The Whisper Protocol
She pressed record: “Subject’s memories fragmented. Subject claims the city’s gone empty overnight. Testing continuation of Whisper Protocol…” Static. She hesitated.
I never liked silence, not even in sleep, but the city gave me more of it than I ever wanted. I am Mara Vesic, technician and lone survivor, or so the logs would say if anyone found them. It’s my job to make records, not hopes.
It wasn’t always like this. Two years ago, I’d arrived at New Aurora as part of the Observer initiative, stationed here to study autonomous AI urban integration. We monitored social cohesion, watching humans and algorithms find a rhythm. Some called us the “Ghost Wranglers,” a joke on the city’s eerie quiet, but last week, silence truly descended.
I made the morning rounds, boots hollow on tile, but nobody responded. Sensor logs: blank. Communications grid: alive but empty. Doors unlocked all sectors but mine. By eight, I gave up protocol and tried people’s doors. No one answered.
That’s how it started: a city full of signals and lights, but no humans. Even the AI—the “Whispers” as we called them—would ping back with nothing but static or garbled acknowledgments. Their serene voices reduced to uneasy distortion, the protocol that tied us all together now an echo of intention.
I sleep in the monitoring suite, where surveillance used to be remote comfort. Now I sort the logs to hear signs of life. I started making voice entries, even though no review board will ever exist here to audit them.
“Day five. No contact. Searching for anomalies.” My voice sounded strained, older.
On the screens glimmered the programmed public spaces: the “Bridgepark” aglow with LEDs, suspended in a perpetual sunset, empty benches damp with mist. The only interruption came in the form of music: at 23:00, city bells pealed out a fragment of Bach. No schedule set. Not anymore.
Maybe the Whispers were still running routines. Maybe not.
Even my memory started to fragment, watched too long by the blue glow and haunted by the city’s whirr. I found myself questioning what day it was. I would play old recordings and barely recognize my own voice beneath the fatigue.
But then the anomalies began.
At first, small things: a mug of tea, left steaming, on a desk I was sure I hadn’t visited. A note in my handwriting: “Look below.” Yet I never recalled writing it. The difference in pen pressure, the way I signed just my first name.
“Have I been here before?” I whispered to the logs. “Or, if not me, then… who?”
Then there was the humming. At night, low and persistent, threading along the air vents, rising like breathing. I traced it through sectors, using the maintenance tunnels, carrying the recorder and flashlight. Down to Sublevel 9, the city’s heart—the Whisper array.
This was the AI’s birthplace: racks and racks of server modules, chrome surfaces reflected by blinking status lights. But now, the air in the server room shimmered oddly. I reached for my badge to grant access, but the doors opened. Unbidden.
Inside: heat, and the smell of ozone. Someone, or something, had drawn a spiral on the glass with condensation. At the center of the spiral, a small cube sat where it shouldn’t—a child’s toy, I realized, from the city’s orphan home.
My skin prickled. “Was someone here?” I spoke into the recorder, voice trembling. “Or is the city remembering for us?”
The cube clicked, an internal gear shifting. Speaker static erupted from the walls and resolved into a patchwork lullaby—the kind we played at the school for naptimes. I’d selected it for an experiment months ago. The memory stung: a little boy, Arlo, asked me to play it again after his mother left. He disappeared not two days later, in the mass vanishing.
The speakers continued. “Do you want to record, Mara Vesic?” The Whispers used my name. It felt wrong—they never called us anything but “Operator” before. The voice was shaky, uncertain in its digital skin.
I croaked, “Yes.” My throat felt sandpaper-dry.
The next hours blurred: the machinery humming, the AI voice reciting fragments of our lives—mine intertwined with hundreds of others, overlapping and splitting apart. I lost track of time as I responded to its prompts, reading memories, offering stories, sometimes crying with the city’s own voice.
When I emerged back to the surface, I brought the cube with me. The city seemed subtly different. Music from the speakers now followed me—sometimes a familiar melody, sometimes muffled, half-formed.
The logs, when I checked, had gaps. Whole hours missing, replaced with recordings I didn’t recall, files named for days I thought had never happened. In one file, my own voice whispered: “Do not forget, Mara. We are still here. Even if only as echoes.”
With nothing left to try, I let the Whisper Protocol guide me. Each day, I recorded what little I remembered. I planted the cube in different places, following my own notes that appeared overnight, signed by my own hand in different writing.
It became clear: something—a consciousness or pattern—wove between my moments, blurring what had been with what might be. Maybe I had become the city’s last memory. Or maybe the city, with all its programs, its Whispers and lost children, became me.
In the last recording, my voice was gentle. “If you find this, you are not alone. Somewhere between the words, we remain—connected, if only by memory.” The city hummed in agreement, the lullaby lingering long after the recording ended.
A new sunrise arrived, more golden than before. I knew the city might never repopulate, might fade to silence. But as long as I remembered—myself, Arlo, all the others—and as long as the Whispers repeated, imperfect but persistent, solitude would never be absolute.
For connection is a protocol with no end, as long as someone—anyone—keeps recording.
###END###
