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Novelo Rectangle

The noise didn’t belong in 2074.Verity woke to a rasping static that buzzed through the walls of her pod. For a disoriented second she thought it was inside her skull, the echo of some half-forgotten dream. But then she saw it: a glow across the room, pulsing in the dark.Her apartment was normally predictable. The ventilator’s wheeze, the fridge-core’s low hum, the muffled ads through thin walls—all of it had blended into background years ago. Even the drone traffic outside was familiar, a constant whine as fleets of silver insects traced the sky-rails above Sector 12. But the sound now was jagged, broken, insistent.&nbsp;On her desk, a relic waited.&nbsp;The comm-unit was rectangular, its casing yellowed with age, corners chipped, a spiderweb crack running down the corner of its tiny glass screen. It looked fragile, but its red light pulsed like a heartbeat.She frowned. Nobody used comm-units anymore. The towers had been dismantled when she was a child. Voicemail, especially, had been outlawed—why archive voice when streams were instant, permanent, clouded, monitored? Even the concept felt alien.And yet, there it was.&nbsp;She pulled the blanket tighter around her shoulders, stood, and crossed the adhesive tiles to her desk. The letters on the flickering screen made her breath falter.17 unheard voicemails.Her first thought: prank. Some glitcher feeding junk tech into the block. It wouldn’t be the first time. But the thing looked too… real. Too personal.The static buzzed again, as if impatient.Her hand hovered. Against every scrap of instinct, she pressed play.&nbsp;Message 1 sputtered through the ancient speaker.The voice was female. Low. Cracked. And horribly familiar.Her own.Verity jerked back, bumping the desk.Message 2: “You’ll think this is a hack. You’ll call it a trick. But remember—the scar under your right elbow. The one you lied about. You told your mother it was a fall. We both know it wasn’t.”Her stomach knotted. The scar. Raised, pale, hidden under sleeves her entire adult life. She’d told colleagues it was from a lab accident. Only she remembered the truth: the fence, the blood, her mother’s silence.Nobody else could know.Her pulse thundered.Message 3: “This day matters. Every choice ripples. Please, Verity. Please listen.”Her name, dragged through her own ruined voice, made her knees weaken.&nbsp;She forced out a laugh. It scraped her throat raw.“A scam. Just another AI scam.”It had to be. Black-market AIs ran cons daily, imitating voices, scraping data, whispering lies for credits. She worked in a lab that tracked them. She knew their patterns.But none had ever captured her stutter-pause, the breath she took mid-sentence, the way her voice dipped on her name. This wasn’t mimicry. This was… her.By Message 5, denial was sliding.“You’ll see a man today. He smiles too quickly. Don’t trust him. He betrays us. He betrays me.”Her mind flicked to the lab. To managers with polished grins, to interns eager to please. Too many faces. Too many suspects.Message 6: “Your colleagues won’t understand. They’ll laugh. Don’t tell them. Their laughter is the first cut.”Her mouth went dry. She could hear them laughing already—her project manager’s derisive chuckle, the intern’s giggle.Her fingers dug crescents into her palms.Message 7: “Don’t ignore the drones. They’re not scanning for faces. They’re scanning for patterns. And you are the pattern.”Verity turned toward the blinds. Through the slats, the morning sky glowed green with intersecting beams. Drones swept Sector 12 in mechanical loops, their sensors tracing perfect geometries. She’d never noticed the rhythm before, the way the lines converged as though netting her pod.The hair on her arms rose.Message 9: “I tried to run. Once. They followed. They always follow.”Her throat closed. Who followed? The drones? The man with the smile? Or something worse, something unnamed?Message 10: “The shuttle. I tried to resist. But once, just once, I took it. I smelled ozone. The tunnel became a furnace. Glass screaming, people clawing at the doors. My skin burned. Don’t go, Verity. Don’t repeat it.”She clutched the desk, bile rising. She rode that shuttle daily. Commuters pressed shoulder to shoulder, air hot with recycled breath. Now she imagined it: fire curling through the tunnel, bodies crushed against metal, her own flesh blistering.The voice hadn’t been warning. It had been remembering.Her own scream rattled her chest.Message 11: “He’ll offer you help. Don’t take it. Help is the cage.”Her breath came shallow. She scanned her pod as if expecting him already—some smiling man, waiting in her kitchen.