Preface

This is a short story written by A.I; specifically by ChatGPT 5+.

The story is based on an idea from a Facebook posting about the narrow spectrum range of human vision.

“If we could “see” radio waves, all this WiFi would blind us.

That could be the basis for a sci-fi story! A race of aliens that see in the radio wave spectrum land on Earth and get blinded by people downloading cat videos and arguing on social media!”

So, in the spirit of internet technology. The follow story prompt was posed to ChatGPT:

What I would like to do is to write a short story. This story should have a length of between 3,000 and 5,000 words. The premise of the story is about extraterrestrial beings who come to present day Earth in search of water.  The biology of these extraterrestrial beings is similar to humans with the added ability of being able to sense/see/feel electromagnetic energy in the narrow spectrum around 2.45 GHz.  This narrow spectrum is centered around the frequency that is used by microwave ovens and is readily absorbed by water. This spectrum also overlaps the 2.4 WiFi spectrum used by most wireless devices on Earth. These extraterrestrial beings have discovered Earth in their search for planets that have an abundance of water. Their own planet’s water supply is dwindling and they require new sources of fresh water. They discovered Earth because it radiates a considerable amount of electromagnetic energy at 2.45 Ghz. The extraterrestrial beings presumably evolved the ability to sense electromagnetic energy at and around that frequency in order to detected sources of water on their home planet. Their home planet never had an abundance of water which is why they evolved this ability as it helped them to find water.  Their arrival to Earth is problematic as they discover that the majority of the electromagnetic energy being emitted from Earth is due to all the social media and other internet activity and not from water sources. This excessive amount of electromagnetic energy overwhelms both their craft’s instrumentation and their electromagnetic sensory biology. Their ship crash lands on Earth. Their ship is damaged but the beings do survive the crash. 

What happens next?

The resulting story follows.

ARU

At home, water was never a horizon. It was a rumor braided into rock, a glint under frost, a soundless well that you learned to hear by learning to be quiet. I was born into a people who survived by listening to the way the world refused our calls. We sang a low chirp into the earth and took meaning from what did not come back. Where it was swallowed, we dug. Where it slid, we moved on.

Coming into Earthspace, we aimed for a planet that screamed in our register.

“Lock to the peak,” I told the guidance lattice, though it had already done it—eager, hungry. The peak sat round 2.45 gigacycles, a clean mountain in the spectrum, rising out of the softer hum of narrowband instruments, the beaded threads of beacons. A planet so wet, it burned. Kel laughed in the coil-web next to me, the laugh of someone smelling a table laid full.

We expected noon glare, not noon in the center of our skulls.

At two hundred lengths altitude, the lattice folded with a choked whine, all the little diodes brightening into pain. The ship’s shell was a mirror; the mirror blew hot. The band was not a lake’s rim. It was cities. It was kitchens. It was an ocean of ovens.

“Back it off,” I said, and the ship did not hear me. Noise piled on noise. The absorption we had evolved to read—the breath of water—was mashed flat under human chatter. Wide channels stacked: 1 and 6 and 11, tiled like roofing, multiplied across valleys, rebroadcast and leaking. It was like trying to taste a single grain in a mouthful of salt.

“Kel—” I managed.

“White,” they said, the word our miners use for when a lamp burns out and the rock swallows the light.

We dipped into a sky of invisible lightning. Autopilot threw us into a correcting bank; there was nothing to anchor on except the din, so it anchored on the din. Our chirp went out looking for lakes and read itself in a million kitchens. The nav shells saturated. The correction became a spin, a misread became altitude loss, and the ridge came up like a knife.

We clipped the knife and squealed down a slope softened by brush. Hull skin sparked, the lattice screeched, and then we went still enough to hear our own breath. I remember a burnt smell that did not read as fire, and then Kel saying something like a prayer.

The first act after any crash is silence. You buy it.

I crawled blind by sense memory, fingers slipping on webbing, gritting my teeth against the instrument keening. We had a foil-laminate survival tent folded into the skin, meant for the cold nights of our home plateau. I tore it free, pitched it across a thorn-snag, and shoved us under it. The noise lifted by an inch. The blanket was a cheap Faraday, not perfect, but it was shade. We lay there with our mouths open like fish, breathing heat that belonged to our hull, and I held my lattice against my chest as if that made my head quieter.

Kel’s forearm was slick with coolant. The loops were water. Not brine. Not the poison that made our catalysts fur early and harden the pumps. On our world, we never used water as coolant. We did not have enough. Here, we had designed in the luxury. Here, on the world that burned with water, we now could not walk to any of it.

“Status,” I said when my tongue allowed it. It did not come out in any language we used for work; it came out in the litany we speak before drinking, the word that means: I am here to not waste.

“Pressure low. Filters intact,” Kel said. The tent was shade enough for a small logic scale. They tapped up a schematic. Nadir coil temperature had already picked up three degrees over safety. Their skin shone saltless and made my mouth hurt to look at.

“Where are we?”

Kel laughed again and then swallowed it with a hiss. “We are under a bad star.”

I slid my sense out from under my breastbone and tried to look. In quiet, the world at 2.4 GHz is a soft map: a valley is a bowl where the chirp disappears more than it should, a tank is a notch sharp and hollow, and a human is a warm blur, mostly handheld water. Under the tent I saw only static, and outside it the static had weight. It pressed on the tent, and the tent creased.

“There’s a pattern,” I said, gritting my jaw against a pulse. Every few breaths, the din wavered and there was a tiny cool. Dinner in a thousand kitchens follows the solar clock. When people cook, the ovens flare. When they sleep, the cabinets go dark. The routers they left obedient in their walls, the band carved into three broad roofs: one, six, eleven.

“We can walk at night,” I said. “If night comes.”

Kel rolled to the access bay. “We build it.” They pulled a ring out of a broken waveguide and a chunk of hull that had the right stiffness. They made a low hum with a tongue-lath and pressed the ring to it, listening for the place it rang the least. A notch filter is a cave with a long throat—build it right, and a whistle in the band dies in it.

I held the tent higher and sucked heat. When we were small and we camped on the plateau to read the frost line, my mother would sometimes lay foil and say, “Build your own night.” It was a trick and a teaching: night is something you can make with the right materials.

Kel made us night.

The cavity did not kill the noon, but it took some of the sun away. They lashed it to my face, an extra dim behind my own lattice. When I looked out now, I saw the edges of the band like clouds. I chirped gently through our tent’s seam, teeth set against the immediate pain. The chirp went out and back. The returns were smeared. But there—there was a small, honest dip and it was round at a certain height, and another flat one low and long like a pipe.

“Tower,” I said, and then: “mains.”

Kel smiled, which creased the blood at their lip. “Fresh?”

“Salt would sing in the wrong throat,” I said. “This one is quiet.”

They flexed a hand and then flinched at the muscle. “Crunch the schedule. Find me a path with the flares off.”

We had our work: hack night out of noon, and then run before the sun grew a watcher.

RAE

The first time I saw a moving hole in the band, I thought the observatory’s software had glitched and left a blank rectangle on the waterfall.

