Elliot Crawford

# The Frequency of Ghosts The radio tower groaned in the wind like something dying slowly. Elliot Crawford stood three stories up on the rusted catwalk, headphones pressed tight against their ears, listening to a signal that shouldn't exist. Behind them, the abandoned industrial complex sprawled across twenty acres of crumbling brick and forgotten machinery—the perfect place to hide something the world wasn't supposed to find. The signal had started three weeks ago. Not a burst or a flash, but a sustained, mathematical pulse that made Elliot's stomach drop the moment they isolated it from the background noise. It came from beyond the orbit of Mars, compressed into a frequency range that conventional astronomy would have dismissed as cosmic static. But Elliot had never been conventional. They'd spent the last seventy-two hours without sleep, mapping the signal's origin point, running decryption protocols, and slowly—impossibly—extracting meaning from the electromagnetic chaos. The aliens called themselves the Axiom. They were dying. Their sun was failing, had been failing for generations, and their homeworld had maybe twenty-one days before the radiation became unsurvivable. They were asking for help. Elliot pulled off the headphones and looked out across the city's glittering sprawl. Somewhere in that mess of light and motion, people were going about their lives, completely unaware that they shared the universe with an intelligent species facing extinction. More importantly, somewhere in those glass office buildings downtown, officials at the National Space Administration were probably already tracking Elliot's unauthorized transmissions. The text had come through an hour ago. Unknown number. "We know what you've found. Stand down." Elliot had deleted it immediately, but the message lingered like a bad taste. The proper channels would take forever. NASA would convene committees, consult international bodies, debate protocols. By the time bureaucracy finished its slow dance, the Axiom would be ash. But if Elliot tried to send a real response—a transmission powerful enough to carry technical data, coordinates, survival information—it would light up every detection array on the planet. The space agency would move fast then. Faster than they had any right to. A sound pulled Elliot's attention away from the city. Something metallic, distant, coming from deeper within the complex. They descended the tower quickly, their sneakers finding purchase on the corroded metal rungs as if they'd done this a thousand times. Maybe they had. This place had become a second skin. The original structure that drew Elliot here had been the transmission station itself. Twenty years ago, they'd found the archived records in the basement of a local library—microfilm documenting a pirate broadcaster called WEXT-9 that had operated from this very complex in the seventies and eighties. The FCC had shut them down, or so the official story went. But the files suggested something darker. The broadcaster had been conducting their own experiments. First-contact attempts. They'd built transmitters that operated on frequencies so obscure that the government hadn't even known to regulate them. Then, suddenly, the station went dark. The records ended abruptly. No explanation. No closure. Just silence. Elliot had restored the equipment piece by piece, reverse-engineering technology that predated the internet, breathing life back into ghost frequencies. They'd never expected anything to actually answer. The metallic sound came again. Closer. Elliot ducked into the main warehouse, letting their eyes adjust to the deeper darkness. The Axiom's signal was still coming through on the portable receiver clipped to their belt—a steady pulse like a heartbeat. Twenty-one days. Three weeks to save an entire civilization. "I was wondering if you'd figure it out." Elliot spun, hand instinctively reaching for the knife in their pocket before they saw the figure emerge from the shadows. Middle-aged, weathered face, wearing a NASA jacket that looked like it had been dragged through a decade. But something about him was older than his face suggested. "Director Marcus Webb," the man said, not extending his hand. "I've been keeping an eye on this place for longer than you've been alive, kid." Elliot's mind raced. "How did you—" "Find you? The hard way. Thirty years of dead drops, encrypted communications, dead drops. Watching this facility like a hawk because I knew someone would come back here someday. Someone with the right skills. The right obsession." He took a step closer, and Elliot saw the exhaustion in his eyes—real exhaustion, the kind that came from carrying secrets. "My predecessor was here when WEXT-9 made first contact. Did you know that? Did your research turn up that part?" Elliot's throat tightened. "The records were incomplete." "Because we made them incomplete. The government didn't shut WEXT-9 down." Webb's voice was soft, almost mournful. "We took it over. A special joint task force between the FBI and early NASA operations. We kept broadcasting. We kept listening. And we learned something that terrified the people in charge so much that they've been managing the knowledge like a biohazard for thirty years." "The Axiom," Elliot whispered. Webb nodded slowly. "Different name then. Different designation. But yes. First contact was real. It happened, and nobody knew what to do with it. So they classified it. They weaponized it. They built military applications based on the Axiom's technology. All of it illegal under the Contact Accords that nobody was supposed