“Are you still in the lab? I swear to God, it is like you don’t even sleep anymore!”

I grabbed the piece of toast that Tina handed to me and took a bite before using the corner of the remaining toast to point at the little nest I created for myself using a mattress, some pillows and piles of paper, “I take power naps over there when I need to rest. Besides, I don’t need a lot of sleep. I guess that is one of the perks of having a dangerously unstable brain.”

She wasn’t very impressed with my response, and she chose to demonstrate her displeasure by smacking the back of my head with enough force to make sure it really stung. “Don’t be a smart ass. You need to sleep just like everyone else. If anything, sleep is more essential to you than other people. What could be so important that you are risking your health to stare at a bunch of screens all day?”

I rubbed my tired eyes and yawned before looking away from the holographic screens surrounding me. As much as I would have liked to deny it, I had to admit that I was pushing things a little too far. Power naps were good and all, but I hadn’t had a proper sleep in days and it was starting to show. “Alright Tina, I’ll go and sleep in my actual bed. It wasn’t like I was getting anywhere with this anyway.” I wearily powered down the computers and got up to stretch the kinks out of my spine.

It had been three weeks since me and Tricia had taken over the lab and started working. First thing we did was to check if there were any ways to send or receive information from the shelter. What we found was that all the cameras, sensors, and antennas that were outside had been fried. Thankfully, some of the subterranean solid drum-antennas were still functioning. With some clever maneuvering, Tricia was able to use the drum-antennas to receive a wide range of signals. To our disappointment, all we managed pick up was garbled noise. We spent days analyzing the noise but came up with nothing.

To be honest, I wasn’t much help at first, but I was a quick learner and had a basic understanding of programming, so I took over trying to find something useful in the noise we were collecting. I wasn’t in any way an expert in the field, but with the help of the almost endless trove of information available in the laboratory’s archives and the incredibly intuitive computer system that bordered on being an AI, I was able to apply a variety of techniques and filters to try and get something. Unfortunately, it was all for naught. Even after applying all the methods I found recorded in the repository of knowledge that was the archives, I was still left with nothing.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

As I lay on my bed, staring at the concrete ceiling and trying to fall asleep, something kept nagging at me about the signals I had been trying to analyze earlier. The program I had been using displayed the signals visually on a graph as it performed its analysis and I couldn’t stop thinking about the erratic waveforms I had seen. I had been staring at similar waveforms for days, but now that I lay down and simply remembered each and every waveform, I started to realize that there were some parts that regularly repeated themselves at some intervals. That sudden thought made me jump out from my bed and race back to the laboratory. On my way, I woke up a groggy Tricia and dragged her with me.

Tricia was still half asleep as she asked, “Why did you wake me up? Did something happen?”

I rapidly tapped on the multiple holo-screens that quickly appeared and disappeared around me as I worked. “I figured it out. I know how to clean up the noise from one of the potential messages.”

The fatigue and sleepiness she was exhibiting seemed to disappear as she spoke in agitation, “What did you say?”

“There is a looped message in here somewhere. It keeps repeating itself again and again. Of course, there is some interference that is garbling it up, but small bits of it still manage to pass through. I will take advantage of this to create an algorithm based on an interpolation function to find the most common repeating patterns to reconstruct the original waveform.”

As I was speaking. My hands and fingers never stopped working and right as I finished, one of the nine screens that formed a wall in front of me made a loud beeping sound and a red blinking dot started flashing on an adjacent screen to its left. The results I was seeing made me so excited that I jumped in joy up and hugged the uncharacteristically bewildered Tricia. “This is it! This is the message!”

Not able to wait another second, I pressed play on what was apparently a video file. A slightly older Asian gentlemen appeared on the screen and started to speak, “To whomever might be listening, this is New York Mayor Damien Wu. Most of the tristate area has been completely wiped out. What remains of the fire department and police force have been using the underground subway and sewer systems to launch rescue operations, but we’ve had very limited success. I beseech whoever is watching this to send aid to our city. We are in desperate need of help!”

The video had barely finished playing when multiple beeps started going off. More and more red dots appeared and started blinking, each representing a different message.

Tricia and I could only watch in slack-jawed amazement as the number of red dots just kept increasing.