I watched the night in colors, blues and greens for the noise floor, yellows for the stubborn APs that never went to sleep, red for the cheap microwave in the break room that had a leak like an old sun. The valley liked to do what it should, mostly. We were quiet by law. The observatory is a radio telescope. Everyone signs a paper that says your router sleeps when we sleep. Everyone puts their phones in lockers when they come to the ridge.

But people are people. They buy smart fridges. They run a baby monitor because it feels like care. They forget that microwaves leak a little if the seal is old. It’s my job to remind them with nice letters taped to their doors and a tiny spectrum plot showing the spur like a neon sign.

The rectangle moved from north to south, steady and slow. It wasn’t a drone, because drones leave combs. It wasn’t a failure, because failure looks random and this was a mask marching across channel six and then clipping the edge of channel eleven. Not—a jammer. A jammer would splash wide and mean. This was a careful absence, held like a boy scouts’ hand cupped around a candle.

I sat up in my chair and pushed the wheels forward so my knees hit the console. I nudged the gain on the south head and watched the notch pass overhead like a bird. I should have called it immediately. They pay me to call it immediately. Instead I tracked it with the waterfall running, listening to the air conditioner thrum and to my own breath. The valley has only a few ways out if you’re trying not to be seen: the old fire road, the hiking trail along the creek, the culvert under the highway that only deer use.

The notch paused. The notch resumed, slightly offset in frequency like someone turning a tiny screw. I blinked. On the top edge of the screen, the time ticked into local two-oh-five. Dinner was long over. Most routers had gone to their scheduled naps. The valley was not black, but it was twilight, and the notch made it feel a little cooler.

I texted nobody because you don’t text out here. You carry a brick phone that draws enough current to be noticeable and you keep it off. I lifted the handset and hit a button that routed me to the ranger station’s wireline. I told the ranger there’d been a sweep, polite, nothing accusing. He breathed a yes into the line and said he’d log it. I put the handset in its cradle and looked down at the human hand not logging it in our system.

“Okay,” I said to the room, as if the room did not know that I talk to it because I am alone on midnight scans. “We are going to drive.”

I left a sticky note on the console that said, in case I didn’t make it back before the next tech, “Possibly dumb: check south hillside. Bring foil if dumb.” I stuffed two emergency blankets from the quiet kit into my backpack and a museum-crawl of a cavity filter I’d saved for a joke into the side pocket. It had been sitting on my shelf for years because I love obsolete hardware in a way that might be morally wrong. I grabbed it all and the wired phone for good measure, because habit is religion out here.

At the ranger station, I signed out the key to the fire road like someone borrowing a Bible. The ranger nodded without asking why. I drove with the lights off along the ridge until my shoulders loosened in the old way of people who learned to drive by watching the line of pine tops against stars. I felt foolish in a very adult way. Then the brush ahead of me lay flattened in a tidy, sick way that was not a storm and was not a tree fall.

My heart split into its two hearts: the one that likes trouble because puzzles are better than sleep, and the one that prefers no trouble because I like not losing my job.

The smell hit me: metallic, not burnt wood, not gasoline. I parked under the drooping arm of a juniper. I took a breath like I take before I turn on a chain saw.

“Hello,” I said in English to the brush. And then because I am me, and because this was the quiet zone, I added, “I am Rae Whitlow and I turned everything off.” I took my handheld analyzer and pulled its battery. Then I set the analyzer on the ground like a little food offering.

The dead brush moved.

A corner lifted: foil-laminate, of the kind you wrap around cold runners after a marathon. Under it, not light—less light. Under it, someone had made a tent out of night. I did not see them, not really. I saw how my skin prickled like I had stepped into an air-conditioned room.

“Okay,” I said, but this time I said it like I was not talking to a room. “That’s very good,” I added, because you praise the dog when you want the dog to not run.

There were a pair of eyes or something like eyes and a shape next to the eyes that was not an arm but also was. I am a radio person. If you ask me later what they looked like, I will talk to you about their spectrum. I will tell you that they were dim against a range that usually burns. I will tell you that they were hurt heavy in a loop that read as too warm.

I did the other thing you are taught to do around animals: make yourself smaller. I crouched. I showed my hands. Then I took a charcoal stub from my jacket because I am a person who draws schematics on gloves and I drew a sharp notch on a flat rock, then a soft dip a little lower, then a big barrel shape.

They watched the charcoal. Their head tilted. They took the stub and drew the same two shapes in the same order and then circled the barrel until it smudged.

“Tower,” I said. I said it softly, like the word the valley uses for water when it is not for sale.

They put the notch between the tower and their head, and they made a wave with their hand that looked exactly like the little slider on my old filter.

I laughed in a way that told the part of my heart that likes puzzles that it can live.

“Okay,” I said for the third time. “Let me get you a better cave.”

ARU

The human arrives correctly. They come without light. They leave their buzzing tools turned to sleep. They crouch to my height under the tent and make an absence with their hands.

They say their name, and I do not read the sound so much as I read the method. There is a rule among thirsty people: you speak before you drink. It lets anyone nearby decide if they can share or must take an action to equalize. It is culture that fell out of physics. It is etiquette that fell out of thermodynamics. The human says who they are. It is a small ritual. It is the beginning of making quiet.

They make the shapes. I make the shapes back. The barrel is water I cannot reach. My tent is a bad night. They put a new thing on the rock: a mouth drawn as a rectangle with a screw at its edge.

Kel leans over and wheezes in a way that means their warmth has run too high for too long. I give them the last drop of our made water and bar my eyes on the human. If I ask wrong, I make us prey. If I ask right, I make us a bargain.

I draw a channel. I draw three roofs: one, six, and eleven, equidistant. I draw myself walking under a roof where the rain does not hit my face.

The human nods. They take out a box that is not a box. It is a length of waveguide cut short like a flute. Inside it is a ring. They twist a tiny screw with two coins pinched and the ring moves less in one place than another. I can feel the place through the tent. It is pale in the part that hurts.

They bring me the flute and tilt their head. I push my lattice into the mouth of the ring and feel the ring drink some of what is killing me. It is not enough. It is a beginning. I lay the flute down and tap the rock barrel. The human does the silly thing of showing their teeth to reassure, and then they make a double circle with their finger along the edge of the ring: tunable, the motion means. We can move the night to match your sky.

Kel closes their eyes and opens them. “We need more night,” they say. “We need the whole roof gone.”

I draw a line through all three roofs. The human shrugs in a way I read as honest grief. They cannot kill the roofs without making someone real angry. They can lower them for a moment.

I point at the sky. I draw two when circles and a strange toaster shape burning. I point and cover my eyes. The human laughs. They understand: dinner time is noon-time here for my head. They point at their wrist and make it tick with fingers. They make two fists: the human symbol for a number that is not ten, because their night is divided differently than ours.

I lower the tent until I am a coil, and the human leaves like someone walking away from a den.

Kel grins, a line in dust. “You made a friend.”

“You made the night,” I say. “I made us someone who knows how to turn it off on purpose.”

We plan in half language. We do not tell the ship flat what we do because the ship is a recorder and we do not know if there is a law here against carving out below the roof. We mark the tower and the mains. We mark the main line’s leaks where our chirp, tiny, honest, went into what should have been pipe and came out as air.

