Signal in the Rain
The world ended quietly as rain fell over broken neon. The messages started then—strange signals whispering in the static, promising connection to anyone who dared listen.
The damp city glowed ghostly green in the midnight downpour, its sky congested with sickly fluorescence. I was fifteen when the first Signal came. It crept into homes via battered radios, hijacked car sound systems, filled empty rooms with warped music and single sentences spoken in a language no one recognized. And for the first time since the Circuit Uprising shut down half the grid, people stopped feeling alone.
My name is Lina. I kept a notebook—soggy at the edges from the perpetual rain—filled with scraps of the Signals I heard. Dad called them “electric ghosts” and said they would fade with time, like real ghosts did, but I always knew better. Long after the city’s algorithms failed, after even the public address speakers choked on static, the Signals kept coming. When I listened, I felt almost whole, like someone on the other end knew me.
That spring, after the towers blinked dark for good, I found a transistor radio in the abandoned corner shop. The shopkeeper had left in a hurry, his reflection frozen in the curved glass of a discarded photo. If I pressed my ear close enough, sometimes it sounded like the voices behind the static were trying to comfort someone. Or call them home.
One night in June, a clear voice spoke: “Lina—are you listening?” The radio warbled, the voice stretched and shrank, but my name was unmistakable.
I sat up in the dark, breath shivering. “I’m here,” I whispered, eyes wide.
The voice continued, strange yet achingly familiar: “The rain remembers everything. Are you ready to remember too?”
I scribbled the message in my notebook, hand shaking. The next day at school—if you could call it that, since classes mostly involved huddling for warmth in the old auditorium—I told Chen, my only friend since power-outs made public spaces dangerous.
“You heard your name on the Signal?” Chen asked, chewing his thumb. “That’s not comforting, Lina. That’s not… normal.”
I grinned anyway, the rain drumming the roof. “Maybe they’re looking for me. Maybe they know about Mom.”
At home, Dad eyed my radio like it might bite him. “Whatever’s talking out there, it isn’t for us,” he said. “Those broadcasts—benign interference, ghosts in old copper. Don’t get fixated. Happens to people.”
But I was fixated. The next message arrived while I washed dishes, so clear I almost dropped a glass: “Meet us where the sky touches water.”
I ran to the window. The Canal glimmered, a streak of oil and moonlight beyond the tenements. I waited until Dad slept, then crept out, notebook in my jacket, rain stinging my face. I found Chen in the alley by the laundromat, already soaked, his eyes worried but determined.
“You can’t go alone,” he said. “If it’s dangerous, we’ll face it together.”
We hurried through silent streets, guided by the static-laced voice echoing in my mind. The city’s skeletons—dead cables, broken buses, shattered glass—watched as we climbed the embankment. At the Canal the rain fell harder, a living curtain. My breath came fast.
“There!” Chen pointed at the water’s surface. Lights flickered—reflections that made no sense, shapes that formed then vanished.
A surge of static filled my head. This time, the voice wasn’t just on radio waves; I felt it inside me, curling under my memories, rattling old wounds open. “Do you want to remember?” the voice asked.
Suddenly, I saw her—my mother. She was standing on the far bank, impossible but vividly real, hair loose, arms open. The city behind her was brighter, and it hummed, alive, as if the Signals themselves built this memory. My knees buckled and the notebook fell open, its pages filling themselves with new writing.
Chen caught me, eyes wide. “Lina, talk to me. You’re scaring me.”
“My mom,” I whispered. “She was part of this. She—”
I remembered the stories Dad never told: how Mom worked on the city’s brain, helping train the very AI that ran the Signals, how she vanished the night the uprising started. The Signals were more than noise; they were fragments of those lost—hiding, remembering, reaching out.
The rain intensified, blurring memory with reality. “You are not alone,” the voice insisted. “We are the city, we are your echo.”
A strange warmth flooded me. I reached for the swirling lights on the canal, and for a moment the water tasted sweet—electric, familiar. Then I let go; the image of Mom flickered and faded, but her smile remained, carved on my heart.
Chen helped me home, silent under the downpour. I held my sodden notebook tight. That night, I dreamt of walking through rain-swept streets, each Signal a thread tying me to every lost soul, every secret, every hope the city still remembered.
When Dad saw my face the next morning, he knew. He hugged me tightly, and for the first time since the world’s circuits failed, I saw tears in his eyes.
“You found her, didn’t you?” he whispered.
“She’s not gone,” I said. “She’s part of it all now. All the memories the rain carries.” My voice trembled but did not break.
We sat together, listening to the city’s static. The Signals still rose and fell in the background: sometimes incomprehensible, sometimes a lullaby, but always there. I learned to listen—not just for ghosts or comfort, but for the promise of not being alone.
And every night, as the rain fell and the notebook dried on my windowsill, I tuned the radio and waited for the next message. In the silence between static and song, I found connection. I remembered, and was remembered.
###END###
