Dead Signal

The ocean had vanished, leaving a cable ship stranded above miles of exposed seabed. Inside its rusted hull, a receiver kept printing distress calls from a line severed decades earlier. A salvage crew followed the cable across the salt flats, passing wrecks whose doors had been welded shut from the outside. With every kilometre, the messages grew shorter. Coordinates became names. Names became a single instruction: keep coming. Beneath their boots, something struck the buried cable hard enough to shake salt from the ship's distant mast. The crew cut the line again. The receiver continued printing. Across the basin, an enormous shape began lifting beneath the crust, dragging the wrecks toward its centre. The signal had never been asking for rescue. It had been arranging a delivery.