The Zero Signal, Part 10: Channel Zero

The Zero Signal, Part 10: Channel Zero

The Story Begins

The stairs beneath the old transmission tower were narrow, wet, and unpleasantly steep. Lea led the way, holding her flashlight close to her chest. Its beam leapt across peeling plaster, rusty handrails, and cables running along the ceiling like dried roots.

Viktor walked behind her, holding his phone in front of him. No map or messages were open on the screen, only a dark, unlit surface. Even so, he watched it intently.

“Can you still feel it?” Lea asked without turning around.

“Not exactly like a signal,” he replied quietly. “More like pressure. It’s weak, but it’s coming from below. And then… it’s as if it spreads in several directions.”

Denis exhaled sharply behind them. “Perfect. An underground maze full of cables and invisible pressure. All we need now is a sign saying: Welcome to the worst decision of the week.”

“It’s only Monday,” Tami reminded him. Her canvas headphones hung around her neck, and her curly copper hair glowed orange in the flashlight beam. “You’ve got plenty of time to regret it again.”

Denis looked back at her, but he did not smile. Even his sarcasm sounded a little quieter that night.

At the bottom, the stairs ended at a service corridor. The air was colder there and smelled of damp concrete, dust, and old metal. A layer of grey dust covered the floor, broken by two clear shoeprints.

Lea stopped.

“These weren’t here before,” she said.

Viktor crouched down but did not touch them. “They’re fresh. The edges haven’t been covered with dust yet.”

“So we’re not the only fans of abandoned buildings,” Tami whispered.

Heavy metal doors hung at the end of the corridor. One side stood open only a hand’s width. Denis moved forward, but Lea raised a hand.

“Slowly.”

“I’m just taking a look.”

“That’s exactly the problem. You’re always just taking a look.”

This time, he did not argue. Together, they pushed against the doors, and they opened with a long creak.

Beyond them was a low, windowless room. Metal cabinets lined the walls, some open, others sealed with old labels. A device stood on a base in the middle of the room. It had a dark screen, a row of mechanical switches, and cables leading into the floor. A faint cyan light clung to its edges beneath the dust.

Viktor approached as carefully as if the device might be breathing.

“This isn’t an ordinary transmitter,” he said. “A transmitter would have antenna lines and output modules. This has branches for measurement, feedback… and something like control loops.”

Lea swept her flashlight over the bundle of cables. In her sight, the threads of electricity appeared as thin cyan lines. Some were dark and dead. Others pulsed faintly and disappeared deep into the walls.

“It isn’t disconnected,” she said. “Something is still supplying power.”

“The city grid?” Tami asked.

“Maybe. But not a normal branch.” Lea narrowed her eyes. “It’s too weak. As if the system is waiting on standby.”

Viktor touched the metal frame beside the screen. He jerked his fingers back at once.

“Ow?” Denis asked.

“No. Just… the pressure changed.” The boy adjusted the old wired headphones around his neck, although he was not listening to anything. “There’s a connection to something beyond the tower. Something very distant, or spread through many branches.”

Beneath a layer of grime, a small label had been stamped into the device: SYNCHRONIZATION UNIT 0.

Tami read it aloud. “Unit Zero. Is that our zero signal?”

Viktor nodded slowly. “I think so. But it wasn’t meant for the public. It wasn’t a programme, a secret station, or a broadcast anyone was supposed to pick up on a phone.”

When Things Start to Change

“Then what was it for?” Lea asked.

The boy stared at the switches. “Synchronization. Several devices at once. Maybe so they would react at the same time.”

Denis’s expression hardened. “And people?”

Viktor did not answer for a long time. Then he pointed to the small connectors on the side of the device. Each had a faded symbol beside it: pulse, hearing, movement, neural response.

“Biological reactions too,” he said at last.

Silence filled the room, and this time it did not belong to Tami.

Then the screen flickered to life.

