Chapter 3: The Broadcast
At 5:45 a.m., Seoul's skies lit up with interference.
The digital billboard outside the Ministry of Culture flickered once, twice—and then froze on a single symbol: a clef wrapped in a circular void. Then came the sound.
It started faint.
A distant echo.
A child's lullaby bleeding through every screen, speaker, and headset in the nation.
By 6:00 a.m., emergency hotlines crashed.
By 6:15, students across Asia began reporting hallucinations, headaches, and lost time.
By 6:30, the world knew something had returned.
The Broadcast had begun.
---
In the broken facility at Jeju, Ji-Ah bolted awake.
Her head rang.
The hum wasn't just local anymore.
She turned to Seo-Joon, who was already at the server, pale, trembling.
"They're broadcasting it," he whispered. "Z0 is live."
The console spat out lines of coordinates.
> RECEIVER STATUS: AWAKENED
> REPEATERS: ACTIVE
> SIGNAL WAVEFRONT: GLOBAL
Ji-Ah grabbed her notebook. Her hand shook as she scrawled down the words she couldn't say aloud.
"How do we stop a song that's everywhere?"
Seo-Joon looked at her, eyes haunted. "We find the Composer."
"But we don't know who—"
"We do," he interrupted. "At least part of it. That map we traced? The waveform? It's not just symbolic."
He laid out the blueprint again.
Each former Soundless facility pinged in sync.
Like keys on a piano.
And one was still active.
One they had never found before.
Buried under a mountain in Gyeonggi Province.
Codename: Nocturne.
---
By the time they reached the mainland, the world was already shifting.
On every bus terminal screen, a countdown.
> 72:00:00
> THE COMPOSER CALLS
> WILL YOU LISTEN?
TikTok trends bloomed overnight. #GhostMelodyChallenge. Teens faking blackouts, nosebleeds, levitations. But the real victims? They weren't posting.
They were hearing.
And not just melodies anymore.
Instructions.
Some subtle.
Some direct.
"Walk outside and lie down."
"Repeat the name you don't remember."
"Draw what you hear."
All across Asia, images emerged. Abstract spirals. Broken staff lines. Red pianos. And always: the symbol of the Composer.
---
Ji-Ah and Seo-Joon stayed hidden. They knew appearing on networks could get them tracked. Or worse—heard.
Because now, the Broadcast responded.
At every turn, Ji-Ah could feel it shift.
As if adapting.
As if watching her.
She tried muting it, blocking it—but the melodies now used more than ears.
They ran along nerves.
Traveled through skin.
At a rest stop on the highway to Gyeonggi, Ji-Ah collapsed in a bathroom stall.
Not from fear.
From saturation.
The song was embedding itself inside her mind again—twisting her perfect memory, rewiring it.
And this time, it wasn't a lullaby.
It was a requiem.
For the world.
---
They reached the mountain by midnight.
A single watchtower stood atop the cliff—unmanned.
The entrance to Nocturne lay beneath.
It opened like a vault—fingerprint, retina scan, pulsewave.
Ji-Ah placed her hand on the scanner.
It turned green.
> ACCESS GRANTED: SUBJECT 11
> WELCOME TO STAGE II
Inside: darkness. Clean. Cold. Buzzing with unnatural hums. Not quite electricity. Not quite air.
Walls shimmered faintly. Like glass behind metal.
And in the center of it all: a giant sphere of silence.
Not metaphorical.
Literal.
Sound couldn't enter it.
Or escape it.
Ji-Ah stepped close.
Her eardrums numbed.
Inside that sphere, she felt it.
The Composer.
Sleeping.
Or listening.
Or both.
---
Seo-Joon set up the last of their detection equipment. Everything they had gathered from Jeju and Seoul, patched into one final console.
He flipped the switch.
And then they heard it.
Not sound.
A presence.
Not words.
A memory.
Ji-Ah collapsed to her knees as images exploded across her mind:
> A nursery room made of audio foam.
> Children with wires under their skin.
> A boy with no face, only a mouth that sang without sound.
> Her own hand, reaching out toward a red switch… and never pulling it.
---
Inside the silence sphere, something moved.
Just an outline.
Just a breath.
But real.
Seo-Joon gripped her shoulder. "If we leave now, we can still—"
Ji-Ah shook her head.
She took off her headphones.
And stepped into the silence.
There was no air inside the silence sphere.
No breath, no weight, no sound.
Only pressure.
Like being submerged beneath an ocean of invisible frequencies.
Ji-Ah moved slowly, each step dragging, her pulse growing distant in her own ears. The walls didn't exist. The ground felt like static. The world in here was... undefined.
Until she heard it.
> "Subject 11."
Not a voice.
A thought.
A soundless syllable that shaped itself inside her head like a vibration directly carved into her brain.
> "You've returned."
Ji-Ah clenched her fists. Her heartbeat was the only percussion in this world.
> "What are you?" she asked back — not through speech, but through focus.
> "I am the origin frequency."
> "I was born from silence."
> "And you... were made to carry me."
A pulse of blue shimmered around her, outlining the silhouette of something vast and shifting. It was humanoid — tall, cloaked in a kind of soundwave fog — but its head was a sphere, ever-changing.
