The Ending Code

“There’s that chime again,” Ava said, holding one hand up to her bulky headphones. She was sitting at her mahogany executive-style desk with pen in hand, jotting down everything what she was hearing. Her boyfriend sat on a folding chair beside her with his own pad of paper.

Ava Healy had been living with him, Claude Van Sant, for an over a year in a brown stone apartment building. They graduated high school and immediately got full-time jobs and moved in together, with the help of their parents.

Despite pleas from friends and family, they didn’t want to go to college. Jumping straight into adult life suited the just fine. Who needs to learn more if you graduated near the top of your class and could already start earning good money?

They wanted to stay in the area of their hometown of Alberton, so moved to nearby Blayboro. Their building was one of eight placed together along highway 57, right before a slope leads it down into a tunnel.

Claude was a radio enthusiast, taught by his father. Soon after moving in, they inherited a huge old radio and professional sound equipment.

The night of August 31st, he was fooling around with the precise dial function and hit on a spot that was somehow between 89.9 and 90.0 FM. Crazier still, there was a broadcast running.

He ran and told Ava, unable to contain his excitement. She didn’t understand what he was going on about and, once she did, she demanded he prove it.

He plugged in the headset and gave it to her. She put it on and her eyes went wide. Not only was it a broadcast from this impossible domain, but it also was unlike anything they’d heard before.

A voice rattled off random-seeming letters and words. The voice was calm and measured, almost as if the man was having a casual conversation with a friend.

After a couple nights of listening, they discovered there was also a chime that played somewhere in the middle of it all… at regular intervals.

It was a quick discovery that became a quick obsession. Whatever the reason for this broadcast, there was a system to it. An ordered system that implied a reason for it as well.

They stayed up listening that night, and again the night after.

Out of nothing — out of empty air — came something that gave the rest of the world a meaning it never had.

Out of nothing came something that felt more real than ‘real life.’

“There’s that chime again,” Ava said.

It had been almost two months and they made so much headway that other young tenants across the buildings took notice.

It’s hard not to share a potential huge secret with others. Somehow they learned they were in a race — or was it a rivalry? — with a community college student next door named Samson. And that wasn’t the end of it.

They started taking the whole mystery more seriously. They would spend every free moment listening intently with pads of paper. They decided the best way to get to the bottom of it quickly would be listening and jotting down everything as soon as the chime sounded.

“Ok, go!” Claude yelled.

“‘R-C-Cat,” she began reciting. “H-I-A-T-Tom-U-H-W-O-A-V-Van-N-B-Boy…” Claude furiously scribbled it all down as she tried to keep up with her own pen as well. This continued for upwards of three minutes. “…I-Q-W-Y-G-Go-A-C-Cat.” She paused and he could finally hear the chime again, muffled between the speakers and her ears.

She nodded and took off the headphones.

If nothing else, they knew there was only one sequence. This same sequence, over and over again.

“Ok,” he said. “I think you missed one in the middle, but that’ll still give us enough to compare to mine.”

They held the two papers together and spent a minute or two confirming everything she had managed to capture matched his record.

“So we finally have the full message,” she said. He smiled weakly. “Now… there’s still the matter of what it means.”

“Ha, you’re telling me,” he chuckled. They were silent for a moment, before each letting out a sigh.

“Maybe we should take a break,” she suggested.

No!” he blurted out. She looked at him side-eyed. “I mean… do you think Samson‘s taking a break? Do you think the Dune brothers are?” She groaned.

The Dune brothers were Jake and Josh, twenty-five year old twins that lived another door down from Samson. They had matching blonde hair, though carried themselves differently.

Ava and Claude never knew how exactly they managed to find the hidden station, much less put themselves in the running to decipher it. Odds are Samson had something to do with that. Or maybe it was his sister Judy, who was staying with him while he looked for a new roommate.

Judy, however, didn’t seem to take the same interest in this mystery. They had been assuming Samson was working on his own.

“Alright,” she said, standing up and walking over to the kitchen area. “At least let me make more coffee.”

By the next night, they decided to leave the words out of it. Every word seemed to just clarify the letters anyway.

‘Cat’ was for C, ‘Boy’ was for B, ‘Van’ was for V, et cetera. She re-wrote the sequence without them.