All four of them stepped back. A band of white noise raced across the black screen. Then, in the centre, appeared the symbol they already knew from the blackout: a thin circle with a broken line through its middle. A zero that did not look like a number, but like an opening.

Words appeared beneath the symbol:

CHANNEL 0 RESET

REMOTE ACCESS CONFIRMED

“Don’t touch anything!” Lea said sharply.

Denis stared at the device. “Someone started that just now.”

“Yes,” Viktor said. His face had gone pale. “And not from here. The pressure came from outside.”

A faint tremor passed through the air. It was not a sound, exactly, but a strange sensation in their teeth and chests. Tami pressed her fingers to her ears.

“Can you feel that too?”

Lea nodded. The cyan threads in the walls brightened for a moment. Her hand trembled, only slightly, but enough for the flashlight to draw a restless arc across the ceiling.

“It’s an impulse,” Viktor said. “Not a strong one. More like a test. It’s moving through the city’s old backup circuit.”

“Then let’s switch it off,” Denis blurted out.

“What exactly do you want to switch off?” Lea turned to him. “Something we don’t understand, through circuits we can’t see? Sounds very safe.”

“And waiting is better?” he snapped. “Someone is activating a reset while we’re standing a metre from the device. Maybe they already know we’re here.”

Tami tried to smirk, but it did not work. “Maybe? Denis, the screen said remote access. That’s a pretty enormous neon sign saying they know we’re here.”

Viktor pulled a small notebook from his pocket. He wrote down the time, the order of the blinking indicator lights, and the numbers that flashed across the display. His hands shook a little, but his writing remained tiny and precise.

“The reset didn’t start completely,” he said. “The system seems to be… waiting for a response.”

“From us?” Tami asked.

“I don’t know.”

Denis stepped to the right.

Lea reacted at once. “Stop.”

“I’m just looking from the side.”

“Denis.”

Instead of answering, he moved sharply. He stepped to the right, and for an instant his body blurred, as if the image had skipped a frame. Two seconds later, he stood beside the cabinet next to the device.

He immediately gripped its edge.

“Don’t do that,” Tami gasped.

Denis closed his eyes. “I know.”

A narrow indicator light came on by his foot. The device gave a dry click.

Everyone froze.

After several endless seconds, the light faded back to weak blue. Nothing exploded. Nothing collapsed. Even so, Lea could feel her pulse hammering in her temples.

“This isn’t a game,” she said quietly.

Denis opened his eyes and looked at her. For a moment, his usual defiance vanished. “I know. I just hate it when someone else decides what happens to us.”

“Then don’t help them do it,” she replied.

An Important Moment

Viktor straightened. “We need to find the route. If we find where the backup circuit connects to the tower, we might get logs, or at least a clue about when someone activated it.”

Lea nodded. “Okay. We leave the device alone. For now.”

On the wall beside the door, they found a large wiring plan behind cracked glass. The lines on it had faded, but Lea could see current flickering through some of them. Viktor pointed to a marked route leading from the tower beneath several streets to a small technical building near the former waterworks.

“City backup circuit,” he said. “It was meant for emergency communications. It shouldn’t have worked for years.”

“And yet it does,” Denis muttered.

Tami suddenly turned towards the corridor. “Did you hear that?”

“Hear what?” Lea asked.

“Nothing. Just now. But it was… a very precise kind of nothing.”

For the second time, her ability appeared without her meaning to use it. Sound from the corridor vanished for a moment, as if someone had cut that space away from the world. Then the dripping water and distant hum of cables returned.

“Someone was there,” Tami said. “Or something passed by.”

Lea lowered the flashlight. “We go together.”

In the narrow corridor, Tami deliberately used her silent field. The sounds of their footsteps vanished. Denis’s trainers did not scrape against the concrete, and Viktor’s zipper did not jingle. But after a few metres, Tami tilted her head as if trying to catch the sound of her own breathing.

“Only for a little while,” she whispered. “Then my ears will ring all night.”

