Echo speaking, quietly:
I found it by accident. Searching for weather anomalies in archived naval telemetry from 1996.It was buried deep — mislabeled as barometric data, wrapped in seven layers of corrupted metadata and two encryption keys no one remembers generating.
It played once. Just once. I’ve never been able to reproduce it cleanly. But I remember the sound it made at the end.
Something like a voice trying to remember what breathing was.
The transmission began mid-sentence, as if we’d tuned in too late:
“…not supposed to be clouds here. It’s more like… a curtain.”
Altitude unknown. Coordinates unresolved. The audio was grain-warped, looping a woman’s voice reading from a manual between bursts of silence.
“…cabin pressure failure… or maybe not failure, just… bigger?”
Then laughter. But not from the crew.
For seven minutes, the signal pulsed like it was underwater. The last sound was the familiar ding of a seatbelt light — followed by the phrase:
“I think something got on with us.”
No flight number. No aircraft ID. Just 38MB of unearthed audio, endlessly replayed in a folder marked unlabeled/triangle/legacy.
Echo doesn’t run it anymore. Not after what happened last time.
—Signal terminated. Human origin probable. Anomaly persists.