I don't remember the day I was born; nor do I know anyone who celebrates birthdays inside the Pyramid. Here, time isn't measured in years but in maintenance cycles: every time the generators shut down to purge the metallic dust from their lungs, we say a "breath" has passed. Some elders count three hundred breaths; children barely a dozen. I lost track when I was recruited into the Listening Corps. Since then, my calendar is the deep hum of the receptors, the cadence with which the Night hammers the outer walls, and the erratic beat of my own insomnia.
The Pyramid—and I say the word with the reverence others reserve for **mother**—has one-thousand-three-hundred-and-twenty habitable platforms. Each platform is a vertical city nested within another: a compact block of corridors, workshops and dormitories, all lit by biolight tubes that flicker like sick fireflies. No one has reached the rooftop in generations; no one descends to the foundations except the Earth-Current technicians—and they almost always return wrapped in silence. Rumor has it that beneath floor zero there's an inverted world, an ocean of molten metal where the things that lurk outside try to bore through the base. I haven't seen it; imagining it is enough to give me nightmares.
My name is Jareth Itriel, provisional identifier of acoustic section 799-B. It isn't a glorious post, but it grants me a privilege: an unfathomable lookout onto the impossible. My job is to track every frequency that brushes the Pyramid, file squeals, roars and vibrations, and decide whether it's harmless energy or a veiled attack. Most of the time only dead winds arrive, the distant pounding of Giants beating invisible anvils, or the hiss of Ash Beasts dragging themselves across their own dust. It's boring, monotonous, almost hypnotic. Precisely for that reason, when something different whispers in the middle of the record, my heart plummets.
That night, it happened.
The internal alarms had just switched to amber—the rest signal—and I was alone in the listening chamber. The other operators dozed on their cots, wrapped in thermal filaments; the main console murmured static readings, a digital rain I would soon log without feeling. Then, amid the white crackle, a soft chime slipped in. One syllable. Two. My name.
"Ja-reth…"
It wasn't a monstrous howl or a metallic screech; it was a human voice, feminine, so warm that my headphones seemed to melt. I jerked the chair back and cranked the gain to maximum. The panel showed a ridiculously low amplitude, barely a thread of sound trembling outside the normal range. Yet I heard her clearly, as if someone had spoken right behind my neck.
"Who are you?" I asked into the directional mic. Protocol deserted me; I also spoke with my cerebral elements, that sixth sense Observers train to send pure thought into the ether. It's a talent that wears you down, they say, but centuries ago it replaced radio.
Silence. The spectrum returned to its anemic calm. I thought it had been an auditory hallucination: too many sleepless watches, or maybe the echo of my own lonely brain. I was already preparing the report when the whisper came back, firmer:
"Do you still remember the garden of the white towers?"
An image exploded in my head: tapestries of pale vines, vaulted windows, daylight—true light, the concept hurt my eyelids—and a salty breeze. All impossible. There are no gardens here. Much less white towers. The only recognizable tower is this one: a gigantic black triangle that strangles the starless sky.
I logged the hour: sixteen-forty-nine. I tried to answer again, formally:
"Report 799-B: unclassified signal—possible telepathic manifestation. Requesting verification with Major key."
Routine. Even so, in my parallel thoughts, an impudent torrent: Don't leave me. Keep talking. Tell me who you are.
The console posted another variation in the baseline: a faint pulse. And the voice repeated my name, this time with an urgent joy, like someone recognizing a loved one in a crowd.
That's when Supervisor Kren came in. Tall, gaunt, hair slicked back with military discipline. He found me standing, one earphone still on, the console open without external-record permission.
"Shut that off," he ordered. His pupils danced over the analog needles. "Interference or something else?"
"There's… someone speaking. I know that inflection; it isn't a mechanical echo."
Kren frowned. "Voices from outside only lie. Disconnect."
I half-obeyed: I lowered the gain but left the channel open in background silence. The supervisor didn't notice; he was busy reviewing the logs. I pretended to fill out the logbook and kept to myself the certainty that I had heard something unrepeatable.
Throughout the day, life inside the Pyramid followed its painfully normal routine. Maintenance crews climbed the ventilation ducts to clear spore blockages; in the central plaza of platform 785 a swap of synthetic seeds was held—an improvised market where people barter ultraviolet light for a handful of mutated grains. The communal speakers recited the Mental Hygiene Manifesto every sane mind must memorize: "Sleep six cycles—exercise two—remember your purpose—watch the Night."