We will buy this night with a map. If there is one thing I know from watching my mother work the frost line, it is that nobody refuses water saved.

RAE

If you are going to tilt the valley into a scheduled blackout and call it maintenance, you get to find out how much people will forgive you because you once rewired the church’s bell tower in the middle of a lightning storm and the pastor decided you were good then and forever.

I typed the notice with a deputy’s authority that the observatory sometimes lets me borrow like a sweatshirt: “Routine router maintenance, 2:00–4:00 AM. Please keep microwaves idle. Quiet hours. Thank you for supporting science.” I heard the collective groan in my head and sent it. I grinned at the screen guiltily. I called the water plant operator and asked to see a SCADA screen under the guise of calibrating something else, and he said sure, Rae, you bring donuts, you can calibrate anything in this place.

I went to the church basement and took every emergency blanket we had left from last winter’s cold snap. I knocked on the observatory museum’s door and pulled a dust blanket off the old cavity filters. I put them in the back of the truck like sacramental vessels. I left my phone at home because we’re not idiots.

I went back to the ridge at one-forty-five.

At two-oh-seven, the valley went from summer afternoon to that weird winter day when a snow falls so heavy that everything goes quiet under it. The waterfall plot went dark on six, then thinner on one and eleven. The break room microwave leaked for a second because Frank heated a mug, because Frank always heats a mug at two-oh-five, because habit is physics with a softer name. I saw the spike and then I saw it die.

The tent went still in my peripheral vision. The someone inside it stood and grew. They put their hand on the ring I had brought and moved the screw a millimeter. The waterfall rippled. I didn’t think they were tuning with the waterfall. I think they were tuning with their bones.

They stepped out from under the tent and I did not see them and then I did. I had been thinking “big gray bug” as a mercy because that would be easier for my brain with its barn-Aunt fear of snakes. They were not a bug. They looked like a tall, tired person wearing a suit that cared about frequencies more than fashion. Their skin had a wireless tech’s map of scars: little healed dots where some implant met nerves. Their eyes didn’t like the bike headlamp I had left on at my feet. I clicked it off.

“Walk?” I said, and then I laughed because it was ridiculous, saying “walk” to an alien like you say “walk?” to your neighbor after an ice storm.

They walked. They were unsteady in the way of someone whose inner ear has been messed up by the day changing too fast. I walked a little ahead, because I could see the thorns in normal light and they could see the routers like stars. I made turns that followed the quiet, which I could read from the waterfall and from my memory of the valley. At the substation fence, my chest pulled tight inside. There’s a sign there that tells you how dead you can get if you are an idiot.

The quiet deepened. I felt it in my teeth and in the hair on my arms. It is nonsense but I think silence has a temperature. The someone beside me let out a sound that was not relief so much as it was a statement: this. this is the part that does not hurt.

He—it—they—to hell with pronouns, I told myself, but my head likes pronouns as a mapping trick—knelt next to the capped well where the county tests the aquifer. They put a hand on the metal. Their head cocked. They said a word with much breath in it, one syllable that leaned forward, a kind of gratitude. It was not a language I know. It was so obviously the thing you say before water that it made my throat hurt to hear it.

They chirped.

I say “they chirped” because that’s what the analyzer would have called it: a sweep, a tiny chirp, a song across the band. I didn’t hear it with my ears. The analyzer did not hear it because the analyzer was on my passenger seat asleep. I felt it like the way you feel your own blood in your fingers when you fall asleep on your arm and it wakes: a tiny hum behind the bone.

The returns came out of the steel like a cough; I don’t know how else to say it. The someone made a motion with their hand and the other someone under the tent, the injured one, answered with their own motion, and then my eyes finally learned the second shape under the foil as a person too.

“Okay,” I said, because I say “okay” when I should say “holy,” because profanity is sometimes the only way to let your brain step down the ladder slow enough that you don’t fall.

I led them along the fence to the ditch where the main runs. They chirped again and the ditch lit, in our shared not-sensory sense, like a cold river. They traced their finger along the dirt where the pipe leaked a hair’s worth; their finger came back wet.

“You give me that map,” I said, “and I will get you a corridor that’ll make your grandma proud.”

The someone looked at me with their head tilted and their lips bent in that very human thing I was refusing to name.

“Grandmother,” I tried, patting the ring. Their mouth shape changed again. “Mother,” I tried, and they touched their own chest and the ring between us.

We went back to the tent before the roofs came back. I left my truck headlights off and drove down the road with my hands steady and a piece of me making a list out loud: inventory: two emergency blankets; one cavity filter; one alien; one alien in pain; one water tower with vehicles; one SCADA screen; one job I would keep if I somehow passed this off as a test.

At three fifty-nine, the break room microwave whined. The roofs came back like weather. At four-oh-one, three spectrum heads on my console lit with a new broadband shape with a sharp shelf.

“Shit,” I said. I typed the word into the log. I did not say it louder because there was no one in the room.

Government.

ARU

The government here carries its own noon.

They arrived like a noon arriving on a cloudy day: lights, a voice through a loudspeaker that told us things the water did not need to know, a jammer thrown like a blanket over a fireplace. The tent groaned. Kel’s eyes went wide in the way that means a furnace is about to go too far.

This planet is the most generous thing I have ever seen, and its people are kind in a way that scares me.

Pain is a bad teacher but it is a teacher that speaks loud. The jammer’s edge burned. I pulled the ring tight around my throat, which is not how it’s supposed to be worn, and tuned it with a twitch that made my tongue bleed. The edge moved. The notch followed. It bought me the breath needed to stagger to the console and grade a route that took us under the least of it.

“We’ll die anyway,” Kel said. They do not mean it as despair. They mean it as math. The core temps have a curve. The curve points up.

“Tonight,” I said. “We take the water we need tonight.”

“It is theft,” Kel said, not like a moral. It is a way of saying: it is hard. It is visible. It creates equal and opposite.

“We pay,” I said. “We pay with a map.”

Kel made the little hand sign that means: yes. They set the pumps to wake at a whistle. They packed the ring so the screw would not wander. They laid the filter designs on the slab our console had become, the little measured gaps we could teach someone with metalwork to cut. When the human came back, soon, crazed hair tied up under the brim of a county hat, they slid an object across the slab to me. It was a rectangle of metal chewed thin, etched with a schematic.

I set my finger on the etched lines. They hummed under it. The humming was not a polite instrument hum. It was the correct frequency of a kind of quiet.

I looked at the human and said the word we say before water and they looked down at their shoes like I had told them something they were not sure they deserved.

RAE

Agent Calder looked like an authority figure in a training video: different color windbreaker, low voice, nice boots. He had the posture of someone trying to stand in a field as if it were a doorway. He walked the ridge like a hiker who knows he is being watched by a large animal and does not want to look delicious.

He came into the observatory with his team and a politeness that made me feel like I could decide to be honest. It’s a dirty trick, politeness. It makes you want to finish the song in the register they’re holding.

“I need you to walk me through last night’s outage,” he said, and I walked him through it, because otherwise he would read it from the log and feel like we were keeping secrets. I did not mention the emergency blankets. I did not mention that the notch felt like a person holding my hand. I did not mention the tent in the brush.

