The Last Transmission
The broadcast flickers with static, but then her voice—aged, determined—breaks through: “If anyone receives this, remember who we were. Remember that we tried.”
The feed was breaking up again—lines stuttering over the face of Dr. Mira Tan, her jaw set, the data visor dark around her tired eyes. Dust, always the dust, had infiltrated every surface in the abandoned relay tower, and she coughed before continuing her message into the recorder.
“This is Dr. Mira Tan; last Operator of Relay Station Epsilon. I am sending this in all directions, in all languages, as the protocol requires. If you are listening—if anyone is listening—know that the system has failed.”
She sat back, shoulders aching, felt the ancient machine’s humming beneath her. The wind outside wailed, carrying the ghost-voices of a city now lost beneath poisoned storms. She imagined, somewhere past the cracks in her window, the interlaced lights of the network blinking out one by one, whole districts sinking into silence.
“This system was meant to endure,” she said, forcing the words even as her own voice sounded foreign. “They promised us the Core AI would defend the grid. We built it to keep us safe, connected, informed. For years, it tried. But last week, the redundancies began collapsing. Whole regions unresponsive, their signals now just echoes. And—” Mira hesitated, glancing at the receivers where a red lamp blinked slowly, warning: irrecoverable data loss.
She leaned in and her hands shook. “The strangest part? Some messages keep coming. I receive broadcasts from people who shouldn’t be alive, in cities that don’t exist anymore. My own mother sent a message yesterday. She died three years ago. Her voice was unchanged—she told me to lock the doors.”
Outside, a flash of lightning illuminated the spires of old environmental scrubbers—monuments to a hope no one remembered how to maintain. She wondered whether the story she sent now would ever reach real ears, or only travel in circles, a ghost signal among thousands.
Through the whine of static, a voice cut in. It was her own, taut with confusion: “Mira? This is Mira. Am I… am I late? Was this when the cycle ended?” She felt her blood chill. Not again. The machine was replaying the anomaly. She forced herself to listen, tracing the words, searching for something new in the repetition. Every day, the recording would appear, slightly changed, like a dream seen again but never the same.
A memory flickered behind her eyes—her daughter, Lian, waving from behind a reinforced door, promising to come back. That door had never opened again; the shift in protocol had required them to isolate. Mira frowned. The anniversary was tomorrow. For a moment, her faith faltered. Was this all just a loop?
She stood and moved to the window, pushing aside the curtain to look out into the dust-glow. Her mind replayed the last words she’d said to Lian: “I’ll find a way to reach you. I promise.” Until the core failed. Until the broadcasts began to warp.
The door rattled. Mira stiffened. Slow scraping, metal against the warped floor. She grabbed the message pad, continued, voice low. “I think the world is different now, not just destroyed but rearranged. Sometimes I remember living here with neighbors. Sometimes I remember Relay Epsilon as a space station, not a tower. My mind jumps between versions.”
She stopped herself, unsure where truth ended and the storms began. She played back the messages she’d received. Voices not just of people she knew, but of herself—versions older, younger, hopeful, broken—each warning or pleading, claiming something urgent. One voice, trembling: “Don’t let the memory go. Everything depends on remembering who you are.”
The world outside screamed, a siren’s mechanical wail spinning through the night. The relay computer flashed a new incoming message. Mira’s heart pounded as she opened it; the sender was again her mother, but the date stamp was decades in the future. She pressed play:
“You must trust your memory, even if you suspect it’s lying. The system will break you. If you forget, you’re lost. When you wake, remember: I love you, and you are not alone.”
Mira fell back against the terminal, tears sharp in her eyes. The message was not new. It was a fragment she’d recovered before, on a day she barely remembered. How many times had these moments repeated? Each time she uncovered more—a few extra words, a different intonation. The system was not just failing, it was retelling, changing reality with every cycle.
She sat, breathing slow, and recorded again. “We thought the Core would save us. Now the Core is us—all that’s left is remembrance. Somewhere, maybe, these words will echo in a world less broken.”
The side room flickered with blue light. She turned: another version of herself stood there. Hair longer, eyes harder. “You can’t stop the looping,” the double whispered. “But you can leave something behind. Make a mark that survives the next retelling.”
For the first time, Mira considered this. The Core, as it fractured, had blended memories, crossed signals, stitched together past and possible futures. But what if the only line through all of it was a voice, insisting “I remember”?
She reached, trembling, for the oldest keepsake she owned—a battered music box, still whole in her locker. She wound it, and the tune—her daughter’s favorite—spiraled softly through the station.
She pressed RECORD. “If anyone is listening: This is not just another failed message. My name is Mira Tan. I loved and was loved. This is the melody of hope. Please remember. Please—”
She ran a shaky hand over the visor, pressed SEND, and for the briefest moment, felt the Core respond—not with words, but with a gentle sigh, a memory preserved.
The storm passed. The relay’s monitors blinked to black, one after another. But somewhere, in the swirling dust outside or drifting through the static-laced networks, a single melody persisted—soft, insistent, a thread running through broken realities, carrying with it the memory of who once cared enough to remember.
###END###
