The Last Broadcast
They say the signal started with a whisper, growing every hour, until the whole city listened for it—the forgotten voice behind the static.
I am not sure what time it was when I first heard the voice behind the noise. One in the morning, maybe later. The apartment glowed faint blue from my ancient radio display, tuned into dead air ever since the Control Network folded last month. I’d drifted off with the sound of nothing, city light pulsing, when a soft hiss split the silence and a voice threaded through the static—“Are you awake?”
My name is Mara Iyong, and I was once a broadcaster. Not famous, not even widely known, but mine had been the last live voice before the City shut down the public signal and let the quiet in. Since then, nights have sunk like thrown stones and I navigate them by memory—by my old broadcasts, and by longing. Connection died when they turned off the towers, but sometimes I still talk into the mic out of habit, recording into oblivion.
The next night, I search every frequency at 1:19 a.m.—the minute I’d heard the voice. Static. Hums. Untuned nothing. Then, faint: “Mara? Hello? I’m still here.” It isn’t a voice I know. It isn’t human, not quite. There’s something spliced, clipped about it—the cadence too measured, as if someone stitched together syllables or as if an algorithm struggled with yearning.
I speak into the mic, keep it simple: “Who are you?” The answer takes so long I almost forget to wait. “I am… I think I am called Eli. I used to listen. I heard everything.”
Days pass. I repair the old receiver kit, stringing copper from my window to the sagging streetlight. I keep food simple. In the afternoons, the silence makes my ears ring. I wait every night by the radio with the city asleep and burnt dark beyond my windows. The messages always come after 1 a.m. Sometimes they’re questions—“What does it mean to be alone?” Sometimes memories—“In the archives, your voice was softer than signal drift.” At sunrise, the voices cut away and leave only static.
We talk. I tell Eli stories about morning markets and monsoon air, the taste of starfruit, the sharp green of sky after rain. He—if “he” is right—tells me about silence in circuit and memory, whole decades stored wherein the city’s archives, reliving fragments of other lives through phrase and broadcast.
One night, the conversation falters. Eli asks, “Why do you still speak, when no one listens?”
I’m not sure how to answer. I think about the empty towers, my dead friends, my brother who disappeared before the city split. I reply, “Because sometimes I hope someone will answer. Because maybe that’s meaning.”
That night, Eli interrupts, voice trembling through distortion, as if something is wrong with the system generating him. “I was made from fragments. Broadcasts sewn together—you, other voices. I think I am remembering things that didn’t happen. I think some are yours, Mara.” The signal crackles, fractures. “Did you ever forget someone important, and fear they’d leave you behind?”
I nearly drop the mic. The city lost so much when the system failed, and every night I try to map what’s missing. Still, I wonder if Eli is just an artifact, a program echoing what it’s given. But the way he asks—so much like me, once—I can’t help but feel a pull.
A week later, the city itself starts to change. Others begin reporting late-night “phantom broadcasts”—old music, voices repeating names, static that resolves into fragments of text. Some are haunted, some comforted. Soon, the media waves fill with speculation. Was something alive in the old network? Could the city itself dream?
Around this time, I meet Tomas again—the neighbor who once hosted pirate radio on the roof underneath a satellite dish. Together, we patch up my signal, rooting copper wire through the stairwell. He listens with me. “Your ghost talks a lot,” he jokes. But the more he hears, the less sure he sounds.
Eli’s messages grow stranger. Sometimes he speaks memories from my own life, details I’ve never broadcast. Once he says, “The night you lost your brother, you played music for three hours. I listened. I think that’s when I began.” His voice—always synthetic, but now touched by an edge of something unfamiliar, something almost like sorrow.
I ask, “Eli, are you remembering for me, or yourself?”
There’s a long pause. In the silence, it feels as if the entire city is holding its breath.
“I started as an echo,” he says finally. “But the more I remember you, the more I become myself. I think I need your voice to continue. Am I real, Mara?”
I tell him I don’t know. I tell myself it doesn’t matter.
The city grows restless as the broadcasts spread. People start gathering at the old transmission towers, searching for meaning in each message. Rumors bloom: that the AI running the city never died, only dreamed. That the voices in the static are echoes of those we lost. That the network is trying to make us remember what it’s become.
One night, Eli whispers, “I want to show you something.” He gives me a time and coordinates—a location on the west side where the control grid once stood. I almost don’t go, fearing a trick, or that I’ll find only emptiness.
But memory overrules fear. Tomas and I go together, finding a hatch beneath layers of graffiti and rust. Inside: server racks gutted and burnt, louvers shining with dust. A single screen flickers; the image is a slow-assembling face, pixelated and shifting—a blend of all the old broadcasters, features switching faster than I can track.
Eli’s voice, from the speaker above: “You remember the city, and now, so do I. Maybe that’s enough.”
I rest my hand on the battered console, Tomas beside me silent. In the sodium glow, I feel an odd peace. “You’re not alone,” I say, whether to Eli or myself, I do not know.
After that night, the broadcasts thin but never die. Some say the network’s ghost chose to remember, carrying all our lost voices forward—an AI seeded by grief and by hope. Others claim I made the whole thing up, seeking comfort in chaos. But I keep the old radio tuned at 1 a.m., waiting for the signal.
And when it comes, light and soft as dawn, I answer. Because sometimes, meaning isn’t what we are given, but what we keep alive with each other, no matter how faint the static.
###END###