Like a conductor wearing every mask.
Ji-Ah trembled, but she didn't step back.
> "Why are you broadcasting?"
The Composer's form pulsed.
> "Because the world forgot how to listen."
> "So I will make them remember."
Images danced across Ji-Ah's mind:
Children humming lullabies inside padded rooms.
Red pianos playing themselves in glass cells.
Doctors writing scores instead of charts.
Subjects screaming in perfect pitch.
> "You made me."
> "Now I will finish the song you left undone."
> "And silence all those who refuse to hear."
---
Outside the sphere, Seo-Joon watched helplessly as Ji-Ah stood frozen.
Her vitals flickered. The sensors couldn't track her.
But the console lit up — not with errors.
With music.
A live composition was being written in real-time.
Each note shaped by Ji-Ah's brainwaves.
Each phrase encoded with meaning.
He realized in horror: The Composer wasn't controlling her.
She was composing it.
---
Inside, Ji-Ah felt the chords building.
The lullaby warping.
The notes shifting from minor into something terrifyingly clean.
The Composer stepped closer. Its mouth opened — a swirl of pure white noise.
> "Sing with me."
> "Be the bridge."
> "Let the world know the harmony of extinction."
Ji-Ah saw her past flash again:
Her mother's voice, calling her name in panic the night she collapsed after humming a ghost song.
The hospital bed.
The music therapist who never made eye contact.
The quiet fingers on her temples.
And the machine that had started her symphony without asking.
---
"No," she answered.
This time, out loud.
And in that silence — her voice became the disruption.
The Composer reeled back.
Sound, true sound, cracked the false vacuum.
Ji-Ah screamed.
And the silence shattered like glass.
---
Outside, the sphere imploded.
Sound rushed into the void.
The facility walls trembled. Screens burst. Frequencies bled across the air like spilled light.
Ji-Ah stumbled forward into Seo-Joon's arms.
Her lips moved.
"I remember it now," she whispered.
"My real song."
---
The console behind them sparked.
A new symbol appeared.
Not Z0.
But S11.
A new composer code.
> "Would you like to override the Broadcast?"
> "Y/N?"
Seo-Joon looked at Ji-Ah.
She didn't hesitate.
She typed: Y.
---
But the override wasn't a shutdown.
It was a composition.
A response.
One only Ji-Ah could finish.
---
Across the world, the Broadcast shifted.
No longer a threat.
But a conversation.
A melody rewritten by someone who had survived it.
One that whispered, not commanded.
> "If you can hear me..."
> "You're not broken."
> "You're harmonized."
And for the first time since it began, the frequency fell quiet.
---
But not gone.
Somewhere deep in the last uncharted node of Daedalus, a small red piano lit up again.
Waiting.
Listening.
Because a true composer… never writes only one song.
The next morning, the world held its breath.
No new Broadcast.
No new signal.
No more deaths.
But silence—real silence—was louder than ever before.
At 8:02 a.m., the Ministry of Science issued an emergency statement, citing an "anomalous wave of psychogenic auditory incidents" now believed to be cybernetic in origin. No one said the word music. No one said Project Soundless.
But the survivors knew.
And Ji-Ah? She wasn't hiding anymore.
She was preparing.
---
The facility at Nocturne had collapsed shortly after the override.
Ji-Ah and Seo-Joon escaped through the emergency tunnel, their data drives intact, their mission unfinished.
Because the override hadn't destroyed the Broadcast.
It had changed it.
Now, thousands of teens across East Asia were reporting the new melody.
Not haunting.
Not painful.
Just… unexplainable.
It whispered to them in dreams. Appeared in glass reflections. Danced beneath their eyelids when they blinked too long.
And it all pointed back to one place:
Seoul.
To one person:
Ji-Ah.
---
She didn't return to her old apartment.
Instead, she and Seo-Joon moved into the abandoned underground music studio near Hangang Bridge, wiring their equipment into the city's forgotten radio towers.
If the Composer had used the network to control, Ji-Ah would use it to free.
She composed night and day.
But not alone.
Every day, she received new files.
Recordings from students, musicians, even random civilians across the globe.
Each one humming or tapping or strumming something that matched her frequency.
It was growing.
Not a disease.
A choir.
---
On the 7th day, Ji-Ah broadcast her first message.
It wasn't in Korean. Or English. Or any language.
It was a pure tone.
28.02 kHz — far beyond the human range.
But they heard it.
Everyone like her heard it.
She called them the Resonants.
And they were waking up.
---
Government agents began sniffing around.
One night, Ji-Ah and Seo-Joon found their door marked with a black symbol: an ear crossed out by a treble clef.
The organization behind Project Soundless wasn't dead.
Only hiding.
And now, it was hunting again.
Ji-Ah started encrypting her songs.
Each melody layered with codes, instructions, safehouse coordinates.
Each chorus a map.
And the Resonants followed.
---
They came in ones and twos.
From Daegu. From Busan. From Kyoto. From Hualien.
Some with instruments.
Some with nothing but a song they couldn't stop hearing.
Ji-Ah listened to each of them.
