The Unmarked Signal

 
She first assumed it was a glitch. But glitches don’t whisper.

While reviewing resonance logs—line by line, glyph by glyph—Lyra noticed an irregular pulse.

Not noise. Not error.

A signal.

She backtracked. Scrubbed the data.

No origin point. No timestamp. No modulation source.

It was a broadcast that didn’t register as sound.

But when she layered it through the glyph interpreter and looped it through her resonance lens—

—it made sense.

It wasn’t language. It wasn’t music.

It was older—a meaning shaped from silence, sculpted from absence.

The signal repeated only once.

But that was enough.

It unfolded in her mind like a door opening inward.

And something on the other side leaned closer.

She staggered back from the console, breath caught in her throat.

The lens continued to glow.

Later, she tried to duplicate it.

But the file was gone. Not erased—absorbed.

She wrote one note in her margin:

> “This was never a signal. It was a door—and now something knew it stood ajar.”