The Zero Signal, Part 8: The Tower Without Signal

The Zero Signal, Part 8: The Tower Without 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 had 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 or map anymore. “So this is our big plan? Go into an abandoned tower because of an arrow scrawled on a wall?”

“It wasn’t scrawled,” Lea corrected him. 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 was a single number: 0. “That person was watching us. They knew where we were looking. And they left a trail leading straight here.”

Tami pushed her headphones higher, from her neck onto her hoodie. “Maybe it’s a secret fan. Or someone 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 atmosphere up.”

Lea stopped beside the cracked road. “One more time. If something goes wrong, we don’t play heroes. The exit is that way. If we get split up, we meet at the old bus stop. No blind jumps, Denis.”

The boy rolled his eyes. “My jump isn’t blind.”

“Last time, you ended up in the 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, car radios, Bluetooth headphones. It all mixed in his head like air pressure before a storm. Here, though, the pressure was fading.

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 raised 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 only a dull rectangle remained on the glass above it, where an old sticker had been. Inside, it smelled of dust, damp concrete, and old iron.

The first stairs led upward. Light from narrow windows drew pale bands across the walls. Screws, a piece of plastic casing, and a faded reflective vest lay on the floor.

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 braced one palm against the wall. “No. There is… nothing here.”

Tami lowered her voice. “What do you mean, nothing?”

“No signals. Not even weak ones. Not even reflections. Outside, I could feel the city, even if only from far away. Here I can’t feel Wi-Fi from houses, mobile networks, or a radio from a car 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 cables. They were more like delicate strands of light that showed themselves only when she focused. They ran through the wall, under the floor, and farther on, 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 transmission tower,” Denis argued.

“Not inside the supporting stair column. And not in the concrete beneath our shoes.”

They climbed one floor higher. Every step on the metal stairs made a hollow clack that carried 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 as she moved. But the sound of the stairs faded before it could return as an echo.

On the second floor, they found electrical cabinets. One door stood open, but inside there were no ordinary circuit breakers. There were dense bundles of grey cables, old components, and empty spaces where someone had removed something long ago.

Denis crouched. “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 had not been switched off. This was not like a place with no coverage. He felt something beneath the emptiness, as if all the waves had been forced 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 breathed, 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 irony in his voice.

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

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

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

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

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

“And what do you suggest? Sit down and wait for it to explain 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 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 perhaps they had simply missed it.

“Come here,” she said.

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

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

“There’s current,” she said. “Very weak. As if the whole thing were 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 silenced him.

Lea reached out. With her fingertips, she touched the metal beside the lock. It was not energy she could create. She only found a small remnant of current in the old wiring and redirected it very carefully. The cyan threads brightened for a moment.

Her fingers stung. Then came a muffled click.

The doors opened by a few centimetres.

Behind them, a staircase led down. From below rose 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 nobody was supposed to enter.”

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

They descended slowly. The walls were smoother than upstairs, without graffiti or peeling plaster. Yellow safety signs hung in several places. Most of the text had faded, but one line on the final door was still readable: SYNCHRONIZATION HUB – SERVICE ENTRANCE.

Denis stared at the sign 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. Metal consoles with dark screens stood along the walls. Bundles of cables hung from the ceiling, some as thick as wrists. In the middle rose a low structure of coils and circular frames. Everything was covered in dust, but nothing looked completely abandoned.

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

Tami walked past a table covered in 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. “I don’t know exactly. I can’t read technology just by looking at it. But synchronization means several things are meant 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 throughout the city: the school, hospital, station, housing estates, and industrial zone. The tower stood at the centre of everything.

And around it was 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 darkened streets. The silence without traffic. The moment her phone flashed without a message, and the world felt too quiet for a second.

“We were in the zone,” she added.

A plastic box of documents lay beside the technical table. Denis opened it more carefully than anyone would have expected. Among the yellowed diagrams, he found one page marked with a red strip.

The heading was printed in large 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.”

“A response from what?” Denis asked.

Under the heading was a table with several empty columns. One was labelled 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 thread beneath her palm strengthened, then went dark at once. A faint tremor passed through the room, as if a motor had moved somewhere deep below.

What Comes Next

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

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

“Maybe?” Denis’s voice was tense. “Viktor, I can jump forward when I’m running. Lea sees electricity in walls. Tami can switch off sound. That’s not maybe.”

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

Just then, a faint buzzing came from deep inside the device.

Orange emergency lights along the walls flashed and came on. Their dusty cones filled the room with an unpleasant light. One screen on a console glowed for a moment, then darkened again.

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

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

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

Lea grabbed his sleeve. “Wait.”

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

“It’s not an intrusion alarm.” She watched the cyan threads race from the consoles towards the back corridor. “The system isn’t reacting to the doors. It’s reacting to us. As if it’s checking whether someone is here.”

“Great. We’re the answer in a test.”

“And what if we leave without finding out who shut it down?” Viktor asked. He was still tired, but his voice was no longer uncertain. “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 remained on the ceiling speakers. “One. And this time, nobody goes 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 a single table, an old terminal, and a metal document cabinet.

A log sheet lay on the table. Unlike the other things, it was not covered in dust.

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

SYSTEM SHUT DOWN MANUALLY.

ACCESS CONFIRMED.

DATE: INCOMPLETE RECORD.

Below it was only a string of symbols and a damaged imprint from an identification card.

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

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

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

Viktor suddenly froze. He gripped the table with one hand.

“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 was like a weak pulse somewhere behind a wall, an echo that arrived late. Viktor closed his eyes, but this time he did not try to push harder. He only listened in his own strange way.

One soft beep came from an inactive console by the wall.

All four of them turned.

A single dot lit up on the black screen. Small, cold, cyan.

Then the dot blinked a second time.