Episode 3: "The Signal in the Silence"The silence wasn’t empty—It was encoded.

Episode 3: "The Signal in the Silence"

The silence wasn’t empty—It was encoded.

EPISODE 3: THE SIGNAL IN THE SILENCE

Rey hadn’t spoken to anyone in two days—not after what he saw on Aariz’s phone. The distorted recording showed a frame-by-frame loop of Rey himself… but blinking at different times than the real him. The video shouldn’t exist, and yet there it was, embedded deep within an untraceable folder.

At 2:13 AM, his speakers crackled.

No music. No voice. Just static—and then, a blip.

Rey, panic-ridden yet driven, ran a decryption protocol he had written for a school project. The static wasn't noise—it was a data stream. Binary pulses translated into GPS coordinates and a timestamp: 4:44 AM, Crescent Tower Parking Lot.

Skeena insisted they not go alone. She brought Alian along, who now insisted on staying in the car. The moment Rey stepped into the lot, streetlights above flickered. Below, the concrete vibrated softly.

Then, the glitch returned.

Reality shimmered—not visually, but in Rey’s skin. His nerves pulsed like a distorted modem tone. A dark figure appeared beneath a flickering lamppost, pixelating as if out of sync with the world.

"You're not supposed to be looking," it said, in a voice that lagged like broken audio.

Before Rey could ask anything, the figure collapsed into a cloud of black code—vanishing as Skeena screamed from the other side of the lot.

Rey turned to see a glowing handprint seared into the trunk of their car. When he touched it, everything went black.

And then… he woke up in his bed. Again.

Except… the calendar now read January 9. They’d lost a day.