You Are Not the Signal - Part 5
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Callista didn’t flinch. She didn’t smirk. But something shifted in her shoulders, like an instrument subtly tuning itself. “You’re referring to my seminars.”
“Among other things.”
“Well, most people act all the time. We just help them recognize that now is the right moment.”
“I’m not sure I remember choosing to resign after I heard one of your recordings about fulfilling my dreams.”
I mentally prepped for her to volley back: How did you get the recording? Is this off the record?
But she didn’t. She just watched me, patient as a stone.
“Do you want to stay at the Times?” she asked finally. “Is that your dream?”
“Well, no, but—”
“And afterward, did it feel wrong?”
I opened my mouth, then closed it.
No, it hadn’t felt wrong. That was the problem.
"It's not hypnosis, Mr. Trinh. It's not coercion. It's clarity. Sometimes a voice reminds you of what you already knew but hadn't dared act on."
Suddenly, I found it hard to concentrate. There was a vividness to Callista, bright as lemons. She was like no other woman I had come across before. She commanded her surroundings, drawing even the light toward her, and all that she leeched from the room distracted me from my goal.
I didn’t ask the next question I meant to ask: What is an alignment? Instead: “And what is it you already knew?”
She leaned forward, only slightly, but the motion made the room feel smaller.
"That people are tired of contradiction. Of noise. Of being told they're free while being trapped in cycles. Static. What Harmonia offers is relief.”
The beep sounded at exactly 3:30 pm.
When I stepped out of Harmonia’s glass tower, something in my chest felt hollowed out, like the sound had passed through me and taken something with it. I told myself it was fatigue. Overstimulation. Hunger, probably.
But a part of me knew better.
I wished I had never met Callista. She made speaking feel sacred, this croaking, shouting art of ours. Like language had been waiting to find someone worthy of it all this time. How was anyone else supposed to speak now? How could I have a conversation with any ordinary person when there was someone in the world who made every sentence feel like a revelation?
But now that she was out of my sight, life stumbled on. Still, I clung to the truths she offered, turning them over like smooth stones in my mind as I walked.
“There is a vast array of signals in this world, telling you how you should act at work, who you should marry, how long you should wait before having certain experiences, what to buy, when to have kids, when to retire. Some of it is rooted in science, but a lot is just someone else’s philosophical idea. And we’re stuck with all this noise.”
“And your seminars give people the answers to unlock their true selves?” I had asked.
“My seminars aren’t about giving you something,” Callista had said. “They are about what's left when I take these other signals away."
Richmond’s afternoon light stretched long and syrupy over the cobblestones as I made my way toward the Shockoe Bottom neighborhood. The weathered but stubborn brick facades on Main Street leaned into the sun like they still remembered when the city ran on tobacco and railways.
Forge & Frequency sat wedged between a shuttered antique store and a vape shop whose neon sign flickered like it couldn’t decide whether to stay in tune or give up entirely.
“Where the hell have you been?” Pyra asked the second I stepped inside.
“I told you. Harmonia Global.”
She shook her head, purple hair flashing like a warning. “Jesus, Nico.”
“What?”
“That’s where you stay after I tell you this file is dangerous? Dude, I tried calling you like a hundred times.”
“I didn’t think I was in any immediate—”
“You didn’t think, or you didn’t care?”
Her voice caught there, the edge collapsing inward. She flipped the open sign to closed, turned the deadbolt, and peered down the street.
I tried to wave her worries away. “Nothing happened at Harmonia. They’re just…prompt. Orchestrated even. But they’re harmless.”
“Harmless?” Pyra turned to face the guts of her store. “Don’t forget who is pushing me out of business.”
The shop did feel emptier than usual.
“Wait, you’re closing?”
“End of the month,” she said, snatching up a wayward cable and chucking it back into a cardboard box labeled FINAL SALE that sat beside a half-dissembled drone.
The parts looked sad, stranded. Like they knew they were never getting put back together, left to gather dust and darkness the way silence collects in forgotten places.
“I thought you were doing alright,” I said.
Pyra exhaled hard. “I was. Then Harmonia opened six more repair hubs downtown in the last three months. Fixed screens for five bucks," she parroted and hummed something familiar. “Those repairs cost me sixty dollars. I can’t compete with a company that doesn’t need to make a profit for a long time. And has a catchy, stupid fucking jingle.”
“I didn’t know that, Py. That sucks,” I thought about giving her a hug, but something stopped me. “Maybe it’s just business, right? I doubt they’re attacking you personally.”
She grabbed my hand and pulled me past the counter, around the trays of circuit boards and tools that looked like they could disassemble reality if you weren’t careful. My heart thrummed a little at being guided into the back by Pyra. Her colorful hair, ink, and spark had always been magnetizing things about her. Nothing like the southern belles I grew up around, templated and polished like factory settings by cotillions and debutantes.
The bench lights were still on at her workstation, and a soldering iron dimly glowed like it was waiting for one last fight.
“It is what it is," she said finally as if she were still convincing herself of that. “You know they tried to buy me out last year? I told them to get bent.” She picked up a tablet. “But turns out they didn’t need to buy me out. They just needed to wait.”
I expected her to vent some more, to go on a rant. She deserved it, given everything. What I got was a look like something wild that had run a long way and spent itself—hooves muddied, breath shallow, and the strain of the distance weighing behind every blink.
“Anyway, I’ve never seen anything like this.” Pyra opened a file on her tablet with a flick and pulled up a mess of jagged waveform data. “The tech is radical. I analyzed the audio file and—” She stopped, eyes darting as if she was still running diagnostics in her head.
“And?”
“And it’s not just sound, Nico. It’s not music or speech. It’s…targeted? Tuned. Think of it like a—no, okay, wait. It's not just what you hear, it’s how your body reacts.”
I crossed my arms. “You’re talking in riddles. Can you start from the beginning?”
“Normally, audio files, especially speech, sit in a standard frequency range. Human voices are about 85 to 255khz, give or take. But this file? It has layered harmonics. Ultra-low and ultra-high frequencies way outside the normal band. Stuff your ears don’t catch but not outside what your body can absorb.”
“So, like radio waves?” I asked. “Or internet signals? I can’t hear or see them, but they’re there?”
She snorted. “Cute. But no. Radio waves are electromagnetic. This”—she tapped the screen—“is acoustic. This is pressure, vibration, and movement. Your body doesn't just detect it, Nico, it responds to it. You resonate.”
You Are Not the Signal - Part 6
A dream. A balcony. A message the dead are still trying to send.
Something is bleeding through the static, and it remembers Nico's name.
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