Chapter 12: All Who Heard Are Dead |
This thought, like a cold bolt of lightning, split open all the chaotic clues in Shen Mo's mind.
He immediately pulled up all the duty records of the city's psychological aid hotline, focusing on the twelve hours of Zhou Zhenguo's last shift before his death.
The electronic files coldly displayed the facts: around the time of the distress call marked "source unknown, not located," Zhou Zhenguo's call records showed three complaints.
The content of the complaints was largely the same, all pointing to his poor work performance—"his tone was cold, like he was reading from a script," "he had no empathy at all, just going through the motions," "I felt like I was talking to a robot."
Behind each complaint, there was a handwritten note by his supervisor, Sister Li: "Spoken to."
But apart from these two words, there were no further follow-up measures.
Shen Mo interviewed Sister Li.
This middle-aged woman, who had worked at the hotline center for nearly twenty years, had a face etched with professional fatigue and a hint of unconcealable panic.
At first, she just dodged his questions with official jargon, emphasizing that Zhou Zhenguo was a veteran employee, skilled in his work, and that occasional emotional fluctuations were inevitable.
Her voice began to choke, and she finally confessed everything.
"Old Zhou... it wasn't easy for him," she said, her head bowed, her fingers unconsciously twisting the corner of her clothes. "His wife became a high-level paraplegic seven years ago due to a medical accident. He took care of her all by himself. All these years, he's been like a tightly wound string. He works during the day, and at night he goes home to do rehabilitation, feed her, and turn her over. He's barely had a full night's sleep."
The long-term mental stress caused Zhou Zhenguo to suffer from severe depression. He often lost focus at work, as if his soul had been drained from his body.
Sister Li had long noticed it and had thought of transferring him to logistics, but the center was always short-staffed, and new recruits couldn't fill the gap. The matter was thus delayed again and again.
"I thought it was just a normal emotional problem, that a little counseling and a few days off would help him recover," Sister Li's tears finally fell, her voice filled with regret. "I never expected... I only found out later that after work every day, he would lock himself in his study and listen to that un-rescued distress call recording over and over again. He wasn't analyzing it, nor was he investigating it. He was punishing himself. That humming sound, to him, wasn't noise; it was judgment. He sank deeper and deeper, until he himself became a part of the echo."
Shen Mo listened quietly, the logical chain about the "Echo" in his mind being completely welded shut by Sister Li's tearful account.
He remembered Zhao Wan's breakdown in the interrogation room, her constant repetition of "I should have stopped her." The guilt of failing to prevent her friend Lin Wanqing's death was so similar to Zhou Zhenguo's self-blame for his failed rescue.
A bold and clear inference formed in his mind: the "Echo" was not randomly contaminating. It was like a predator with a keen sense of smell, precisely selecting those who harbored strong feelings of guilt and "unfinished responsibility."
These people, due to their own mistakes or powerlessness, had a void in their hearts that could never be filled, and the "Echo's" hum was the poison that filled this void.
He immediately applied to Sun Tao to retrieve the case files of all abnormal death cases in the city for the past six months.
In the mountain of files, he quickly found more supporting evidence.
A firefighter, who had made a misjudgment in a fire rescue and failed to save the last trapped child, hanged himself at home with a fire hose half a month later. Before his death, he had repeatedly mentioned hearing a strange singing to his colleagues. A surgeon, whose misdiagnosis led to a patient's death after missing the best treatment window, died of sudden cardiac death while on duty in the operating room shortly after. Surveillance showed him muttering to an empty intercom before he died. A high school homeroom teacher, who had ignored a depressed student's cry for help, leading to the student's suicide, was found dead in his car a week later. The car radio was repeatedly playing a segment of unrecognizable static noise...
All the deceased had one thing in common: they had all been in contact with some form of public communication device before their death, and without exception, their autopsy reports showed extremely slight diffuse bleeding points in their brainstems, which was completely consistent with the symptoms of long-term exposure to specific frequency infrasound.
The "Echo's" hunting ground was spread throughout the city.
Shen Mo and Su Wanying returned to the abandoned commercial and residential building once again.
This time, they were no longer like headless flies.
Based on the precise coordinates of where Zhao Wan's phone signal last disappeared, they went straight to the second basement level.
The cold, damp air was filled with the smell of rust and mold. At the end of the dark corridor stood a heavy, rusted iron door.
There was no lock on the door; it seemed to have been welded shut from the inside.
Shen Mo used a crowbar and, with great effort, managed to pry open a crack in the door.
With a teeth-grinding "creak," the iron door was forced open.
The scene behind the door, however, stunned them both.
There were no complex instruments, no altar, and certainly no body.
The room was empty, the four walls bare. Only on the wall directly opposite the door hung an old-fashioned black rotary phone.
