Tag: Fiction

Chapter 1 – The First Transmission

The city slept under the hum of surveillance. From the hills, the skyline looked like a circuit board—towers pulsing with blue light, drones tracing patterns across the smog-choked sky. Somewhere beneath that electric web, in a forgotten service tunnel that once fed power to the old commuter lines, a single light glowed in the dark.

Pastor Ezra crouched over a battered transmitter. The casing was dented, its dials worn smooth from years of use. He adjusted a cracked frequency gauge with the precision of a man handling a relic. Every movement was measured; every breath carried risk. Somewhere above, microphones and thermal scanners waited to catch an unauthorized signal—the government’s idea of silence enforcement.

The static throbbed through his headset. He tuned past bursts of coded chatter, music loops, official propaganda—all the sanctioned noise of the new order—until he found what he was looking for: nothing. Pure, open static. Empty space in a crowded sky. His heart beat faster. “That’s the one,” he whispered.

On the table beside him lay his Bible—half its pages missing, the cover soot-stained from the night his church burned. He ran a hand over the ragged edge of the binding like a man tracing a scar. If the Word could survive fire, he thought, maybe it can survive me.

He flipped the mic switch.

“This is Pastor Ezra,” he said quietly, his voice trembling at first, then settling into resolve. “Broadcasting on an unregistered frequency… because the truth deserves to be heard.”

He paused, listening to the emptiness. Static hissed back, like the breath of a sleeping world.

“They banned the Bible.
They shut the churches.
They said worship was a threat to peace.
But peace without truth is just anesthesia before the end.
So if you can hear me—wherever you are—you’re not alone.”

He glanced at the small timer glowing green on the console. Three minutes until the next drone sweep. He pressed on.

“John 1 verse 5. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
They can outlaw the Light, but they can’t extinguish it.”

A muffled boom echoed somewhere above—maybe thunder, maybe the sound of another raid. Ezra kept talking.

“You’ve heard their gospel: unity, progress, the new dawn. But their dawn has no sun. Their unity has no heart.
We were made for something better than compliance.”

He read one more verse, the words barely audible beneath the hum of machines: ‘The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever.’

Then came a faint tone in his headset—three pulses, evenly spaced. Not system feedback. A reply.

Someone was out there.

Ezra froze, staring at the receiver. He tapped the table nervously, counting seconds between the pulses. Three, pause, three again. A deliberate pattern. Morse code maybe—but it didn’t match anything familiar.

He scribbled the sequence onto a scrap of paper, his hand shaking. Then he killed the power. The room fell into darkness.

Above, the drone engines changed pitch—a mechanical snarl searching for the source. Ezra held his breath. The tunnel walls vibrated with their passing.

When the sound faded, he slumped back against the chair. His pulse still pounded like the hum of the transmitter. Somewhere in the static, someone had found him.

And that meant one thing:

The first transmission had been received.