The dime store on Polk and Franklin smelled like sun-warmed cardboard and cheap ink. Clara stood in the stationery aisle far longer than she needed to, running her fingers along the spines of identical notebooks—spiral-bound, plain covers, 200 ruled pages.
She chose a black one. Thicker than her first. No design. No label.
Just a vessel.
At the counter, the clerk didn't even look up. He rang her up with a glazed stare, dropped the notebook into a paper sack, and offered her four cents in change without speaking.
She walked home with the bag tucked beneath her arm like a secret.
That night, after her shift, she sat at the tiny kitchenette table with a pencil, a lamp, and the notebook open to page one.
At the top, in small, even print, she wrote:
> Irregular Calls – Clara Varnell
(Begin March 7 – post-Line 4 anomaly)
She began transcribing from memory and scraps—phrases that stuck to her like radio ghosts. Some she had written in the margins of her ledger, others scribbled on napkins or receipts during lunch breaks.
She didn't organize them. She just listened again in her mind.
> "Umbra node awake."
"Package one is not yours to know."
"Operator standing by."
"Phase one is closed. Phase two... awaits."
"Hal confirmed. Repeat: Hal confirmed."
"The umbrella is open."
"No echoes. No delay. No memory."
"Vector Hal."
"Hal's got the coordinates."
She paused at the last one.
Hal again.
She flipped back through her older notes. Twice the name had been said aloud. Once as a question, once as a confirmation. No surname. No rank. Just HAL. Spoken like an entity.
She underlined it, slow and dark.
Then flipped to a clean page and wrote the name once more—centered:
> HAL
Beneath it, she drew a box.
And then another.
And another.
Each connected by a line. Like a switchboard. Like a web.
Her pencil moved on its own.
It was near the end of her shift when the call came through—one of those soft, almost whispering connections that felt like it hadn't asked permission to arrive.
Line 6 flickered yellow.
Clara plugged it in, automatically. "Operator," she said.
Nothing.
Then a faint hum. Not static. More like air passing over a microphone. And then:
> "The umbrella is open."
The man's voice was dry, clipped, not quite Southern. No pleasantries, no question. Just that sentence, like a passphrase.
A pause. Then a second voice came through—calmer, older.
> "Hal's got the coordinates. Red 12. Repeat—Red 12."
Clara's stomach flipped.
She pressed her pencil to the margin of the call sheet—then stopped herself. She was being watched too closely now.
Instead, she leaned back, let the call ride.
> "Target?" the first voice asked.
> "Unknown. Echo terminal waiting."
Then a sharp click. Both lines dropped at once.
Clara disconnected the patch slowly, not blinking.
Red 12. Hal again. Umbrella.
She looked at the test sheet on her desk. Her regular logbook showed the call's origin as "Unknown/Local." Destination: "Region 12."
There was no Region 12. Not according to Bell's grid.
Her fingers hovered over the page. She picked up her personal notebook—black cover now smudged with graphite—and penciled in the newest line:
> "Umbrella is open → Hal = Red 12 = Echo terminal waiting."
She stared at it.
Then boxed it in twice.
And underlined Echo three times.
She sat at her station long after her shift ended, the headset draped loosely around her neck like a stethoscope for ghosts.
The other operators had filed out already, voices fading into the hallway buzz. Miss Luntz hadn't returned from her third-floor check-in. Clara had ten, maybe fifteen minutes before someone noticed she was still logged in.
She opened the black notebook again.
She began flipping.
Page by page, going backward this time.
Every odd phrase. Every clipped exchange. She skimmed for the word—Hal—like scanning for fingerprints at a crime scene.
There it was.
Twice in the past week, not counting last night.
> "Hal wants silence."
"Operator Fourteen says Hal approves."
Two different voices. One low and quick, the other deliberate. Neither offered context. No surnames. No locations.
She turned another page. On the corner of a napkin she'd taped in:
> "HAL – too close to call."
That one had come from a man in a routine-sounding domestic call. Something in his tone had been too flat. The rest of the conversation had flowed strangely—like he was reciting lines.
It was a code, she realized.
Not a name.
Or not just a name.
She wrote at the top of a new page:
> "Hal is a vector."
"Hal is a signal phrase."
"Not a person. Not a call sign. A confirmation."
The pencil trembled slightly in her hand.
She drew a triangle below the notes. Labeled the points:
> Echo
Umbra
Hal
She circled the triangle.
And beneath it, wrote:
> "Where does it begin?"
The next day, Clara waited until Miss Luntz left the floor under the pretense of handling a delivery complaint—something about a missing box of headset foam. It didn't matter. Clara only needed five minutes.
She walked quickly to the filing alcove and pulled the March 3rd shift log—one of the older ones, forgotten in the back of the shelf, covered in a thin sheen of dust.
She hadn't planned to look at it. Her focus had been on last night's entries. But something tugged at her—an instinct, or maybe just a hunch fed by too little sleep and too many half-heard phrases.
She flipped to the 10 PM hour block.
Line 2. A note in the margin:
> "Phase marker." Then, a name—Hal—lightly written in pencil.
And then—partially erased.
Someone had gone over it with a pink rubber eraser, enough to smudge it but not fully remove it. The "H" was still visible, faint as a breath on glass. The rest was a gray smear. In its place, someone had scrawled the word "Redundant" in pen—newer ink, darker than the rest of the page.
She ran her fingertip lightly over the paper. The pressure difference was subtle. You wouldn't notice unless you were looking.
But Clara was looking.
Someone had come back to this log, days after the shift. Not to correct an error—but to remove a pattern.
She flipped ahead to March 4. Another name—"Hal"—in one entry. No timestamp. Just an arrow leading to a crossed-out line.
Then March 5. Nothing.
Then March 6.
Her night.
Her scream.
Also scrubbed.
She sat there, surrounded by dusty binders and electric hum, her hands suddenly colder than they had been seconds ago.
Hal wasn't just a code.
Hal was something people were being told to forget.
By the time midnight fell over Chicago, Clara was seated cross-legged on the floor of her apartment, surrounded by papers.
Her work blouse still clung damp to her back, her shoes lay discarded by the door, and the old brass desk lamp in the corner cast long shadows across the wood floor.
The black notebook was open in front of her. It no longer looked neat.
Its pages bulged slightly with taped slips of paper—ticket stubs, post-it notes, receipts she'd scribbled phrases onto mid-shift. She'd drawn a crude map of the switchboard layout and labeled each terminal where strange calls had come through.
Lines connected dates to voices.
Circles formed around code words—Echo, Phase, Operator, Red 12.
But always, at the center: HAL.
Sometimes underlined. Sometimes boxed. Always present.
She had even torn a page from the March 6 log (a risk she knew was dangerous) and folded it into her book. It still had the soft residue of an eraser mark.
Her notes had changed, too. Less documentation, more conjecture.
> "Hal = phase trigger?"
"Is HAL a person or a trigger word?"
"Operator 14 = Echo handler??"
"Red 12 = location? clearance level?"
She began noting voice qualities—accents, tone, even emotional temperature. Calm voices. All calm. Always emotionless, except the scream.
That's what stood out. The scream hadn't fit.
Which meant it was real.
Which meant someone had died—and someone had erased it.
She rubbed her eyes, sat back against the wall, and stared at the notebook as if it might blink first.
The radiator hissed beside her. From the window, the soft orange halo of a streetlamp lit the edge of her kitchen tiles.
She couldn't sleep.
Couldn't stop.
This wasn't eavesdropping anymore.
This was listening to something that didn't want to be heard.