The Deep Black Box

It was to be a routine salvage dive.

The Eurydice, a charter exploration vessel, was sweeping the South Atlantic for wreckage sunk beneath the waves—old war debris, shipping containers, anything that was worth salvaging. The trench they were searching was outside most shipping lanes, in an area of sea so deep it swallowed sonar.

On the fourth day, something pinged.

It's a locator beacon," replied Lei, the sonar technician, fiddling with the dial. "Frequency equals a CVR. A cockpit voice recorder."

Dr. Ewan Rourke, expedition leader, glanced up from his logbook. "From what plane?"

Lei frowned. "That's the odd part. It's broadcasting an aircraft ID that doesn't exist in any database—civilian, military, commercial, anything."

"Perhaps old," Rourke ventured, but the tension in his voice gave him away.

Curiosity trumped prudence. The submersible was deployed within the hour. Rourke and Lei watched in silence, tracking its camera monitor as it descended 15,000 feet into the black.

And then, through a haze of silt and grays—it appeared.

A battered black cylindrical thing, half-buried in the silt. The casing dented, battered, but intact. Stamped in subdued orange were the standard markings of an aviation CVR.

Lei leaned in close to a detail just above the serial number and turned white.

"What the devil does that say?"

Rourke edged closer. In chipping white paint, stenciled on the casing were the words:

"RETRIEVED: AUG 12, 1996. DO NOT DUPLICATE."

Static filled the control room.

"This isn't possible," Lei whispered. "If it was retrieved in '96, why's it still down there? Who brought it back?

They brought it aboard under tight lockdown. No announcement. No press. Just questions.

The casing was unusually cold—far colder than anything else recovered from that depth. The beacon was still active, its power source well beyond its expected lifespan.

Inside the lab, they connected the device to the decoder.

“We’re lucky,” Lei murmured, fingers dancing across the interface. “Audio is intact.”

Rourke glanced at her. “How long?”

“Seventeen minutes.”

“Let’s hear it.”

The first thirty seconds were normal business. Pilots reading checklist. Smooth tones, barely perceptible accents—American, maybe Canadian.

And then the turbulence. Screaming. Alarms. Metal shrieking.

And then another sound. Not from the cockpit. Not through a headset. Beside the recorder.

"Altitude is not real," the voice said.

Rourke hunched forward. "Rewind that."

They rewound it.

"Altitude is not real. Time is wrong. Coordinates don't mean anything."

Static burst. More cries of pain. Then a second voice, drowned by the chaos.

"We were not supposed to land. We were supposed to disappear."

A silence of long hours followed. Then the unmistakable beat of a heart—slow, metallic. And a final hushed word:

"They're listening."

The file closed.

No flight number. No crash report. No human voice found.

Rourke remained there in shocked stillness. His mind cycled through all possible explanations—hoax, old tape, some hidden psychological campaign—but nothing cohered. The equipment was standard, the wear genuine, the information unshakeable.

He spent the night that evening reading the transcript alone in his cabin. At 2:14 a.m., the ship went dark for seven full seconds.

When the lights came back on, the black box was gone.

No surveillance tape. No alarms. No sign of tampering.

Lei was gone the next morning.

The Eurydice returned to harbor with a redacted log and crew that no longer discussed what they'd found.

During the succeeding months, Rourke received three unmarked packages.

The first was a cassette recording of the same message but with other voices—names unknown to him.

The second held an aviation map featuring a flight path that looped in continuous circle in a closed circuit over the South Atlantic.

The third one was a postcard. Had no stamp upon it. And just one line written in big bold ink:

"You opened it. Now they know you listen."

-Amzad Rahid