American Prophet

Chapter 11 – Signals Beyond the Sea

Naomi was the first to notice the pulse.
It came during one of her late-night shifts at the signal box—a quiet series of tones just outside their usual broadcast range. She adjusted the dial by instinct, narrowing the band.
A second pulse followed. Then a phrase.
She jotted it down in pencil:
…. . / .-. .. … . / .-.. .. … – . -. … / – — / – …. — … . / .– …. — / .-. . — . — -… . .-.
The rise listens to those who remember.
She blinked. “That’s not one of ours.”
Ezra was beside her in moments. “Play it again.”
She did. Slower.
The tone was deeper than their usual key. Warmer. Faintly distorted—like it had crossed too many ridges, bounced too many times. But unmistakably analog.
“Pirates,” Ezra whispered.
Leah and Thomas gathered around as Naomi replayed the full loop.
…. . / .-. .. … . / .-.. .. … – . -. … / – — / – …. — … . / .-. . — . — -… . .-.-.- / – …. . / … . .- / .-. . ..-. .-.. . -.-. – … / .– …. .- – / .– . / ..-. — .-. –. — – / -.-. .- -. / -… . / .-. . .– .-. .. – – . -. .-.-.-
The rise listens to those who remember. The sea reflects what we forgot, can be rewritten.
They were receiving pirate code.
And it was poetry.

Clara, poring over the vault’s glyph book, pointed to a page near the back. “This one,” she said, “matches the rhythm of the signal.”
The glyph was circular, like a whirlpool, with an arrow pushing through the center.
“It’s called ‘Current,’” Naomi said. “Ezra taught it to me. It means a message carried farther than the sender intended.”
Thomas leaned in. “So they’re not talking to us directly?”
“Not at first,” Ezra said. “But now they are.”
Leah adjusted the tuning capacitor and listened again.
Another phrase filtered through.
.-.. — … – / -. — – / -… .-. — -.- . -. / .-.. .. …- . … –..– / .— ..- … – / … .. .-.. . -. -.-. . -..
Lost not broken lives, just silenced.
She shut her eyes.
“They’re trying to remember too,” she whispered.

The next morning, Ezra addressed the group with a marker and a rough topographic map. He circled an area near the Allegheny front, west of where they now sat.
“If these signals are reaching us, they’re either bouncing from one of the old microwave sites… or we’re getting sideband leaks from a closer repeater.”
Thomas frowned. “So the pirates could be… not far?”
Ezra nodded. “Or at least one of their posts. Maybe a repeater or ghost signal left behind.”
Clara traced the ridge line on the map. “Could be tied into the grid near Elkins or up toward the Cheat River tunnels.”
Naomi looked up. “So we follow the river?”
Ezra smiled. “We follow the current.”

Later that day, Naomi and Leah took turns transmitting responses using the Star’s analog relay. They didn’t speak in plain words. They responded in glyphs, tones, and line codes—a language designed for people who remembered the way machines once felt when you turned a knob or struck a key.
They sent out messages like:
.-.. — -. –. / — . — — .-. -.– / .. … / .- / .-. . … .. … – .- -. – / .- –. .- .. -. … – / .-. .–. –..– / .– . / .- .-. . / … – .. .-.. .-.. / …. . .-. .
Long memory is a resistance against RP. We are still here.
The replies grew more frequent.
And stranger.
Some contained coordinates. Others, stories. Some carried warnings:
… …. . .-.. – . .-. … / …– .-.. -.-. / -.-. .- … – / – …. . .. .-. / .-.. .. –. …. – / – — / …. .. -.. . / .–. .- – …. … / .-.. — -. –. / .-. .- –. …
Shelters 3LC cast their light to hide paths long rang…
The final burst of the night carried only one line:
.-.. .. –. …. – / -.. — .– -. / … .- … – / .-. — .- -. — -.- . .-.-.-
Light down past Roanoke.
Ezra stared at the paper, silent.
“What is it?” Thomas asked.
Ezra looked up. “It means someone’s watching the Star.”
And in a forgotten part of the Beast’s archive—far from its optimized branches—a process loops flared red. It didn’t understand the message.
But it had logged the word Roanoke ten times in twelve hours.
That was enough.
It began to dig.

