Chapter 5: Whispers in Static

Chapter 5: Whispers in Static

The image of Silas’s smile was burned onto the back of Chris’s eyelids. It was Dr. McDonough’s smile, a predator’s grimace stretched across the face of a man who shouldn’t exist. After Silas had vanished as silently as he’d appeared, Chris had spent an hour locked in the security hub, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. He was being toyed with. The altered video, the impossible appearance—it wasn't just a system glitch; it was a deliberate, psychological attack. He was being isolated, made to question his own mind, and pushed to the edge.

He was certain he wasn’t crazy. And that certainty was the most terrifying thing of all.

There was only one other person in this concrete hell who hadn't dismissed him, one other person who had seen a crack in the perfect facade.

He found Aris Thorne in the medical facility’s small, private lab, long after the subjects had retired for the night. She was hunched over her terminal, the glow of the screen illuminating the exhausted lines on her face. She looked up as he entered, her body tensing with alarm.

“They can see us,” she hissed, gesturing at a tiny camera embedded in the ceiling corner.

“Let them,” Chris said, his voice a low, ragged whisper. “I need to tell you what happened. I need someone else to know.”

He told her everything. The video footage from Day 4 showing forty people, and how, an hour later, the exact same file showed forty-one. He told her about Silas appearing at the door to the hub, silent as a ghost, wearing that soulless, corporate smile. As he spoke, he watched Aris’s face shift from clinical skepticism to wide-eyed horror. She believed him.

When he finished, she was pale, her hands trembling slightly as she turned back to her keyboard. “I… I did some more digging after you left today. Off the record. I ran Silas’s profile against every medical and civil database I could access through the company’s back channels.”

“And?” Chris prompted, his gut twisting.

“There’s nothing,” she said, her voice barely audible. “It’s not just that his records before Ashfield are classified. They don’t exist. There are no verifiable data points for a John Silas of his age and description anywhere. No birth certificate, no driver’s license, no social security number. Medically, socially… he’s a null set. A complete fabrication that begins the moment he supposedly entered this town.”

A null set. A man who was a zero, a placeholder, given a name and a face. The confirmation settled in Chris’s chest like a block of ice. They were up against something that didn’t just alter reality, but created it from whole cloth.

The atmosphere in Ashfield grew heavier in the days that followed. The alliance with Aris was a small comfort in a rising tide of paranoia. Silas was everywhere. Chris would see him on the monitors, standing perfectly still on a lawn for an hour, just staring at a house. Then he’d catch a glimpse of him at the end of a street during his patrol, his head snapping around to fix Chris with that vacant gaze before turning and walking away. Baker remained oblivious, treating Silas like any other subject, a fact that was somehow more unnerving than open hostility. The world had accepted Silas. Only Chris and Aris were left in the cold, clinging to a reality that no longer existed.

The nights were the worst. The manufactured town was dead silent after 10 p.m., the only sounds the whisper of the ventilation systems and the hum of the servers. It was during his late-night perimeter check on the tenth day that he heard it.

He was passing the row of houses on the north side, a sector that included the still-unoccupied residences. As he neared House 23, a sound reached him, faint and strange. It was like static. The sound of a radio tuned between stations, but underneath it, almost too low to register, was something else. A rhythmic, sibilant noise.

Whispers.

Chris froze, his hand instinctively going to the heavy mag-light on his belt. House 23 was on the official roster as empty. The power was on, but no one was assigned to it. He checked his tablet; the internal sensors for the house showed no motion, no life signs. According to the data, the house was silent and still.

But he could hear it. A low, constant hiss of static, interwoven with what sounded like a thousand hushed voices, all speaking at once, their words tumbling over each other into a meaningless, chilling chorus. The sound seemed to be coming from inside.

He drew his sidearm, the click of the safety echoing in the oppressive silence. Every instinct screamed at him to follow protocol: stay back, call it in, wait for Baker. But who was he going to call? Central, who would tell him his senses were faulty? Baker, who would tell him he was hearing things?

He was alone. He had to see.

The front door was unlocked. It swung open without a sound onto a dark, empty living room. The whispering static was louder in here, seeming to emanate from the very walls. It was a physical presence, making the hairs on his arms stand up, his teeth ache with a strange vibration.

“Ashfield Security,” he called out, his voice sounding thin and useless against the noise. “Is anyone in here?”

Only the static answered.

He swept the ground floor with the beam of his mag-light. The rooms were filled with the standard-issue furniture, all of it still covered in plastic sheeting. Dust motes danced in the white light. There was nothing. No one. He moved to the staircase, his boots thudding on the steps, the whispering growing in intensity as he ascended. The air grew cold, thick with a palpable sense of wrongness.

The second floor was the same. Two empty bedrooms and a bathroom, all sterile and untouched. He checked the closets, under the beds. Nothing. The static seemed to be loudest in the master bedroom, a constant, irritating hiss that made his head spin. But the room was empty.

He was losing it. Maybe Baker was right. Maybe the isolation was finally getting to him.

Frustrated and unnerved, he turned to leave. He descended the stairs, the static seeming to cling to him, a foul residue in his ears. He stepped back out onto the perfectly manicured lawn, the cool night air a welcome shock after the cloying atmosphere inside. He closed the door, the sense of failure a bitter taste in his mouth.

He took two steps away from the house, then stopped. A primal instinct, a feeling of being watched, made him turn back. He tilted his head, aiming the beam of his mag-light at the second-story window of the master bedroom he had just cleared.

For a single, heart-stopping second, something was there.

It wasn't a man. It wasn't Silas. Pressed against the inside of the glass was a face, but it was a nightmarish mockery of one. It was distorted and malleable, like clay that had been crudely shaped. Two dark patches shifted and swirled where the eyes should be. A thin, wavering line suggested a mouth before dissolving back into the churning, flesh-toned mass. It had the basic structure of a human face, but it was incomplete, a monstrous thing caught in the middle of becoming. It was not human, but it was trying to be.

Chris stared, frozen, his breath caught in his chest. The face—the thing—pulsed, and then, as if startled by the light, it recoiled from the window, melting back into the darkness of the empty room.

The whispering static abruptly cut off. Silence crashed down.

He stood there for a long time, the beam of his flashlight shaking. The horrifying truth bloomed in his mind. The anomaly wasn't just adding fabricated people like Silas. That was just the finished product. This… this was the process. It was something monstrous and alien, hiding in the empty spaces, learning to assemble a human mask from stolen parts and whispered sounds. It was learning to wear a face.