‘They always make that noise,’ Talbot shouted above the rumble of the switch-room, his words were muffled in their usual way from the tail of a half-smoked cigarette wedged into the corner of his mouth.
Closing the access panel behind him, the engineer loafed down the ladder and looked out into the depths of the jumbled circuitry. ‘It’s the cutting in and out of the filter relays that really helps you enjoy the silence,’ he said dourly, flicking the cigarette off the catwalk and out into the careless beyond of nothing below.
The station was calm, static out here wasn’t to bad this time of year and the chance of any fallout from spent capacitors was only a problem for wherever the wind carried it. Things were stable here, they were quiet. In many ways the region around the repeating-station had been fairly safe when compared to the edges of the salt plain, the stations that were closer to whatever existed beyond.
Mel hadn’t seen that far out, not many had, she wasn’t sure even the poor bastard who looked after the last station was alive enough to know what was really going on. How old would their transceiver be? How did they even fix it? No matter how reliable the old Longwave units were there was no way one would be still transmitting without any new parts; and yet, every so often a message would come in when things were quiet. ‘All clear,’ it simply said, with silence then its punctuation. Mel had once read that a signal can be re-looped in the openness of the salt-flats, the signals were so strong that occasionally they would rebound off the curvature of the earth and then become scrambled and repeat themselves like an echo down in the cabling trenches. She wasn’t an engineer but eternally repeating signals seemed a little farfetched to her; why did the words ‘All clear’ always fill her with such dread, was there a chance that things were about to change?
Mel had been sending messages to a nearby station on the public channel recently and it had nice to talk to someone that wasn’t Talbot for a change even if she didn’t know who. Her job was simple, log the previous day’s incomings and then transmit them to the next available repeater. The stations closer to the city were busier of course, some apparently received enough transmissions that they needed a team of recorders to work in shifts, each person collecting dozens of old logs every hour and then sending them off…somewhere; Mel didn’t actually know the point of the logs or could guess at who eventually received them. The message ‘All clear’ must have been repeated by her time and time again, duplicated by dozens of stations nearby and then sent on with a time stamp and some basic static measurements. What could you do with this information? It all seemed to be stagnant in a sense, like whoever built all the stations was gone and the people that needed the data had forgotten to say stop.
The operator of the close by station was old, Mel could tell by they transmitted, whoever it was had been there for quite some time apparently and they had stopped transmitting incoming logs. ‘Just another noise in the air, dear,’ they sent in their last transmission, ‘the words will get where they need to go.’ Mel had been thrown by this; people always managed throw her when she thought she was getting to know them. She wasn’t great at talking but who really was? That was why she asked to be deployed to a station so far out; she wanted to be challenged, to prove that nothing was beyond her. But quietly, in that part of her mind that was often too difficult to ignore, she wondered if just wanted to be away from the city, away from all that noise.
She had seen a line once: it was etched into the impossibly white sky by something that was above the cloud-line. A thin streak of blue that looked as if a thread had slipped and and an old tear reopened, one broken seam: frayed of edge and expanding into the fathomless beyond.
Not many saw the sky anymore, that deep blue mystery once said to have blanketed the world with warmth and with light. There were stories about this blue: paintings and tales of imagination that made people feel hopeful; but to believe that there was nothing above the clouds, that there was just one single colour radiating out into infinity, it all seemed childish.
Mel often thought about that streak of blue, she thought about placing hope where she knew it shouldn’t be, she thought about pointless things and how they still gave some people solace. That’s why she asked Talbot how the receiver worked, that’s why she keeps transmitting the logs each day. There were things that people couldn’t understand and she was beginning to become ok with that.
‘How do you keep finding more cigarettes?’ Mel smiled at the old engineer and gave what she hoped was a friendly wave, ‘I’ve been hiding them for like a month.’
‘Well missy,’ Talbot laughed while tapping at the side of his crooked nose, ‘I’ve been in this station for longer than you’ve breathed air, you need a better hiding spot and to stop wasting good daylight. Anyway, I’ve been hiding your coffee for long enough that if I ever need them, I’ll just ask politely.’
With what was the first simile that Mel had seen Talbot attempt to grimace, the day continued as it always had before: the dust remained as dust and the clouds still lingered overhead.
Deep in the heart of all that remained, a looped message rolled out like a lance through the static, a message that was both scrambled and apocryphal.
‘All clear-‘
J.McCray
2021
Sunday Short Stories 