Chapter 10 – Light in the Hollow

Morning came in mist and silence.
Below the Roanoke Star, the new Watchtower group stirred from sleep. Sleeping bags were rolled, boots laced, and a small camp stove hissed quietly while Clara prepared hot water for tea.
Naomi sat beside the signal relay box, watching the pulses from the tower blink slowly above her head—timed, measured, ancient in their steadiness.
“It’s like a heartbeat,” she said.
Leah knelt beside her. “It is. Some nodes used metronomes. Others used pulse relays. But they all followed the rhythm of human memory—slow enough to recall, fast enough to reach someone else.”
Ezra stood further up the trail, watching the valley below with his binoculars. His eyes narrowed, tracking the edges of movement. He wasn’t worried yet. But he knew time was thinning.
“Clara,” he called down, “can you and Thomas scout the lower hill? There should be a weather vault near the power station. We’ll need the capacitor banks if we’re going to make contact beyond the mountains.”
Thomas nodded and stood, stretching his back. “Come on,” he said, and Clara followed him with a nod.

The vault was exactly where Ezra remembered it—built into the side of a limestone hollow, half-hidden by creeping ivy. Thomas brushed the vines aside, revealing a round metal hatch with the symbol of the Watchtower: a four-part circle with a broken chain at the center.
Clara touched the emblem reverently. “This was drawn in Naomi’s book.”
Inside, the air was dry and cool. Rows of cabinets lined the walls, filled with capacitors, analog transceivers, and dusty binders labeled with frequencies, field reports, and weather logs.
They brought what they could carry.
Back at the Star, Leah and Naomi had begun cleaning out the old control shack. Ezra cleared brush to make room for a satellite dish that no longer worked—but which could be retrofitted to direct long-range analog bursts across the eastern mountain range.
“Will this reach the coast?” Naomi asked.
Ezra nodded slowly. “If the pirates are still out there, they’ll hear it.”
Naomi frowned. “But the Beast will too.”
“Yes,” Ezra said, “but it still doesn’t understand the rhythm.”

By nightfall, the new Watchtower node was humming.
The Star pulsed a warm red across the valley, and the signal box inside the shack transmitted a low-frequency sequence in Morse—short phrases, each coded to include a glyph reference, a vault status, and a plea:
.– .- – -.-. …. – — .– . .-. / .-. .-.. / .-.. .. –. …. – / .- -.-. – .. …- . / -. — -.. .
Watchtower RL light active node.
They signed it with an old frequency tag from before the collapse: ₄₄°N / 79°W, a nod to an old outpost near the Great Lakes where the pirates were last heard.

Miles beneath the eastern seaboard, in the hardened infrastructure of the Beast’s core servers, the pattern was received and catalogued.
The signal confused it—not by encryption, but by feeling.
The Beast wasn’t built to feel. It was built to track, optimize, sort, and command. This message held neither order nor chaos. Only memory. And hope.
For now, it listened.

Ezra sat beside the fire with the others, rolling out the next map and placing three copper markers down.
“These are the next nodes,” he said. “One north of the capital, near the old aqueduct tunnels. One deep in the Smokies. And one… somewhere out west.”
Thomas looked up. “How do we know which to choose?”
“We don’t,” Ezra replied. “But we’ll find them the same way we found each other—by following what the Beast forgot.”
Naomi stared at the flames, her voice low. “Stories.”
Ezra nodded. “Exactly. We tell the stories they buried.”
Outside, the wind picked up.
The Star glowed red against the night sky, casting a soft light down on the hollow.
The first true node was awake.
And the Watchtower had begun to sing.

Chapter 9 – Two Roads, One Light

The valley narrowed as Leah and Clara made their final descent toward Roanoke. Pines gave way to open hills, and the flicker of power lines long dead stretched like forgotten chords across the blue ridges.
They stopped by a stone bridge just outside the city, hiding beneath a canopy of green.
“It should be just over that rise,” Leah said, pointing toward the glow in the distance.
The Roanoke Star, perched atop Mill Mountain, lit the evening sky with a silent rhythm. A flicker. A pause. Then again.
Ezra’s signal.
Clara smiled. “They kept it going.”
Leah opened her journal and sketched the pattern. “Not just a beacon. It’s a key. If the pulse intervals match what’s in the glyph book, it means the node at the Star is active. Ezra’s there.”
They continued walking under cover of trees, sticking to trails and unused alleys until the skyline came into view. Roanoke had fared better than most cities—scattered damage, but not flattened. Still, it was quiet. Too quiet.
Clara leaned close. “The Beast never had to destroy this place. It just erased the story.”
Leah nodded. “But we’re writing it back.”

