I never should have taken the contract.
It was supposed to be six months on the ridge station—an isolated listening post perched atop the permafrost cliffs of Baffin Island, tasked with monitoring seismic activity and deep-earth resonance. I wasn't even supposed to be stationed alone, but bureaucratic missteps and a last-minute personnel issue left me the sole technician.
It was quiet work. Too quiet. The kind of silence that grows teeth.
The ridge station, called Outpost Theta, had a history. Nothing written, of course. But old field notes, scratches etched into metal lockers, and the journal fragments left behind by past operators painted a picture. A rotation rarely lasted the full six months. "Mental fatigue," the reports said. But some of the older notes said things like "the signal is still moving" and "don't listen past 2 a.m."
I assumed it was just the darkness playing tricks on people. But then I started hearing it myself.
It began around the third week. A low-frequency hum, just beneath the auditory threshold. I couldn't hear it in the traditional sense, but I felt it—a pressure behind the eyes, a tremor in the bones. I initially blamed the old equipment, convinced it was the magnetometers pinging off anomalies in the bedrock. But when I ran diagnostics, every system checked out.
Then the dreams began.
I dreamed of vast, spiraling structures buried miles beneath the earth—architecture so cyclopean and intricate it seemed to laugh in geometry's face. Beams twisted in impossible ways, and their angles moved when I wasn't looking. There were no lights, but everything glowed with an internal luminescence that pulsed like breath.
And always, in the center of it all, a presence. Not a creature. Not a god. Just a mass of intent—alien, watching, patient. I couldn't remember its form upon waking, only that it was wrong in a way the human brain isn't built to process.
I started talking to myself. At first to stay sane. Then because I wasn't sure who else was there.
On day 47, I stopped sleeping entirely. I wasn't even tired. My thoughts had become glassy and brittle, always bending toward the signal—the hum, which now pulsed in rhythm. Like a message.
I fed it into the analysis software. It was sound, yes, but not noise. It had structure. Modulation patterns. Deliberate shifts. I ran it through linguistic filters, spectrographic renderers, AI analyzers. No results. But it felt like a language. Not made for human tongues or ears. Something deeper. Older.
The logs say I began recording myself that week. I don't remember doing that.
One of the tapes begins with me standing in front of the observation window, muttering, "They're not from the stars. They were always here. We're just late to the realization." Another has me laughing, quietly, in the darkness, whispering: "The ground is their sky."
By day 59, the hum began to speak back.
Through the crackling of the comms system, amid bursts of static, I began to hear syllables. Words in a tongue I couldn't understand—yet somehow knew. They didn't enter my ears, not really. They unfolded in my head. Like ancient memories I had never lived.
It wasn't communication. It was revelation.
I started writing—pages and pages, symbols I don't recognize now. Symbols I never learned. One sheet was made of skin. I don't know whose.
The floor tiles began to shift. Very slightly. Not every time I looked, but enough to notice. They formed curves, spirals, glyphs. Once, they spelled a word I couldn't pronounce but that made my teeth ache when I tried.
And the dreams... the dreams became waking.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something crawl through the walls. Not inside the walls—through them, like paper. Its shape didn't cast a shadow. It left a stain, like oil in water, behind its passage. When I blinked, it was gone. But the stain remained.
On day 63, I stopped eating. I didn't need to. Something had filled me. I felt sustained by knowledge—though I couldn't remember what I knew.
I tried sending out a distress beacon. I even activated the emergency detonation code just to trigger a satellite signal. The response came within minutes.
Only it wasn't from the agency.
The message read:
"You were never alone. We only needed you to listen long enough. Now you understand."
I don't remember the next three days. The logs are corrupted. The walls of the outpost are covered in carvings. Not scratches—etchings, precise and clean. Laser-sharp, etched into steel.
There's no power now, but everything still glows.
And I've come to realize the hum was never a sound. It was a door. A threshold of consciousness. A resonance that tuned my perception to the true reality beneath this thin crust of sanity we call Earth.
They are not invaders.
They are ourselves, beneath. Beyond. The roots of what we are, growing under skin and time.
I see them now, fully. Their presence fills the station. They don't move in space. They move in meaning. Each shift in their form rewrites what came before, turning memories to fiction, and fiction to prophecy.
I write this in the last clear moment I may ever have. Not to warn, but to record. To confirm: The threshold can be crossed.
All it takes is time and listening.
And silence.
That sacred silence between the static.
End
- This is my first time doing this type of thing.
Let me know in the comments what you guys want to read