Caller Unknown

Dead Line: Episode 1

The silence in the call centre pressed inward. It crushed down on the room like deep ocean water.

Maya sat at Desk 4. The only sound was the drone of the air conditioning. It was a low and industrial thrum. It vibrated in the fillings of her teeth. The time was 02:37 AM. The human body demands sleep at this hour. Maya was awake. She vibrated with caffeine. She felt the phantom itch of a headset clamped to her skull for five hours.

She stared at the reflection of her own eyes in the dark glass of the secondary monitor. She looked grey. The fluorescent lights overhead were long and buzzing tubes. They flickered with a subconscious strobe. They washed all the colour out of her skin. She resembled a ghost haunting her own life.

She picked at a loose thread on the arm of her chair. It was cheap and scratchy polyester. The smell of the office was specific. It tasted metallic on the back of the tongue. It smelled of static dust burning on a heat sink. It smelled of stale carpet cleaner and warm plastic.

Six other desks sat in the gloom around her. Empty chairs were pushed in. Headsets rested on keyboards like sleeping bats. The shift rota said she was alone. The room felt watched. The black monitors of the other desks acted like mirrors. They repeated the room back to itself in an infinite loop.

On her primary screen the call handling software idled. Oracle v4.5. A green pulse beat in the corner. System Active.

Maya rubbed her face. Her hands smelled of sanitizer. She had handled a domestic dispute at midnight. She had handled a panic attack at 1 AM. Then she sat through ninety minutes of dead air. She reached for her can of Red Bull. It was warm and flat. She stopped.

Line 4 lit up.

There was no sound at first. There was only the visual assault of red pixels against the grey interface.

UNKNOWN / BLOCKED

There was no location data. There was no caller ID. The Region field displayed a string of null errors.

Maya frowned. The system usually triangulated a cell tower within three seconds. She tapped the screen. The touchscreen was resistive old tech. You had to press hard.

“Crisis Line. This is Maya. You are through. How can I help tonight?”

She had said those words ten thousand times. They were armour. The script started. She was not Maya Khatri aged 32. She was The Operator. She was a function.

Static.

Static flooded the line. It was wet, heavy. It sounded like deep water churning in the wires. It was a deep and rolling crackle.

“Hello?” she said. Her voice dropped into the soothing register. “I am here. Take your time.”

Five seconds passed. Ten seconds passed. The line hissed.

A sound cut through the white noise. It was a sharp intake of breath. It was small. It was trembling.

“There is someone in my room.”

The voice was a whisper. It was pitched high. A boy.

Maya hit the keyboard before her brain caught up. Incident Log: Open.

“Okay,” she said. Her eyes scanned the blank data fields. “You are safe to talk to me. I am listening. Are you alone in the house?”

“I do not know,” the boy whispered. “I think so. Mum is at work. There is a man. He is just standing there. At the end of my bed.”

Maya pressed the volume up key. The audio quality was terrible. It was degraded and full of artifacts. She could hear the background. A duvet rustled. Air whistled through a nose in shallow bursts.

“Alright. I need you to stay calm. You are doing great. Can you see him clearly? Is he moving?”

“No. He is just staring. He has not moved since I woke up.”

Home Intrusion Protocol. Maya typed. The clack of her mechanical keyboard sounded like gunshots in the quiet office. Subject stationary. Caller minor.

“What is your name?”

“Danny. Daniel Morse.”

“Okay Danny. I am going to get some help to you. I need your address.”

“It is 14 Ashmore Road. Please. He is still just standing there.”

Maya froze. Her fingers hovered over the keys.

14 Ashmore Road.

The air in the room seemed to drop ten degrees. She did not just know the address. She knew the topography of the house. She knew the squeak of the back gate. She knew the layout of the upstairs landing.

She knew it because it was the failure that kept her awake on the nights the caffeine failed.

The system tried to load the address. The History wheel spun. It lagged. It struggled to pull the data from the deep archive.

“Danny,” she said. Her voice wavered. She cleared her throat. She forced the professionalism back in. “Danny. Stay with me.”