to know existed." Elliot's hands were shaking. "Why are you telling me this?" "Because the Axiom never stopped trying to reach us. Every thirty years, their signal strengthens. And every thirty years, my agency scrambles to suppress it." Webb looked away, toward the tower visible through a shattered window. "But this time is different, isn't it? This time, they're not asking. They're dying. And they're asking for our help." "So you came to stop me." "I came to recruit you." Webb turned back, and there was something broken in his expression. "The military faction at NASA—the people who want to weaponize first contact, who see an alien species facing extinction as an opportunity to acquire technology—they're closing in. They intercepted your signal an hour ago. You've got maybe two hours before they mobilize a raid on this facility." Elliot felt the walls pressing in. Two hours. The Axiom needed data—coordinates for unmanned probes, technical specifications for survival technologies, trajectory information for any vessels they might repurpose for evacuation. None of it could be transmitted in two hours. Not safely. Not without alerting every military asset in the hemisphere. "There's something else," Webb continued. "Something in the archive that you haven't found yet. Third sub-basement. There's a sealed chamber—it was sealed by the original contact team in 1977. They put something in there. Insurance, they called it." "Insurance against what?" "Against a scenario just like this one." Webb pulled a key card from his jacket—old technology, the kind that hadn't been used in twenty years. "The Axiom gave us something back then. A piece of their technology. A way to amplify signals without detection. To bounce transmissions through their own communication network to bypass any terrestrial surveillance." Elliot stared at the card. "You're saying..." "I'm saying you can do this. You can save them. But you have to decide right now whether you trust the system or trust yourself." Webb's voice hardened. "And you have to know that the moment you use that technology, you become a fugitive. There's no going back to normal. There's no happy ending where you finish high school and go to MIT and have a quiet life. This is a complete irrevocation of your future as you understood it." The portable receiver at Elliot's belt pulsed. The Axiom's heartbeat. Three weeks until extinction. "Show me," Elliot said. The third sub-basement existed in the kind of darkness that felt alive. Webb's flashlight cut through it weakly, the batteries clearly dying, casting everything in stuttering shadow and light. The sealed chamber was exactly where he'd said it would be—a concrete wall with a lead-lined door that looked like it belonged to a bank vault from the Cold War. The key card worked. The door hissed open, revealing an interior lined with insulation and electromagnetic shielding. And in the center of the small room: a device that looked like nothing on Earth. Organic curves, impossible geometries, metals that seemed to shift color depending on the angle of the light. "Axiom technology," Webb whispered. "A gift, they said. Something to help us understand them. We've been too afraid to use it." Elliot approached it slowly, and something strange happened. The device hummed. Not with electricity—with something deeper. Recognition, maybe. Or greeting. "It's active," Elliot breathed. "It's always been active. We kept it shielded, but it's been waiting thirty years for someone like you." Webb stepped back, moving deeper into the darkness. "Take it. Send the transmission. Save them." Elliot reached for the device, and then Webb's footsteps stopped. There was a sound—a gunshot, muffled but definitive. Elliot spun to see Webb collapse, red spreading across his chest. Behind him stood two figures in dark tactical gear, weapons drawn. "Stand down, Crawford," a sharp female voice commanded. Colonel Sarah Chen, Director of Special Operations for NASA. The face from the classified briefing Elliot had hacked into months ago. "Step away from the Axiom device." Elliot's mind fractured into a thousand pieces. Webb was dying. The Axiom device was inches away. The transmitter was three floors above, and the military had already breached the complex. Everything was falling apart. "You don't understand what you're doing," Elliot said, hands raised. "They're dying. Three weeks—" "I know exactly how much time they have," Chen interrupted. "Because Director Webb told us. Because he's been our asset for the last fifteen years, feeding us intelligence about your activities, waiting for you to reach this exact moment." The world tilted. "The text you received," Chen continued, stepping closer with her weapon trained on Elliot's chest. "That was real. We do know what you've found. We've always known. WEXT-9 wasn't suppressed—it was a pilot program. Webb's predecessor didn't die in a classified accident—he was debriefed and reassigned. And the Axiom—" She paused, and something almost like sympathy crossed her face. "The Axiom have been in contact with us for decades. We know about their crisis. We've been offering them solutions. Military solutions. Technology exchanges. Weapons platforms that could preserve their civilization in exchange for first-contact protocols that benefit human security." Elliot looked down at Webb, who was still breathing, eyes open, watching with something like resignation. "He was never going to help you," Chen said. "He was testing you. Seeing if you were brilliant enough to be useful. Smart enough to cooperate when you understood the situation." "You're lying," Elliot