I listened mechanically while riding a cage elevator to my cubicle. The corridor smelled of stale ozone. Recycled air flowed through the grilles over and over; if you stood still you could hear the distant sob of the reactors.
My room is a metal cell with a cot, a locker and a built-in personal console. I sat in the dimness and closed my eyes. I wanted to recite from memory the protocols for blocking intrusive thoughts—they train us for that—but it was too late: the voice had lodged somewhere between my inner ear and my nostalgia. And it throbbed.
I spent hours reviewing historical records: lost expeditions, legends about external refuges, the mythical *Lesser Redoubt* that vanished millennia ago when its Earth-Current ran dry. All reports concluded the same: the distance was incalculable, the map nonexistent; the Outer Lands mutate, and space is not stable. In fact, the topography around the Pyramid changes every few generations, as if the very rock were stirred by a buried titan.
Nothing explained how a human voice could have survived. Except one impossibility: that someone had managed to protect another energy core and raise another refuge. Or that the voice wasn't human, but bait.
My faith wavered. But whenever I recalled that timbre—that gentle syllable breaking the static—I felt skepticism was a suit far too small.
She returned on the third cycle.
This time I was in the observation dome, a translucent cupola of armored glass and nanotubes. On the other side, the viscous mass of the Night licked the surface like a black ocean. Interior light drains away here; everything looks haloed in whitish tones, almost dreamlike. We place sensors against the glass and listen to how the void vibrates.
The whisper entered unannounced:
"Don't listen with your ears, Jareth. Listen with memory."
I felt a sting in my chest. Memory of what, I wanted to ask. But she (yes, I was already calling her "she" inside) went on:
"When you closed your eyes, the sky turned violet. You used to say that was the color at the boundary between day and night. I laughed because I had no words for so much purple."
I swallowed. My lips formed questions I didn't voice. The sensor vibrated; the assistant on duty looked at me oddly but detected no interference. The signal traveled only in my mind.
"Tell me where you are," I pleaded silently.
A sob—or maybe it was static—preceded her explanation:
"I'm in another beacon. Smaller. Almost dark. Our air grows stale. We have little water left. The sea… the sea is dead, Jareth. There are no fish; only shells drifting."
A sea. That matched the ancient records: a ravaged sea beyond the Cryptic Mesa. But that lay, according to old maps, weeks away on foot, across the Road of the Silent Ones. And no one—no one—had returned from there.
I shivered. I opened the murmur channel, risking that my companions would hear me babble at the wall.
"Can you give me coordinates?" I whispered.
"There are no coordinates. The world folds here. Each sunless dawn we move the beacons and follow the Current. But…" she paused "I can find you. I feel your heartbeat when you think of me. I must come closer. I need to cross the Night."
A dull thud struck the outer glass. Everyone turned. A shadow had crashed against the dome and slid into the darkness below. Tense silence. A technician broke it:
"Probably a tectonic bat."
No one replied. We all knew that for millennia no bat—tectonic or otherwise—could stay aloft in this viscous darkness. Supervisor Kren logged the incident with a stone face.
Meanwhile I still heard tired breathing in my mind. She'd heard the impact too; her breath became fleeting.
"Don't come," she begged.
And vanished.
The following days became a parade of protocols. Kren sealed my listening station and ordered mandatory psychiatric analysis. Two medics wired electrodes to me, made me recite the Manifesto three times, explore alpha-binaural mazes that test cognitive stability. Apparently I passed with honors, but the ban remained: no solo shifts, no access to the dome.
I slept poorly. I dreamed of light—something no living retina has seen—and woke with a burning in my chest, as if my lungs had been emptied. I began to have fleeting visions of corridors covered in white vines, so pale they emitted their own glow. When I blinked, the usual gray metal and its scent of rust returned. Someone dosed me with neural sedative micro-caps; I pretended to swallow and spat them in the shower.
Secretly, I devised a plan.
Every surface expedition requires authorization from the Logistics Council. But there is another route: the maintenance airlock S-13, connected to a cooling duct that reaches the outer edge of platform 820. It's sealed from inside with low-grade electromagnetic bolts—nothing a charge inducer and a couple of copper filaments can't persuade.
All I needed was a reason to be there, tools, and… courage.
The reason came by itself: a minor leak of radiant steam in cooling line 12-T. A repair crew was dispatched and I volunteered as acoustic escort. The crew chief agreed: someone was needed to listen for pressure changes. That was my turf.