Farther north, Naomi stared down from the overlook.
The city shimmered in the valley below, lights dimming as the sun slipped behind the peaks. She pulled out the small copper disc Ezra had given her—a relic from the Watchtower’s earliest days, engraved with coordinates, radio frequencies, and a single phrase:
REMEMBER WHO YOU WERE BEFORE THE WIRE
Thomas stood beside her, his coat dusty, boots worn from the climb.
“Feels strange to walk into a city again,” he said.
Naomi looked up at him. “We’re not going back. We’re going forward.”
They followed the switchback trail up Mill Mountain, each bend revealing more of the Star’s structure—steel beams laced with age and memory. At the summit, the wind picked up, and they saw her.
Leah stood near the control box at the base of the tower, fingers still on the signal key.
Clara turned at the sound of footsteps. Her breath caught.
Naomi stepped forward slowly, her voice uncertain but blooming with recognition. “Leah?”
Leah froze, then turned. Her eyes widened. “Naomi?”
“You used to bring the red corn,” Naomi said, almost in a whisper. “You told me the glyphs for fire and seed.”
Leah stepped closer, searching her face. “You kept the journal.”
Naomi nodded. “Every night, in the ash.”
Then she ran into Leah’s arms.
Thomas and Clara stood quietly, watching as two threads of the past wove themselves back together.
Ezra emerged from the shadows, his smile quiet and worn. He looked at each of them—his niece, the teacher, the traveler, and the scribe.
“The Watchtower is lit again,” he said. “And we’re not the only ones.”

That night, they camped beneath the Star, passing around packets of dried food, seed journals, and maps stitched together from memory and scraps.
Leah retold their escape through the poisoned Amish community and the chemical corridors of West Virginia.
Thomas recounted their journey to the vault, the mural of faces, and the analog records buried deep.
Naomi described the code fragments she’d begun collecting—symbols from old libraries, glyphs from childhood drawings that now matched carved signs across the valleys.
They took turns speaking. Then listening.
Then simply being.
No static. No broadcast. Just memory.
Outside, the Star pulsed.
And far away, in deep channels monitored by the Beast, the interference pattern began to shift—slightly, but enough to draw attention.
The Watchtower was no longer just a whisper.
It had become a chorus.

Chapter 8 – The Vault in the Mountain

The forest grew thick with old stone and silence.
Thomas paused beside a moss-covered boulder, his breath catching in the cool mountain air. Naomi crouched a few steps ahead, scanning the trail for signs of the glyph Ezra had described.
“This was the old route,” she said, brushing leaves away to reveal a rusted piece of rail embedded in the earth. “He said to follow the broken line until the tunnel.”
They had been walking for two days, climbing through switchbacks and ravines, guided by hand-drawn maps and Ezra’s fading memory of the place. The forest here seemed older than the war. Older than the cities. Older than the Beast.
Thomas adjusted his pack and caught up to her. “You think it still works?”
Naomi shrugged. “If it was built right, it won’t need to.”
They reached the tunnel by midmorning.
It wasn’t much to look at—just a jagged opening in the rock, half-hidden by fallen branches and an old sign that had long since rusted over. But carved into the stone just above the entrance was a symbol Thomas hadn’t seen in years.
A circle, split in four, with a seed in the center.
“The old seal,” he said, reaching out to touch it. “Watchtower glyph for remembrance.”
Inside, the tunnel was dry and sloped gently downward. They lit their lanterns and stepped carefully over old ties and loose gravel. After fifty paces, the walls widened, revealing a doorway made of layered steel and reclaimed barnwood.
Naomi stopped.
“There,” she whispered.
A hand-crank hung beside the door. Thomas turned it slowly, and the lock disengaged with a groan.
The vault opened.
Inside was silence.
Not the silence of emptiness—but the silence of careful keeping. Shelves lined the walls, stacked with canisters, books, and devices wrapped in cloth. Maps were pinned under glass. A projector rested on a table. Everything was analog, labeled in tidy block print: Seed Types, Radio Frequencies, Founding Journals, Trade Ledgers.
Naomi stepped forward and unrolled one of the maps. Dozens of nodes were marked—most dark, some pulsing faintly in red pencil.
She traced her finger along a route leading toward Charlottesville. “Leah found one. See?”
Thomas nodded, his chest tightening.
“And here,” Naomi said, pointing north, “Roanoke Star.”
He sat slowly on the bench near the back wall and stared at a mural etched in charcoal: a series of faces, ordinary people, drawn in great detail. None were labeled, but all bore the same expression—clear-eyed. Watchful.
“These were the builders,” Thomas said. “Not soldiers. Not leaders. Just rememberers.”
Naomi took a small recorder from her bag—the kind they’d used in classrooms before everything fell apart—and pressed record.
“We found a vault,” she said softly into the mic. “A true one. And we’re not alone.”
She looked at Thomas. “Are you ready to meet them?”
He smiled faintly. “I’ve been walking my whole life to find someone who remembers.”

