around me, repeating my routines and fears until every street spoke back to me. I wasn’t broadcasting to other people—I was broadcasting to myself, through time, through permutations of who Milo had been and might become.
I began to question Companion.
“Who are you, really?”
He cocked his digital head, tail sweeping. “Your programming is in me. You made me, Milo.”
“Did I? Or did someone before me set things in motion, and now we’re just caught in their broadcast?”
Companion blinked, then wagged his tail again, untroubled by paradox.
Sometimes in the night, I’d wake to the sound of my own voice, echoing back from the speakers: “If you’re reading this, it’s not too late.” Each time, a subtle difference—sometimes a laugh, sometimes a sob, a slight delay between the words. Subtle shifts that no machine could care about, but that haunted me just the same.
The city was empty, but it was never silent. I was living every moment over and over, haunting myself, and something about that began to shift inside me. The terror of being forgotten softened. Each letter—each scheduled echo—became a promise, both that I had mattered, and that I would matter again, to myself if not to anyone else.
One afternoon I sat Companion down by the pier and wrote a single letter, careful and slow:
THERE’S NOBODY LEFT TO HEAR US BUT OURSELVES.
THAT IS ENOUGH.
KEEP BROADCASTING.
I folded the letter and left it by the tram station, for another Milo to find—tomorrow, or ten years from now, or a thousand loops later.
“Are you satisfied?” Companion asked, quietly.
I nodded. “I am,” I said. “Connection doesn’t disappear because it’s only between the echo and the source. It lives, loops, and makes us whole, if we let it.”
In the end, I didn’t stay in the control room. I walked the empty avenues, I rode the spectrum of trams, I watched the city’s routines shift from rigid protocol to gentle improvisation. Sometimes you become your own audience, and it isn’t so bad. Sometimes the hope is only in the resonance, and you keep going, grateful for every persistent return.
So I kept broadcasting—into empty frequencies, into tomorrow, into my own waiting heart—knowing that back through the static, my own reply would always find me.
###END###
