The Last Radio Signal

Amara's nights never stopped until dawn. While the rest of her classmates at the university slumbered through the night in dormitories, she sat in the observatory, headphones stretched tight, eyes on the rows of data inching across her screens. She wasn't scanning for meteors, or for the faint glow of distant galaxies. Amara was listening.

Listening for whispers.

It was on the third night of October, shortly after 2 a.m., that she received it: a soft, steady pulse hidden behind static. At first, she thought it was interference—perhaps from a faulty satellite or an ancient ship radar. But the longer she listened, the more intentional it seemed. It wasn't haphazard. It had a pattern, almost like words.

Her heart raced. She stored the record and played it back, over and over, the strange beeping burrowing under her skin. It was too official to ignore.

The rest would have dismissed it. But Amara had spent the past two years studying unusual radio signals—pulsars mistaken for extraterrestrial communications, encoded messages used during wars, and pirate stations that vanished overnight. She wasn't foolish enough to overlook a pattern when she heard one.

All she needed was help.

The Operator

Jonas hadn't been in a radio room in two decades. His hair had turned gray, his hands were stiff, but his ears were still the sharp ears of a man who once listened for whispers across oceans.

He was living over a hardware store, quietly, when Amara discovered him, spending most of his days tinkering with old radios he never quite got rid of.

She played it for him on her phone. He smiled mutely at first, ready to tell her it was no more than noise pretending to be meaning. But the smile disappeared as his face set. His forehead furrowed.

"That sequence," Jonas growled, stepping closer. "That's a back code. Shortwave. Government bands. I have not heard that in years."

Amara stepped closer. "But if those bands are dead, why is it repeating now?"

Jonas did not answer right away. He picked up one of his old radios, tuned it slowly, and within a minute or two, the smooth beat flooded back into the air again. His hand trembled slightly.

"This station should be dead," he said. "Someone—or something—is bringing life to it."

The Taxi Driver

For three nights running, Amara and Jonas tried to trace the signal. They pieced together fragments, aged codes, half-translations. But the pattern was broken, like a puzzle with no edges.

On the fourth night, exhausted and exasperated, Amara hailed a taxi to take her home.

It was then that she met Nia.

Nia was the kind of driver who employed silence as a cue to spin tales. She described the city as though it were sentient, every street imbued with recollections, every crumbling building imbued with secrets. She had her radio playing ever so slightly off-tune, where ghostly voices tended to crackle through.

Riding the coastal highway, Amara heard it again—the slow beat pulsing from Nia's dashboard radio. Her breath snagged.

"Wait—stop! Can you turn that up?" Amara asked.

Nia laughed. "Oh, that? I hear it most nights on this stretch. Sounds like ghosts attempting to get a ride. Gives me the shudders, really."

Amara leaned in. "That's not ghosts. That's the same signal I've been following."

Nia scrunched her brow. "Well, if it's not ghosts, then what is it?"

"Something that doesn't exist anymore."

The Abandoned Station

All three of them—Amara, Jonas, and Nia—formed an odd team. Amara possessed curiosity, Jonas possessed memory, and Nia provided the bridge between now and then, the driver who understood where the signal grew strongest.

They followed their path to the coast, where the salt wind battered a wrecked radio station. The fence was corroded, the windows in shards, but inside, machines continued to whirl feebly, as if in refusal to die.

Jonas's hands trembled as he discarded centuries-old switches, amazed to find they still functioned. The generators had been jury-rigged into service with captured parts and wire, a Frankenstein's monster of machinery. But the transmitter's heart still pulsed, slow and methodical.

"Somebody kept this going," Jonas gasped. "But not very long ago. Look at this dust. This system's lain dormant by itself for years."

Amara's computer screen glowed as the signal came into clearer view. Amara and Jonas worked desperately, piece by piece, while Nia paced anxiously, spouting theories of secret societies and concealed plots.

But when finally the message started to form, none of them was prepared.

The Letters to the Future

It wasn't a spy transmission. It wasn't a distress call.

The signal was. letters.

Encrypted broadcasts, left behind by scientists decades ago, when political upheaval threatened to annihilate their work. They had put their study, their fears, and their hopes into radio pulses, praying one day someone would stumble upon them.

Amara read from one of them:

"We don't know if our words will survive the purge. But knowledge must live, even if we do not. To those who hear us: carry us forward."

Jonas sat quietly, the years pressing down. He had once been instructed to listen for foes. Never had he imagined that he'd be listening to long-lost allies, speaking across a span of decades.

Nia, never shy with a quip, was quiet for a moment. She gazed at the old transmitters, her words a mere whisper. "So… they weren't attempting to talk to people at the time. They were attempting to speak to us."

But the final transmission chilled them more than anything.

"If you are reading this, you are not the intended recipient. Our words were meant to cross centuries. The coordinates we leave are not of a place, but of a time. Knowledge outlives us all."

The Choice

The three of them sat for hours in the ancient station, surrounded by the hum of machinery and the soft whisper of history.

Jonas finally broke his silence. "We should tell someone. The university, the media. people should know."

Nia shook her head. "And then what? Some corporation comes in, covers it up, profits off of it. That's not what those scientists were trying to do.".

Amara's eyes were shut, the weight of choice pressing on her. She'd waited years chasing after secrets, wishing to be the one who found something other. She had it now. But it wasn't hers to keep.

"Say we don't tell anyone," she breathed. "Say we leave the signal burning, like they did? Let it keep running, hoping for the ones it was truly intended for."

Jonas hesitated, then nodded. "Sometimes the most honourable thing to do with knowledge is not to take it for yourself, but to protect it."

Nia smiled faintly. "I suppose that makes us the new ghosts on the radio."

They left the station at dawn, the sea glinting gold in the sun. The transmitter still vibrated behind them, sending voices of the past to an unknown future.

Amara pulled back understanding that her life had changed. She hadn't simply discovered a secret—she'd become part of its chain, one of a series of links in a message that stretched across centuries.

Jonas, for the first time in years, felt purpose creeping back into his life. His days of listening weren't yet over.

And Nia? She still operated her cab on the city streets at night, radio tuned just a notch off. But now, when the distant rhythm drifted up from the white noise, she smiled. Because she knew precisely what it was.

Not ghosts. Not conspiracies.

But humanity, talking to itself in the future