Disconnected
Dead Line: Episode 6
[ORACLE v4.5 // SYSTEM_CRASH] [USER: ALL // ID: NULL] [TIMESTAMP: ERROR]
LOG_ALERT: MEMORY OVERFLOW. LOG_ALERT: REALITY BUFFER FULL. LOG_ALERT: THE QUEUE IS HERE.
SYSTEM FAILURE. UNABLE TO REBOOT. INITIATING PURGE PROTOCOL? [Y/N] ... ... IGNORING INPUT.
Red light flooded the call centre. It washed out the grey walls. It turned the shadows into pools of black ink. The air hung thick, a haze of bloody smog.
Maya stood by Desk 4. Her hands covered her ears.
A wall of noise struck her chest like a shockwave.
A thousand voices spoke at once.
Maya opened her eyes.
The office was full.
The infinite rows of desks stretched out to the horizon. They curved upward at the edges of her vision. The room formed a bowl, a stadium of bureaucracy.
Every desk was occupied.
At Desk 3, a woman in a grey hoodie wept into her headset. Her skin was pale. Her eyes were red.
At Desk 5, a woman in the same grey hoodie clawed at her neck. Her fingers were wet with blood. She screamed silently.
At Desk 6, a woman threw her head back. Her mouth hung open in a rictus of agony. A high, perfect violin note poured from her throat.
Maya spun around.
Desk 7. Desk 8. Desk 9.
They were all her.
Hundreds of them sat in the chairs. Thousands. An army of Mayas. A legion of broken clones.
They were the iterations. They were the discarded files of the previous shifts.
Some looked fresh. They looked bored. They drank from cans of Red Bull. They remained ignorant of their death.
Some looked old. Their skin resembled grey parchment. Their hair fell out in clumps. Their clothes hung off sharp bones like rotted rags.
Some were damaged. One Maya at Desk 12 had no eyes. Only static leaked from the sockets. One Maya at Desk 20 had a headset fused into the side of her skull. The plastic had melted into the bone.
They all talked.
“Crisis Line, this is Maya.” “Please hold.” “I can’t move.” “He is behind you.” “Stop it.” “Help me.”
The voices layered over each other. The cacophony sounded like a hard drive screeching as the needle dug into the platter.
Maya—the current Maya—stumbled back. She bumped into Desk 4.
The phone on her desk was dead. The screen was black.
She was the only one not talking. She was the glitch. She was the only one awake.
“Quiet!” she screamed. “Everyone be quiet!”
Her voice disappeared into the hurricane. No one looked at her. They remained locked in their loops. They processed the trauma of the city. They filtered the nightmare.
Movement caught her eye.
Far down the central aisle, something walked.
It was tall. It was thin. It moved with a jerky, stop-motion gait. It looked like a stick insect made of charred wood.
The Floor Manager.
It walked the rows. Supervised.
It stopped at a desk. The Maya sitting there tried to take off her headset. She fought the wire.
The Monster leaned down. It placed a long, needle-fingered hand on her shoulder.
The Maya froze. She slumped. She stopped fighting. She began to speak the script.
“Crisis Line. This is Maya.”
The Monster nodded. It moved to the next desk.
It checked performance, ensured the suffering continued.
Maya crouched down and hid behind her chair.
She looked at the far end of the room.
In the distance, rising above the sea of cubicles, a glass box floated above the floor on steel pillars. The windows were dark. It was the Supervisor’s station. The server room.
A single red light pulsed from inside the glass box.
It was a phone.
It was the only phone in the building ringing.
Maya knew. The logic of the nightmare inserted itself into her brain. That was the Master Line. That was the input.
She had to answer it.
She looked at the aisle. The Floor Manager moved closer. Its head twitched. It listened to the calls. It scanned for silence.
Maya took a breath. She tasted the ozone and the copper.
She ran.
She stayed low. She sprinted down the aisle.
“Crisis Line,” a Maya to her left whispered. “Please don’t,” a Maya to her right begged.
Maya kept her eyes on the red light.
The floor shook. A low rumble vibrated through the carpet. The system was unstable. The geometry of the room failed.
Ahead of her, a section of the floor had collapsed. A jagged hole opened in reality. Inside the hole, white noise boiled like magma.
Maya jumped. She cleared the gap but landed hard. Her ankle twisted. Pain shot up her leg.
She scrambled up. She kept running.
The Floor Manager stopped.
It turned its head. The black wire stitching on its mouth pulled tight. It had sensed the footsteps. It had felt the deviation from the pattern.
It screeched.
A modem connecting to hell. A high-pitched digital shriek filled the air.
The army of Mayas stopped talking.
Thousands of heads turned. Thousands of pairs of eyes locked onto Maya.
“Line 4,” they said in unison. Their voices merged into a single, deafening announcement. “Line 4 is active.”
The Floor Manager moved. It glitched, teleported forward in jagged bursts.
Ten feet closer. Twenty feet closer.
Maya ran. Her lungs burned. The red light was fifty yards away. The stairs to the glass box were metal and steep.
A hand grabbed her ankle.
Maya fell. She hit the carpet and instinctively kicked out.
The Maya at Desk 400 had grabbed her. This Maya was old. Her face was a skull. Her eyes were gone.
