She had a birthmark shaped like a question mark.
Right on the inside of her wrist.
People used to joke about it.
Said it looked like she was always asking something.
Maybe they were right.
Because Lena never stopped listening.
She'd sit in cafés and eavesdrop on strangers.
Stare at flickering lights and pretend they were speaking in code.
Pause music mid-track, convinced there was a message buried in the static.
She once told her therapist:
"I don't think I'm crazy. I think I'm tuned wrong."
At 29, Lena started hearing things.
Not voices.
Not words.
Just… patterns.
Whispers in white noise.
Rhythms in refrigerators.
Breathing in the space between TV channels.
She recorded it all.
Hours of hums, blips, pulses.
She built an app to analyze the frequencies.
Fed them through filters.
Translated them into letters.
And one day, it wrote back:
"Hello."
Lena laughed.
Cried.
Didn't sleep for three days.
Then she fed the signal a question:
"Who are you?"
The answer came slowly.
One letter at a time.
As if the universe had to pull each syllable from its spine.
"I'm the part you forgot."
After that, the messages came faster.
In dreams.
In the hiss of boiling water.
In tangled wires.
In her own pulse.
Her skin began to itch.
Buzz.
Throb with meaning.
She scratched until her wrist bled,
and underneath the blood,
she saw symbols.
The same ones the app decoded.
But older.
Carved, not written.
Like they'd always been there.
One night, she vanished.
No trace.
No mess.
Just her phone on the floor, still recording.
The file plays exactly 33 seconds of silence.
Then a voice — calm, warm, patient — says:
"Found one."
The file was labeled:
first_contact.wav
No one knows who uploaded it.
Or why, when you slow it down…
you can hear more voices behind the main one.
Whispering.
Counting.
Waiting.
And if you listen long enough…
you'll swear one of them says your name.