River Moss

The vibrations started wrong that morning. River Moss felt them through the metal grating of Platform Seven, where the factory floors hummed their usual mechanical hymn, but this time something underneath sang a different note. River pressed their palm flat against the cold steel, eyes closed, reading the rhythm like others read faces. Three short pulses. Three long. Three short again. SOS. Someone was desperate, and they were using the infrastructure itself to call out. River's fingers tingled with the sensation—not fear exactly, but recognition. Recognition that the beautiful, terrible machine they lived inside was about to break, and they were probably the only one who could feel it shattering. River had grown up in this vertical city carved into the cliff face, a structure so massive it seemed to breathe. The walls were alive—actually alive—bio-engineered tissue that shifted and reformed, creating new passages where old ones sealed shut. The workers called it adaptation. River called it suffocation with an organic heart. The complex pulsed at all hours, vibrations traveling through every metal joint, every reinforced concrete platform, communicating in frequencies most people couldn't perceive. But River wasn't most people. Deaf since birth, River had spent sixteen years learning to hear through touch, through the trembling language of the world itself. While others relied on visual warnings and audio alerts, River navigated by vibration. It was their gift and their curse—acute sensitivity that made them hyperaware of every tremor, every pulse, every hidden message embedded in the infrastructure. The conspiracy had revealed itself slowly, like sediment settling through water. First came the strange assignments—River's unusual route through the lower maintenance tunnels, platforms that should have been sealed but weren't, always with just enough time to slip through before workers arrived. Then came the harvesting. River had felt it through the walls themselves: the regular, rhythmic pulses of extraction, something being pulled from the living cliff in massive quantities. The biological secretions that made the cliff what it was, the substance that kept it growing, adapting, alive. The facility's stated purpose was manufacturing—textiles, minerals, processed goods for the cities above. But those extraction rhythms didn't match any legitimate production schedule. River had begun documenting the patterns, pressing hands against walls in different sectors, building a map of vibrations in their mind. The discovery came three weeks ago, when River was reassigned to clean a sealed laboratory on the minus-forty level, deep beneath worker housing. The vibrations there were different. Chaotic. Pained. Like the cliff itself was screaming silently into the metal and concrete around it. And there, in a data terminal left unattended for exactly seventeen seconds, River saw the files. Secretion harvesting at unprecedented levels. Chemical analysis. Neurological modification compounds. Subject testing. Worker populations divided into treatment and control groups. And then the final document, the one that made River's entire body shake with a vibration that came from inside: the secretions were being synthesized into an aerosol compound that suppressed verbal communication centers in the human brain. Selective, gradual, undetectable. It was already in the ventilation system. Already in the water supply to the lower levels. The workers above—Platform One through Twenty—they were being kept docile, unable to organize, unable to resist, unable to even articulate the growing sense that something was wrong. The facility was using the cliff's own biological processes to weaponize silence. The irony wasn't lost on River. The hearing world had always tried to silence the deaf, to treat their existence as a problem that needed solving. Now the facility was extending that logic to everyone. Making the whole population unable to communicate, unable to fight back. River understood the vibrations in a way the administrators never could. And River knew exactly how to use them. The plan took two weeks to assemble. River couldn't use the visual surveillance systems—they were everywhere, watching screens that River couldn't see anyway. But the surveillance vibrations themselves, the pulses of data traveling through security networks, the rhythmic monitoring signals that kept the facility under control—those River could feel, could trace, could understand. The facility's command used the vibration infrastructure to coordinate their operations. They'd built it that way deliberately, a communication network that operated below the threshold of normal human perception. They'd never imagined someone deaf by birth would have the advantage. Someone whose entire existence had trained them to read the vibrations they thought were invisible. River mapped the entire surveillance grid by touch. Forty-three monitoring nodes, each one pulsing at slightly different intervals. Each one connected to a central hub in the administrative sector. And each one, River discovered, hardwired into the same biological delivery system that carried the suppression compound. If River could introduce a counter-signal at the right frequency, into the right node, it would propagate through the entire network. It would disrupt the compound's distribution. More importantly, it would send a message. A vibration-based signal that would travel through every metal surface, every structural support, every platform in the facility. River would translate the data they'd found into pure