Chapter 3 – Signals at Dawn
The tower stood like a broken tooth above the forest line.
It was old—rusted through in places—but still tall, still pointing toward the sky like it remembered what it once did. Vines curled around its legs, and birds nested in the curve of a cracked microwave dish. The Watchtower team had arrived just before dawn. The air was cool, and the wind tugged gently at the tarps covering their supplies.
Ezra was already crouched near the base of the tower, connecting a line from the antenna to a shortwave receiver built from scavenged parts and old ham radio gear. The unit buzzed and hissed as he dialed through the static.
Naomi hovered beside him, biting her lip.
“What if it’s just another ghost signal?” she asked. “Like the ones that bounce around the mountains and loop back?”
Ezra gave her a small smile. “Even ghosts have a source.”
Thomas stood nearby, arms crossed. He was watching the horizon, where the sun was beginning to rise behind layers of red clouds.
The radio clicked.
Then again.
A sequence of sharp beeps echoed through the receiver—more rhythm than language at first.
“. -.. .-. .- — / — ..-. / …- . -.– .-.. — -.-. .- .–. .–. . .-. …”
Naomi frowned. “That’s gibberish.”
Thomas leaned closer. “It’s Morse. Scrambled. Looks mirrored.”
Ezra flipped open a logbook and began decoding aloud. “‘Dram of Veylocappers’… doesn’t mean much yet. But it’s got a pulse.”
Caleb arrived with a spool of copper wire under his arm. “I boosted the dish with some mesh from the greenhouse roof. Got a 10% gain.”
Ezra nodded in approval. “Good. We’ll need every bit.”
Thomas bent over the map. “Where did the signal come from?”
Ezra tapped three places on the grid—former relay towers that once carried analog microwave transmissions across the country. “Signal strength from all three is just strong enough to triangulate. If the bursts are bouncing clean, I’d place the source here.”
He circled a point on the map.
Naomi’s eyes widened. “Kansas?”
“Flat land,” Caleb said. “Perfect for long-range analog.”
Ezra added, “And far enough from the old network spines to stay off the grid.”
Thomas ran a finger along a faded line on the map. “Old Long Lines route—used to carry AT&T’s microwave traffic before fiber.”
Naomi blinked. “But the Beast controls the fiber now.”
“Yes,” Ezra said. “And the satellites. Everything digital, everything clean and fast—it all runs through the Beast. It sees everything in ones and zeroes.”
“But not this,” Thomas said, pointing to the tower.
Ezra smiled. “No. Not this. Analog’s messy. It fades. It warbles. It’s hard to pin down. That’s why it works.”
The receiver crackled again—this time, layered with a faint tone. Like music buried under water.
Caleb adjusted a dial. “There’s something under the code.”
Naomi tilted her head. “Sounds like… a prayer?”
Thomas listened. The voice was broken and hard to understand, but he caught fragments.
“… the Beast forgets … we remember … hold fast … west wind rises …”
Ezra looked up slowly.
“That’s a pirate code,” he said.
Naomi’s eyes narrowed. “Pirates?”
“Out on the coast. The Gulf. The broken cities. They’re transmitting—sometimes with bursts of old music, sometimes prayers or jokes or scraps of poetry. But the messages are layered.”
Thomas asked, “What do you mean ‘layered’?”
“Multiple frequencies. Staggered code patterns. Visual glyphs. Even emoji-like scripts,” Ezra said. “It’s like they’re speaking three languages at once. Somehow, it slips past the Beast.”
“Can’t the Beast listen?” Naomi asked.
Ezra’s face turned serious. “It can listen. But it can’t understand. Their signals… confuse it. Twist it. Like showing a funhouse mirror to a computer.”
Thomas frowned. “How?”
Ezra hesitated. “We don’t know yet. But some of us believe… the pirates used to be part of it. The old Consortium. The corporate kings who split up the country in the first place.”
Naomi’s mouth fell open. “The ones who sold everything off in the ’80s?”
Ezra nodded. “They broke companies. Then they broke people. And when the glaciers melted, they saw profit in the flood. Control became currency. And the Beast was born.”
Thomas spoke quietly. “To divide. To confuse. To tell just one version of the world.”
Ezra didn’t answer right away. Then he said, “There’s an old story… the devil asked God for a hundred years to rule the Earth. God agreed. After a hundred years, the devil said, ‘Now let’s see what’s left.’”
Naomi looked down. “Is that what this is?”
Ezra folded the logbook shut. “Maybe. After a hundred years, living memory dies. The people who fought, who built, who stood up—they fade into bullet points in a test. You forget who they were. What they felt. What they feared.”
He stood and faced the tower. “But stories change that. Memory keeps people real—even their mistakes. That’s what the Beast wants to erase.”
Thomas looked at Naomi. “That’s why we’re here.”
She didn’t speak.
But she listened.
—
### Expanded Edition: New Scenes
**After “Even ghosts have a source.”**
Ezra slid a small slate tile toward Naomi. On it, he had etched the simple Morse alphabet by hand. “When you can’t trust the speaker, trust the rhythm,” he said. “Rhythm is older than lying.”
**After the pirate prayer fragment**
Caleb rolled the coil wire between his fingers. “My uncle ran corded phone lines between hollers after the ice storms in ‘96,” he said. “When the power went, voices still walked those lines like they were back roads. Maybe that’s all we’re doing—teaching voices to walk again.”
**Before Ezra’s devil story**
Thomas looked at the map’s grease-pencil scrawl and felt the old teacher in him surface. He drew a quick sketch of a plate boundary in the corner and showed Naomi how pressure built and was released. “Systems fail when they forget to bend,” he said. “People too.”
American Prophet 