The screen flickered. The monitor gave a high-pitched whine. The file slammed open.

ARCHIVE RETRIEVED Incident #2847-19 Subject: Daniel Morse. Address: 14 Ashmore Road. Time of Call: 02:37. Outcome: DECEASED.

Maya stared at the word. It was written in standard bold Arial font. It was clinical. It was final.

Cause: Home Invasion. Fatal wound to chest/neck. Caller did not connect. Phone recovered at scene.

Date: November 14th.

Maya looked at the bottom right of her screen. Today’s date: November 14th.

She looked at the old file’s timestamp. 02:37.

She looked at the wall clock. 02:37.

“Are you still there?” Danny whispered. “He is breathing really loud. Can you hear him?”

Maya felt bile rise in her throat. She clicked the Attachments tab on the old file. Her hand shook. The cursor skittered across the screen.

The crime scene photos loaded line by line. It was remeniscent of a slow internet connection from the nineties. A small bedroom. Football posters. A pile of laundry. A narrow bed. The sheets were black with blood. A smartphone lay on the carpet. The screen was cracked.

“Danny,” Maya said. She gripped the edge of her desk. Her knuckles were white. “Danny. Listen to me. How old are you?”

“Twelve. Why? Why does that matter?”

The archive file: Victim Age: 12.

“He is moving,” Danny gasped. “Oh god. He is moving closer.”

Maya looked at the call timer. 00:04:18.

In the archive the estimated time of death was 02:42.

Four minutes.

“Danny. Tell me what he looks like,” Maya said. She needed to break the logic. This was a prank. It had to be a recording. Someone was using a soundboard. “Is he wearing a mask? What is he wearing?”

A pause followed. The static swelled. It sounded like ocean waves.

“I cannot see his face,” Danny whispered. “It is too dark. He has something on his head.”

“A hat?”

“No. It looks like a… a headset?”

The temperature in the call centre plummeted. The hairs on Maya’s arms stood up. It was painful and electric.

“Say that again,” she commanded.

“A headset,” Danny said. His voice trembled. “Black plastic. With a microphone. Like a gamer’s headset. It looks cheap. It only has one ear cup.”

Maya moved her hand to her ear. She touched the foam pad of her own headset. She felt the thin plastic arm of the microphone curving toward her mouth. It felt suddenly heavy, a parasite attached to her skull.

“There is a wire,” Danny continued. His voice was barely audible now. “A long black wire. It goes from the headset down his neck. Into his shirt. No. Not into his shirt. Into his skin.”

Maya gagged. She pulled her hand away from her ear. The plastic felt like it had burned her.

“He is speaking,” Danny said. “He is whispering.”

“What is he saying Danny?”

“He is saying ‘You are through. How can I help tonight?’”

The world tilted. The fluorescent lights overhead seemed to stretch and warp.

“He is saying it over and over,” Danny whimpered. “In a lady’s voice. He sounds like you.”

The text field for the current call notes began to fill on Maya’s screen. She was not typing. Her hands were clamped to the edge of the desk. The cursor blinked. It raced across the line. Characters appeared in perfect sync with her own racing thoughts.

Subject reports intruder mimicking operator voice. Intruder wearing standard issue call-centre hardware.

“Danny,” she said. “Get out of the room.”

“I can’t...”

“Get out of the room!” She screamed it. She shattered the professional mask. “Smash the window! Throw the chair! Just run!”

“He is fast,” Danny cried out. “He moves weird. He moves like a glitch. He is at the bed.”

Maya looked at the archive window. The file from five years ago was changing. It was the closed record of a dead child. It was sealed. It was immutable.

The text did not just appear. It rewrote itself. The pixels scrambled and reformed.

Operator: JAMES HOLBROOK vanished. Operator: MAYA KHATRI appeared.

Outcome: NO ANSWER vanished. Outcome: CALL CONNECTED appeared.

The system was merging the past and the present. It was correcting an error.

“Danny please,” Maya begged. Tears blurred her vision. “Do not look at him. Just run.”

