*click*
♫"-say things you don’t understand-“♫
*click*
♫”-if you creeping, please don’t let it show-“♫
*click*
“-ing to TRVE ROCK FOREVER, at 104.3 FM!”
Fine enough.
Jess leaned back in her seat as the radio host went through his usual self-aggrandizing spiel. Tapping her fingers on the wheel to the beat of the muffled background track provided some well-needed distraction from the awful traffic ahead and aggravating voice in her ears alike.
I get it dude, everything made past the year of my birth sucks. Can you put on some tunes now?
Thankfully, she wouldn’t have to wait too long for her request to be fulfilled; the final ad break soon coming to a close and gracing her ears with whichever many hundredth listen of Down With The Sickness.
Overplayed or not, a bop is a bop.
The congestion in front of her finally loosening up distracted Jess from being able to hum along with the tunes too accurately beyond broadly matching the bass line. Classic or not, seems this one would be relegated to the role of filler background tunes-
Or so she thought.
“I̅t s̅ee̅m̅s w̅h̅at̅’̅s̅ lef̅t o̅f̅ my̅ h̅um̅a̅n s̅i̅de I̅s s̅lo̅wl̅y̅ ch̅a̅ngi̅ng̅ i̅n m̅e̅-“
The beeps were only barely audible, so high pitched Jess was keen to not give them any more thought on behalf of them merely being some sort of glitch. She was about to try her luck with a less buggy station, but then… she caught it.
Is this… Morse?
As soon as Jess tried to focus on extracting meaning out of these bugged whines, they were gone; the track continuing as if nothing was amiss.
♫”Oh, no, there is no turning back now
You’ve woken up the demon in me"♫
----------------------------------------
In the grand scheme of things, some bugged noises on the radio weren’t much to write home about. Trashy station with a love boner for the eighties being too poor to upgrade their hardware beyond said decade; what else is new. At the same time… it wasn’t just some glitch, Jess was certain of that. A singular drawn out whine sure, but not something this ordered, this regular.
Something was afoot.
And if only Jess had any idea whatsoever what it might have been, she might have even gotten anywhere with her pondering.
But alas, it was not the case. Work came and went with almost no productivity to speak of; the ride back home was little more than a blur to the backdrop of the same five overplayed classics. All the while, she chewed through getting any progress done in solving this mystery. She’d need some way of going back and listening to that broadcast again, which to her knowledge wasn’t possible.
That is… unless someone else had already done the hard part of transcribing the hidden message for her.
The dinner was shoved into the microwave and swiftly forgotten about as Jess’s focus shifted over to Google. She attempted to wrangle the behemoth of a search engine into revealing the secrets of the universe to her, one string of keywords at the time.
“seattle 104.3fm 07.03.23 beeping”
“seattle true rock forever glitch”
“seattle radio morse code 07.03.23”
Nothing of value, again and again.
The closest Jess got to any worthwhile revelation was a Facebook post by a soccer mom complaining about weird noises on the radio at about the same time as when the morse code message was transmitted. It didn’t even specify a station, much to her irritation; failing to even unequivocally confirm that she’d heard what she’d heard and wasn’t going insane.
She was about to call it quits there and then, finally grab her long-since cold dinner and relax to her favorite Twitch stream… before getting one final hunch.
“true rock forever radio station archive”
No way.
The YouTube channel sat at an admirable fourteen subscribers, many of the videos without as much as a single view to their name. Twelve hour blocks of low quality audio paired with a still, extremely compressed image of the station’s logo, dating back years. And, among them, today’s broadcast, uploaded just twenty minutes ago; having already racked up the inspiring viewer count of… three.
Jess’s heart thumped in her ears as she clicked the play button. She immediately started jumping around the timeline, searching for any information about the current time. This was six; she heard that message at around quarter to eight, skip ahead, skip ahead, skip ahead-
♫"OOH, WAH-AH-AH-AH-“♫
There we go.
And sure enough, there was the Morse code, archived with the rest of the broadcast. In her manic search, Jess realized she didn’t have anything to actually write the message on; the realization snapping her out of her hyper-focus. Her eyes jumped all around her desk, hands patting every inch of her pocket and purse in search of a suitable canvas-
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
An old, crumpled receipt, gotta suffice.
Jess replayed that section of the song again and again; the hidden message coming together one beep and boop at a time. Now to consult a translation chart, and see what's hiding in here~.
2131555602
Was this… a number station… thing?
She’d heard many urban myths about them, but thought they’d be their own thing as opposed to being snuck in on top of a regular broadcast. In either case, the numbers on their own explained little, her progress arriving at an apparent dead end.
Hmm.
Six-oh-two.
What if-
(206) 555-1312
A local phone number.
Jess blinked at that realization; instinctually reaching for her phone before stopping. Hidden message inside a radio broadcast, turning out to be an obfuscated telephone number. If not for her being as terminally online as she was, she might have even gotten a bit spooked at that procession of events.
She’d always wanted to take part in an ARG, and now she’d managed to stumble face first onto one during her morning transit. One hell of a way to spice up her Monday routine.
Don’t mind if I do~
Though… let’s use her work phone for this, just to be safe.