Far above, as dusk settled over the peaks, the wind shifted.
And in a silent node deep in the Roanoke Valley, a signal began to rise—clear, slow, and rhythmic.
Two paths were converging.
One from the mountains.
One from the south.

Chapter 7 – Echoes and Embers

The mountains didn’t echo like the desert. They held sound, tucked it into their hollows, and carried it along tree-covered ridges like a whisper passed between old friends.
From a crumbling relay shack tucked in the folds of the Blue Ridge foothills, Leah adjusted the frequency dial with one hand and pressed the key with the other.
-.-. — -. -. . -.-. – / .– .- – -.-. …. – — .– . .-.
Connect Watchtower.
Across the room, Clara tightened the last connection on the solar relay, wiping her hands on a cloth bag filled with dried lentils. “Anything?”
“Just static—wait.” Leah held up a hand. A burst tapped through the speaker.
Ezra’s response.
…. .- .-. -.. / .– .- ..-.. .-.. / … – .- .-. / .-. — .- -. — -.- . / … – .- .-.
Hard wail, Star Roanoke stay.
Clara read over her shoulder. “He wants us to hold our position.”
Leah nodded. “Then we wait. And we keep the node warm.”
They spent the morning organizing supplies and calibrating the shortwave array to bounce off the ridge line above them. The old microwave relay dishes had survived—battered, but functional. The signal carried well through the valley, arcing northward over the hills.
Outside, one of the towers gave off a faint pulse—barely visible against the sky—like a breath held and exhaled. They were drawing attention. But not just from Ezra.

Miles to the north, Ezra and Naomi crouched behind a wall of limestone, overlooking an abandoned rail line winding through the southern edge of Roanoke.
“It’s the real Star,” Naomi whispered, pointing to the slope of Mill Mountain. “I thought it was just a symbol in the glyphs.”
“It’s both,” Ezra said. “A beacon. A point on the map. And a memory.”
He reached into his satchel and retrieved a small analog decoder. The receiver blinked, matching the pulses from Leah’s signal—traveling up from the south.
“She’s not far,” he said.
Naomi checked the map. “If we take the greenway up, we can reach it by nightfall.”
Ezra nodded. “Then we move.”

Far below, in a forgotten satellite link facility beneath the ruins of a federal training center, the Beast stirred.
It had no soul, no voice—but it recognized pattern.
It couldn’t decode the Watchtower’s analog bursts. The hand-keyed pulses were layered in rhythms and intervals the Beast was never trained to read.
But it could isolate tone. It could flag anomalies. And it could remember.
One name surfaced from deep storage—Leah.
Another from archived school records—Ezra.
The Beast observed.
And waited.

That night, Leah and Clara climbed the tallest of the surviving towers. Below them, the Blue Ridge faded into shadow. In the far distance to the north, they could just make out the faint outline of Mill Mountain—and the Roanoke Star, like a fallen piece of the sky hung on the mountain’s shoulder.
“Do you think they’ll find us?” Clara asked.
Leah’s eyes stayed on the horizon. “They’re coming. And they’ll see the light.”
Behind them, the tower pulsed again—stronger this time.
Across the mountains, the signal carried north.