Nultý signál, časť 8: Veža bez signálu

The Zero Signal, part 8: The Tower with No Signal

The Story Begins

The old transmission tower stood at the end of an empty road like a thin dark line against the grey sky. From the city, people had seen it for years, but nobody ever really looked at it. Now it seemed closer, taller, and unpleasantly quiet.

Denis walked in front and kept checking his phone every few seconds, even though he had no signal and no map anymore. “So this is our big plan? Go into an abandoned tower because of an arrow scratched on a wall?”

“It wasn’t scratched,” Lea said. In her hand she held the photo she had taken by the old warehouse. On the concrete was a symbol: a circle crossed by a thin vertical line. Next to it stood one number: 0. “That person was watching us. They knew where we were looking. And they left a trail straight here.”

Tami pushed her headphones higher up from her neck onto her hoodie. “Maybe it’s a secret fan. Or a person who wants us to walk into a creepy tower and disappear in chapter two.”

“That’s very encouraging,” Viktor said quietly.

“I’m trying to keep the mood realistic.”

Lea stopped near the cracked road. “One more time. If something goes wrong, we do not play heroes. The way out is there. If we get split up, we meet at the old bus stop. No blind skips, Denis.”

The boy rolled his eyes. “My skip is not blind.”

“Last time you ended up in bushes.”

“Technically beside the bushes.”

Viktor was looking at the tower. His face was paler than usual. Around the city he could always feel signals: mobile networks, home Wi-Fi, radios in cars, Bluetooth headphones. It all mixed in his head like pressure before a storm. Here, though, the pressure was weaker.

Not naturally. It was as if someone had placed a heavy cover over this place.

“It’s starting,” he said.

Nobody asked what exactly he meant. They all knew.

The gate in the fence hung on one hinge. Denis pushed it aside just enough for them to enter. The metal gave a soft creak, and Tami automatically lifted a hand. The sound suddenly shrank, as if someone had wrapped it in cotton. The gate moved without an echo.

The girl immediately clenched her jaw. “Okay. One use. And please, no more metal concerts.”

The entrance to the tower was open. The door had peeling grey paint, the lock was gone, and on the glass above it only a dull rectangle remained where an old sticker had been. Inside, the smell of dust, wet concrete, and old iron hung in the air.

The first stairs went up. Light from narrow windows drew pale bands across the walls. On the floor lay screws, a broken plastic cover, and a faded reflective vest.

Viktor stepped over the threshold and stopped so suddenly that Denis almost walked into him.

“Hey,” Denis muttered. “Does gravity not work here or what?”

The boy rested one hand on the wall. “No. There is… nothing here.”

Tami lowered her voice. “Nothing?”

“No signals. Not even weak ones. Outside, I could feel the city, even if only from far away. Here I can’t feel Wi-Fi from houses, mobile networks, radio from cars on the road. Nothing at all.”

Lea took out a flashlight and shone it on the wall. At first she saw only grey concrete. Then she narrowed her eyes.

Faint cyan threads appeared along the stairs. They were not lightning bolts or bright wires. More like soft light lines that showed themselves only when she focused. They ran through the wall, under the floor, and farther away, out of sight.

When Things Start to Change

“There’s wiring everywhere,” she said. “Even where there shouldn’t be.”

“There are cables in an old tower,” Denis argued.

“Not inside the main stair column. And not in the concrete under our feet.”

They climbed one floor higher. Every step on the metal stairs made a hollow clack that bounced into the empty space. Tami tried to keep their movement inside a small circle of silence. It was not complete silence. Lea could still hear her own breathing and the fabric of her jacket when she moved. But the sound of the stairs disappeared before it could come back as an echo.

On the second floor they found electrical cabinets. One door was open, but inside there were no usual switches. Instead there were thick bundles of grey cables, old parts, and empty spaces where something had been taken out long ago.

Denis crouched down. “Here. At least one cable has to be live.”

“Don’t touch it,” Lea said.

“I’m not planning to lick it.”

Viktor was already standing by the cabinet with his eyes closed. He tried to find even a trace of the familiar pressure. At first he breathed calmly. Then his shoulders tightened.