Jess took a deep breath as she finished dialing in the number, thumb hovering over the Call button. She had no idea where that sudden burst of hesitation came from, but it was no less potent despite that. It’s just a silly game being set up by a nerd with way too much free time on their hands and a relative who worked at a shitty radio station.
What was there to fear? Having a neckbeard rant into her ear about how she was going against his arbitrary rules?
Let's do this.
Nothing but silence answered her for a few seconds, before abruptly cutting off to a pre-recorded message read back by a robotic voice-
“-Alpha. Uniform. Uniform. Alpha. Two. Victor. X-Ray. Echo. Charlie. RAT-“
Huh, that last word sounded weird.
She’d spent enough time around her way-into-military brother to decipher the NATO phonetic alphabet with little difficulty; revealing another string of what appeared to be random characters. C'mon, an ARG, it's obviously a part of an URL, but what for? Too short for YouTube, so… Pastebin.
There we go.
Unsurprisingly, the paste contained just a single line of what looked like random characters. One Caesar's cipher later, they turned into a URL, leading Jess to another page, once more empty aside from a small bit of text.
The chase from page to page got trickier the deeper in she went, but never quite too hard. Digging information out of the background noise of an unlisted video with four views? Took a bit of fiddling, but doable. Having to access a few specific pages with Tor for them to load properly? Unintuitive, but ultimately straightforward.
Each bit of progress tingled the rodent part of her brain; pulls of the metaphorical lever rewarding her each time with not-at-all-metaphorical dopamine. She had no idea what this ARG was even for, but goddamn, she was here for it. Hours passed by in what felt like minutes; the gradual depletion of her water bottle being the only indication of the passage of time.
Alright, a YouTube link, let's see-
♫”Be-boop be-boop, be-boop be-boop-“♫
Who’s calling- oh.
“Hey hey Johnny, what’s up?” - Jess spoke offhandedly after accepting the call with a hotkey; both her monitors occupied by dozens of tabs, about everything from various ciphers to several results of googling "audacity tutorial".
“Jess, are you alright?” - Her friend’s voice was alarmed, finally snapping the wannabe investigator out of her focus.
“Hmm? Why wouldn’t I be?”
"Your status looks weird."
A glance at her Discord revealed the quirky one-liner that sat below her username to have been replaced with just “RAT”, the word giving Jess whiplash.
“I, uh… got distracted, is all.”
“Oh thank God, I thought something bad had happened.”
“I’m sorry man, didn’t mean to spook y’all.”
“It’s alright Jess, don’t worry, just glad to hear you’re fine and all. Still down for the game night on Friday?”
“Yep yep, see ya then, Johnny.”
♫"Ba-ba-bum.“♫
Alright, what the fuck.
Has one of the sketchy websites she'd visited today given her PC digital herpes? She was much smarter than to click any fake links or to do anything with the files these sites downloaded but immediately delete them.
Worth running an antivirus scan overnight either way. Probably a good idea to lay off this whole goose chase too, considering the messed up impact it was having on her PC, but…
Let's check out this latest link first, just in case.
Oh shit.
The video’s title was empty, the channel name consisting of random characters with a default thumbnail. Its premiere was scheduled for midnight, denying her any immediate answers.
As clear of a perfect stopping spot for tonight as she was gonna get. Let's finally grab-
Oh, come on, the dinner’s gone cold.
----------------------------------------
Ah, insomnia.
You bastard.
A grumbled check of her phone determined the time to be just after six. Too early to get up, too late to get any more sleep in. Couldn’t think of a more awkward hour to wake up if she’d tried.
Might as well get an early breakfast and chat some more with her friends in Australia-
Zero Discord notifications overnight.
The realization sped up her ordinarily sluggish awakening by an order of magnitude. Her lock screen was swiftly replaced with the messaging app’s gray background, the server icons all gone. Wouldn’t be the first time a backend outage resulted in a messed up server list, maybe it’s just-
Her friend list was empty, the entire account renamed to just “RAT”.
Okay, what the fuck was going on?
Still in her pajamas, Jess walked over to her PC setup; brow furrowing by the moment. Was her Discord account completely hacked overnight? Guess whatever virus she'd caught ended up finishing its job before the antivirus had quarantined it. Not what she wanted to wake up to, but not the end of the world, either. Just gotta contact support and they’d figure it out in time.
And in the meantime, it was as good a time as any to see the timegated vid for herself, finally.
Twenty seconds of harsh static with an all black video accompanying it. Probably got a secret message hidden in the noise; she’d have to fiddle around with Audacity once she was back home from work. Let’s see if the title had been updated in the meantime. F5, aaand-
STAGE 6A: RAT HUNTING
A cold jolt went down Jess’ back as she read the title again and again, a glance over at Discord confirming that association. She could see that the description box wasn’t empty either; her shaking hand navigating the cursor to open it.
DUE TO UNFORESEEN CIRCUMSTANCES, STAGE 7 HAS BEEN REPLACED WITH A NEW TASK.
A STRAY RAT HAS STUMBLED UPON OUR LITTLE COMPETITION.
YOU KNOW WHAT TO DO.
And, underneath it all, her address.