The Zero Signal, Part 2: The First Pulse

The Zero Signal, Part 2: The First Pulse

The Story Begins

Lea had slept for maybe three hours. At least, that was how it felt as she walked to school that morning, with every car on the wet asphalt sounding too loud.

The city was working again after yesterday’s blackout. Traffic lights changed colours, trams rattled along their tracks, and warm yellow light shone from the bakery by the stop. Still, something felt wrong.

Along the utility poles, she could see thin cyan lines. They were not bright like lamps or sharp like lightning. They were more like faint threads clinging to cables and junction boxes, as if the electricity had forgotten to leave after the blackout.

Lea pulled her black denim jacket closer around her neck. Yesterday, she had told herself that her eyes were simply tired. That after the darkness, sirens, and panic, her brain was making things up. But she could still see the threads this morning.

Her phone vibrated in her pocket.

She pulled it out so quickly that she nearly dropped it. For a second, the screen lit up with a strange display. No message, no notification. Only the time.

21:17:43.

The exact same time when everything had gone silent for a moment during yesterday’s blackout.

A short cyan line flickered beneath the numbers. It was so quick that she could have mistaken it for a screen glitch. Then her normal lock screen returned.

“Great,” she muttered. “My phone has flashbacks.”

As she put it away, she noticed that her fingers were trembling slightly. She did not know whether it was the cold or something worse.

The classroom was stuffy, even though the radiator had barely begun to warm up. Tami sat by the window in a dark green hoodie, headphones around her neck, repeatedly tugging her sleeves over her hands. Two desks away, Denis was drawing something in his notebook that was definitely not a history note. Under his desk, Viktor checked his phone as if he expected an important message any moment.

Lea sat down and tried not to stare at them for too long. They had all been there during the blackout. They were all pretending nothing had happened. That did not prove anything yet.

Tami tore a scrap of paper from her notebook, scribbled something on it, and slid it across the desk towards Denis. The paper stopped at the edge.

“Come on,” she whispered.

Denis reached for it, but at that moment the teacher’s footsteps sounded in the hallway.

Tami froze. Her hand remained suspended in the air.

Then the sound vanished.

It was not the sort of silence that came during a break when nobody was talking. It was an empty space. The scrape of a chair in the back row disappeared halfway through the movement. Whispers by the door became silent moving lips. Even the distant hum of the hallway was suddenly gone.

Lea felt pressure in her ears. Her phone vibrated on the desk in front of her, but without a sound.

Tami clutched her head.

A second later, sound returned all at once. The chair finished scraping, someone in the back row coughed loudly, and the teacher’s footsteps landed on the floor directly outside the door.

“What was that?” Denis breathed.

“My charm,” Tami said too quickly. “Sometimes people lose their speech around me.”

Nobody laughed. Not even Tami.

The teacher opened the door, looked at the class, and frowned for a moment. “Why is it so quiet in here?”

“We’re studying independently,” Denis replied.

When Things Start to Change

“I haven’t even assigned you any work yet.”

Tami lowered her gaze. Meanwhile, Lea looked at her own phone. The black screen showed the time of the last recording: 08:12:06. Directly beneath it was a barely visible cyan dot.

After the second lesson, Denis sprawled out into the schoolyard as if he needed to get the classroom out of his head as quickly as possible. The cold air ruffled his short brown hair. Viktor stood by the railing, one earbud hanging near his collar and the other in his ear.

“So, what is it today? Is everyone’s software crashing?” Denis asked.

“Tami didn’t shut down the whole classroom,” Viktor said cautiously. “Just the sound. I think.”

“That’s even better. We have our own school bug.”

Lea came out after them but stayed a few steps away. She did not want to begin a conversation she had no proof for.

Denis kicked an empty plastic bottle beside a bench. It rolled towards a puddle. He ran after it, perhaps just so he would not have to deal with everyone else looking at him.

Halfway through the step, his body jerked.

It was not as though he vanished. It was more like two seconds had been skipped in a video and the image reappeared a little farther on. Denis was suddenly at the puddle, one foot already in the air, although a moment earlier he had been almost a metre away.

He landed awkwardly, flailed his arms, and slammed his shoulder into the bench.