To him, the signals were not turned off. It was not like a place with no coverage. He felt something under the emptiness, as if all the waves had been pushed down, deep under the floor, and held there.

Suddenly he opened his eyes and grabbed the edge of the cabinet.

Lea was beside him before he could slide down. “Viktor.”

“I’m fine,” he said, though his voice cracked. “It’s just… when I focus on it, it pushes back. Not like noise. Like an emptiness that doesn’t want anything inside it.”

“That makes no sense,” Denis said, but this time there was no sarcasm in his voice.

“That’s exactly why it’s a problem,” Lea answered.

She put a hand on Viktor’s shoulder and felt him shaking. In her own fingers, a small tremor appeared. The cyan threads near the cabinet spread into the wall like a map nobody was meant to see.

“Something active is blocking communication,” she said. “This tower isn’t dead. It’s just pretending.”

Denis straightened up. “Then we search it faster. The sooner we find out what this is, the sooner we’re out.”

“That’s exactly the kind of attitude that gets you into more bushes,” Tami snapped. She sounded sharp, but she was nervously rubbing her fingers against her sleeve. “If something cut the whole city off from signal, maybe it doesn’t want us running around its hallway.”

“And what do you suggest? Sitting and waiting until it explains itself?”

“I suggest thinking for longer than two seconds.”

The tension between them hung in the air for a moment. Then Lea pointed her flashlight down toward the ground floor. Behind an old reception desk, she noticed a narrow strip of metal in the floor. It had not been there before, or maybe they had simply missed it.

“Come here,” she said.

Under a layer of dust, an outline appeared. Metal doors set into the concrete. They were not marked as storage or maintenance. Along the edge only part of a black sign remained: RESTRICTED ACCESS.

Lea dropped to her knees. Near the lock, her power immediately answered in faint cyan traces. The threads connected with the floor, with the wall, and continued deeper down.

“There’s current,” she said. “Very weak. Like it’s been sleeping.”

Denis leaned closer. “Then wake it up.”

“If I do it wrong, maybe I’ll wake up something we don’t want.”

An Important Moment

That finally shut him up.

Lea reached out. With her fingertips she touched the metal beside the lock. She could not create energy. She only found a small leftover current in the old wiring and carefully redirected it. The cyan threads grew stronger for a second.

A sting shot through her fingers. Then a dull click sounded.

The door opened a few centimeters.

Behind it was a staircase leading down. From below came the smell of wet earth, metal, and something sharp that reminded her of old batteries.

Tami raised her flashlight. “So officially we’re in the part where nobody was supposed to go.”

“Officially, this tower isn’t even supposed to exist anymore,” Viktor said.

They went down slowly. The walls were smoother than upstairs, with no graffiti and no peeling plaster. Yellow safety signs hung in several places. Most of the text had faded, but at the last door one line was still readable: SYNCHRONIZATION HUB – SERVICE ENTRANCE.

Denis stared at the words for a long time. “Hub? That doesn’t sound like a normal transmitter.”

“Because it wasn’t a normal transmitter,” Lea said.

The underground room was about the size of two classrooms. Along the walls stood metal consoles with dark screens. Bundles of cables hung from the ceiling, some as thick as wrists. In the middle stood a low frame of coils and ring shapes. Everything was covered in dust, but nothing looked fully abandoned.

Lea watched the glowing threads in the walls. They led to the coils, then into the floor, then out again, as if the whole room was one part of a giant circuit.

Tami walked past a table covered with papers. “This is a really weird escape room. Where’s at least one clue that doesn’t look like it wants to eat us?”

Viktor noticed a label on one console. The letters were small, but still readable.

“Experimental synchronization system,” he read. “Field point networks… adaptive measurement…”

“What does that mean?” Tami asked.

The boy shook his head. “Not exactly sure. I can’t read technology just by looking at it. But synchronization means more things are supposed to do the same thing at the same time.”

On the other side of the room, Tami found a thin metal map fixed to the wall. It showed points around the city: the school, the hospital, the station, housing blocks, and the industrial zone. In the center of everything was the tower.

