The Lady of the Airwaves

London, 1942

The air in the bunker always smelled like warm dust and electricity. Eleanor Hughes sat hunched over the console, headphones clamped tight over her curls, twisting the dial one meticulous notch at a time. The low hum of static was a comfort now, more familiar than any lullaby from her childhood.

At twenty-four, Eleanor had already become a ghost. No records, no name on the payroll, no family allowed to ask where she was. Officially, she was “on war assignment.” Unofficially, she was a wireless operator buried beneath Whitehall, intercepting enemy transmissions and forwarding them up the invisible chain of command.

The men called her “The Lady of the Airwaves,” half in jest, half in awe. Unlike most of them, Eleanor didn’t just hear Morse. She listened.

That night, the signal came at 2:14 a.m.

At first, it sounded like any other scrambled German chatter, but as she filtered through the garble, something caught her ear—English. Not clipped like the BBC, nor American. It was clear, conversational, but... strange.

“...repeating for clarity. London, this is Station Echo-One-Seven. If you can hear this—do not dismiss. The year is 2025. I repeat, twenty-twenty-five.”

Eleanor froze. The headphones crackled, and her breath caught in her throat.

“Anomalies in frequency drift have allowed us temporary contact across time. To whomever receives this: there is a threat. Operation GOLIATH must never proceed. Millions will die. We believe your time is the origin point.”

Silence.

Then static.

She tore off the headphones and stared at the machine as if it had betrayed her. Her pulse thundered. Had she fallen asleep? Hallucinated? Some cruel trick by German intelligence?

She logged the incident—every word—and locked the page in her drawer.

The next night, the voice returned.

“We know how this sounds. But we’ve tracked signal leakage through electromagnetic warping. You’re near the rift’s origin—somewhere under Whitehall. We can’t hold the frequency long.”

Eleanor replied. Voice trembling, she pressed the microphone key.

“Who are you?”

No response.

But the messages kept coming. Not nightly, but often enough that she stopped doubting. Names. Places. Dates. Some made no sense—“Bio-cloud over New Delhi,” “Glacial breach, Greenland 2032,” “Synthetic cognition vote 2048.”

Yet a few felt terrifyingly close. Operation GOLIATH appeared again and again. A covert weapons initiative involving chemical payloads and a device called the “M-Seed,” something so unstable it was never supposed to be tested. The broadcasts claimed its early prototypes were conceived in 1942, buried in a project Eleanor had never heard of: Midnight Forge.

Eleanor took her findings to Lieutenant Greaves, her supervisor, a stiff man with a stiff jaw.

He skimmed the report. “You’ve been working long hours. Take a day.”

“But sir—”

“It’s fantasy, Hughes. Intercepted fiction. Likely Nazi code meant to mislead.”

The drawer was locked tighter after that.

But something changed.

The next broadcast wasn’t a warning. It was a message—personal.

“Eleanor Hughes. Born 1918. You played piano at the Rose Street recitals. You lost your brother at Dunkirk. We’re not guessing. We know.”

Eleanor’s blood ran cold.

“You are the earliest point of contact. We believe it’s because of you. Something about your position, or your biology, or your choices—they anchor the drift.”

The voice paused.

“You must find the documents hidden in Cabinet 4G, bottom tier, left of the copper valve. They detail the project’s early drafts. GOLIATH begins there.”

That night, long after the others had gone, Eleanor took a flashlight and knelt by the storage units near the copper valve.

Cabinet 4G.

Her hands trembled as she pulled out a file marked “FORGE - Preliminary, 12 Jan 1942.” Inside were diagrams—strange devices, molecular chains, a prototype warhead shaped like a teardrop. She couldn’t make sense of the science, but she knew horror when she saw it.

The next day, the cabinet was empty. Every trace of FORGE was gone.

She never heard from Station Echo-One-Seven again.

Weeks later, Eleanor received orders for reassignment to a different station in Bletchley Park. Before she left, she buried a copy of the files in a tin box beneath a rose bush just outside the bunker. She never spoke of the broadcasts again.

London, 2025

A research team restoring old war archives digs near Whitehall during routine renovations. Beneath a rose bush, they find a tin box, wrapped in oilskin, sealed with wax. Inside: faded documents marked FORGE, and a handwritten note.

“If the voice ever returns, tell them I listened.”

Signed,
Eleanor Hughes
The Lady of the Airwaves