Chapter 11: Don't Answer That Phone |
It should have been empty, but now a faint, ethereal hum emanated from it, like a fragmented melody captured by an old radio on a poor-signal midnight.
The sound echoed and refracted in the empty corridor, seeping into the bone marrow from all directions, making it impossible to pinpoint its source.
Su Wanying's breath hitched. She subconsciously grabbed Shen Mo's arm, her fingertips ice-cold.
Shen Mo didn't look back. His gaze, like a probe, precisely locked onto the closed server room deep in the corridor.
The sound was coming from there.
He started walking, each step as steady as if he were measuring an unknown danger.
Su Wanying followed closely, the soft clicks of her high heels on the smooth floor sounding particularly abrupt amidst the strange humming.
The door to the server room was ajar, and the eerie green light of server indicators shone through the crack.
Shen Mo pushed open the heavy metal door. A cold draft, mixed with ozone and dust, rushed to meet them.
Shen Mo and Su Wanying exchanged a look and walked towards the sound.
Rounding the cabinets, the scene before them made both of them suck in a cold breath.
In a corner, half-hidden by clutter, was a sealed, soundproof room of about two square meters, like a makeshift recording studio.
And the strange humming was coming from an old-style tape player that was still running inside the soundproof room.
The player's casing was yellowed, its model ancient. What was most horrifying was that its power cord was neatly coiled, the plug lying forlornly on the floor, clearly long disconnected from any power source.
This machine, with no energy supply, was operating on its own.
Su Wanying's eyes were fixed on the rotating tape in the player, her voice dry with shock. "This... this is the backup tape we just took from the archives..."
Shen Mo's gaze, however, went past the player and landed on a cabinet next to it, sealed with a strip.
Through the glass door of the cabinet, they could clearly see that the original backup tape they thought they had taken was lying quietly in its original place, perfectly sealed in an anti-static bag.
A fact hit them like a bucket of ice water: the one in their hands was an "extra" second backup tape that had appeared out of thin air.
And this tape was playing the strange hum from Zhou Zhenguo's suicide scene, in a machine that couldn't be started.
"Something's wrong." Shen Mo quickly calmed down. He didn't touch the player. Instead, he took a portable oscilloscope from his toolkit and skillfully connected the probe to the player's audio output.
On the screen, a ghostly green waveform instantly appeared.
The seemingly monotonous hum, under spectrum analysis, revealed an extremely complex form, beneath the main melody, countless fine, high-frequency modulation signals surged like an undercurrent, as if hundreds or thousands of inaudible voices were simultaneously overlapping and conversing.
"Slow it down," Shen Mo said to Su Wanying in a low voice.
He adjusted the playback speed to 0.3x.
The tape's rotation speed instantly became sluggish. The humming was stretched out, becoming like a long, painful sigh from afar.
After being slowed down and digitally noise-reduced, the hidden noise was gradually stripped away. A clear, cold young female voice emerged from it, as if coming from an abyss:
"...I know... you're listening... come quickly..."
This voice was filled with an inhuman allure that drilled directly into the mind.
Su Wanying's face instantly turned deathly pale. She covered her mouth, her eyes filled with terror. "Shen Mo, this isn't a recording... It's talking to us, it's responding to us in real time!"
Shen Mo's heart also skipped a beat.
He immediately disconnected the oscilloscope, staring at the strange player. A long-forgotten term surfaced from the depths of his memory—"Echo."
An anomalous phenomenon that could parasitize information carriers and spread itself through imitation and replication.
It wasn't a ghost, but it was more troublesome than a ghost because it followed the laws of information science.
"We have to destroy it immediately," Shen Mo made a decisive decision. He took out a special anti-static shielding bag from his toolkit, preparing to forcibly remove and seal the tape.
Just as his hand was about to touch the player, the phone in his pocket vibrated urgently.
It was Sun Tao from the technical department.
"Dr. Shen! It's bad!" The voice on the other end was extremely anxious. "I just tried to recover the data from the backup tape you took, and I found a huge problem in the server logs! This recording... has been secretly accessed remotely 17 times in the past 48 hours!"
Shen Mo's heart sank. A sense of foreboding gripped his heart.
"What about the IP addresses?"
"That's the weirdest part!" Sun Tao's voice trembled slightly. "17 accesses, with IP addresses scattered across six different administrative districts in the city. I traced the access terminals. They weren't computers or mobile phones at all... but public phone booths in the old city, the internal call system of the First People's Hospital, and even a primary school's campus radio station!"
In an instant, all the clues connected into a terrifying chain in Shen Mo's mind.
He looked up sharply, surveying the cold server room, as if he could see countless invisible data streams spreading out from here.
This was not an isolated supernatural event, but a silent "information plague" that had already begun to spread.