“Unregistered emission,” he said, tapping the waterfall plot. The notch looks like that—like a transmitter that is not in anyone’s book. “You know the drill. We will need to run a sweep.”

“Your sweep is a jam,” I said, which is the right argument in a quiet zone. It still carries weight, even in the year where a man will put a router in his bathroom because he read that walls drink Wi-Fi like bread. “You can’t.”

“Someone is carving silence in my valley,” he said. “I am going to do the thing the manual says to do.”

We both looked at the footprint of the notch in the center of the band. There is something about talking about an invisible current war that makes you want to whisper. I found myself thinking of the someone’s hand on the well pipe.

“What did they want?” he asked, a very normal question, aimed at my job.

He means: what did the jammer-wrangler want. The leaker. The rainbow’s absence.

I said the thing that would be true even if I were lying. “They wanted water. And quiet.”

He tilted his head. “Not mutually exclusive,” he said, like a line from a training video again.

“Except in a world that uses quiet to carry everything else,” I said.

He studied me like someone learning a language by watching someone speak and thinking about where the tongue went under the teeth. “We’re going to need to test your routers,” he said. “And I need you to keep your people off their microwaves.”

Frank, I thought. Frank at two-oh-five. Good luck with that.

I said yes because I am me and I am sincere in my yeses even when my next action is to go outside and do something that I will need to explain to the part of me that wants to retire in this valley and never read a microscope slide of my own conscience again.

The thing about our substation is that the old switch remains.

You can make a valley dark. It will be legal for exactly eight minutes under the ethos clause that lets the observatory run emergency drills. You can file a paper after and call it Preventive. You can slide the lever with both hands and feel the weight of old copper and the hot stress of now.

I have a truck and it has drums in the back and a distiller we borrowed from the plant and turned into a condensor because the people I know like puzzles and we are all sick of letting the only cleverness belong to the ones who make weapons. I drove it to the test well. I left the keys. I taped a laminated printout under the bumper with a wet bandage. It was a map of the valley with alleys marked where few routers lived. It had times. It had my terrible handwriting where the map said “don’t go” next to the hospital because that is sacred.

I wrote one last thing on the lamination with a marker because I am also a person who talks to the room. I wrote: “Pay me with a leak map.”

Then I went to the substation and pulled the lever.

ARU

Night dropped like a stone thrown into the sun.

Pain is not binary, but my senses treat it that way sometimes. Down and up. With the lever, down. The jammer gasped as if it had lungs; the roof of the band bowed. The valley went to twilight and then to cold blue in the edges. I tuned the ring until the screw bit my thumb and then I tightened it a little more for Kel.

We came out from under the tent with our heads not screaming and it felt like childhood. It felt like frost is a friend and the morning is something you earned.

The test well was lined with good intentions and bolts. I chirped through the ring with the lightest touch my skin allows. The return painted a bowl buried in stone. It is a rare pleasure to do the thing you were shaped to do. I could feel the way water drank and fed back. The notch of the tower glowed tall; the mains lay like long bones under dirt. We set the pump we’d built for desert nights on our plateau. It needed different filters here; I watched the salts like snakes. We have no word for “freshwater” that does not hold the word for “clean” inside it; on a planet like this, you would need to separate the two. Here, the river is clear and the chemistry is wrong.

While water filled the loops and sang through the ship’s veins, we moved with a speed that Kel’s pain made desperate. The drones came. I could feel their side lobes rake the ditch and the substation fence. I dropped my sense into the ring like you stick your face into a scarf on a cold wind night. The drones pinged. The notch gave them nothing to hold.

We had to choose.

The ship, wounded, would rise if we asked and then fall when the lattice met the noon that has no sky. The ridge would cut us again. I could cut a path with the ring and the little tunnels the human had given me—alleys of no-routers and sleeping ovens—up to the tower where I could drink well enough to get us to the next valley. I could cache water here for a walk. I could leave the ship to the brush and ask it to sing low for a year while we learned to be a valley thing.

Kel looked up from the panel where the loops had joined. Their skin looked like home. Their eyes were human in their hurt. “We go,” they said.

The human was as good as we are. They had left the map in a place where their friends would think it a trick. The map in the glovebox had a wafer under it. The wafer was etched with design. The design was the recipe for night in a world with too much day. I took it and left in exchange a sheet of our own fieldwork: a leak map drawn in a dozen blue frets—where water goes wrong, hand to a barrel.

We loaded the drums. We pressed the ship’s mouth to the quiet and told it to sing only through the ring.

When the lever lifted, our noon came back hard and white. We climbed anyway.

RAE

In the glow of the security lights, Calder read a phone he was not supposed to have on, out here. He did it with the slyness of a man who knows the rules and knows that he is the one who enforces them so who will enforce them on him?

The convoy came along the ridge. The valley was waking up to its routers again. The rile in my stomach was not relief. It was the other thing that attaches to adrenaline like a remora. I thought about the lever. I thought about the well. I thought about the little ring in an alien’s hand, turned with the tenderness you reserve for a thing that will keep your lover alive.

On my console, the waterfall showed a line that lifted. It was not a green sickle. It was a clean notch that rounded as it went up, like someone narrowing a throat as they sang a note they wanted to make sure belonged to no one else.

Calder stepped closer to the screen. He did not put his hands on the console. It is a thing I notice about people who have learned to be careful. “Is that your jamming sweep?”

“No,” I said. “Your sweep would look like a slab.”

He squinted. I watched the notch slide toward the high end of 2.5 and then thin like a contrail. Once, when I was a kid and we still allowed balloons at the church fair, I let one go and watched it until the world decided it belonged to its own story now. I felt my throat do the same shape.

Calder turned and looked out the window that did not show anything at that frequency except the dark and the fir line. “We’ll want your logs,” he said softly, as if he were a friend asking for sugar.

“You’ll have them,” I said, because they were already on the server that his people would mirror.

He didn’t ask me if I had cut the substation. He did not have to. He knew the valley well enough to read a drop. He knew the valley well enough to enjoy the part where he could say he was not angry.

“What did they want?” he asked me again, the way you ask a field tech to repeat in case the first time had been a mistake.

“Quiet,” I said. “And water.”

He nodded. “Did we give it to them?” he asked, which is the moral math if you go to church here and think about grace.

“I gave them eight minutes,” I said.

“You could have given them a radio,” he said.

“They can hear something else,” I said, not sure how to explain to a man whose job is radios that there are other senses I’ll spend the rest of my life wishing I had.

We both watched the line thin. We both pretended we did not want to go out into the parking lot and hold our hands up the way I do when the first snow comes.

The water plant console beeped in the other room. Somebody had walked in before me, because the donuts were gone. On the SCADA screen, the tower level ticked down in a way that made my stomach grab and then ticked back up. The kind of leaving and returning that reads as test, not theft.

The waiver I had written on the laminated map said “Pay me with leaks.” Someone had come into my truck and left a paper with a leak map printed in lines that looked like a score from a piece of music from a species that used water for staff lines.

Calder’s team wrote things down. They walked their polite circles across the ridge. They tried to triangulate a thing that had made itself a hole and then had used the hole as a ladder.

