Nultý signál, časť 1: Výpadok

The Zero Signal, part 1: The Blackout

The Story Begins

At 21:17, the city still looked completely normal.

Buses braked at the stops, shop windows spilled light onto the wet pavement, and in the apartment blocks the blue glow of TVs mixed with the yellow light of lamps. Lea stood under the shelter at the stop near the centre, her hands buried in the pockets of her black denim jacket. The bus was seven minutes late. Not unusual, really, but the rain was turning into cold fog and she was not in the mood to wait another seven.

Then everything went out.

First the ad above the pharmacy. Right after that, the street lamps. One second later, darkness rushed through the whole street, from the traffic lights to the windows on the top floors. Only car lights stayed on, shaky beams from mobile phones, and the distant orange window of an old tram that had stopped in the middle of the crossing.

Someone near Lea said, “Great. Exactly what I needed today.”

The stop filled with nervous voices. One woman tried to call her daughter. A boy with a scooter waved his phone above his head as if that might catch a signal. Lea pulled out her own mobile. In the corner, where the signal bars should have been, there was only empty space.

No service.

That happens during a blackout, she thought. But there was no usual click of emergency lights either. The city had not gone dark in pieces. It had gone out all at once, clean and exact, as if someone had pressed one switch.

Her screen dimmed. Then it lit up by itself.

No app opened. There was no ad, no alert, no error message. Only a black screen with a small white zero in the middle.

Under it was one word: CHANNEL.

Lea did not tap it. Her finger stopped a few millimetres above the glass.

The screen did not act like a frozen app. It had not crashed. It was waiting.

She could not see it directly. She only felt a tiny pulse of light around the zero, steady and patient. Like a lift waiting behind a door, not yet sure which floor it would open on.

“Is your internet working?” the boy with the scooter asked.

Lea looked at his phone. There was a zero on that one too.

A moment later it vanished. His mobile went back to the lock screen as if nothing had happened. Only the time at the top still said 21:17.

She remembered it. She did not know why.

Meanwhile, a few streets away, Tami stood under the wide shelter by the entrance to a shopping passage. She had canvas headphones around her neck, and her copper curls blew in the cold wind across her face. The doors into the passage had jammed just as the tills and the music from the shops went dead.

People were trapped inside. More people were trapped outside. And between them were the glass doors, impossible to open in either direction.

“So,” Tami said loudly enough for two nervous men near the doors to hear, “we have a new escape room. Task one: find a flashlight. Task two: do not panic like extras in a disaster show.”

The man in the coat frowned at her. The girl beside him gave a short laugh, then quickly covered her mouth.

Tami liked that moment. The joke did not need to be good. It only had to break the fear for one second. But when she pulled out her phone to get some light, the smile fell from her face.

Black screen. White zero.

When Things Start to Change

“What is that?” she whispered.

To her left, a woman let out a sharp breath. “Do you have it too?”

Tami turned. The woman was holding up her mobile. The same zero. By the locked doors, a third phone lit up, and on it appeared the same empty channel.

“Maybe it’s the operator’s new way of telling us we pay too much,” Tami blurted out automatically.

Nobody laughed. That scared her more than the dark.

Quickly, she took a screenshot. Her finger slipped on the glass, but the picture saved. Right then the zero blinked and disappeared. Service still did not work. The passage stayed dark, with only the dull reflection of an electricity-free city coming through the roof windows.

“I got it,” she said, more to herself than to the others.

“What did you get?” the girl beside her asked.

Tami pulled the phone to her chest at once. “Nothing. Just a very boring glitch, I guess.”

On the other side of town, Denis kicked the curb with the tip of his white trainer. He was standing by a stop at the edge of a shopping zone, in front of the dark logo of a sports shop and a row of cars pressed uselessly near the crossing. The traffic lights were dead. Drivers were honking so long that the horns began to sound like a fight with no words.

“Brilliant,” he muttered. “Even public transport has rage quit.”

He tried to send a message to his teammate that he would not make training today. The phone only spun a small wheel. Then the wheel stopped and vanished.

A zero appeared.

Denis frowned. He opened settings, tried airplane mode, turned mobile data off and on again, though he already knew it was useless. The zero stayed on the screen, calm and unnervingly clean.

“Is this some kind of test?” the boy at the kebab stand asked.

“If it was, they’d at least give us a button,” Denis shot back.

The boy lifted his own phone. Zero.

Denis pulled out the small watch he wore only because nobody could claim the time on his phone was broken. The watch still showed 21:17. Two seconds later, the zero disappeared.

Weird, he thought. Not scary. Weird.

He crossed the edge of the car park to a side street, where the noise was weaker. He wanted to find a place where he could see whether the power was out in the next blocks too. Then a group of people rushed past him, someone shouted that an emergency entrance had opened near the station, and Denis turned sharply.

For a moment, his head spun.

It was not ordinary dizziness. The street in front of him seemed to skip one square. One second he was by a bike rack, and the next he had two metres of pavement in front of him and one hand against a cold wall. He had not tripped. He just could not remember the two steps in between.

He froze, his heart pounding up in his throat.

“Great,” he said quietly. “Now my brain is in energy-saving mode too.”