“Ow,” he said. Then he immediately straightened up. “That is exactly what it was supposed to look like.”

Viktor looked at him. “You weren’t there.”

“I was. Just fast.”

“No. You were over there.” Viktor pointed behind himself. “Then suddenly you were by the puddle.”

Denis smiled, but the smile did not last. “Maybe you didn’t see properly again.”

“I saw.”

Lea noticed Denis turning pale. For a moment, he gripped the edge of the bench and squinted, as though the yard around him had moved in the wrong direction.

Her phone vibrated. This time, she pulled it out at once.

08:29:41.

The same line flickered beneath the time.

“That’s not a coincidence,” she said before she could stop herself.

Denis looked at her. “What isn’t?”

“Nothing.” Lea switched off the screen. “Nothing yet.”

But Viktor was watching his own display. “I just saved a weird recording. A brief signal spike.”

“Perfect,” Denis snapped. “So I get super-speed, and you get a graph.”

“You don’t have super-speed,” Lea said. “You tripped.”

“Thanks for the support.”

“You’re welcome.”

Later, Viktor went down the stairs by the school workshop. It was usually quieter there, with only the smell of metal, old wood, and cleaning fluid. He wanted to compare the data on his phone with what he had caught that morning. He did not expect Lea to follow him.

“You saw that time too,” he said without greeting her.

“Maybe.”

“That means yes.”

He placed his phone on the windowsill and opened his notes beside it. The screen showed three times, each with a short, unfamiliar symbol.

“During the blackout, I recorded some sound,” he explained. “I thought there would only be static. But in the middle, there’s a pulse. Very brief. Not a tone, more like… a blank space in the signal.”

Lea studied the display. Around the phone, she could see a thin cyan outline. Threads ran along the metal windowsill and vanished into the wall where the cables passed.

An Important Moment

“Can you see it?” she asked.

Viktor looked up. “See what?”

She held back her answer. Not yet. Telling someone she could see electricity sounded even worse when she said it aloud.

Viktor combined two recordings on the screen. At that moment, he drew in a sharp breath and stepped back. One hand caught the railing.

“Viktor?”

“There are too many.”

“Too many what?”

“Signals.” He closed his eyes. “Wi-Fi. Phones. Bluetooth. Everything is… packed on top of everything else. Like I’m standing in the middle of a crowd, except the crowd is invisible and everyone is shouting at once.”

Lea took his phone from the windowsill, and the display went dark. The cyan threads around it weakened for a moment.

Viktor took several breaths. “It isn’t only in phones,” he said quietly. “Something is hanging around nearby. And when we’re close to it… it gets stronger.”

During free period, Lea laid four phones out on the windowsill. Tami gave her hers only after a long look. Denis set his down with the comment that if his playlist got erased, someone would die of boredom. Viktor said nothing.

Lea compared the timestamps. The blackout recording. The morning vibration. Tami’s silence. Denis’s strange shift. Viktor’s spike by the stairs.

The times did not match exactly. There were several seconds between them. But they all repeated within the same short window after the pulse.

Yesterday’s recording lit up on her phone screen. At 21:17:43, the sound wave dropped into a flat line for a moment.

Lea moved a finger over the display. The cyan threads shivered and drew together. She felt a faint prick in her palm. She tried to guide them back into the phone, only slightly, to find out whether she was imagining it.

The display flickered.

At once, her hand began to shake. A dull pressure settled behind her eyes, like the beginning of a bad headache. She pulled her palm away quickly.

She could not create energy. She understood that much already. She could only redirect it for a moment. And not for free.

“So?” Tami asked. She tried to sound casual, but her fingers clenched the drawstring of her hoodie.

Lea took a breath. “Each of our phones caught the same pulse during the blackout. Then it showed up again with every… thing that happened today. Not the same pulse exactly, but similar. At the exact time.”

Denis leaned against the wall. “Are you saying I nearly smashed myself into a bench because of a phone?”

“Not because of the phone. The phone only picked it up.”

“That’s much more reassuring,” Tami remarked.

Viktor looked at the times again. “If it’s a pattern, we can track it.”

“But not test it on people,” Lea added.

Denis smiled in a way that made it clear he was already planning exactly that.