And around it, a wide circle.

“Look,” she called.

Viktor stepped closer. His finger traced the edge of the circle. “That’s the range. During the blackout, we were all here.”

Lea remembered that night. The dark streets. The silence without traffic. The moment her phone flashed without a message, and the world felt too quiet for one second.

“We were in the zone,” she said.

By the technical table there was a plastic box with documents. Denis opened it more carefully than anyone would have expected. Among the yellowed diagrams he found one page marked with a red strip.

The title was printed in big letters: ZERO CHANNEL TEST.

Nobody in the room spoke.

Viktor read aloud, slowly and carefully. “Zero channel: controlled state of communication suppression. Purpose: activation and synchronization of a response within range.”

“Response of what?” Denis asked.

Under the heading was a table with several empty columns. One of them was marked FIELD SUBJECTS. Another: RESPONSE AFTER PULSE.

Tami stopped joking. “I really don’t like the word subject.”

Lea touched the edge of the table. A cyan line under her palm grew stronger, then disappeared at once. A faint tremor ran through the room, as if a motor deep below had moved.

What Comes Next

“It wasn’t a failure,” she said. “Someone started the blackout as a test.”

Viktor was looking at the circle on the map. “And we were in range. Maybe it’s connected to what happened to us.”

“Maybe?” Denis sounded tense. “Viktor, I can skip two seconds forward when I’m running. Lea sees electricity in walls. Tami can shut off sound. That’s not maybe.”

“We don’t know if it was meant to cause exactly this,” Viktor said. “Or if it was even supposed to affect people.”

Right then, a soft buzzing sound came from deep inside the system.

Orange emergency lights along the walls flashed and came on. Their dusty beams filled the room with an uncomfortable light. One screen on a console lit up for a second, then went dark again.

Tami reacted first. She stretched silence across the space around them. The buzzing vanished, footsteps disappeared, and even Denis’s sharp breath could not be heard. But the girl went pale and pressed her fingers against her ear.

“I can only hear my own head,” she whispered. “And it has a horrible playlist today.”

“We have to go,” Denis said. He was already turning toward the stairs.

Lea grabbed his sleeve. “Wait.”

“The emergency lights came on. That’s a pretty clear message.”

“It’s not an alarm against breaking in.” She was watching the cyan threads race from the consoles toward the back corridor. “The system isn’t reacting to the doors. It’s reacting to us. Like it’s checking whether someone is here.”

“Great. We’re the answer in a test.”

“And if we leave without finding out who turned it off?” Viktor asked. He was tired, but his voice was no longer unsure. “Someone kept this place secret. Someone may have been watching us too.”

Denis looked at each of them. Then at the blinking light above the door.

“One room,” he said at last. “Not five. One. If something moves, game over.”

Tami nodded, though her eyes stayed on the ceiling speakers. “One. And this time nobody is playing solo.”

The back corridor was narrow and ended at an unmarked door. Denis opened it only a little. Behind it was a smaller room with one table, an old terminal, and a metal cabinet for documents.

On the table lay a log sheet. It was not covered in dust like the other things.

Lea stepped closer. At the bottom of the document was the last readable report:

SYSTEM SHUT DOWN MANUALLY.

ACCESS CONFIRMED.

DATE: INCOMPLETE RECORD.

Below that was only a row of symbols and a damaged imprint from an ID card.

“Manually,” Viktor said. “So it didn’t fail by itself.”

“And someone still had access after the tower was shut down,” Lea added.

Tami turned toward the door as if she expected to see someone standing there. “The person who left us the trail… maybe they weren’t watching our search by accident.”

Viktor suddenly froze. He put a hand on the table.

“I can feel it,” he said.

“What?” Denis took a step closer.

“A signal. Small. Very far away… or very deep.”

It was not like normal network pressure. It felt like a weak удар somewhere behind a wall, an echo that came late. Viktor closed his eyes, but this time he did not try to push harder. He just listened in his own strange way.

From a dead console by the wall came one soft beep.

All four of them turned.

On the black screen, a single dot lit up. Small, cold, cyan.

Then the dot blinked a second time.