The Listeners
The old radio tower hadn't broadcast anything in twenty years, but Maya still climbed the rusted ladder every night. At the top, surrounded by dead equipment and peeling paint, she'd press her ear against the cold metal framework and listen.
The whispers came after midnight, threading through the steel like electrical current. Not from the radio, but from the tower itself, as if the metal had absorbed decades of transmissions and learned to speak.
"Soon," they murmured tonight, a chorus of static and sorrow. "So very soon."
Maya had been twelve when the broadcasts stopped. One day, every station, everywhere went silent. No explanation. No goodbye. Just dead air where music and voices used to live. Most people moved on, found other ways to fill the silence. But Maya remembered her grandmother's words: "When the world stops talking, that's when you need to listen hardest."
So she listened.
The voices in the tower knew things. They spoke of the great quiet that crept across the land like fog, swallowing sounds one by one. First the birds stopped singing. Then the insects. Even the wind seemed to hold its breath. Only humans kept making noise, desperately filling the void with chatter and music from old recordings, pretending nothing had changed.
"Look at your hands," the voices urged tonight.
Maya held them up against the starlight. The scars were spreading thin silver lines like circuit patterns beneath her skin. Everyone had them now. They'd appeared when the silence began, growing slowly, inevitably. Doctors called it a condition, priests called it judgment, and the extremists called it evolution.
Maya called it listening.
She pressed her palm against the tower's central beam. The metal thrummed with a thousand conversations that never quite existed, phantom broadcasts from futures that wouldn't come and pasts that might have been. Through the steel, she felt others like her: the listeners scattered across the world, each at their own dead tower, each hearing the same truth.
The end wasn't coming. It was already here, had been here for twenty years. Humanity just hadn't noticed it was over yet, like a song that continues playing in your head after the music stops.
"What do we do?" Maya whispered to the darkness.
The voices swirled around her, no longer speaking in words but in pure meaning that bypassed her ears and bloomed directly in her mind. They showed her what the listeners were truly for—not witnesses, but harvesters. Each scar was a channel, drawing something vital from the world, siphoning it into the void between frequencies.
"Take," the voices commanded. "Take what remains."
Maya understood now why the sounds had disappeared. The listeners had been stealing them, one by one. Every bird song absorbed through silver scars. Every whisper of wind collected and stored. Twenty years of gathering what the old world had squandered, preparing for what came next.
Below the tower, the town slept fitfully, lights glowing in windows like dying stars. They didn't know their dreams were being drained, their memories extracted through the network of scars that connected every human to the great silence. The listeners were the antibodies of a dying system, and tonight they would finish their work.
Maya pressed both palms against the tower. Around the world, she felt the others join. Thousands of listeners at thousands of dead towers, their scars burning like brands. Together, they began to pull.
The last sounds of Earth flowed through them, crying babies, barking dogs, the hum of electricity, the whisper of breath. All of it rushed into the scarred channels of their bodies and up through the towers, broadcasting into the hungry dark between stars.
The town below flickered and went dark. Street by street, house by house, life by life. Not death, but erasure. A clean slate.
When the sun rose, it would shine on empty streets and silent homes. But deep beneath the earth, in seeds and spores and patient stones, the next world waited. It had been waiting for twenty years, for the listeners to finally clear the stage.
Maya climbed down from the tower, her scars now black and empty, their work complete. She walked through the voided town, one of last few thousand humans in a world preparing to begin again.
The voices in the dark had spoken truly. The end was here, but so was the beginning.