The Signal

It began to rain just before midnight. Not the kind of rain that gently talks to the rooftops or falls softly, but a heavy rain that cloaks the edges of the city and turns the reflections into faerie dreams.

Amy sat at the wide window of her twenty-second-floor apartment, fingers wrapping around a chipped coffee mug that had cooled long before. The city lay before her—thousands of windows dimly glowing like dying stars. She had not spoken to anyone for two days. She had no reason to.

Her email inbox was empty. Her phone sat silent. The last message she had received from an unknown and anonymous person:

At first, she thought it was a joke until the static began.

Early in the morning, at 3:15 AM, her radio would crackle to life. Always by itself. Always at that moment when she was just between sleep and wakefulness. It will always follow the same pattern: bursts of static, then a faint sound underneath—a rhythm? a voice? hiding in the noise.

She recorded it once, and the file had disappeared the next day, not corrupted, nor deleted. It just vanished.

Amy didn't believe in ghosts or aliens, or any of the theories that filled the forums that she had suddenly taken to obsessively reading. She believed in signals. She was an audio engineer by profession—trained to find patterns when others heard chaos. She had built her career on knowing what to listen for.

But this was not a code she could break.

That night, while the storm pulsated on her window panes, the radio flickered back to life. 3:15 AM. Right on cue.

The white noise was louder this time. Thicker, but it parted, like a curtain.

And a voice, as clear as breath against her ear, whispered:

"I'm here."

Amy stood up so fast that it knocked the mug off the table.

She wasn't imagining it. She could not be. She had not even touched the dial, she hadn't even moved the antenna, nor turned the radio on.

She slowly walked up to the desk.

“Who are you?” she whispered.

The voice didn’t respond. One thing did.

A deep tone began to hum beneath the static. Steady. Pulsing. Like a heartbeat.

Amy sat down, opened a frequency analyzer on her computer, and began to record in real-time.

She noticed something odd. The waveform was not random. It wasn’t even a normal signal. It looked… like letters.

She zoomed in.

And froze.

There, in the sine waves like a spectral signature, was her name.

Amy

Amy blinked. Once. Twice.

The waveform flickered. Changed.

And then it changed to:

HELP ME

Morning came with a golden light and the eerie silence that follows an unanswered question. Amy didn’t sleep at all.

The recording disappeared. Again. But the visualizer screenshot was still on her screen.

She stared at it for hours. Then she personally packed a small bag for herself—some essentials. She left the apartment key on the table, beside the cold mug and a note that said simply, “If I’m not back, check 3:15 AM."

And she just left. To where? She didn’t even really know. But something—or someone—was calling.

The transmission cut out.

Amy is still nowhere to be found.

The apartment was left untouched with no signs of forced entry or struggle. The keys were still on the table, and the laptop was still open but dark. The only sign of any intention was a single note in Amy's handwriting:

"If I'm not back, check 3:15 A.M."

The detectives came and went. They were happy to dismiss it as a disappearance. Voluntary. There were no indications of mental illness, and nothing alarming hinted at distress—the girl was just quiet. A quiet girl who went missing during a stormy night. Most of the detectives lost interest relatively quickly.

Most, not all.

A week after Amy went missing, a janitor named Tommy was cleaning the twenty-second floor. While he was cleaning, he heard a voice whisper his name, but it was not a sound from the hallway or from outside. The voice came from inside Amy's apartment.

He couldn’t believe it. He had locked the door behind him.

He entered the room gingerly. He could feel a cold breeze, the kind you feel at the back of your neck when it’s windy.

And then he saw it: the radio. Still unplugged. Still dead.

Except it was on.

A faint crackle. Static. Then, a female voice, broken and faint:

“Don’t trust the pattern.”

Tommy backed out of the room and never went back. He made no report. He told no one in the building management.

Two nights later, a college intern from the university's signal processing lab came to investigate. She had stumbled across Amy's case in a now-deleted forum post she read the night before.

The student unpacked audio equipment into Amy's room. Tuned to 3:15 AM. Waited.

The static came back, much louder. And layered this time. A thick, chaotic hum threaded with something deeper. She ran the signal into a spectrogram.

What she saw made her blood turn cold:

A binary sequence embedded into the sound. Clean, perfect code. She converted it.

It came back as an IP address.

When she typed it into her browser, the screen flashed white, and then black. A video began to play: a blurry corridor. Empty. Familiar.

It was the corridor of Amy’s apartment, inside her front door.

The camera shook slightly as if held by a shaky hand. The timestamp read: 3:15 AM.

In the video, Amy came into the frame. Walking toward her door. She paused. Looked back down the hallway.

Then she opened the door.

She didn’t walk inside. She was inside. She stood on both sides of the threshold—one Amy looking out, one looking in. Wearing the same clothes. Wearing the same face. One of the Amys whispered something but the camera microphone didn’t pick it up.

Then…

They both flickered like bad TV reception.

And vanished.

The video faded to black.

Even now, the radio in Amy's flat still crackles at 3:15 AM. Even when it is unplugged, even when it has no power. No technician has been able to explain how this is physically possible.

Some people say Amy must have crossed over to a dimension that is located 'beyond.' Other people say she discovered a signal that was never intended for human comprehension; something very ancient, brilliant, and very present.

And then there are people—who wait up each night, with radios tweaked to the static, lights off—who swear that if you isolate the static just right, slow it down enough, and process it through layers of noise reduction, a voice comes through.

Sometimes it says:

"I'm still here."

Other times it says:

"Don't let it find you."

But once, only once, someone said,

"Come through."

Was Amy duplicated? Transported? Was this science fiction, a brush with parallel realities—or a descent into madness dressed up as signal theory?

The apartment is still there.

The signal is still active.

And the voice—hers, or something else—keeps calling.

Would you listen?

Would you answer?