Summer Storms (5) : There have been plenty of thunderstorms this summer, and everyone is blaming the weather for the strangeness of their electronics--or, bored kids out of school. It’s not uncommon to get phone calls from impossible numbers--strings of letters and numbers, and a blank caller ID. It’s hard to make out any sounds; it sounds like static, and a broken up voice in a language you can’t make out. There is no way to call the number back; it says the line is disconnected. Sometimes, text messages come through, in foreign symbols. The messages always disappear within a few seconds, and there’s no way to reply. People have even had video chats, but the image is always staticky and it’s impossible to make out any details except for a silhouette, and the same strange, foreign language. The city is hoping to have this issue fixed soon, but in the meantime they are asking for patience.
It had been raining for hours. Laike, bundled in unseasonal blankets, sat near the window with a cup of tea and several potted friends on the low table next to him. The window was long, yawning nearly the height of his apartment, though it was narrow as the boy who kept it. As Laike looked out at the brooding clouds, they fired back with a heavy sheet of rain. A flash, then thunder echoed distantly. Its rumble was soothing, and Laike felt tired.
Perfect nap weather -- he knew from experience. He reached for his phone, half-buried under a floor pillow, and unlocked it to check his weather app. Better to know when it would end, and how long of a nap he could take before he had to get out the door and run tiresome errands. He touched the app, and --
someone called him. Something called him.
Laike fumbled his phone, dropped it as his clangorous ringtone echoed through the otherwise quiet apartment. He answered the call out of compulsion once he fetched his phone out of Rengar's pot, and picked the dirt out of his hair while he waited for a voice, or the comfortable static of a robot that never detected a presence on the line.
It was quiet at first -- he heard something, but couldn't make it out. It sounded like static, but not the same static of a radio, or a shirt being rubbed across the microphone. It broke up, its sound as variable as a descending airplane. It sounded like the ocean, like a conch, like a chorus of sighs. Somewhere in it, buried deep, he heard a voice. Distant it was, little more than a whisper, spoken in fits and starts. The words broke and reformed, pushed together by the static.
"Hello? He-... Hello? Can you hear me?" He tried. The voice grew fainter, then came back to its barely audible volume. Then the call dropped with a pair of beeps.
Laike stared at his caller ID screen, brows furrowed with his consternation. He frowned at it, then at Rengar, then tried redialing the number. An automated voice helpfully informed him that the number was no longer in service, for as much as it was a number. For some time after, Laike stared at his phone, more mesmerized by what he just experienced than by the thunderstorm beyond the window.
When he was young, his grandmother told him a story about a great Fuyin, a maiden and a beautiful clarion bell. A Son of Heaven demanded a bell that tolled over a hundred li, a bell that was most remarkable with gold and brass and sonorous silver. His grandmother explained that these medals would not reconcile with one another, being most opposed, and each time the workers cast this great work, the metals grew brittle and tarnished. The second time, the bell turned more feeble and its housing cracked. If its casting failed a third time, Guanyu the Fuyin would be beheaded for his insolence.
The maiden, Guanyu's daughter Ge-ai, learned of this threat. She loved her father more than all the world had to offer, so she offered herself bodily to the molten furnace where the bell would be cast. The lakes of fire swallowed her whole, and out came such an immaculate bell that it rang further than a hundred li. That bell rang every day for five hundred years. That bell rang every day, and with each tone it called out her name: Ge-ai.
As he stared at his phone, he thought of Ge-ai. This wasn't the first time he encountered the weird calls or the garbled texts, but it was the first time he felt bad for them. He wondered if someone's soul was trapped in the seas of static, stuck in the digital world and calling out for company. It might've been storm interference like the news warned, but Laike kept holding onto Ge-ai's story.
A ghost in the wires. A sad song of static to touch the living.