At the next service door, Lea noticed a scratch on the metal plate near the floor. She knelt and shone the light closer. Pressed into the dust was a regular pattern of three narrow teeth and a small semicircle.

“Viktor,” she called softly.

The boy took out his phone and photographed the mark from several angles. “It isn’t from a shoe. It looks like the end of a tool. Or an identification key that slots into a lock.”

Denis examined the door without touching it. “The lock is worn down. Someone didn’t open it just once. Look, the scratches all run the same way. They knew exactly where to press.”

“So it was a person,” Lea said. “Not a random system error.”

Tami released the silent field and frowned at once. “Great. We have proof that one particular person is haunting us. That’s almost reassuring.”

“Let’s not destroy the evidence,” Lea added. “Viktor, do you have the photos?”

“I do. And maybe I can compare that pattern with municipal service keys. If the records aren’t completely gone.”

They returned to the device more carefully than before. Denis stayed a step behind the others. Lea noticed, but said nothing. It was enough that he was not rushing ahead this time.

Viktor set his notebook beside the device. On one page, he had sketched the blinking symbols from the reset. Next to them, he copied data he had once caught beneath ordinary network traffic. Then he added the dates of their ability fluctuations over the past few weeks.

Tami frowned at the page. “Are those the evenings when everything went wrong for us?”

“Not everything,” Viktor corrected her. “Only our abilities. And always in roughly the same order.”

With one finger, he joined three marks.

“Look. A weak impulse. A change in response. Then a pause. And again. This isn’t interference. It’s a sequence.”

Lea felt her stomach tighten. She remembered the last impulse, when her light threads vanished and returned unpredictably. Tami, who could barely hear her own voice after a powerful silence. Denis’s skips, after which he crashed into a cabinet because he lost his sense of direction.

What Comes Next

“Calibration,” she said.

Viktor looked up. “Probably. The system was testing how we react. Maybe it was adjusting its settings to us.”

“To us?” Denis gave a short, humourless laugh. “We’re not settings. We’re not broken headphones.”

“I know,” Viktor said. “That’s exactly why it scares me.”

Tami leaned against the wall. “From the beginning, I’ve felt that the zero signal isn’t just around us. That someone is waiting to see what we do. At least now it isn’t only a feeling.”

A new line lit up on the device. No one had touched it.

Viktor’s shoulders stiffened. “I was only downloading passive data. I shouldn’t have sent anything.”

The screen flickered. The characters formed slowly, one point of light at a time.

SEQUENCE 0 COMPLETE

SUBJECTS CONFIRMED

PREPARE PHASE 1

A simple pattern appeared beneath the text: three teeth and a semicircle. Exactly the same one they had found by the service door.

“That’s an answer,” Tami breathed.

“And it knows we’re here,” Lea added.

Viktor reached for a switch, then hesitated. “If I turn it off, I could interrupt the record. If I leave it on, another impulse might begin.”

Denis took a step forward, but this time he stopped and looked at Lea. “What now?”

The question surprised her more than the message on the display. For a moment, she listened only to the distant dripping of water and the pulse in her ears.

“Now we don’t start anything,” she decided. “Viktor, photograph everything. Tami, silence the corridor if necessary. Denis, no skips until you tell us where you’re going.”

“That sounds terribly unheroic,” he muttered.

“That’s why we might survive.”

Viktor quickly took the last photographs. Just as he put his phone away, a metallic click sounded from the corridor.

Not from the device.

From the door.

Tami lifted her head. Her eyes held a sudden, hard focus. She stretched her silent field around them. The sounds vanished so completely that Lea could not hear her own breath.

A shadow moved behind the partly open door.

Despite Viktor’s attempts to switch it off, the device blazed brighter. Cyan light flooded the room, and beneath the words PHASE 1, a new icon appeared: an open circle with a single line leading deeper underground.

Someone was not merely watching them from a distance.

Someone was showing them where to go.