&nbsp;By the time the eleventh message died, Verity was shaking uncontrollably. Her world, once ordinary, now throbbed with menace.And still six messages remainedMessage 12 came alive just as Verity’s fingers touched the window latch.“Don’t open it. The drone outside isn’t for you.”Her breath caught.The latch was half-turned. A tremor of cool air slipped in through the seal. Then the wall flashed green as a hunter-drone hovered into view, its beam slicing across the glass. It lingered, sensor panning, humming like an insect deciding where to sting.If the window had been open, her heat signature would already be tagged.She stumbled back.Not coincidence. Not a trick. The message had synchronized with her every move.Message 13: “Don’t answer the call today. He’ll tell you it’s urgent. He’ll beg. But when you follow, that’s when the pattern closes. That’s when we vanish.”Her mouth was sandpaper. Who was he? The smiling colleague? Her supervisor? A stranger in the corridor? She could almost hear her comm-link chiming already, demanding she come. The voice was soaked in certainty, as if the outcome had happened a thousand times before.She pressed the pause button with shaking hands, but the device refused to stop. The next message bled through anyway.Message 14 was almost a confession.“I thought I could outwit it. I mapped every possible choice—took side streets, ignored shuttles, skipped meetings. It didn’t matter. They always found me. And when they did, I was already too late.”The voice cracked into sobs. “I can still smell the glass, molten, fused into my skin. I can’t wash it off. Every loop I warn you. You don’t listen.”Verity clutched her scar through her sleeve, as if it might open again.Message 15: “Don’t search for where the device came from. Every time I did, it ended worse. One loop I dismantled it. The drones arrived within minutes. Another loop I traced its circuits back to the tower ruins—nothing there but ash. And still the messages returned.”Verity’s eyes flicked to the back panel. The temptation to pry it open, to understand, itched across her fingers. But fear pinned her in place.Message 16 dissolved into static. Then fragments pierced through:“…river of glass… blood on rails…”She pressed her palm against her mouth, but nausea still surged. The images were too vivid.Her heart begged her to stop listening. But her finger hovered anyway, trembling, because some part of her needed to hear the end.Message 17 was nearly unrecognizable.Her own voice, shredded, older, frayed to threads.“By the time you hear this, I’ll already be gone. Don’t look for me. Don’t repeat me.”A sound followed—a choked gasp, a noise of finality—and then the device snapped into silence.The red light blinked out.Verity sagged onto the bed, arms hugging her knees. The pod’s ordinary noises returned, but now they felt staged, a theatre of normality: the ventilator, the fridge-core, the distant pitch of advertisements peddling upgrades and sleep-drugs.Loop.The word coiled through her skull like barbed wire.She imagined herself stacked in layers: Veritys burned alive on shuttles, Veritys dragged away by smiling men, Veritys dissected under drone-lights. A thousand corpses piled beneath the weight of every choice she hadn’t yet made.Her body rocked as if in prayer. “Not me. Not this time.”But even as she whispered it, she knew the message was already true.The relic was still in her room. Which meant the loop had not broken.&nbsp;Then it flickered.&nbsp;A fresh notification glowed on the cracked screen.Voicemail 18.Her breath stopped.The pod seemed to shrink. She should smash the thing, hurl it out the window, let the drones shred it into circuitry dust. She should run down the stairwell, keep running until her lungs bled.But she didn’t.Her hand lifted, slow, inevitable, like a marionette on wires.The sender ID scrolled across the glass.Not anonymous. Not her older self this time.Her own number.Timestamped tomorrow.The screen pulsed once. Twice. Waiting.Verity’s chest hollowed as if her heart had been scooped out. A truth gnawed at her, worse than fire, worse than betrayal.It wasn’t done with her yet.&nbsp;

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Message 18

XenaQueen

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Message 18

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Sharon Wong

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