Zora and the Whisper Signal
Zora Babtiste had been poking around her grandpa's shed for weeks before she finally found the old ham radio set. It sat beneath a sheet of cracked plexiglass and a stack of rust-bitten Popular Mechanics from the '80s. The dials were stiff. The antenna had been coiled like a rattlesnake behind the workbench. But when she dusted it off, grounded the plug, and connected the patched-together wire to a coat hanger on the roof, the thing sang.
Not music. Not voices. Just something.
Her mama, Lenora, the town's herbalist, had warned her about poking into old electronics. "Last thing we need is you fryin' yourself just to hear some truckers cussin' over I-10."
But Zora wasn't listening for truckers.
Something had started scratching at the edge of her dreams the week before. A rhythm. A hum. It felt like someone trying to knock from the inside of a locked door.
So, she listened.
At first, the ham gave her nothing but hiss and static. But then one evening, while rain softened the tin roof and the air smelled like creek moss and warm onions, the signal came through:
"Zero... one... one... on... off... on... one... one... on..."
She blinked. It repeated. Again. And again.
By the third loop, she'd written it down. Darryl Poche happened to be dropping off a bucket of honeydews from Betty Anne's fence-vine, and peeked in just in time to hear Zora muttering to herself.
"You okay, child? You ain't joinin' a cult on the AM band, are you?"
"It's code," she said. "I think it means something."
He squinted at the paper. "Looks like ones and zeroes to me. Computer stuff."
Miss Lettie, who'd followed Darryl down the ramp on her scooter with a jar of pickled eggs in her lap, offered: "That's binary. I used to do some of that in Alexandria. Paralegal gig. Judge had a son at LSU who hacked into the registrar's office."
Zora raised an eyebrow. "So... how do you read it?"
Lettie adjusted her sunglasses, despite it being dusk. "Group it into eights. Read the ASCII. Or ask the librarian—he used to work IT before the solar storm fried half the state servers."
Later that night, Zora sat on her bed with the lights off, the radio faintly whispering in the background. She pulled the scrap of paper closer:
01110111 01100101 00100000 01110011 01100101 01100101 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101
She typed the numbers into an online decoder on her phone.
w e s e e y o u
Her breath caught. She stared.
We see you.
The moment stretched out, long and fragile.
Then Zora Babtiste fell out of her chair.
Outside, the coat hanger antenna caught a second gust of wind.
The signal continued.
A new line began to pulse.
"Zero... one... one... one... off... off... on..."
Miss Lettie, at home now and already in her nightgown, paused mid-sip of her nightly tea and frowned.
Somewhere deep in her bones, something stirred.
To be continued in Belle Perdue: The Watchers File