The desert between Jerusalem and Ramallah is a kind of hush.
Not quiet.
Not silence.
Just hush, the sound of something withheld.
As if the wind knows too much and has chosen not to speak.
Nora felt it as they crossed the checkpoint, unmarked vehicle, ghost credentials, the kind of movement that didn’t show up in logs because it was never meant to.
Alon drove.
He hadn’t spoken since the last drop site in Ein Karem, where a battered intel file had arrived in a rusted tea tin, passed through five hands and smuggled across three walls. It held two things:
A burned security key once registered to Regenesis Phase I.
A name.
Elia Givon.
Last listed in 2003.
Official status: Deceased.
System note: Record deleted. Not archived.
Which, in Regenesis protocol, could mean only one thing:
She was never meant to exist.
Ramallah woke slowly as they arrived.
Markets groaned to life. Rooftop antennas blinked awake. Surveillance drones drifted like disinterested birds. The scent of burned coffee and cold dust clung to the alleys like a blanket no one wanted to shake off.
Their contact met them in an abandoned telecom tower.
She was young. Too young to have known Yael, or the early days. But she spoke with the confidence of someone who knew the past had teeth.
“It started last week,” she said. “Background hum on backup frequencies. No origin. No trace. No loop.”
“A ghost broadcast?” Nora asked.
The girl shook her head.
“Ghosts need origin points. This didn’t come from anywhere. It just… started.”
Inside the tower, they climbed to the relay deck.
And there, hooked into an analog repeater no one had touched since the Second Intifada, was a line of code pulsing across an oscilloscope.
One phrase.
“We were never alone.”
It repeated.
Endlessly.
No sender.
No source.
Just… presence.
Alon stared at it.
“That’s Regenesis syntax.”
Nora stepped closer, breath held.
“No. It’s pre-Regenesis. This is from the framework they scrapped. Before the funding. Before the ethics trials.”
She looked down at the old receiver, dented, dust-choked, but alive.
“This was a listening node.”
The girl nodded.
“We ran a trace. The frequency’s tangled, encoded in atmospheric drift. It doesn’t broadcast in waves. It hides in echo.”
“Echo of what?” Alon asked.
The girl hesitated.
Then:
“Voices.”
That night, Nora sat alone on the rooftop of the tower, wrapped in a weather-stitched shawl, a cracked commlink balanced on her knee.
She played the signal again. Slowed it. Twisted it.
And beneath the repeated phrase, something shimmered.
Not words.
Breath.
Someone was there.
Not dead.
Not alive.
Just…
Waiting.
She activated the regen tool and overlaid a vocal pattern filter.
A faint hum resolved.
Then a whisper.
Barely audible.
But unmistakable.
“Nora.”
Not a message.
A memory.
One not stored.
One spoken.
Downstairs, Alon opened the rusted archive box recovered from Jerusalem. Inside, beneath layers of fiber wrap and oxidized shielding, was a recording.
MiniDisc.
Unlabeled.
Ancient tech.
He played it.
At first, static.
Then,
A voice.
Female.
Measured.
Calm.
“Elia Givon, primary architect of neural thread scaffolding. Regenesis Phase Zero. Voice entry begins.”
Alon froze.
Then the next line.
“This memory is not mine. It’s been grown. Curated. Given to me.”
“I am not a scientist. I am a storage vessel.”
“But I remember everything you forgot to delete.”
Above, the signal shifted.
The phrase pulsed once more.
“We were never alone.”
Then,
Silence.
Followed by a single, final message.
Just five words.
A whisper curled into static.
“They’re still inside the code.”