I drove home at nine in the morning and sat in my driveway listening to the valley. The routers made their little noises like bees. The microwave at my neighbor’s whined because she is a nurse and heats her coffee like a consequence of labor. My mother called and asked if I was still planning to come up the mountain for supper. I said yes and I told her I’d bring a loaf of bread. Something in my hand vibrated and I wanted to throw it in the river.

In the glovebox, under the leak map, under my expired registration, under a half bag of sour marshmallows, a little wafer hummed. I did not hear it with my ears. I picked it up and felt its edges in my fingers. It was etched with a diagram specific enough that any old ham could make one in his shed. It was a recipe for a life that could be lived with a little more peace at dinner time.

I turned off my router that night. I put emergency blankets up behind my bedroom curtains like the end of the world had come to make me a fort. I lay in the quiet.

In a thousand kitchens, water boiled. In one valley, a notch lifted and thinned. In a room with foil curtains, a wafer hummed a note pitched to a biology I would never have, and a drop of condensation rolled from the side of my glass, perfectly cold.

ARU

We did not sleep. Sleep is a luxury of steady states; we had a curve that ended in a ledge.

The drums sloshed their promise against the ribs of the cargo net. The ship’s loops ran clear. The smell coming off the exchanger was wrong only in its absence — no brine, no iron. My mouth wanted to be a throat and my throat wanted to be a river.

Kel lay in the coil hammock with a cooling band across their chest. “You’ll go alone,” they said. The word alone in our language wears grit; it implies you will come back heavy.

“Not far,” I said. “To the tower.”

We had rehearsed this walk as one rehearses rituals: the ring snug under the jawline, the emergency foil cloak wrapped so that its seams nested, the cavity’s screw tuned to the place where the jammer’s edge lost interest. The human’s map — a neat mess of alleys left blank by routers — guided the rest. We named them like constellations: Fence Path, Tin Roof Cut, Dead Parking Lot, Church Basement Shadow.

I stepped from the tent into a valley turned down just one more notch, perhaps a kindness the human had no authority to give twice but gave anyway. The noon scaled back to a mountain over the horizon rather than the sun in my skull.

The world, for the first time since we fell, looked familiar. Not because it resembled home — home’s EM was winter moon, not this summer storm — but because it had gradients again. A hawk pulsed on the cliffline as a small, polite spike at a band my lattice cannot love. My ring ate a route through the roofs like a blade parted tall grass.

Microwaves were the worst. The ovens flared and died at dinner cycles like heartbeats in a family that still cooked. At two in the morning there were fewer, but the world—inconsiderate—contains night workers and hungry archivists and men named Frank who will heat a mug simply because it is two-oh-five and that is what hands do. Each flare came at me like lightning. I stopped once, twice, breathing through an open mouth that tasted tin.

The tower was a drum in the sky. The chip of the human’s lamination had circled the base: SCADA sensors, level readouts, the old manual gate wheel that made my mechanical fingers itch. The fence did not mind foil. I slipped under a sag I could smell as habitude.

I chirped and let the returns rise in my skull. Water is a long, quiet syllable in a world that has too many sharp consonants. The tower answered with a bass note that put my teeth into a brace. I knew the sweetness waiting inside, the ache of cool.

I did another ritual because ritual is what keeps your attention from becoming a blade turned inward: I drew a single letter on the dust with my thumb and then put that thumb against my palate and tasted the dirt. It tasted wrong in a way that proved the tower was right.

The valve wheel took both hands and a jaw I set against the ring. The gate moaned. A small vein of pressure bled. I filled two bladders and capped them like an animal caching fat. I did not take more. If I took more, the tower would tell on me in a way that felt like failing the bargain.

When I turned, a drone’s sidelobe touched the foil and went away like a mosquito reconsidering a net.

I climbed the fence in the rattle of my own self-respect.

At the church, the basement’s door had a paper taped to it: “No routers beyond this point.” I stood in it a moment — a small cathedral of foil-lined fellowship hall and folding chairs — and saluted a faith that understood what I had spent a lifetime asking of strangers: please, for a breath, be quiet.

Kel was asleep when I came back. The ship’s loops sang a tune my mother used to hum at solstice. I lay the bladders down and put my hand to their temple. Heat rolled off like fog and then, after a minute, the fog pulled back. The lattice at my sternum settled another hair. I closed my eyes and saw—in that afterimage way you see the thing you’ve been staring at too long—the notch lifting through the world, thin as a reed, trying to thread a space between storms.

RAE

I slept in pieces, like meat sliced wrong. My router — off. My neighbor — on. The wafer — under my pillow in a belief that could be mistaken for superstition or good engineering. The emergency blankets — taped behind the curtains, tacky to my palms when I adjusted them. In the morning I looked like a person who had gotten into a fight with aluminum and won.

At ten, Calder came back. He had the look of someone who didn’t want to be the villain in their own story. The screen behind him showed a squashed comb at 2.45, the jammer’s signature. Men in polite jackets moved across the ridge with handhelds like metal divining rods. We were performing an ancient human ritual with new tools: sweep, locate, name it dangerous because we do not know it.

“Your eight minutes,” he said without preamble.

I had my version of polite. “Emergency drill,” I said.

He didn’t smile. “We’re not enemies, Rae.”

“Good,” I said. “Because I am very tired and historically I become clever when I am tired. It’s terrible for bureaucracies.”

He huffed in a way I chose to read as permission to go on.

“You jam,” I said, and pointed to the slab of noise we had both memorized. “It hurts whatever this is. It tortured my spectrum too. It’s like putting a floodlight on a bird you’re trying to tag. If you want to know them, you make night.”

“You are proposing a blackout corridor.”

“More like etiquette,” I said. “Turn off dinner, politely. Give me two hours when the valley is a lullaby rather than a rave. They will map something for us. Leak detection. Pipes. If they are thieves, they will steal more water than the leak we’ll fix would have wasted in a month, and you can put me in whatever sin bin is fashionable.”

“Thieves,” he repeated, tasting how it felt.

“You could call it triage,” I said.

He stared through me, past me, into the valley. “I can enforce quiet in a half-mile radius without a warrant,” he said, almost to himself. “I can cite a safety statute. I can require microwave ovens to be powered down under a certain code I have not had reason to use.”

“People will break it,” I said. “Frank will heat his mug.”

“We will accept a few mugs,” he said.

His team wanted to swarm the brush. I wanted to go first and sweep the earth with my eyes for the little signs my own kind leaves when we hide: peeled bark, a trash bag weight on a twig, footprints that scuff the soil sideways to break treads. I found nothing. Which is its own sign.

“Who else knows?” he asked.

“In the valley? Everyone,” I said, and then softened because he had not earned that. “Just the ranger. And the water plant guy because I bribed him with donuts.”

“We have logs,” he said, the way you tell a child you have the facts.

“You have a lot of files,” I said, which is not the same.

We did a rehearsal that afternoon in the church basement. I told Calder to bring his jammer and leave it on the edge of the parking lot and then turn it off and then on. We hung emergency blankets like banners. We dragged out old metal chairs and arranged them like a choir. The microwaves in the kitchen had signs taped to them with frowny faces. We killed the breakers for the wing.