Any device capable of receiving and emitting sound could inadvertently become a mouthpiece for the "Echo."
"Sun Tao, seal the server room immediately and activate the highest level of physical isolation protocol," Shen Mo's tone left no room for argument. "Bring your equipment to me. We'll build a temporary shielding chamber on site."
Half an hour later, a simple Faraday cage made of lead plates and wave-absorbing materials was built in the center of the server room.
Shen Mo carefully moved the still self-operating player and tape into the cage.
He connected a higher-precision spectrum analyzer, determined to completely dissect the core of this "Echo."
In the completely shielded environment, the tape's humming sounded again.
This time, even more astonishing details appeared on the spectrum analyzer's screen.
Beneath the complex modulation signals, a set of extremely regular pulse signals was hidden, like a low-frequency Morse code.
After a quick decoding, the pulse signals pointed to a clear geographical coordinate—Old Town, 114 Xingfu Road, the second basement level of an abandoned commercial and residential building.
Before they could recover from this discovery, the spectrum analyzer captured a fleeting additional audio clip at the end of the waveform.
Shen Mo immediately isolated it and played it in reverse.
A familiar electronic prompt sounded in the server room. Su Wanying and Sun Tao's faces changed at the same time.
It was the system prompt: "120 Emergency Center, your call has been connected, please speak."
Cold sweat broke out on Shen Mo's back.
He finally understood.
The "Echo" had evolved intelligence. It had constructed a perfect "trapping mechanism."
It no longer passively waited to be heard, but actively imitated public emergency service systems, inducing victims who heard the abnormal sound and felt fear or needed help to proactively dial a "distress call."
Once the victim made the call, it was equivalent to actively opening a channel, allowing the "Echo" to instantly access their spatio-temporal fragment, completing a new round of contamination and transmission.
"We must cut the transmission chain before it causes a wider infection," Shen Mo immediately conceived a bold plan—"reverse white noise coverage."
He had Sun Tao record a chaotic sound wave of a specific frequency band based on the spectrum analysis results.
This sound wave, precisely calculated, could perfectly cancel out the phase of the humming, physically erasing the "Echo's" sound.
Subsequently, Sun Tao deployed an automatic script within the local area network of the entire Anzhou Mental Health Center. Once any audio device in the system detected a voiceprint similar to the "Echo," it would immediately trigger and play this counter-audio for coverage.
The test was conducted inside the shielding cage.
The moment the counter-audio was played through the speakers, an astonishing scene occurred.
The tape inside the shielding cage suddenly began to vibrate violently, as if suffering great pain.
The plastic gears of the old player let out a strained screech, then broke with a "crack"!
Even more bizarrely, a large amount of fine water droplets condensed out of thin air on the inner wall of the shielding cage, quickly gathering into streams and flowing down, as if the cage was experiencing a miniature storm.
Shen Mo stared intently at the plummeting sound energy curve on the data screen and said in a low voice, "It's afraid of being 'muted'... because the only way it exists is to be heard."
That night, Sun Tao sent the final report: "All known server backups and contaminated terminal nodes have been cleared with counter-audio coverage."
At the end of the report, however, was an abnormal log that left Shen Mo uneasy: after the last audio coverage of a contaminated node at a primary school's radio station, the system detected an unknown IP address that uploaded a brand-new recording file to the server the moment the counter-audio was played.
This recording was only 10 seconds long, and its content was absolute silence.
However, spectrum analysis showed that within this dead silence, there was always a persistent infrasound vibration at a frequency of 18.7 Hz—a sound that human ears could not hear, but could be captured by precision instruments, like a "silent cry for help."
Shen Mo turned off the computer and walked wearily to the office window.
Outside, the city lights spread out like a sea of stars, peaceful and serene.
He suddenly noticed that in the window of a duty room in the city police bureau building opposite, the indicator light of the red emergency hotline phone, without anyone dialing, was silently flashing three times in a fixed rhythm.
Once, twice, three times. Then it returned to silence.
His heart sank. It was still there... and it had learned to disguise itself.
Shen Mo tightened his grip on the steel pen in his hand, his knuckles turning white from the force.
This plague was not over; it had just shifted from clamor to silence.
It was imitating distress calls, simulating all possible emergency signals that could attract attention, whether sound or light.
Emergency... distress call...
A thought struck him like lightning.
The starting point of this case was Zhou Zhenguo.
A psychiatrist who specialized in handling the mental crises of others.
The position he held before his death, wasn't it a never-ending psychological intervention hotline that dealt with countless "distress signals"?
Shen Mo's gaze suddenly sharpened. He seemed to have grasped the thread hidden deep within all the clues.
Perhaps, the first one to cry for help, and the first one to be contaminated, were the same person all along.
(End of Chapter)