Echo Chamber of Secrets

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It was a long walk from the school to the live house. Especially since Haruki had to carry her guitar on her back and one of Sakura’s cymbals in her hand.

Normally, the place would have been open at this time of evening, alive with the sounds of indie rock and chatter. This week, however, it had been shut down for maintenance work. In honesty, it was perfect timing. Completely empty, and the band could investigate without interruption.

Last time they were here, the place had been packed. Like fire-hazard packed. Most of the venue-goers that night were there to see a more popular band scheduled to perform after them, but even so, it was a huge step for Harmonic Distortions and probably the most fun Haruki had ever had. Mayumi had slipped on a cable and laughed so hard she forgot to be embarrassed. Aika had screamed at the sound guy for botching the monitors. Sakura had almost fought someone in the crowd for shoving. And Haruki… she’d felt so alive. The memories of the sounds of that night were intense.

Now the silence was deafening.

Aika was in the front, leading the group. Kenji was in the back, whining.

“Seriously, guys, this is trespassing!”

Sakura was put in charge of watching over Kenji in case he thought of running off.

“Oh, please, you’re acting like we’re about to rob the place. It’s a live house, not a bank.”

She turned back around.

“Besides, this was your idea.”

“We could get in trouble.”

“You’re such a little pussy. I bet you’re just scared of the dark.”

“I’m not scared.”

“Yeah, right.”

Finally, the group reached the main entrance.

The sign above the door still flickered the words ‘LIVE JAM SEVENTH’ and posters of old band performances lined the exterior walls, peeling at the corners.

Aika turned and called out to the rest.

“All right, you guys ready for this?”

“Let’s just get it over with,” Kenji responded.

Aika then turned to Mayumi and gave her a small nod.

“This is locked, Aika. What’s the point?”

“Just wait.”

Mayumi, as if on cue, reached up to her fluffy blond hair and pulled out a hairpin.

“Wait, what are you—”

Before he could finish, Mayumi had already knelt down, sticking the pin into the lock.

“See? It’s locked. This is useless—”

Click.

Mayumi flashed a wide, innocent grin at Kenji.

“She’s full of surprises,” Haruki said with a wink.

Aika stepped inside first.

“This better have been worth the walk, Kenji.”

The live house was quiet—and dark—in the way that buildings closed for maintenance typically were. There was a faint smell of stale beer and dried sweat in the air, and there was some caution tape around an exposed pipe on the wall. Besides that, Haruki thought it looked like any other venue they had performed at in the past. Though, the sight of a stage devoid of any life felt unnatural to her.

A plastic bottle fell from the counter, bouncing across the floor. It landed with a harmless tap and rolled a few inches.

“EEP!” Sakura yelped. She instinctively grabbed Kenji’s arm in a panic.

He stared.

Sakura’s face went beet red. She let go.

“It… it was just a reflex!”

Mayumi giggled under her breath.

They made their way further into the building. Past the dance floor, and the seating area, and the bar, finally stopping when they reached the stage.

“Now what?” Haruki asked.

Kenji adjusted his glasses. “Right, so here’s the deal. The noise in the recording isn’t random. I ran it through a spectral analysis and it’s weird. Too weird to be just static.”

“Weird how?”

“Well, normally sound decays, right? But there’s a frequency that just won’t die out. Just hangs there, constant. My theory is that this building might be the key. Every structure has its own unique acoustic environment—this would be no different. Under the same exact conditions, certain frequencies will be amplified with the same constant amplitude.”

Sakura folded her arms. “How about in English this time?”

“…basically the stage is messing with the sound all weird. You’ll have to recreate the same environment as before so we can figure out if this space has something to do with it.”

“All right, genius, show us what happens when we recreate your experiment in this echo chamber.”

“Trust me, if the same signature emerges, it won’t be coincidence anymore. We’ll have control data that tells us exactly what we’re dealing with.”

Aika did a quick survey of the stage then spoke.

“Then it’s settled. We set up our equipment here and run the test.”

