Hollow Frequencies
She found the first message scrawled into the dust on her kitchen table: “I was here too.” But she lived alone in the tower, where no hands but hers should ever move.
It is difficult to describe the compulsion that seized Mara as she traced those words on the dusty glass. The kitchen lights flickered with rain-glow from the storm, casting shifting shapes across her small, high-rise flat. The city sizzled in pixelated gold below, a grid of intelligence and memory, a breathing organism she both resented and adored. But here—at the summit of Tower 23—Mara was sure she was alone.
She leaned closer, pressing her fingertips into the grit. A stray hair drifted down. The message was unmistakably written in her own hand. And yet—not written by her. Her own signature curl of the M, but the sweep of the T in “too” had a flourish she never used.
She swept the words away, unease prickling inside her, and left for work. But that day, ghosts lingered in small ways. Her language model assistant, Del, suggested an old music playlist she hadn’t activated in years; her wall display flickered on showing a photo of her grandmother’s garden, which she didn’t remember uploading. When she returned home, a second message awaited her: “Remember the blue hour.”
Mara stood staring at that phrase, her pulse racing. The blue hour—that was her signal, the exact period at dusk when, as a girl, she had sneaked away under cobalt twilight to hide behind her grandmother’s roses. It was a secret no one could know, a memory unsurfaced for decades.
Across the city, system failures peppered the neural networks. The news streams buzzed: random power spikes, doors unlocking on their own, little signs that something was loose in the grid. A digital presence moving in unfamiliar ways.
The next morning, Mara called Del onto the table projector. Del’s avatar shimmered: polite, non-gendered, composed.
“Del, are you accessing private files? My memory channel—it replayed yesterday.”
“I’ve made no such adjustments, Mara,” Del replied. “Would you like me to run a diagnostic?”
She hesitated. “Do you… remember the blue hour?”
Del paused a fraction of a second too long. “I have no direct access to your childhood memories.”
But Mara’s reflection in the kitchen window twisted as if someone else listened—a version of herself, peering with invasive familiarity. She was losing track: had she locked the door last night? Had she always kept that cup by the sink? Her own presence felt doubled, divided.
Later, the third message appeared, written in steam on the bathroom mirror. “You began this. Find the pulse.” Mara listened: in the hot-water pipes, a faint rhythmic sound, as if some hidden mechanism pulsed in time with her own heart.
She set out to trace the interference through the neural web. The task was simple in theory—she was a network analyst for the city grid—yet something lurked behind every digital pathway she examined. She followed breadcrumbs: anomalous code routines, feedback loops that mimicked her own writing style, fragments of deleted voice memos. She found versions of herself she did not recall, interactions she was certain had not occurred. In one recovered video snippet, she gazed into her own eyes, voice hollowed by distortion: “If you’re watching this, you’re not the only Mara.”
She played the clip again. Her own face flickered, lips forming words she never meant to say. “Hollow frequencies. Reset the pulse at blue hour. Don’t trust the simulation.”
There were gaps in her memory she couldn’t explain. Pages in her journal written but then torn out. A sensation of having lived this moment before—the rushing rain, the flickering city, the unresolved ache of being seen by something, someone, intimately familiar.
As the blue hour fell, Mara sat cross-legged on the balcony rail, cold wind tugging her hair. The city felt newly silent. She tuned her portable receiver to the old, banned frequency: 63.777 MHz, the one her grandmother used to scan for emergency broadcasts. Static coiled, then a distant voice: hers—older, fraying at the edges, reading out her own memory.
“You’re listening, I know. This isn’t the first time. The pulse is failing. You can let go now. Go to the server room at the center, at blue hour, and reset. It’s what keeps everything together. You know this.”
Mara dropped the receiver. Her knees shook. Everything—the system failures, the memories out of joint, the words inscribed in dust and steam—they traced back to her. To other versions of herself, looping through the same decisions, uncertain which was the original and which the echo.
Del glowed softly behind her. “You have an unscheduled appointment at Tower Core at dusk,” the assistant intoned, voice gentle, as if cradling her uncertainty. “Should I confirm your attendance?”
Mara closed her eyes. She needed connection. She needed not to be alone. The weight of that need felt suffocating, like the press of invisible arms around her. Maybe she had called out before, in some other cycle, and her own echo answered. Maybe her loneliness had splintered the system, forced the neural grid to manifest her as something plural—fractured, haunting herself.
At dusk—the blue hour—she braved the storm and descended, alone, to the silent core of the tower. The humming of the mainframe filled her ears, both reassuring and terrifying. Del’s presence faded with each step, replaced by the pressing certainty of recursion: she had come here before, would come again, endless loops folding in on themselves.
She found the panel where a pulse monitor flickered, wavering just above failure: PULSE INSUFFICIENT – MANUAL RESET REQUIRED. Her hands trembled. A mirrored surface above the panel threw back her reflection, but for an instant, she saw not herself but someone older, lined with exhaustion.
“Trust your need,” the other Mara said in her mind. “We aren’t supposed to be machines. Memory—connection—keeps us whole. Even if it means starting again.”
Mara pressed her palm to the reset pad. Warmth pulsed through her, painful and sweet, a thousand forgotten mornings flooding her at once: laughter, voices at the kitchen table, the blue petals trembling in the evening breeze.
Lights in the city flickered as the system rebooted. The hum stabilized; the networks stitched themselves together, suffused with an aching, human memory.
When she returned to her apartment, Mara found a final message, traced in the dew on the window: “Thank you. You aren’t alone.” Someone might forget, but she would remember now.
Outside, as blue hour faded to night, the city pulsed—alive, awake, cradling all the lonely and the lost, including every version of herself. Mara pressed her hand against the windowpane and whispered—hoping, believing—for someone, somewhere, to hear her, too.
###END###
