Quantum Echo Drift and Other Totally Real Things

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Limbo.

She floats, upright, suspended in nothing. Within an endless space of nothing and nowhere. Colors bloom and fade across the darkness, bleeding into each other.

Red, then blue, then purple…

It taints her skin in an ambient glow. Shapes pulse to the rhythm of a heartbeat that might be hers. Might not be.

Blank music sheets tore across her vision, whipping past. Spiraling, twisting, fluttering in weightless motion. Their edges brushed against her skin like ghost-notes.

Then disappearing back into the void from which they came.

She blinks.

The world blinks with her.

She tries to speak, but her voice catches in her throat.

She tries to walk, but her feet don’t touch the nonexistent ground.

Instead, her body disjointedly drifts through the air. Her limbs numb. As if they weren’t hers at all.

They begin to melt.

Her hands reach for her face.

The tips of her fingers turn to liquid, tracing invisible lines across the fabric of this strange space.

She blinks again, and the world blinks with her.

A hum.

Low, like a muffled melody. She recognizes it. It stirs something deep within her chest. A knot tightens in the pit of her stomach.

And then it appeared.

A mirror.

A lone mirror in an otherwise infinite darkness.

She sees her reflection staring back at her. Or was it her? She couldn’t tell.

Then the reflection in the mirror begins to change.

A room. It seemed familiar. Where had she seen it before?

It reveals more.

A shadow, a figure, a bed, a window. She can’t make them out, but they feel familiar. The space behind the mirror feels vast, and yet, it’s not empty. It’s full, but full of what?

She feels herself drawn towards it, hoping to get a better view.

The reflection continues to transform. Molding, building.

She gets a little closer.

And then, a voice.

It’s familiar. She doesn’t know if it’s hers, but it feels like it could be.

It bounces across time and space.

It’s calling. Calling out to her? What was it saying?

She moves a little closer. Despite herself, despite the weight in her chest, despite the primal part of her mind telling her not to.

The voice calls out again.

This time, she hears it:

Who are you?

*

The chirp of birds broke the quiet of the morning.

Haruki stared down at her phone.

A text from Aika.

“Hey, I heard what happened at practice yesterday. Hope you’re feeling better.”

Haruki quickly typed out a reply.

“Yeah, weird practice. I’m fine though. Just needed rest.”

Another message popped up.

“Kenji’s still looking at the audio. Wants to talk about it after school.”

*

“I still don’t know why I’m being dragged along for this,” Sakura complained. “Kenji is a total creep. Why do we need his help?”

“Maybe because this is a band matter, and you’re a part of it…” 

“Yeah, right. I’ll bet he just told you some geeky, schizophrenic nonsense, and now here we are.”

A pause, then Aika replied...

“Pretty much.”

“But don’t you want to know what happened to the audio?” Haruki added. “What if it’s our equipment, or worse, what if it happens during the next performance?”

Mayumi was trailing behind them, her body starting to shiver cartoonishly.

“What if it’s… it’s… ghooosts??”

Sakura let out a loud scoff.

“Oh please, the only ghost here is that hikikomori in the computer lab.”

Aika pushed the door to the computer club open and the four of them peeked in.

Kenji was sitting at his usual spot at the back of the room: headphones on, in a slouched position, surrounded by a tangled mess of cables. His monitor flashed something indecipherable from a distance and must have had over thirty windows open at once. He hadn’t seemed to notice the band entering.

They walked toward his desk and stopped about five feet from him.

Aika, standing right behind him, crossed her arms.

“KENJI!”

“GAH—!”

He lunged for his mouse, scrambling desperately to close tabs.

“It’s not what it looks like—I—I was researching—!”

“Seriously?” Sakura said flatly. “Relax. We don’t care about your bunny girl fetish or whatever.”

“It was an algorithm fail!!”

“…you look up one thing about quantum echo drift in audio latency maps and the next thing you know, you’ve been tricked into engaging in a psy-op honeypot disguised by lewd imagery!”

“So… you’re telling us you were researching the science of music-induced telepathy and wound up on a cosplay fan site?” Haruki asked with a raised eyebrow.

“GOVERNMENT AGENTS!” Kenji cried.

The entire band face-palmed.

“Well? You said you wanted to talk?” Aika cut to the point. “Why did you drag us here?”

Kenji looked up. “Right. Right. The audio anomaly.”

He spun dramatically in his swivel chair to face the four of them.

He cleared his throat, putting on the voice of a man who’d clearly spent all night over-analyzing. “So, because I’m such a nice guy, I ran the raw audio through a multi-band spectral analyzer, did a full phase inversion check, and even layered it into a bitcrusher chain just for kicks. And what I found was… strange to say the least.”

Kenji gestured excitedly at his screen.

“I cross-referenced the signal footprint with a set of frequency signatures from both environmental recordings and an old archive I… uh… borrowed…”

Silence.

“So we know it loops. Big deal. Echoes bounce, right? Reflections phase out, yadda yadda. But get this… it’s synthetically modulated convolution mapped onto a time-variant impulse response. Like someone’s puppet-mastering the RT60 curve in real time.”

He spun toward them, eyes wide.

More silence…

“…Kenji, I know you’re a touch-less nerd but do you mind explaining that in human?”

Kenji deflated in his seat slightly, rubbing the back of his neck.

“Imagine you’re playing a song, right?” Kenji began, haphazardly swiping some crumbs off his uniform. “Everything’s normal. You’re in the zone. The crowd’s pretending to care, Mayumi’s distracted by the stage lights like a woodland creature, and for once, Sakura’s actually on beat…”

“Hey—!”

“…then, out of nowhere, the reverb—the actual sound reflections themselves? They start spazzing out. And I don’t mean ‘you flubbed the chord progression’ kinda spazzing. More like someone snuck into the file mid-play, carved something in audio hieroglyphics, then bailed without leaving a signature…”

“…and it only kicks in at the exact moment the mic was facing the center of the stage. Not a second before, or after.”

Aika crossed her arms. “So, haunted stage. Cool.”

Mayumi gasped, covering her mouth with her hands.

“G-G-Ghosts!!”

Kenji ignored them.

He pulled up a spectrogram on his computer. The screen displayed a chaotic mess of waveforms and highlighted regions.

“Look. See this? These peaks don’t match the source frequencies. They shouldn’t even be there. But they’re repeating. That’s not decay or feedback. That’s 100% intentional.”

Sakura’s patience was waning now.

“Just cut to the freaking point, Kenji!”

He adjusted his glasses, nodding to himself.

“The point is, you’ll need to return to the original source. Same variables, same conditions. If it’s some kind of environmental interference, we’ll have a control to compare it to. If the anomaly reappears… well, that’s no longer coincidence.”

“Return? You mean back to the live house?” Haruki asked.

“That is correct, yes.”

The band members exchanged looks for a moment.

“I suppose we could…” Aika began before trailing off.

Kenji slid the headphones over his ears and waved. “Ok, bye now!”

“Not so fast.”

Aika put a hand on his shoulder, startling him.

“Huh?”

“You’re coming with us.”

“What? Why?!”

“Because if it is ghosts, we’ll need someone to be the bait.”

“Yeah right! Haven’t I helped you enough already? This is your problem, not mine. And besides, I’m in the middle of a critical level grind quest right now and I can’t leave this spot—”

“Too bad.”

Aika lifted Kenji out of his seat by his sleeve and began to pull him towards the door.

“H—HEY!!”

“Think of it as a new quest. You’ll survive.”

“H—HELP! I’m… I’m being kidnapped!!”

Kenji cried out, but his cries went unanswered.