“It still doesn’t mean anything,” he said. “I mean… R-C-H-I-A-T? That’s not a word.”

“Well,” she said. “We’re obviously still missing something.”

The next night, he showed her how to adjust the advanced sound settings. They tried changing up the balance, then the contrast. It seemed like nothing really changed.

“Wait!” she suddenly shouted. He immediately drew his hand away from the dial he had been manipulating. He looked at her, perplexed. She held up her hand. After another moment, she shrieked. “Yes! Yes… that’s it.”

“What? “He demanded. “What’s it?!”

“Some of the letters are different,” she said. He gaped at her, but she held up her headset and put it over his head. He still looked lost for a moment as he held the earpiece in place, but then he heard it.

“Oh… my god,” he said.

“Yes!” she exclaimed. “It’s… it’s…”

“…A different voice,” he finished. She nodded.

About ten minutes later, it all became clear. Not only was it a different voice saying some of the letters, but those separate letters followed another pattern.

The secondary voice spoke every sixth letter.

They confirmed the pattern twice before determining it could be relied on.

While they could have listened to the sequence one more time, starting from the next coming chime, they didn’t need to.

With about fifteen versions of the sequence written across six different sheets of paper, Ava found the one written most neatly.

She got to work, circling the first letter, and then every sixth letter after. She wrote each of the circled letters down in the space below.

R-U-N-I-N-T-O…

She announced each letter as she went, and he came to look over her shoulder.

T-R-A-F-F-I-C. She gulped and dropped her pen. The words caught in her throat before she managed them.

“‘Run into traffic!’” She sighed bitterly. Just as she was about to ask Claude what he thought, the front door slammed shut.

She’s spun around to see that he was no longer there. She heard loud footsteps speeding down the stairs.

She sped out the door as well, just in time to see Claude running at top speed toward the road. She tried to scream as she ran after him. She bellowed his name against the sound of rushing cars.

She got within 2 feet of him, stretching her arms as far as she could, but it was too late. Upon impact with one of the cars, she saw his body collapse in a spray of blood.

“NOOOO!” she screamed, dropping to her knees. “Claude! No, no, no!!” The only response she got was the crunching of his bones under other tires.

She hung her head, sobbing. Why? Why did this have to happen?! One small moment, and it was all over.

After a moment, she heard thumping footfalls of someone else. She sprung up to see another young man barreling toward the street. She instantly recognized him.

“Samson!” she shouted. “Samson, no. Stay AWAY!” She lept into action, intersecting him four feet to her right.

She slammed into him, knocking herself down and only redirecting his trajectory. His body was flung upward by a side-swipe before being crushed in the second lane.

She shrieked at the top of her lungs. A carnage of two, and she couldn’t stop it.

She heard shouting and running and spun around. Judy was sprinting their way, calling her brother’s name. Ava stopped her with an embrace as the shell-shocked sister collapsed into her arms.

Judy pushed her head into Ava’s shoulder, yelling and crying. They stayed pressed together for a long moment.

Judy broke away and Ava wiped off her tears. Before they could process further, they heard running once again.

They saw not one, but two young men bolting from a nearby building.

“Jake!” Judy screamed. “Josh! No, stop!” Ava grabbed her hand and they sprinted to intercept.

Jake was considerably ahead of his brother. The two of them grabbed him from either side, a couple feet from the curb. They strained to hold him back for half a minute, but he wriggled free.

They didn’t have time to witness his demise. They linked arms and lunged into Josh headlong. He was knocked back, but caught himself. He struggled against their combined weight.

The three of them inched toward the street until Ava and Judy were forced to shift to his side along the curb. Judy lost her grip on his arm and he flung his left half onto the blacktop below.

His foot was run over and he howled in pain. Ava pulled him back and they both tackled him to the ground.

They slowly got up when they realized he was no longer struggling. He gaped at them, eyes wide with shock. He tried to speak, but couldn’t.

The same fateful sound then echoed through their ears in the sun-setting evening. Clomping footsteps. They turned to the end of their row and saw another figure making for the street.

“Alright…” Judy groaned as she looked to Ava, who nodded. “Let’s go!”