The band got to work, setting up as they normally did, except this time there was no crowd.

They found the switch to the main spotlight and flicked it on, lighting up center stage in a cone of yellow-white light in an otherwise sea of darkness.

Haruki adjusted her guitar strap and tested a few notes. Mayumi carried over her keyboard and set it down beside her foldable stool. Sakura tapped her hi-hat.

“Same song as before, right?”

“If we wanna match the conditions, yeah,” Aika said, rolling out a mic cable from the mixer, “we need to play the same song, the same way…”

“…right, Kenji?”

“Huh? Oh. Yeah. Same song. Sorry.”

Kenji, crouched on the dance floor with his laptop and a small USB audio interface, plugged the XLR cable into the condenser mic he’d brought with him. The tangled cables ran from the stage to the dance floor like jungle vines.

Kenji stood and called out to the band.

“All right, mic is in the same spot as last time. I’ve got a multitrack this time, so each instrument has its own channel. That way if something glitches, we’ll know exactly where.”

“And remember,” he added, “even just a small hiccup could ruin the whole thing. So try to play as clean as possible, okay?”

Haruki tuned her guitar to drop D.

“Give us the signal when you’re ready.”

He nodded, adjusted the gain one last time, and hit record.

“Okay… we’re rolling.”

Haruki turned to the others, giving them the nod.

She stepped to the mic and took a deep breath.

“Three, two, one—”

When the song ended, the band was drenched in sweat.

“Cut,” Kenji said. “That’s perfect.”

The band put down their instruments, leaped off the stage onto the dance floor and made their way towards Kenji.

Kenji was squinting at the screen, tapping his fingers on his lap.

“All right, good news, bad news,” he said. “Good news, the main track’s clean. No glitches there.”

The band let out a collective breath.

“That’s a step in the right direction,” Aika replied. “So… what’s the bad news?”

“The bad news…” He zoomed in on the guitar track. “One of the guitar tracks? Totally scrambled. Same as before.”

Mayumi leaned in with a curious look.

“But it was in a different spot this time, right?”

Kenji nodded.

“Yep. That’s the weird part.”

He stared at the glitch, rubbing the side of his face with his hand.

He kept staring at the screen. Then, it was as if he had a “eureka” moment.

“What if…”

Everyone turned.

He returned to his laptop and started typing rapidly, opening a separate program with dozens of complicated dials and graphs.

“Remember how I said it had a pulse? What if it’s not noise? What if it’s encoded—buried inside the sound—?”

“Yeah, you’ve said that already,” Sakura deadpanned.

Kenji didn’t respond.

He slipped on his headphones and began to play the distorted waveform on loop as he fiddled with settings, sliding filters, isolating peaks and valleys.

He paused, rewound, adjusted again.

The band watched in silence as Kenji worked with inhuman speed.

Suddenly, he jolted up from his seat.

“Hey—does anyone have a pen? And paper. Quick.”

“I’ve got some!” Mayumi handed him a flyer and half-dead marker.

Kenji took them without a word, flipped the flyer over to the blank side. He began scribbling something down. Not looking up. Not speaking.

When he finished, he pulled off the headphones.

He exhaled. His face was pale, but calm.

“Well?” Aika asked.

He said nothing. Just flipped the flyer around and held it out:

68 79 78 84 32 73 71 78 79 82 69 32 73 84

The girls stared blankly.

“…do we look like robots to you?” Sakura remarked.

Kenji sighed, pulling the flyer back. “It’s binary. ASCII code, to be specific. Each set of eight digits represents a letter or symbol.”

“See—68 is ‘D,’ 79 is ‘O’…” he narrated under his breath.

Then, with a final stroke of the marker, he flipped the flyer towards them again.

“Hey… isn’t this Haruki’s track?” Kenji asked.

They turned to look at her.

Haruki, being the furthest back, stepped closer until the flyer was in full view.

Her eyes locked onto the message.

D O N T — I G N O R E — I T