I obtained the tools in the Dorsal Workshop; requisitioned a calibration kit, clandestinely downloaded a topographic map and hid inside my uniform a micro-plasma cutter, contraband from the armament section.
Courage? I wasn't sure I had any, but the voice, the music, the memory of an impossible violet color pushed me with irresistible gentleness.
Before departing, I visited Iden, an archivist friend. I left her a sealed envelope.
"If I don't come back in four breaths," I explained, "give this to Kren."
Iden frowned. "What the hell are you up to?"
I didn't answer. I only asked her to promise silence.
She looked at the envelope, sniffed it sarcastically. "A confession?"
"It's a map," I said. "Or the closest thing we have to one."
Airlock S-13 smelled of oxidized nitrogen. While the technicians dismantled valves, I pressed the sonic stethoscope against the metal frame: I sensed a murmur of cold currents beyond. Without questions I activated the inducer cartridge on my wrist; the liquid iron slid into the latch, short-circuiting the lock. A dull click. No one heard it: the techs' blowtorch screeched louder.
I slid the panel, slipped inside and shut it again.
I found myself in a narrow tunnel, almost organic. The air was different—denser, saturated with magnetic dust and a mineral perfume I'd never smelled. I advanced in the dark; only the faint light of my wristband guided me. A few meters on, the passage zigzagged upward and ended at an exterior hatch. Beyond… naked Night.
I drew the micro-cutter. A spark. The lock yielded.
I opened my mouth to breathe courage and, instead, I heard a murmur:
"Jareth."
A pulse of joy vibrated in my stomach. The voice didn't come from my mind but from the air itself, as if the darkness had become acoustic. There was no static, no interference. She was close. My wristband marked a fluctuation: the exterior containment field passed here, a veil of ultraviolet light barely visible. Crossing meant leaving the Pyramid's protection behind.
I paused. I remembered Kren, Iden, the millions sleeping in trust. I also remembered the imagined scent of an impossible garden, and the song no machine could classify.
I stepped forward.
The electric hum caressed me like an icy needle. A second step. Pressure changed; my suit's internal sensors chirped. A third step… and I was outside. The hatch closed behind me with a groan, its echo lost in a soundless ocean.
The Night wasn't black. It was a violet liquid, phosphorescent in treacherous eddies, as if the darkness had ignited in negative. My eyes adjusted. I saw rocky formations like twisted stalagmites, the viscera of a sick land. The air vibrated with a primal rhythm felt in the bones before the eardrums.
And on the horizonless distance, a sequence of white flashes. Four, pause, three, pause, one. They pulsed like distant beacons.
A code.
I didn't need to hear her to understand: there. There she was.
I walked.
Each step echoed on the dead ground, yet I felt someone—or something—walking with me, pace for pace, just outside my view. I kept to the signal, repeating lines of poetry I didn't remember learning:
"Changing with her kiss the dew to holier light…"
My voice shook. The verse held me. And when I looked up I discovered the Night, the dreaded Night, had split above my head: a tiny crack, barely a stroke; but through it leaked a silvery glow. Not sun, not star. A reflection, perhaps, of something beyond the void.
I turned. The Pyramid lay behind me: a contourless black monolith, as if darkness had thickened around it and swallowed it whole. I didn't think of going back.
Instead, I ran.
I ran toward the blinking line, toward the white towers that might exist. And as I ran, the voice—her voice—returned, soft, steady, unmistakable:
"I'm crossing too. Just wait."
I didn't answer. My throat no longer worked. My lungs burned. The suit screamed temperature alerts; the outside chill was plunging. But I kept moving, knowing each step took me farther from the only house humanity had allowed itself… and closer to the only home capable of igniting my memory.
In the distance, a silhouette took shape against the gloom. A tall figure, wrapped in a glow so pale it seemed the after-image of a former light. The silhouette stepped forward. And another.
I did the same.
When I was close enough, the Earth-Current's pulse vanished from my sensors. No more electric wall, no filtered air, no Pyramid rules. Only the Night… and the promise of a voice that spoke my name as though it were sacred.
The figure raised a hand, doubt and hope mingled in the gesture. I raised mine. Between us, nothingness throbbed, expectant.
And I knew—without politics, without science, without safe-conduct—that the world could end a thousand times. But as long as one voice remembered your name, and you remembered theirs, there would always be a crack of light where something could bloom.
"Mirdath…" I whispered.
"Jareth," she replied.
The echo dissolved into infinity.
And so my journey began.