Echo Chamber of Secrets

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Limbo.

She floats, upright, suspended in nothing and nowhere within this strange womb. Colors bloom and wane, bleeding into each other, tainting her skin in ambiance.

Red, then blue, then purple…

Blank music sheets tore across her vision, whipping past in a spiraling, weightless motion. Their edges brushed against her skin as they fluttered past.

Then disappearing back into the abyss from which they came.

She blinks.
The space blinks with her.

She tries to speak, but her voice catches in her throat.
She tries to walk, but she finds no surface below her feet.

Instead, her body disjointedly drifts through the air.
Her limbs are numb as if she didn't have any at all.

Her hands reach for her face.

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

And then, a voice.
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?

⊹ ▬ ▬ ⊹ ⊹ ▬ ▬ ▬ ⊹

“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.”

“Pretty much.” Aika replied after a pause. 

“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 shivered 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, surrounded by a tangled mess of cables. His monitor flashed something indecipherable and he 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!”

“AAH—!”

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 a voice that was a little too proud, “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 bit crusher chain just for kicks. And what I found was… strange to say the least.”

Kenji gestured at his monitor.

“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.”

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—!”

“… And 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 kicked 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, highlighted regions, and some sort of AMV on mute. 

“Look. See this? These peaks don’t match the source frequencies. They shouldn’t even be there, but they are... and 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 readjusted 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, pulling him towards the door.

“H—HEY!!”

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

“H—HELP! I’m… I’m being kidnapped!!”

Kenji cried out, but his cries went unanswered.

⊹ ▬ ▬ ⊹ ⊹ ▬ ▬ ▬ ⊹

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

On weekends, the venue would have been alive with the sounds of indie rock at this time of evening. On weekdays, however, they were conveniently closed. The band would be able to investigate undisturbed. 

Last time they were here, the place had been packed. Fire-hazard packed. Most of the venue-goers were there to see a more popular band scheduled to perform after them, but even so, it was a huge step for Harmonic Distortions. Haruki could still remember the sounds from that night, how her ears still rang for hours afterwards. Now the silence was deafening.

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

“Seriously, guys, this is trespassing!”

“Oh, please, you’re acting like we’re about to rob the place. It’s a live house, not a bank.” Sakura said, who was in charge of watching Kenji in case he thought of running off. “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 five of them reached the main entrance.

The neon sign above the door still flickered the words 'YORU NO MIRAI SUSUKINO' . Posters of past shows lined the exterior walls, layering over one another.

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 reached up to her fluffy blond hair and pulled out a hairpin.

“Wait, what are you—”

Before he could finish, Mayumi had already stuck 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, as expected for a building under maintenance, dark and quiet. 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. However, the sight of a stage devoid of any life made Haruki feel uneasy somehow. 

A plastic bottle fell from the counter, bouncing across the floor. It landed on the floor and rolled towards them.

“EEP!”  Sakura yelped. 

She instinctively grabbed Kenji’s arm in a panic.

He stared, glasses sliding down his nose.

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.

“Right, so you’ll have to recreate the same performance so we can figure out if it's the building itself that has something to do with it.”

Sakura crossed her arms, still a little red. “Alright, 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.”

“Then it’s settled," Aika declared. "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, Kenji?”

“Huh? Oh. Yeah, same song. Sorry.”

Kenji was crouched on the dance floor with his laptop and a small USB audio interface, trying to plug 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.

“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 gestured awkwardly, adjusted the gain one last time, and hit record. The band played, exactly as they had that night, careful not to miss a single note.

When the song ended, the four were drenched in sweat. They put down their instruments and leaped off the stage onto the dance floor to meet Kenji. 

He was squinting at the screen. 

“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 pattern? What if it’s not noise? What if it’s encoded? Buried inside the sound—”

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

He slipped on his headphones and played the distorted waveform on loop.

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 a half-dead marker.

Kenji took them without a word, and 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. A drop of sweat had run down his forehead, but his face remained calm.

“Well?” Aika asked.

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

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—89 is ‘Y,’ 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?” 

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.

YOU ARE THE ANCHOR

🎸