said, but the words felt hollow. "Am I? Then explain this." Chen gestured, and one of her operatives moved to the Axiom device, handling it with surprising care and placing it into a containment case. "We're not hunting you because you discovered alien contact. We're recruiting you. You're the most talented signal analyst to emerge in a generation, and you've done what our teams couldn't—you've created a communication bridge with the Axiom using analog technology we couldn't monitor or control. That's valuable. That makes you valuable." The pulses continued from Elliot's receiver. The heartbeat of a dying world. "What happens if I refuse?" Elliot asked. "Then Webb was wrong about you, and I'll have to use you as a demonstration to the Axiom that we're serious about our partnership." Chen's expression hardened. "But I don't think you'll refuse. Because you're too smart to throw away your only chance to actually save them. With us, you can negotiate. You can ensure the Axiom get what they need. Without us?" She shrugged. "You become a martyr nobody remembers, and the Axiom die anyway, but at least their final transmissions feed our weapons development." Elliot felt something crystallize inside them—not hope, but clarity. The kind that comes when you see the complete picture and understand you've been playing the game wrong the entire time. "You're right," Elliot said softly. Chen's grip on her weapon loosened slightly, satisfaction flickering across her face. "I am valuable. And yes, I'll cooperate." Elliot took a step forward, toward the containment case. "But not with you." Elliot's hand moved faster than their rational mind could track, yanking the portable receiver from their belt and hurling it at the electromagnetic shielding on the chamber walls. The device shattered, and the Axiom signal exploded outward—unshielded, amplified by the chamber's metallic resonance, transmitting at maximum power directly through the Axiom device itself. Chen's weapon came up, but she was a tenth of a second too late. The Axiom device activated fully—not as a receiver, but as a transmitter. The signal that had been confined to radio frequencies for thirty years suddenly broadcast across every spectrum simultaneously: radio, microwave, infrared, visible light. It wasn't just a distress call anymore. It was a message. A confession. Thirty years of first contact, weaponization attempts, technological theft, and military negotiation broadcast to every detection system on Earth—and simultaneously, to every Axiom vessel in the solar system. Chen was screaming orders into her radio, but it didn't matter. The facility's old broadcasting equipment, still partially functional after all these years, had automatically triggered. The signal was everywhere—on commercial networks, emergency frequencies, internet bandwidth. Every astronomer on Earth would see it. Every government would receive it simultaneously. The secret was out. The Axiom device shut down, its single use expended. The chamber fell silent except for Webb's labored breathing. "You stupid kid," Chen gasped, lowering her weapon. "Do you have any idea what you just did?" Elliot did. They'd just shifted the balance of power in a way that no single person should be able to do. The military couldn't suppress a signal that was already worldwide. The Axiom couldn't be hidden anymore. And the truth—messy, complicated truth about thirty years of contact and attempted exploitation—was now public knowledge. "I contacted them," Elliot said quietly, almost to themselves. "The real way. Person to person. Without filters or agendas between us." Outside, in the city below, sirens were beginning to wail. Phones were lighting up. The network was flooding with the Axiom's message—their coordinates, their condition, their desperate need. And now, millions of people would be clamoring to help. Not governments. Not militaries. Humanity itself. It wasn't elegant. It wasn't guaranteed to work. But it was honest. Elliot walked past Chen, past her frozen operative, past the containment case, and headed for the stairs. They didn't run. Running seemed wrong somehow. The world had just fundamentally shifted, and somehow, walking felt more appropriate to the magnitude of the moment. Behind them, they heard Chen's voice, sharper than before: "You think you've won something here, Crawford?" Elliot paused on the first step up, not turning around. "You've started a war. Between nations, between militaries, between every faction that sees the Axiom as a resource to exploit. You've made them vulnerable by exposing them. And now you're going to watch as humanity's worst instincts collide with the best chance we've ever had to grow beyond ourselves." Elliot did turn then. "Maybe. But at least now it won't happen in the dark. And the Axiom will know they have advocates—people like me who chose them over the system. That has to count for something." Webb coughed, blood speckling his lips. When he smiled, it was genuine. "It does, kid. It absolutely does." Elliot climbed the stairs toward the shrieking sirens and the impossible future, leaving the ghosts of the industrial complex behind—ghosts that had finally, after thirty years, found their voice. The frequency of those ghosts was broadcasting now across every spectrum humanity could detect, and there was no going back to silence. The secrets were out. The aliens were real. And somewhere in the solar system, a civilization was listening to hear whether Earth would let them die or whether, this time, we might choose to save someone other than ourselves. It was, Elliot thought, a start.