He did not let himself think it was anything else but stress. Blackout, darkness, noise. A person could imagine things easily. So he wrote the time in his notes: 21:17. Zero. Short loss of orientation.

If he was going to be scared, at least he should have data.

Viktor was closest to the old district, where repaired houses still hid metal power boxes, unmarked technical doors, and cables disappearing under the pavement. He wore a dark blue overshirt over a grey T-shirt, and one old wired earbud hung near his collar. He held the other one to his ear.

An Important Moment

No music was playing. He was listening to the hiss from a small receiver he had built from cheap parts and patience.

When the city went dark, the hiss changed.

Viktor stopped beside a low technical building with a worn sign that was almost impossible to read. A normal blackout would mean stations slowly going silent, as anyone who knew the system would say. But this was not slow. In his ear, a short, sharp tone appeared, too low for a normal alert and too steady to be random interference.

It lasted barely two seconds.

Then there was a metal crash near him. Wind moved a loose cover on the fence. Viktor jerked his hand away from the earbud and looked at his phone.

Zero.

Still black background. One white number. Under it: CHANNEL.

He pulled the receiver from his pocket and held it near the phone. The device caught faint crackling again. Not mobile service. Not Wi-Fi. Not even radio like he knew it. The signal rushed through the band for a moment, as if someone had opened a door into a room full of old transmitters and shut it again at once.

Two seconds later, it was silent.

Viktor looked across the road at the dark tower behind the rooftops. It had not been used fully for years. At least officially, not.

“That didn’t come from outside,” he said into the empty street. “It came through the city layer.”

Later, city police appeared at the crossroads with flashlights, and building managers came out of side houses to open entrances. The blackout had not ended yet, but people started moving. Some said the problem was in a substation. Others swore they had seen a blue flash above the old tower. Every new version was louder than the last.

Tami got out of the passage with the crowd and headed for the nearest open entrance to an apartment block. The caretaker there let people in to warm up and wait for the buses to return. Near the stairs, she bumped shoulders with someone.

“Sorry, I—” she began.

“Watch where you’re going,” Denis said, and then he noticed her face. “What?”

“Nothing. The whole city is just losing the worst level in history.”

They knew each other from school, but only by sight. Not enough to talk, but enough for Denis to know that the girl in the green hoodie usually talked more than everyone else put together.

Lea was standing by the railing. She noticed Tami’s phone, which the girl was still holding too tightly.

“Did it show you a zero?” Lea asked without any greeting.

Tami blinked. “Excuse me?”

Denis gave a mocking smile, but it only lasted a second. “You too?”

Viktor came into the corridor just as the weak emergency lamp above the entrance switched on. His hair was wet at the front, and he had the receiver in his hand.

“You as well?” he asked carefully.

The four of them looked at each other. Around them, people were dealing with flashlights, water, locked garages, and dead lifts. But their small circle by the stairs suddenly felt separate from the rest of the building.

“Okay,” Tami breathed out. “Either we all broke at the same time, or this was not just a glitch.”

“It can still be a glitch,” Denis said. “A big one. Of the network, the phones, whatever.”

“On several phone brands?” Viktor asked. “And with the same interface?”

Tami opened her photo. The zero was still there, sharp and almost unnaturally bright. In the corner was the time: 21:17:42.

What Comes Next

Denis took out his watch and showed the note in his phone. “I have 21:17. The phone did not save the exact seconds. The watch did. Forty-two.”

Lea looked at the screenshot. “It wasn’t a frozen screen.”

“How do you know?” Denis’s tone was not kind, but it was not mocking either. Just too tense.

“Because a glitch behaves in a messy way. This didn’t.” She ran a fingernail along the edge of her phone. “That zero… it was waiting for someone to click it.”

Tami lowered her voice. “I almost clicked it.”

“So did I,” Viktor admitted.

Denis said nothing.

Viktor placed the receiver on the windowsill. “I caught interference. Short and strange. It felt like the old transmission layer of the city switched on for a moment. Not modern antennas. Something near the tower in the old district, more like.”

“And we were all within its range?” Lea asked.

The boy nodded. “Roughly. Not right next to it. But close enough.”

Tami folded her arms. “So the internet didn’t disconnect us. The tower called us?”

“That is exactly the kind of sentence that makes people start inventing aliens,” Denis said.

“Nobody said aliens,” Tami replied. “That was you.”

Still, the corner of Lea’s mouth moved. It was not quite a smile, but almost.

At last Denis let out a breath and looked at the other three. “We don’t know what it was. We only know it happened at the same time. And clearly not everybody saw it.”

“So we don’t tell anyone yet,” Lea said. “Not until we have something more than a zero on a photo and some hiss in a box.”

Viktor nodded first. After a moment, Tami did too.

Denis leaned on the railing. “Fine. But if it turns out to be a marketing stunt for a new phone plan, I’m leaving.”

Right then, the main light in the corridor switched on.

People in the building clapped. Someone shouted that the power was back. Outside, windows began to glow again, then shop fronts, and finally the far-off traffic lights. The city took a breath and started making noise again.

Viktor’s phone buzzed on the windowsill.

All four of them turned toward it.

There was no notification on the screen. Only a black field, a white zero, and beneath it a thin blinking space, like a cursor in an empty message.

It was waiting for an answer.