She wrote it all down.
And then she wove their melodies into a single track.
She called it: "Response."
---
At midnight, Ji-Ah stood alone in the center of their underground studio.
She closed her eyes.
Took a breath.
And played it.
The song echoed across the city like an invisible wave.
Elevator music paused.
TVs flickered.
The wind itself shifted.
And those who could hear it? They understood.
The Broadcast was no longer a threat.
It was an invitation.
To remember.
To resist.
To rewrite.
---
But far below, in the deepest node of the Daedalus system, something stirred.
A failed prototype.
A frequency that couldn't be harmonized.
File Name: SUBJECT 06
Status: Awakened.
Melody: Inverted.
Command: Disrupt the Response.
And the first note played.
A discordant scream that shattered five streetlights in Daejeon.
The Composer was not the only one left.
The first attack didn't make the news.
It happened at a small underground music school in Daejeon — five students, all Resonants, found unconscious in the studio. No injuries. No trauma. But they didn't wake up for forty-eight hours.
When they did, each of them described the same thing:
> A red room. A piano with black keys only. A face made of feedback and static. A song they couldn't scream.
Ji-Ah listened to the reports in silence, her pulse pounding.
Subject 06 had begun.
---
Seo-Joon didn't speak for a full hour after hearing the news.
When he did, it was only to say, "We're not the only ones who adapted."
The Response had changed the network, yes. But the Inversion... it had hijacked it.
Not a counter-melody.
A mirror.
Whatever Subject 06 was, it wasn't just broken. It had learned from the Broadcast.
And it was now playing its own score.
One meant to erase the Resonants.
---
Ji-Ah acted fast.
She rerouted their base signal through shortwave analog towers, hiding transmissions beneath AM stations. She warned the Resonants to limit their exposure to full-spectrum frequencies — and most importantly, to never listen alone.
Because the Inversion fed on isolation.
It hunted silence the way the original Broadcast hunted sound.
And Ji-Ah could feel it moving.
Like static under her skin.
---
Three days later, a Resonant named Min-Jeong disappeared.
She'd been one of the earliest to respond — a violinist who hummed melodies in perfect counterpoint to Ji-Ah's tracks. Her disappearance was marked by a final upload to the network:
> A reversed track. Her own song, played backward. Ending in silence.
No trace of her was ever found.
Ji-Ah listened to that file on loop for hours.
Then she stood and said: "I'm going to the Source Node."
Seo-Joon stared at her. "The Source doesn't exist. It was a theory."
"Not anymore," she whispered.
Because in Min-Jeong's file, buried beneath the white noise, she had heard it:
> The Composer's voice.
> And someone else's.
> Hers.
---
They traced the coordinates embedded in the file's metadata to the heart of an abandoned broadcast relay buried under Namsan Tower.
When they arrived, the tower's lights flickered, then died.
Inside, cables had fused with the walls. Speakers pulsed even without power. The air was wrong — too dense, as if loaded with invisible sound.
Ji-Ah stepped into the main chamber.
And found the Source Node.
A throne made of broken headphones.
A red piano with no strings.
A circle of shattered tuning forks.
And at the center, suspended in the air by wires and rhythm alone — Subject 06.
A boy.
Or what remained of one.
---
He had no eyes. No mouth. Just a face shaped like a speaker, stretched taut across skin. His hands trembled at invisible keys.
Ji-Ah stepped forward.
> "Why are you attacking the Resonants?"
His answer wasn't words.
It was a note.
A perfect B-flat, dissonant with her heartbeat.
She gasped.
Seo-Joon staggered.
And in that moment, Ji-Ah saw his memories — all of them:
> Subject 06, once named Hwan.
> The first to survive a frequency over 30kHz.
> Trained not to sing, but to undo.
> Raised not by music, but by silence.
> Broken, not failed.
> Waiting.
---
Ji-Ah did the only thing she could.
She sat at the red piano.
And played.
Not to battle.
But to mirror.
Every note she pressed — Hwan countered.
A twisted duet began.
His silence.
Her sound.
His scream.
Her song.
And then — a bridge.
One harmony.
One impossible interval.
Both their hands hovering over the same keys.
And for a single second, their frequencies aligned.
---
Subject 06 collapsed.
Not defeated.
Not cured.
Just… still.
His heartbeat visible on the signal monitors.
Ji-Ah's tears didn't fall. She couldn't afford to mourn.
But she leaned forward and whispered:
> "You're not broken either."
> "You're not alone."
---
They stabilized the Source Node.
Hwan's body was transferred to their own underground facility. The Resonants took shifts watching over him, playing soft, balanced tones.
Ji-Ah composed a new track that night.
She named it: "Inversion."
Half hers.
Half his.
And when she played it live across the network — the signal didn't fracture.
It harmonized.
And the static faded.
For now.
---
But in the darkness of the fractured Daedalus servers, one final file blinked.
> SUBJECT: UNKNOWN
> STATUS: PENDING
> FREQUENCY: MULTIPLE
> FILE NAME: GHOST_MELANCHOLY.PROTOTYPE
The melody returned.
But this time… it had lyrics.
And a countdown.
---