The cafeteria was crowded after the third lesson. Trays clinked, a queue had formed by the vending machine, and somewhere by the window, someone was playing music from a phone so quietly that the whole room could still hear it.

Tami and Denis stood by the door to the hallway. Lea and Viktor were a few metres away by the table where the cutlery was kept.

“Just one second,” Tami said. “A really tiny one. I need to know if I can stop it.”

“And I need to know if I can avoid ending up in a puddle,” Denis added.

Water had spilled near the serving counter. The cleaner was looking for a cloth, and Denis wanted to jump over the wet patch to avoid her.

What Comes Next

“This is a bad idea,” Lea said.

“We know that already,” Denis replied, and stepped forward.

Tami focused on the open door. Lea saw the girl hold her breath.

The sound from the hallway vanished.

This time, though, the silence did not remain by the door. It spread across the nearest tables, swallowing the clink of cutlery and the loud laughter of a group of first-years. People began to turn because suddenly they could hear only their own breathing.

Denis pushed off from the wet floor.

His body jerked forwards, just as it had in the yard. He skipped a short distance, but landed too close to a table. His side struck a tray full of cups.

The tray tipped.

In the complete silence, three plastic cups tumbled to the floor. Nobody heard them land, and that made it look even stranger.

Denis grabbed the table. His face twisted with dizziness.

Tami dropped her hands from her head. Sound returned so suddenly that several students cried out.

At that moment, the deputy headmistress, Mrs Kováčová, entered the cafeteria. She stopped in the doorway and looked over the tables, the spilled water, and Denis, who was pretending that leaning against the table was completely normal.

“What happened here?” she asked.

“Physics,” Denis blurted out.

“I can see that. I’m asking about the circumstances.”

Lea caught Tami by the elbow and nodded towards Viktor. “Come on,” she whispered. “Now.”

In the hallway behind the cafeteria, she stopped them by the lockers. Tami pressed her palms to her ears. “My head is ringing.”

“The whole building is spinning for me,” Denis said, then frowned. “Not literally. I hope.”

Viktor held his phone in front of him. “During that silence, there was a huge spike. Every connection nearby jumped for a second. Like someone pressed one button across the entire network.”

Lea felt her fingers twitch again. “Enough. No more tests. Not until we know what we’re doing.”

“And what exactly are we doing?” Tami asked. For the first time, she did not sound funny. “Because I didn’t want to shut down the cafeteria. I just wanted to block out the sound from the hallway.”

Denis looked down at his trainers. “I didn’t want to crash into a tray.”

“You did manage that, by the way,” Lea said.

“Thanks.”

For a moment, they stood without speaking. The hallway was empty, and only the vending machine around the corner hummed. Lea could see faint cyan threads around it. This time, she did not ignore them.

“I found the connection,” she said at last. “Yesterday’s pulse. Our phones. Today’s incidents. It isn’t a coincidence.”

Tami brushed a curl away from her face. “So what? Are we making a group chat for weird reality glitches?”

“Maybe,” Viktor replied. “But no testing things at lunch.”

“That’s a pretty sensible rule for today,” Denis said.

Lea looked at them. It still felt wrong to say aloud what she saw. The threads, the energy beneath the skin of old cables, the pain that came after she touched the phone. Control had always seemed easier when she did not have to rely on anyone.

But Tami’s hands were shaking. Denis was smiling, but he stood too still. Viktor’s face was still pale after the overload of signals.

“When it happens again,” Lea said, “we message the others. Immediately. No one pretends to be funny or indestructible.”

Denis raised an eyebrow. “Was that aimed at me?”

“If you see yourself in it, then yes.”

Tami gave a faint smile. “Okay. First, we confirm it among ourselves. We can save the big dramatic speeches until we at least have a manual.”

The End of the Story

Viktor nodded. “And I’ll try to find out exactly what the pulse is. Without frying my senses.”

“That would be useful,” Lea said.

At the end of the hallway, an office door opened. Mrs Kováčová stood in the light by the cafeteria door. She did not call after them. She only watched them.

Her gaze rested on Tami, then Denis, and finally on the four phones Viktor was still holding.

Lea noticed the deputy headmistress writing something in a small notebook.

The cyan thread by the vending machine flashed.

And all four phones vibrated at once.