“You sound different now,” Danny said. His voice went flat. It was eerie. “Last time you told me to hide in the wardrobe. He found me there. He did not like that.”

“I never told you that! We have never spoken!”

“We speak every time,” Danny said. “You always pick up. You just forget.”

Creak.

The sound came from the speakers. It was loud and distinct. It was the sound of weight shifting on a mattress.

“He is on the bed,” Danny whispered. “He is crawling. His eyes... they are not eyes. They are just static. Like the screens.”

“Stop it!” Maya hammered the Escalate key. “Supervisor! Security! Anyone!”

The system ignored her. The Escalate button turned grey. Function Disabled.

She spun her chair around. She looked for help. “Hey! Is anyone there?”

The office was empty. It was not just empty of people. The other desks were gone. The floor stretched out into infinite darkness. Row upon row of unlit monitors extended forever into a void where the back wall should have been.

She was alone in an ocean of dead technology.

“Why do you keep answering?” Danny asked. He was not whispering anymore. He sounded resigned. “It hurts every time Maya. Why don’t you just let it ring?”

The audio changed. The boy’s breathing vanished.

A new sound took over the line. It was a proximity effect. Something was right up against the microphone. It was wet. It was laboured.

“Maya,” a voice said.

It was her voice.

It was not an impression. It was the sound of her own vocal cords. They were recorded. They were chopped up. They were reassembled by something that did not understand how to breathe.

“Maya Khatri. Employee ID 8940. Time of death: 02:42.”

“No,” Maya whispered.

Danny screamed on the line.

It was a tearing sound. It was a wet and primal shriek. It peaked the audio meter into the red. It stayed there. It was the sound of soft biology meeting hard reality. It went on for three seconds. It was cut off with a wet crunch. The sound of a melon being dropped on concrete.

Silence followed.

Maya stopped breathing. She could not move. She could not think.

The call timer hit 00:00:00 on her screen.

It did not stop.

-00:00:01 -00:00:02

The physics of the clock broke. Time was bleeding out.

Maya scrambled back. Her chair wheels screeched on the carpet. She had to leave. She had to get out of this chair.

Rrrrring.

The phone on her desk lit up.

Maya froze. She was halfway out of her chair.

Rrrrring.

INCOMING CALL UNKNOWN / BLOCKED

She looked at the screen. The archive window for Daniel Morse had minimized. A list was populating in its place. It scrolled down the screen like a waterfall of data. It was faster than she could read.

MISSED CALL. 02:45. DURATION: 06:23. OUTCOME: FAILED. MISSED CALL. 02:52. DURATION: 04:15. OUTCOME: FAILED. MISSED CALL. 03:17. DURATION: 09:58. OUTCOME: OPERATOR DECEASED.

The list was predicting the next hour of her life. It was predicting the end of it.

Rrrrring.

The sound was louder this time. It was aggressive. It was piercing. The red light on the console pulsed in sync with the throbbing of the headache behind her eyes.

She tried to stand. Her legs would not work. It was not just fear. It was the room. The gravity seemed to be centered on the desk. The darkness of the surrounding office pressed in. It pushed her back down. There was no door. There was no car park outside. There was only the desk. There was only the screen. There was only the ringing phone.

Rrrrring.

The software flashed a warning: AUTO-ANSWER IN 3... 2...

“No,” she whimpered.

1...

Click.

The line opened.

The speakerphone activated automatically. Maya shrank back against her chair. She put her hands over her ears. She could not block it out.

Static.

Breathing followed.

It was heavy and wet breathing. It was the sound of lungs full of fluid.

“Hello Maya,” the voice said.

It was her voice again. It was older. It was cracked. It was ruined.

“I am at the desk,” the voice rasped. It was her voice. “I am looking at the screen. I can see you.”

Maya stared into the black reflection of her monitor.

“I have been trying to reach you,” the voice said. “It is time for our shift.”

The monitor flickered. The reflection changed for a single frame. It was a fraction of a second.

The Maya in the glass stared back.

She grinned.

It was a wide and rigid smile. It was a smile that knew the future.

The line went dead.

WAITING FOR NEXT CALL...

---

---