The midnight shift had a weight to it.
Not just fatigue—something heavier. A hum under the skin, like being underwater just deep enough to lose the sound of your own breath.
Clara sat at her station, headset slack against her collarbone, the lights of the switchboard panels pulsing in lazy, half-hearted rhythm. Fewer calls came in during these hours. Most were routine—a bar owner in Uptown double-checking a supply order, an old woman trying to reach her daughter in Milwaukee, a missed connection patched and repatched through four different lines.
None of them mattered.
Her real work was in her lap.
The black notebook lay open behind the Bell ledger, angled just enough to stay hidden from anyone walking past. Not that anyone was walking. It was only Clara, a girl named Ruth two panels down, and a janitor whose pushcart echoed once every hour like a metronome.
She flipped slowly through the pages.
Hal. Echo. Red 12. Operator 14. Umbra.
Her own handwriting looped back at her in graphite spirals.
She was running out of room.
The lines between the phrases were starting to connect in her mind—not logically, but musically. Some words seemed to rhyme with each other not by sound, but by purpose. Like clues in a language she hadn't been taught but understood anyway.
She tapped her pencil against the margin, underlined the name "Operator 14" again, then added a faint note:
> "Recurring title? Code or person?"
Her eyes burned. She didn't blink.
The lights on Line 9 flickered. She glanced up—but it steadied again. No call.
She checked her watch. 2:46 AM.
Time thinned at that hour. The air between seconds stretched like taffy. Even the electrical hum in the wall behind her sounded less mechanical, more… expectant.
She looked back at her notebook and frowned.
One word had been written on the bottom of the left-hand page. A single name.
> Stinger
She stared at it.
She didn't remember writing it.
Clara blinked hard, as if to shake loose the word on the page.
Stinger.
There it was, written in her own hand—angled left, the 'g' closed at the loop like she always did when she was half-distracted. But she had no memory of writing it. Not even a flicker of the moment it appeared.
She ran a finger under the name, slow, almost hesitant.
Then Line 3 blinked. Not yellow. Red.
That wasn't normal.
None of their boards blinked red unless it was a test pulse—or a scramble.
Clara frowned and checked her panel. The board showed no incoming origin, no caller ID, no transfer route. Just a blinking red bulb, pulsing steadily.
She glanced down the row. Ruth was humming faintly to herself, head tilted toward her own console. Oblivious.
Clara hesitated. Then plugged the patch cord into Jack 3.
The headset went dead silent.
No static. No hum.
Then, a twitch—like her eardrum adjusting.
And then the distortion began.
It was faint at first, like someone breathing through a rotary fan. Then a sharp, high-pitched bend, like a violin being detuned in slow motion.
A voice cut through.
Calm. Male. Measured, like always.
> "Stage Blue reconfirmed. No lag. Operator latency: below threshold."
Clara's hand gripped the patch cord harder.
> "Stinger aligned. Hal present. Proceed with Delta fallback."
There it was.
Stinger. And Hal. Back to back.
But the voice—it wasn't just distorted. It felt slightly behind itself, like she was hearing it a half-second after it was spoken, the words chasing themselves into place.
> "Echo is red. Aurora pending."
Then: a series of tones. High-low-high. Like Morse code without rhythm.
Clara yanked the line.
The headset screamed with feedback—just once, like something tearing.
She ripped it off.
The panel in front of her returned to normal. No red light. No error. As if nothing had ever connected.
She sat still. Breathing fast. Heart thudding hard against her ribs.
She looked down at her notebook.
The word Stinger had been circled.
Twice.
She hadn't done that either.
Clara didn't touch the headset for nearly a full minute.
She just stared at the switchboard, palms flat against the cool wood, the phantom shriek of feedback still ringing in her skull.
Her breath had settled, but everything else felt raw.
Then—Line 4 lit up.
Amber.
She froze.
Not red. Not blinking. But Line 4. The line. The one that started it all.
She plugged in slowly, headset on, careful.
"Operator," she said, voice barely above a whisper.
No response.
Only the soft sound of static—not white noise, but layered. Beneath it, she could swear she heard a ticking—mechanical and steady, like a stopwatch counting backward.
Then the voice returned.
> "Stage Blue confirmed. All operators accounted. Echo traces align. Awaiting confirmation from—"
A brief flicker of static.
> "—Stinger."
That word again. Now embedded, matter-of-fact. Like it was always part of the vocabulary.
> "Phase signal pending. Do not engage. Operator 14 silent."
Clara's hand trembled.
Operator 14.
She mouthed the words silently, as if by doing so she might change their meaning. They came out like code, not title. She didn't know why, but it felt… personal.
The voice continued:
> "Audio latency acceptable. Pattern loop reestablished."
A long pause.
Then, slowly:
> "Listening protocol acknowledged. External confirmation: Clara Varnell."
Her stomach dropped.
She yanked the headset off.
The line clicked out.
Nothing remained. No echo. No hum. No proof.
But her name had been said.
Out loud.
On a call that wasn't supposed to exist.
Clara didn't move for a long time.
The headset dangled from her shoulder, its cord spiraling down toward the floor like a dropped question. She stared at Line 4, waiting for something else—another flicker, a pulse, a buzz of regret—but nothing came.
The board was silent.
Normal.
She pushed herself away from the desk, slowly, careful not to make a sound, and pulled her black notebook from beneath the Bell ledger.
She flipped to the back.
Past her map of the switchboard. Past the spiderweb of names and phrases. She found the page from the night before—when she'd circled Stinger.
There it was.
Neat, deliberate. Not a frantic scrawl. Not something added mid-panic.
She stared at it. Then turned two pages back. Another instance.
> "Hal confirmation → Stinger node ready."
She hadn't remembered writing that.
She hadn't remembered hearing it before tonight.
But it was there. Logged. Documented. In her own pencil.
She gripped the edge of the page, her fingers whitening. Her chest felt tight, like something important was hovering just outside her field of view.
Either she had written it and forgotten…
Or she had heard it earlier, buried in some garbled call and only now realized the meaning.
Or—
She didn't want to consider the third option.
Her eyes scanned the room.
No one. Ruth was gone. The hallway dark.
She slowly pulled the pencil from behind her ear and added a new note beneath the circled "Stinger":
> "Repeated name. Same voice. Multiple entries. But… memory gaps?"
She underlined it.
Twice.
The notebook sat open on her lap, but Clara wasn't writing anymore.
She was staring.
Staring at her own loops and slants, at phrases she recognized but couldn't place, at the sickening familiarity of names that meant something—but what?
Had she forgotten them? Or had they been planted?
She pressed her palm to her forehead. No fever. But a pressure behind the eyes, like too much light or not enough sleep.
She flipped to an earlier entry—one of the first after the scream. A line that read:
> "Operator Fourteen is awake. Hal listening."
She hadn't remembered that one either. It sounded like something she'd written in a dream.
Or something she'd been told.
She picked up the pencil again, hand less steady than usual, and wrote a question down in a blank margin:
> "Is memory being altered? Or did I miss the start?"
The idea was absurd. Ludicrous. But not impossible.
She thought of the warm jack that night. Of the red light that wasn't supposed to blink. Of the voice that had spoken her name like it had known she was listening for weeks.
She reached for the phone on her desk—then stopped.
Who would she call?
The police?
Miss Luntz?
Her sister?
There was no name in her mind that wouldn't lead back to suspicion. Or silence. Or worse—confirmation that she'd lost touch with the line that mattered most: her own sense of reality.
She stared at her notes again.
Then flipped to a blank page.
Wrote three words:
> "Start over. Listen."
And below them, smaller:
> "They are."