The phone's receiver hung limply, its long spiral cord like a withered umbilical cord, broken in the middle and lying on the dusty floor.
This was the source.
Shen Mo signaled for Su Wanying to step back, while he put on the highest protection level industrial soundproof headphones.
He took a long-handled insulated clamp from his toolbox, carefully picked up the broken cable interface, and connected it to the probe of a portable oscilloscope.
The moment the circuit was connected, the steady green line on the oscilloscope's screen suddenly turned into a frenzy of peaks and valleys.
In his headphones, the familiar, scalp-tingling hum reappeared, but this time, the background was no longer empty silence.
Countless fine, overlapping whispers, filled with despair and resentment, like a tide surging from the depths of hell, instantly flooded his hearing.
"...Why didn't you listen... you could have saved me..."
"...You should have been there... you promised..."
"...Did you hear... you should have heard..."
Su Wanying stared at the chaotic waveform on the oscilloscope, then glanced at the lonely phone on the wall. She took out a thread-bound ancient book from her cloth bag, flipped through it quickly, and finally pointed to a page, whispering to Shen Mo, "The 'Yiji Hall Funerary Records' mentions a 'Proxy Speech Studio.' It says that in some places, because too many unanswered cries for help and prayers have gathered, over time, those obsessions will attract and merge with each other, no longer being a single soul, but becoming a 'river of resentment.' This... I'm afraid, is the mouth of that river."
"If it's a trap set using people's sense of responsibility and guilt," Shen Mo took off his headphones, his eyes sharp, "then we can use this mechanism in reverse."
A bold plan quickly formed in his mind.
He returned to the bureau and recorded a simulated audio overnight.
He took the base frequency of the "Echo's" hum as a foundation, but completely changed its harmonic structure. Using the frequencies that are most likely to induce calm and comfort in psychology, he superimposed a steady baritone voice: "Your responsibility has ended. The cry for help has been heard. The deceased has rested in peace. Please lay down your burden."
Then, he used his authority to implant this "antidote" audio into the backup encrypted channel of the police communication system and applied to have this five-second audio automatically play after the closing remarks of all psychological crisis intervention hotlines in the city.
Three days later, Sun Tao came to him with a data report, his expression complicated.
"It's effective," he said. "Across the city, passive access to the abnormal voiceprint has dropped by eighty-three percent in seventy-two hours. But... we've found a new batch of abnormal individuals."
The report showed that many people who had been initially marked as "potential contaminants" did indeed have the abnormal fluctuations in their brainwaves disappear, but they developed a new symptom—aphasia.
These people no longer heard the humming, nor were they troubled by nightmares, but they lost the ability to speak.
The latest functional brain scans showed that the language centers in their brains were in a state of deep, non-organic inhibition, as if a "pause" button had been forcibly pressed by an invisible hand.
Shen Mo's heart sank.
He understood. The "Echo" had not been weakened; it was merely retreating.
It had replaced "crying for help" with "silence," evolving into a more insidious and terrifying form of contamination.
It was telling everyone it had marked: since you heard, then you will be silent forever.
Late at night, Shen Mo was the only one left in the special task force office.
He was alone, sorting through piles of materials, trying to find a new breakthrough among the "silent contaminants."
The phone on his desk vibrated violently without warning. A glaring line of words flashed on the screen: Unknown Number.
He didn't answer, letting the monotonous ringing echo in the empty office.
However, after ringing for a full minute, the call did not automatically hang up. Instead, it connected on its own.
The receiver was dead silent. No sound, no humming, no static.
Only an extremely faint, almost imperceptible rhythm.
It was the rhythm of breathing, captured and amplified with extreme subtlety by the phone's microphone.
Shen Mo's pupils suddenly contracted—this frequency, this pattern of throat muscle vibration, was perfectly synchronized with the breathing sound he had heard from the monitoring equipment when Zhao Wan was deeply contaminated.
He slowly, stiffly, raised his head and looked at the huge floor-to-ceiling window in his office.
Outside was the myriad lights of the city, and inside, due to the temperature difference, a thin layer of mist had condensed on the glass.
On that mist, as if an invisible finger was writing, stroke by stroke, extremely slowly.
A line of words, from blurry to clear, finally appeared completely before his eyes:
You heard... so you, too, should be silent.
Shen Mo stared intently at the words formed by the steam, his hand holding the phone hovering over the red hang-up button, but he didn't press it.
His gaze went past the words, to the streets further away outside the window.
At that very moment, he saw that along the main road below, extending to the end of the city, all the old-fashioned public phone booths, their originally dim red call indicator lights, as if receiving the same command, in the deep night, one after another, silently, all lit up at the same time.
(End of Chapter)