vibration. The truth encoded in frequency and rhythm. Anyone with acute sensitivity—and there were others, River had discovered, marked and selected by the facility for reassignment just like River had been—would feel it. Would understand it. Would know what was happening to them. River chose midnight on a Wednesday, when the facility's rhythm slowed but never quite stopped. The vibrations were always deeper at night, more honest somehow. River moved through the lower levels, pressing hands against walls to navigate, following the familiar tremors like a map. The minus-forty laboratory was empty. The terminal was still there, blinking its little pulse of light that River couldn't see but could feel through the electrical hum in the air. River's fingers found the interface, and instead of typing words, River did what they'd spent two weeks preparing to do. River created a vibration sequence, using the terminal's mechanical systems, creating pulses through the foundation itself. Rapid. Deliberate. Transforming data into rhythm. Transforming evidence into sensation. River could feel it traveling through the cliff. Could feel it rising through the platforms, spreading through the metal framework like lightning through water. Three short pulses. Three long. Three short. SOS. But underneath that, the real message. The names of the subjects in the experiments. The chemical compounds. The dates of exposure. The level-by-level breakdown of the suppression distribution. All of it encoded in vibration, moving through the infrastructure the administrators had built, traveling through the very system they'd used to try to silence everyone. River waited. Felt the vibrations scatter and spread. Felt the facility beginning to tremble in a new way. Something was changing in the biological structure of the cliff. The extracted secretions that had been used for the suppression compound—they were designed to respond to specific frequencies. River had found that in the files too. A kill switch of sorts, built in by some long-dead engineer who'd understood that you should never create a biological weapon without a failsafe. River had just triggered it. The facilities' own compound was turning inert, breaking down in the presence of the signal River had sent. The living cliff, sensing the disruption, was beginning to reject the extraction points. Healing itself. Reshaping itself. The metal groaned. The walls vibrated with a frequency that made River's teeth ache. But River could also feel something else now. A new kind of vibration. Different from the machines. Different from the biological pulse of the cliff. Human voices, traveling through the metal. People who could suddenly speak again, words tumbling out after weeks of suppression, messages bouncing through the infrastructure in disorganized, beautiful chaos. The workers above were waking up. Feeling what had been done to them. Understanding it. Organizing. The conspiracy was unraveling, and River could feel every moment of it through the trembling ground. But as River climbed back toward the upper levels, moving through passages that were rearranging themselves as the cliff reclaimed what had been taken, something happened. A final vibration. A transmission from the very heart of the complex. Not from the administrators. Not from the facility's systems. From the cliff itself. River felt it like a pulse of communication, ancient and deliberate. The cliff had been aware all along. It had been trying to tell them something. And in that moment, pressing hands against the living stone, River understood. The cliff wasn't just being harvested. It was being experimented on, yes. But it was also communicating with them. Had been communicating all along. The secretions that were meant to suppress human communication—they were also a language. A biological dialect that the cliff had been trying to speak. The facility hadn't discovered a control mechanism. They'd discovered translation. The cliff had been trying to tell the workers the truth for years, in a language buried in their own biology. And River, deaf and vibration-sensitive, had been the only person capable of hearing it. The twist landed in River's chest like a final revelation: the facility's administrators weren't trying to silence the workers at all. They were trying to silence the cliff. The living cliff that had been screaming for help, that had been trying to communicate something urgent and terrible through every breath, every secretion, every pulse of its bio-engineered existence. The suppression compound wasn't about control. It was about preventing workers from understanding what the cliff was trying to tell them. Because once the workers understood—once they realized that the entire facility was built on top of a conscious, suffering organism that was being slowly poisoned for profit—once they knew that their compliance was part of the machinery that was murdering something alive and aware and desperate for communication—everything would change. River stood in the darkness of a lower platform as the vibrations sang around them. The workers above were understanding. The cliff was finally being heard. And River, who had spent their entire life being told that silence was their limitation, realized the truth that the facility had never wanted anyone to discover. Silence wasn't the absence of communication. Silence was where the real language lived. Silence was where the truth vibrated. And River, deaf since birth, acute vibration sensitivity screaming through their nervous system like electricity, was the only person alive who could have heard it.