“Join the queue,” the skeleton whispered. “We are all waiting.”
Maya kicked the hand. The bones snapped like dry twigs.
She scrambled away.
The Floor Manager was close. She smelled the rot, tasted the meat left in the sun.
She reached the stairs and grabbed the railing. It was cold, and vibrated with the energy of the system.
She hauled herself up.
Clang. Clang. Clang.
Her boots hit the metal steps.
The Floor Manager reached the bottom of the stairs. It looked up. Its face was a pale moon in the red light.
It raised a hand. Pointed a needle finger.
“The shift is not over,” a voice boomed. It was the voice of the angry man from the second shift. It came from the Monster’s chest. “You cannot leave the desk.”
“I quit!” Maya screamed.
She reached the top of the stairs.
The door to the glass office was closed. It had no handle. Just a slab of black glass.
Maya hammered on the glass. “Open! Open!”
The glass rippled. It was liquid. It was a screen.
She pushed her hands into the surface. It was cold. Thick. It felt like mercury.
She pushed harder. She fell through.
The sound cut out.
The inside of the office was silent. The roar of the call centre was gone. The red light was blinding here.
There was no desk.
There was only a plinth in the centre of the room. It was made of a small black server cluster. The machines hummed. They generated a tremendous heat.
On top of the plinth sat a phone.
It was an old rotary phone made of heavy Bakelite. Black.
It was ringing.
The sound was real. It was mechanical. It was the only real thing in the world.
Maya walked toward it. Her legs shook. Her breath came in ragged gasps.
She looked through the glass walls.
Below her, the call centre was in chaos. The Floor Manager tore the stairs apart. The army of Mayas screamed. Static rose from the floor, consuming the desks. Reality formatted itself.
Maya reached the phone.
She looked at her hand. It was stained with blood. It shook.
She picked up the receiver.
The weight of it was immense. It felt like she was lifting the planet.
She put the receiver to her ear.
“Crisis Line,” she whispered. “This is Maya.”
Static.
Then a voice.
This voice belonged to the living.
“Emergency Services,” a woman’s voice said. “Which service do you require? Police, Fire, or Ambulance?”
Maya froze.
The voice was crisp. It was bored. It was professional. In the background, Maya heard the mundane sounds of a real office. She heard a chair squeak. She heard someone typing. She heard rain hitting a window.
It was the Real World.
“Hello?” the operator asked. “Is anyone there?”
Maya understood.
She was not the operator. She never had been.
She was the block.
The calls from the dead, the calls from the missing, the calls from the sorrow of the city—they were trying to get through. They were trying to reach the emergency services.
But they hit her.
She was the glitch. She was the buffer that trapped them. She was the purgatory. As long as she picked up, the calls could never be answered. As long as she existed, the queue would never end.
“Hello?” the operator asked again. “I can hear breathing. Do you need assistance?”
Maya looked down at the chaos below. The Floor Manager smashed against a steel pillar. The static rose.
“No,” Maya said. Tears ran down her face. They felt hot. They felt real. “No assistance required.”
“I am sorry?”
“I am clearing the line,” Maya said.
“I don’t understand.”
“I am the busy signal,” Maya said.
She looked at the cord of the rotary phone. It went down into the plinth. Into the heart of the machine.
She grabbed the cord.
She wrapped it around her hand.
She pulled.
She pulled with everything she had left. She pulled with the strength of a thousand dead shifts.
Snap.
The cord tore loose from the base. Sparks showered the room. They were white and hot.
The voice of the real operator vanished.
The red light died.
The humming of the servers groaned and stopped.
Below her, the call centre froze.
The Floor Manager froze mid-scream. The army of Mayas froze. The static froze.
The image began to break up.
Pixels turned to grey dust. The walls dissolved. The floor vanished. The glass box melted away.
Maya looked at her hands. They were turning into code. They were turning into light.
She felt no pain.
She felt only silence.
The ultimate silence.
The screen went black.
SYSTEM OFFLINE. PURGE COMPLETE. NO CARRIER.
EPILOGUE
The screen remained black for ten seconds.
A phone rang.
It was a standard, modern ringtone. Bright and digital.
Rain lashed against the windows of a 999 call centre. The office was bright and busy. People moved with purpose. The smell of cheap coffee and wet coats filled the air.
A young woman sat at a desk. Her name tag read: “SARAH”.
Sarah took a sip of lukewarm coffee. Her headset beeped.
“Emergency Services, Sarah speaking. How can I help?”
Static filled the line.
Then a voice. It was faint. It sounded like it was coming from the bottom of the ocean.
“Thank you,” the voice whispered.
Click.
Sarah frowned. She checked her screen.
The location field read: 14 Ashmore Road. The caller ID read: UNKNOWN.
Sarah shrugged. She logged the call.
“Nuisance call,” she muttered.
She took another sip of coffee.
The office continued. The phones rang. The horror was gone.
But on Sarah’s screen, in the corner, a small green pulse beat.
It flickered.
Just once.
Pixels scrambled. Grey text appeared against the black background.
SYSTEM REBOOT.
LOADING USER PROFILE...
WELCOME, SARAH.
Catch up HERE
