Chapter 5: Sub-Harmonics**

Chapter 5: Sub-Harmonics

The discovery in the supply depot had broken something in Liam. The frantic, high-octane panic had bled out, leaving behind a cold, desolate certainty. He was a specimen in a jar, and his air was running out. He retreated to the sterile prison of the control room, the seventy-seven screens now feeling less like windows and more like the unblinking eyes of his captors.

He did the math on a datapad, his hand shaking so violently that the numbers were jagged and ugly. At one protein bar and half a liter of bottled water a day, his personal supplies might last him two weeks. Maybe three if he pushed it. After that, starvation and dehydration would begin their grim work long before the phantom helicopter was due.

The first forty-eight hours after the discovery were a haze of despair. He slumped in the command chair, the blue-white light of the monitors painting his haggard face in shades of exhaustion. He had stopped talking to himself. The silence he had once tried to fill with his own voice now seemed a more fitting companion to his hopelessness. It was in this profound, dead quiet that he first felt it.

It wasn't a sound, not at first. It was a vibration, a deep thrumming that resonated up through the soles of his boots. It was incredibly faint, a sub-bass frequency so low it was more a physical sensation than an auditory one. He placed his trembling hand flat on the concrete floor. The vibration was there, a steady, rhythmic pulse, like the slow, deep breathing of a colossal machine buried miles beneath the rock.

A flicker of his old self, the pragmatic problem-solver, stirred. A sound had a source. A source could be identified. He turned to the console, his movements sluggish but deliberate. He ran a full diagnostic on the station's primary systems. SUBLEVEL 2 - POWER GENERATION: NOMINAL. TURBINE RPM STABLE. HVAC SYSTEMS: NOMINAL. AIRFLOW STEADY. SERVER FARM - COOLING FANS: NOMINAL.

According to the station’s own nervous system, there was nothing amiss. The generators were purring along as they should, the climate control was a gentle whisper, and the server fans were spinning within normal parameters. None of them could produce a vibration this deep, this pervasive.

This was the same maddening paradox as Camera 12. A physical phenomenon—a sound, an image—existed in stark contradiction to the system's own unimpeachable data. The station insisted it was not making this sound, just as it had insisted Sublevel 3 did not exist.

Over the next day, the vibration grew. It blossomed into an audible hum, a low, mechanical drone that seemed to emanate from the very bones of the building. It was a constant, unending C-sharp note that seeped into everything, a sound without a source and therefore without an escape. It coated the silence, giving it texture and weight. It was the sound of the station's true engine, and Liam was beginning to suspect it wasn’t powered by diesel.

Sleep became a battlefield. When he finally succumbed to exhaustion, collapsing onto the thin mattress in his spartan quarters, the humming was the last thing he perceived. It became the foundation of his dreams. And it was there, in the defenseless landscape of his subconscious, that the true horror began to metastasize.

He dreamed he was standing in the hallway.

The rust-colored stains on the concrete were wet in his dreams, glistening under the sickly lights. The air was thick with the coppery, metallic smell of old blood. He could feel the slick coldness of the wall against his fingertips as he tried to steady himself. The hum was louder here, an oppressive physical force that made his teeth ache and his skull feel like it was about to crack.

And at the far end of the hall, the figure was waiting.

In his dreams, it wasn't motionless. It would twitch, a subtle, marionette-like jerk of a limb. Sometimes, its head would tilt at an unnatural angle, as if listening to the hum. One night, in the dream's terrible, slow-motion logic, it took a single, scraping step towards him. He tried to scream but the hum filled his throat, choking the sound. He always woke up just before it could take a second step, his body drenched in sweat, his heart trying to batter its way out of his chest, the real-world hum a steady, mocking welcome back to consciousness.

The line between his waking nightmare and his sleeping one began to blur. The isolation and the incessant, bone-deep drone were eroding his mind, sandblasting his sanity down to a raw, exposed nerve. During the long, lonely hours in the control room, his eyes would play tricks on him. A shadow in the corner of an empty lab on Camera 23 would seem to shift. The reflection in the smoked glass of the medical bay on Camera 34 would momentarily take on a tall, slender shape that wasn't his own.

He found himself staring at the floor for long stretches, his head cocked, trying to pinpoint the humming’s origin. It was strongest here, in the control room. It felt like it was coming from directly beneath his feet. From the place the blueprints swore was nothing but solid bedrock. From the place he knew was Sublevel 3.

His hands shook constantly now. He could barely hold a cup of water without sloshing it onto the console. The protein bars tasted like cardboard and fear. He was a ghost haunting his own tomb, and the tomb itself was humming a funeral dirge just for him. The figure was no longer just a threat confined to a phantom screen; it had invaded his dreams, and its soundtrack—the low, pervasive hum—was the new, permanent reality. He was trapped, starving, and now, he was being psychologically dismantled, piece by piece, by a sound he couldn't stop and a nightmare he couldn't wake up from. He knew, with a certainty that chilled him more than any emptiness, that he was being tuned. Like an instrument. And something was waiting for him to achieve the perfect pitch.