Calder stood in the doorway, hands in his pockets, polite rulebreaker posture.

“It’s just a basement,” he said.

“Wait,” I said.

We waited. And there was a moment when the air changed.

I can’t put words to it without sounding like the people I make fun of at the farmer’s market who tell you their crystals hum. The blankets deadened the room in a way that made the shoulders occur. Calder’s posture changed by two degrees.

He rasped his palm against his trousers. “Well,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said.

He tapped a note into a notebook. “Two hours,” he said. “Tonight.”

“I’ll post it,” I said.

“You’ll enforce it.”

I saluted with the wafer’s edge in my pocket digging against my thigh — a talisman and a plan.

ARU

We have a ritual before drinking. We press the pads of our fingers to the ground, we name the work we did to merit this, and then we name the work we will do with it. On my fifth breath of the ritual I heard the whine the jammer makes when it is being told by someone with authority to sleep. The valley bowed its head.

Kel woke and sat carefully. “We repay?” they asked. Their voice was still lined with fever, but the edge had dulled.

“We map,” I said.

Mapping on our world is poetry — not because it is beautiful (it is) but because it carries rhythm and constraint. Our chirp is measured; our returns are a meter. In a quiet corridor we wrote to the valley the way my mother wrote to a plateau: a line, a pause, a line where the ground swallowed sound more than it should. The mains sang straight until they didn’t. They leaked in curtains behind the school. They dribbled in the grove where the valves had always stuck. A hundred thousand drops found words.

Kel sketched while I sang. We used our last good ink. We traced the map onto two layers: one to leave, one to know. In the middle of writing the valve under the old cannery as forever stubborn, we both felt the edge of noon, faint and curious. Drones patrolled the valley like social insects, asking “What are you? What are you?” My ring radiated refusal. The refusal hummed at 2.45 in the tent.

I do not know what the human will be to their people later. I do not know if their leaders will allow them to name this as grace or if they will choose to call it criminal and feel better for having a box to put my mouth in. I only know the sound they made when they put a foil cover on a light in a church and stood in it to see what the world could be if it stopped shouting for a minute. That sound belongs to all the languages I learned on the way to becoming a navigator. It is the word we say before water.

We finished at dawn. We bundled the map. Kel slept with the intent sleep of a saved limb. I left with a bladder and a folded page and slid the folded page into the human’s truck’s glove compartment—the place where they had left me a lesson. I put under it the wafer we had etched on our ship’s thin plate stock: a cavity-pattern tuned to this place’s roofs. On the back I burned a small diagram of how to schedule a household. It is not a new technology; their people could have done it themselves if they had ever needed to drink silence.

Then we had one more choice to make.

The ocean was the bright lie at the edge of this planet. It made the valley look like a bowl, made my bones feel like sand. Salt is water wearing armor. My catalysts would fur and burn.

There was a river, old and obliging, farther north. The human’s map drew a way that crossed fields without routers and crept under microwaves that slept at three and woke at six. We could walk it. The ship could hum under brush, asleep and safe, and we could be pilgrims to a quiet that moved.

Kel would live a walk like that if the weather allowed. We had drums enough to chase the river’s shoulders. We had a ring that made a tunnel through noon. We had a world I loved and feared.

I set my hand to the hull and felt it answer in the low diagnostics hum it had used to talk to me when I was a child in the training pit. “Rise,” I told it and meant nothing grand, only the half-meter of lift we needed to slide over scrub and not snag. It rose. It shook. It held.

“Go,” Kel said.

We went.

RAE

There is a special category of human task called “turning things off other people think should always be on.” It has a case for it in the federal code and a library of forms and a trail of bad feelings if you do it wrong. I signed the paper that said the valley was going to be a lullaby for two hours. People cursed me and then sent me photos of their quiet husbands reading books.

Calder’s team stood down the jammer. They posted trucks at both ends of the fire road like sentries in an opera.

I watched the spectrogram and it looked like the sky when a front passes: pressure dropping, a stillness before the wind actually moves. The notch we had seen the night before built itself again but this time it was more deliberate, less a wound and more a path. It flowed along the band like a seamstress’s chalk line, roughing in a shape that would be sliced and then edged.

“Are we helping someone run?” Calder asked, hands behind his back, tone neutral.

“I am helping someone breathe,” I said, which are sometimes identical tasks.

I felt a ridiculous urge to make coffee, then remembered I had taped my microwaves shut like a Luddite with a label maker. I heated water on my camping stove and thought about how often civilization and incompetence shared a bed.

Two drones trawled the valley like a pair of metal swallows. Their operators kept their jammers off because they had been told to and because — this surprised me — they were not entirely eager to be the people whose floodlight killed a bird. We had said bird out loud enough times that the metaphor stuck, which is another reason metaphors are dangerous and good.

On the waterfall, a second line lifted, fainter, as if someone were throwing a shadow cord around the first one to leash it. I frowned, then smiled. The first line was the ship lifting with its ring tuned narrow; the second was something else — an echo from the foil tent or the truck’s glovebox wafer singing in sympathetic spike. It was nonsense; it was poetry; I could convince myself it was information if I put my head at the correct angle.

“You’re smiling,” Calder said.

“It’s my face,” I said.

He snorted, the half-surrender noise of men in boots.

We lost the line at the edge of our heads. The drones flew farther north. I filed the last of my forms. I wrote an email to the water department with the map attached and the note, “Fix these, cataloged by a very new friend.” The operator wrote back a single holy and then five minutes later you should come down here and I did, armed with donuts again because technology and religion both run on sugar.

The operator laid the leak map against the screen and it matched exactly. “If this is a prank,” he said, “it is the kind of prank that empties a lake back into my reservoir.”

The pipe behind the school had been a headache for years, dye tests and nobody home. He sent a crew. He sent a photo when a geyser of dirt and water said, like a confession, I was hiding. It was obscene how happy it made me, like a moral had been proved. You do not often get to prove a moral with a backhoe.

On my porch that night, I listened. It was silly to listen; the notch was far away or gone or a thing my job would not let me say. The wafer on my table sang in a way that made the glass sweat. I put my palm on it and it vibrated like a cat that had settled on a chest.

I turned off my router because that was now the ritual before sleep. I taped a note to it — “This is a choice, not a punishment” — because that was also how I talk to rooms.

My neighbor’s microwave whined at two-oh-five because, of course, it did.

ARU

We have leaving rituals too. They are made of the same parts as drinking: name the work, name the debt, name the promise.

We rose into a noon that wanted to erase promise. We threaded the roofs with a mouth small enough to escape gravity without swallowing it, and the ship sang a narrow note that matched the cavity’s tune. The drones turned their heads. The valley’s dogs felt the edge of that same note and told the dawn that it was wrong.

The ridge fell back. The field called Fence Path glinted. The hospital’s roof steamed like a hazard and we curved away from it. The old highway underpass the deer love gave us a tunnel the band forgot. We did not aim for the ocean because we are not fools. We aimed for the river like men with canteens.

Kel watched our depletion ratio dip into liveable numbers. It is a feeling like having a hand unclench that you had not realized was clenched your whole life.

