The first time it happened, Clara thought it was a coincidence.
A glitch. A line misfire. A trick of memory.
It was 2:09 a.m.—deep in the slump of the night shift—when Line 7 lit up.
Clara patched it through with practiced ease. "Operator," she said. "How may I assist you?"
Silence.
Then, a voice—quiet, clipped, unmistakable:
> "Operator, please hold."
Her own voice.
Not similar.
Exact.
Same tone. Same inflection. Same pause between the words.
Clara's hand froze on the switch.
> "Operator, please hold."
The phrase repeated. A perfect copy. Like a recording—but one she had never made.
Then: click. The line cut out.
She stared at the board. No light. No disconnect signal. No route trace.
She slowly removed her headset and let it rest against her collarbone.
The phrase still echoed in her ears—not the words, but the way she had said them. She remembered saying it before, casually, maybe two or three shifts ago. Just once, to a caller who'd asked for a number she couldn't find.
She'd said it, sure.
But she hadn't said it tonight.
She pulled the black notebook from her desk drawer and flipped to the last page of current entries. Her own handwriting stared back at her—neat, curved, deliberate.
She added the line:
> "2:09 AM – Line 7 – Voice match: self."
Playback or loop?
And below that, almost without thinking:
> "Being recorded? Or re-used?"
She circled the phrase.
Then stared at the switchboard.
And waited.
It started slowly, like a murmur in the static.
The next time it happened, Clara wasn't even sure if she'd heard it right. The call had come through at 3:25 a.m. A soft buzz on Line 3, and then, a voice—different from the last.
This time, it wasn't her own voice. It was an older man's, gravelly and tired, like someone who had been up too long in the cold.
> "Operator, please connect me to 345 Willow Street."
The phrasing was all too familiar. She'd taken that exact call three nights ago. The same request. The same address. The same flat desperation in the man's voice.
Clara blinked and immediately started to dial.
But then—just as she pressed the receiver to her ear—she heard the voice again.
> "Operator, please connect me to 345 Willow Street."
It was verbatim.
Exactly the same.
A feeling—a chill that had been riding her since the first echo—crept up the back of her neck. She lifted the receiver again, her eyes flicking back and forth across the board.
Line 3 was dead silent now. No signals. No light.
It was as if the call had never happened.
She hesitated, then quickly checked the call log. There was nothing there. No record of the call. Just a blank space where it should have been.
She felt a wave of nausea build up at the back of her throat.
For a moment, she just stood there, holding the receiver, waiting for something else to happen. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe it was just another crossed wire.
But she knew better.
It was too deliberate.
Clara waited until break.
Ruth had gone down for a smoke, and Miss Luntz was in her glass office pretending not to sleep with her eyes open. The timing was perfect—ten minutes of silence, maybe twelve if no one buzzed reception.
She slipped into the back alcove where the paper logs were kept, the familiar metallic smell of binder ink settling around her like a second skin.
She pulled the March 9th call log—today's—and flipped to the 3 a.m. entries.
She ran a finger down the list.
Nothing.
Line 3 was blank between 3:20 and 3:30 AM.
She flipped back two pages to check the timestamps. Calls were logged normally every five to ten minutes all night. Then—abruptly—a hole.
No notes. No scribbled initials. Not even a maintenance flag.
She opened her black notebook and checked her own notes:
> "3:25 AM – Line 3 – Repeat of 345 Willow Street call."
She flipped to the March 6th binder—the day of the original call—and found the first instance:
> "3:26 AM – Line 3 – Caller requested 345 Willow Street. Male, hoarse voice. Connected to wrong number."
That one was intact. But tonight's… gone.
She opened the March 9th log again and ran her fingers over the blank space. There were faint indentations. Like someone had written something, then erased it with deliberate care.
Clara leaned in closer.
A shadow in the margin caught her eye—just the ghost of a pencil stroke, barely visible under the light.
It wasn't a name.
Just one word.
> Repeat
She froze.
Then backed out of the alcove, notebook tucked tight under her arm, heart pounding harder than it had in days.
Line 8 blinked once, then held.
Clara plugged in.
"Operator," she said.
Silence.
Then a voice, flat and distant—as if spoken from behind a closed door.
> "Some lines aren't meant to be traced."
Her heart stopped.
The line crackled.
> "Clara?"
She dropped the cord.
It clattered softly against the board, still tethered, still live.
She stared at the panel as if it had spoken on its own.
Because she knew that sentence.
It wasn't just familiar.
It was hers.
She flipped through her notebook with shaking fingers, breath shallow, eyes skimming page after page—until she found it:
> "Some lines aren't meant to be traced."
Written in her handwriting.
In pencil.
Two nights ago.
She'd written it after talking to June. She remembered the exact moment. The exact feeling.
But she hadn't said it out loud. Not to anyone.
Certainly not over a phone.
She pressed the headset back to her ear.
> "Hello?" she said. "This is Operator Eight. Who is this?"
Nothing.
Then, softly:
> "Stage Blue is open."
"Hal knows the origin point."
"You were always part of the circuit."
Then silence.
And a long tone.
Not a disconnect.
A tone.
Held.
Flat.
Then gone.
She didn't go home after her shift.
She stayed in the breakroom, lights dimmed, notebook open, pen uncapped.
The voice had used her words.
Not copied them.
Used them.
And the phrases—Hal, Stage Blue, "you were always part of the circuit"—they weren't following a linear trail anymore. They were jumping. Looping. Bleeding into one another.
Clara flipped back through her last ten pages, circling everything that repeated. Every word spoken more than once. Every pattern. Every phrase said on a day that shouldn't connect to another.
There were many.
Too many.
She underlined each in a different color. By the end, her notebook looked like a wire diagram for something organic—something alive.
The system wasn't just listening anymore.
It was responding.
Worse—it was selective. Her logs were missing. Her phrases were being spoken back to her. Not at random. But by design.
She pulled out a small, battered pocket map of the Bell Systems floor plans—something she'd kept tucked away from years back when she was first hired.
There, in the upper-right corner, someone had scrawled an annotation from long ago:
> ECHO PROGRAM – v.3 – Manual Override Authorized
It had been written in faded blue ink. She hadn't noticed it before.
Or maybe she had, and dismissed it.
Now, she didn't.
She wrote below it in her own notebook:
> "What if the system isn't glitching?"
"What if it's evolving?"
"What if I'm inside it?"
She paused. Then added one more note—just two words, written slowly, in the center of a blank page:
> Loop trap.
She didn't know if she was still listening...
Or if she'd already started repeating.