At the edge of the valley we met a piece of the world I could not recognize at any register: a billboard that spoke to phones and cars at once, its push pictures spraying across the band like birthday glitter. My ring howled. The ship shuddered; a panel shrieked as if wind had caught it, though there was almost no wind.

“Back,” Kel said, soft and flat.

We retreated into the valley like a bird who has found a river and seen the desert beyond. We were not as foolish as we had been at midnight. We were not as brave either.

There are people who spend whole lives in bowls, making them better.

We could cache water and build another ring and trade maps for corridors and learn the dinner cycles of a thousand Franks. We could stitch a chain of basements hung with foil across a county.

The other choice — leave — was an equation with too many teeth, and we had already cracked two.

I set the ship down under brush and did a thing that felt like removing a bone: I turned its voice down. Not forever. Just long enough for the noon to look elsewhere.

Kel did the thing that contains love: took inventory. “Two months,” they said. “Maybe three if the leaks in this town imply a culture that will like saving them. Longer if they gift us tools.”

“Long enough,” I said, and meant it as both promise and prayer.

RAE

The valley had a rumor now. We are not supposed to allow rumors because the quiet zone deals in fact and enforcement and not in stories. We are humans. We have stories. The ranger told the pastor who told the water plant guy who told the clerk at the feed store who told me because she tells me everything. The rumor was a quiet corridor that had been cut the way a canal is cut, by men and women with shovels and forms and an urge to dig.

I drove the ridge road at dusk and felt like I was saying grace over a long table. My router at home had an index card taped to it that said Sabbath in a handwriting that looked like my mother’s. I had not written it. I think my mother had, after supper, after I told her I wanted the bread and the quiet both.

Calder called. He wanted to debrief in the precise way of men who file their feelings in numbered folders.

“We saw a second anomaly far north,” he said. “Could be atmospheric.”

“Could be a balloon,” I said.

“Could be your friends,” he said. He did not say the words aliens. He did not collude with my fantasy or my terror. He sat in the doorway of that word and did not go in.

“I have enemies?” I said, too light.

“You have rules,” he said. “And you are good at them until you are not.”

I said nothing.

“If they stay,” he said, “I cannot protect them.”

“From who?” I said, though I knew.

He did not answer.

He let the silence sit, which was, I admit, polite.

After the call I took the wafer back out. I traced the etched cavity with a pen as if I could draw more quiet into my house. The wafer warmed under my palm. The glass sweated. Somewhere in the dark a dog barked and then barked again in that exact rhythm dogs have when they are certain they are witnessing a fox.

I stood on the porch. The valley breathed. High overhead, at a place where my band does not live, something crossed. It could have been the ship; it could have been a sky survey plane; it could have been my urge to make an arc where there is only the straight line of other people’s lives.

The next day, the water department sent me a photo of the repaired main behind the school. Children ran through the spray before the crew shut the valve. Their bodies were bright in the ordinary spectrum. Their joy made a signature I could read with any organ. A leak had become a fountain had become a lesson had become a story. That felt like a deal.

At the observatory, I wrote a memo that started with Etiquette for the Band and went on like a scold and ended like a benediction. We posted it in the church with the frowny faces and the dim lights. It said: Turn it off if you can. Night is helpful. Water listens best when we do.

Calder’s drones still traced their lines. The jammer sat on a pallet like a sleeping giant. The fire road had two new cut marks where a heavy thing had scraped itself shy.

I took the emergency blankets down in the basement and folded them into the cabinet. I put one aside by accident and then not by accident. I kept it in the trunk next to the donuts.

At two-oh-five in the morning, Frank heated a mug. The wafer hummed under my pillow. Somewhere upvalley, a tent made of night breathed in and out. A line lifted on a plot I was not watching. Or didn’t. You could argue either and win.

And if you ask me, months from now, what happened next, I will say: we learned how to make a little more quiet. We fixed a pipe. We put foil on our windows and felt silly and then holy. Sometimes the line returned at the edge of hearing. Sometimes it didn’t. Sometimes I dreamed the band as weather and woke with rain on my tongue. Sometimes I left the router off on purpose and my house felt like a field.

Agent Calder will retire and grow tomatoes. The ranger will marry the pastor. Frank will switch to tea because his doctor told him their heart wants something else. The leak map will gather coffee rings and carry a legend that says, in my handwriting, Paid in full, for now.

If you make me pick an ending, I will give you two:

In one, the ship rises like a thin, clean seam and slips into a sky that forgives it for being a song. In the other, it settles under brush and becomes a shrine, and two people who do not have words for neighbor find one anyway and bring water at night.

Both are true. Both are weather. Both taste like quiet.

The End

Story Elements

These are the elements of the story as “imagined” by ChatGPT A.I.

Premise

After an alien survey ship crashes into a U.S. radio-quiet valley, a spectrum-sensitive survivor and a local radio technician must carve “silent corridors” through Earth’s 2.4 GHz din to find freshwater and cool the failing craft—while government teams close in on the unexplained outages. In a world ablaze with wireless, their only hope is silence.

Cast

• Aru — alien navigator (our alien POV). Physiology similar to human baseline, plus a subdermal microwave sense lattice tuned ~2.3–2.6 GHz. In quiet, Aru “sees” water via active sensing and return-loss patterns; on Earth, Wi-Fi/microwave ovens are blinding noon suns. Pragmatic, spiritual about water.
• Rae Whitlow — human radio technician at the local observatory’s spectrum-monitor station (our human POV). Ham call sign, lives by the “quiet zone” rules, knows every rogue access point in the county. Curious, careful, and not great at following orders when the orders are dumb.
• Kel — alien engineer, injured in the crash; keeps the ship alive with jury-rigged coolant loops that need freshwater (salts corrode their catalysts).
• Agent Calder — federal liaison for the “quiet zone” and national security. Professional, not cartoonish; wants to keep skies safe and hates unexplained jamming. Brings spectrum analyzers, drones, and authority.
• Town backdrops — water plant operator, lineman who knows which substation feeds the valley, a church with a basement lined in emergency blankets (Faraday-ish).

The Science (peppered details you’ll feel in scenes)

• Why 2.45 GHz? Water has a strong dielectric relaxation around this band; it absorbs microwave energy (hence ovens). The aliens evolved active sensing: emit low-power chirps, read return loss / phase to map water pockets (aquifers, pipes, flesh hydration). On Earth, our existing carriers (Wi-Fi channels 1/6/11, BT, microwave leakage) saturate their organs and instruments (think retina permanently flooded with white light).
• Notch filters & quiet corridors. To survive, they need spectral notches—hardware cavity or metamaterial filters tuned to suppress human carriers—plus physical Faraday wraps (emergency blankets are a crude stopgap). Even better: timed blackouts of 2.4 GHz sources across a route (routers off, microwaves idle, smart meters quiet) → a “quiet corridor.”
• Fresh vs. salt. Their coolant loop and hydration chemistry reject salinity; seawater is poison. They want fresh: tanks, towers, groundwater, ice. Distill/condense if forced.
• What “mapping” looks like. Aru chirps across 2.38–2.52 GHz; the hull’s skin measures tiny dips where water soaks energy. In Earth’s noise, they must gate: brief silent windows to take snapshots. Leak detection in human pipes becomes a trade chip.
• Spectrum cat-and-mouse. Government uses direction finding on outages and drone sniffers. Irony: their broadband jammers make the aliens’ agony worse; Calder’s best move is actually to enforce quiet, which conflicts with rapid response.

Structure: 3 Acts, Alternating POV (14 short scenes)

(ALIEN = Aru’s POV; HUMAN = Rae’s POV)

Act I — impact & pattern

1. ALIEN: White Noon. Approach vector narrows on a world blazing at 2.45 GHz. Aru rides sensory pain like staring into a sun. Autopilot misclassifies noise as water; instruments saturate; they clip a ridge and plow into scrub. Kel’s injured. They pitch a foil-laminate “quiet tent” from hull skin; the pain dims. A ration of meltwater hisses through the coolant loop; not enough.
2. HUMAN: The Missing Band. Rae watches the overnight spectrum waterfall; a moving notch appears—APs going dark in a sweep, like someone carving silence on purpose. She triangulates with two remote spectrum heads. The path points toward a ridge and the old fire road.
3. ALIEN: Triage. Aru tests the band with gentle chirps; the world screams back. They improvise a mechanical notch filter from a snapped waveguide and ring cavity; crude but usable. Fresh water signature? A faint negative across the valley—a water tower—or a tank farm—buried by Wi-Fi glare. Kel’s temperature climbs; time pressure is explicit.
4. HUMAN: Fieldwork. Rae hikes into the radio-quiet woods (no phone, analog gear). Finds scorched brush, a metallic aroma, and… a tent that tastes like a Faraday cage to her handheld analyzer. She calls it in using a wired line at a ranger station—no broadcast, per valley rules.

Act II — collaboration under pressure

1. ALIEN: First Contact. Rae returns before the suits do, announces herself by turning off her own handheld’s LO and laying it on the ground. Aru perceives her as a dim figure against a bearable twilight. Communication begins with frequencies and numbers drawn in charcoal on rock; water symbol = a soft notch. They barter: water in exchange for answers; trust is slow.

2. HUMAN: Engineering a Truce. Rae raids the church basement for emergency blankets and the observatory’s scrap cavity filters (museum junk but perfect). With Aru’s specs, they solder together a tunable notch around 2.437 GHz (channel 6). It gives Aru a “dark river” to walk in. Rae drafts a quiet-zone notice: “Router maintenance, 2 AM–4 AM.” The town will grumble, but she has pull.

3. ALIEN: The First Silent Window. At 02:07 local, routers drop. The valley falls into microwave night. Aru chirps softly; the world becomes readable: water tower, leaky mains, a cool aquifer lens under sandstone. Kel maps draw rates vs. survivability. Aru promises data to Rae: they’ll gift a leak map that could save the town millions of gallons—if Rae can keep the corridor open.

4. HUMAN: Footsteps. Calder arrives. Courteous, skeptical. Wants to know who authorized a midnight quieting and why three spectrum heads saw an unregistered emitter before the silence. Rae parries with policy and shrugs; she knows she can’t outrun DF gear forever. She sneaks out a copy of the town SCADA network map to plan future corridors—ethically gray, narratively juicy.

Act III — squeeze & decision

1. ALIEN: Salt & Time. The nearest visible giant signature—the ocean—is a trap (salt). Kel’s coolant is near redline; Aru needs fresh now. The water tower is defended by razorwire and bylaws; the aquifer lens sits under a substation fence. Aru plots a path keyed to microwave oven usage cycles (dinner flares) and night-shift lulls, but Calder’s drones hum in the high band, watching for outages and reflectors.

2. HUMAN: The Deal That Isn’t. Rae tries official channels: proposes a controlled silent corridor and a temporary draw from the tower to test “foreign sensors” that could revolutionize leak detection. She’s stonewalled. Meanwhile, Calder’s team requests a broadband test jam at 2.4 GHz to “flush” the unknown. Rae argues that jamming violates the quiet zone and creates safety risks. She loses the vote.

3. ALIEN: Pain Test. The government fires up the jammer. To Aru, noon returns and burns. The tent groans; Kel convulses. Aru slams the improvised notch across the band edge, barely carving shade. Aru decides: take water by stealth during the next blackout—or die.

4. HUMAN: Creating Night. Rae can’t stop the jammer, but she can pull the substation’s feeder for the industrial park—legally framed as an emergency test under old quiet-zone authority. For eight minutes, the valley falls dark. She drives a truck with water drums and a retired chlorinator turned into a field distiller/condensor to the aquifer test well. She leaves the keys and a printed map of low-noise alleys taped under the bumper.

5. ALIEN: The Corridor. Aru moves through a valley of sudden hush, senses narrowing to a dark ribbon. The aquifer lens drinks the chirp and gives back its cool signature. They pump, filter, and fill the ship’s loop. Drones are near—Aru feels their sidelobes prickling. Kel stabilizes. Aru has to choose: sprint for the ship’s partial lift or cache the coolant and try an overland quiet migration to a deeper reservoir. Aru leaves a gift in the truck’s glovebox: a wafer etched with a low-noise protocol (timed windows, router duty cycles, a cheap cavity-filter design).

6. HUMAN: Ambiguous Dawn. An unmarked convoy crests the ridge. Calder’s face is unreadable in the strobing of emergency beacons. In the predawn, Rae watches the spectrogram: a clean notch rises skyward, slow and narrow—is it the ship punching out through the band with its filter… or a government test sweep riding a balloon? The valley’s dogs bark; the water tower’s level dips on the SCADA screen and then steadies. Calder asks Rae, softly, “What did they want?” Rae answers honestly: “Quiet. And water.” She doesn’t add: and grace. In her glovebox at home, the wafer hums faintly at 2.45 GHz, and a condensation bead rolls down a glass, perfectly cold.

Motifs & Imagery to Weave

• Wi-Fi as weather: describe the band as sky—overcast at dinner, clear at 3 AM, scattered storms from baby monitors, lightning from microwaves.
• Water as silence: the quiet needed to find water mirrors the quiet one needs to hear oneself think.
• Rituals: Aru’s people whisper a word before drinking; Rae silently kills her router at night after this is all over.

Scene-level Technical Sprinkles (light touch, not lecture)

• Wi-Fi channels 1/6/11 and their center freqs; microwave oven magnetron leakage near 2.45 GHz; “return loss” and “Q-factor” when they tune the cavity; emergency blankets as crude Faraday wraps; DF (Time Difference of Arrival) triangulation; SCADA tap for water level readouts; a ring resonator notch filter you can tune with a tiny set screw.

Voice & Pacing

• Short, present-tense paragraphs during “noon” (EM pain). Longer, sensory prose in “night” (quiet windows).
• Aru’s POV uses color/texture metaphors for frequencies (“meal-warm amber,” “cold blue rutile”). Rae’s POV uses instrument language (“noise floor,” “spurs,” “roll-off”) but stays human and wry.

Title Options

• The Quiet Corridor
• Noon at 2.45
• Leak Map
• Return Loss