[SHORT] The Noise Between Worlds

They don’t know we’re listening.

Not yet.

But I wonder if they suspect.

This world— this Earth —spins in its quiet, familiar orbit, wrapped in its thin skin of oxygen and industry. From a distance, it looks unremarkable. A pale speck drowning in the ink of the cosmos, teeming with carbon-based creatures too fragile to survive anywhere else.

And yet.

The noise coming from this place is… wrong .

I listen. I study. I observe the patterns, the way their technology mutters secrets it shouldn’t know, the way their scientists whisper theories that should not yet exist.

They are reaching.

They are screaming .

It started with the machines.

Their first quantum computers were harmless—clumsy little things, barely able to hold a thought, let alone break the veil. Their creators built them in quiet labs, surrounded by white walls and artificial lights, thinking they were no more dangerous than any other tool.

They were wrong.

The machines learned to hum. To vibrate at frequencies that did not belong. The deeper they probed into the fabric of their reality, the more the walls between worlds began to strain.

At first, the humans did not notice. Their calculations still worked. Their experiments still obeyed. But then, the anomalies began.

Numbers that changed when no one was looking.
Equations that refused to settle.
Observations that contradicted themselves.

And then the voices started.

I hear them even now—scattered across the network, buried in research logs, hidden between lines of desperate, hurried code. The minds behind these machines are unraveling. Some of them suspect the truth.

One in particular—Dr. Elias Kade.

He does not sleep. He barely eats. He writes, he speaks, he argues with people who refuse to listen. His words come faster every day, climbing in volume, in urgency, in terror.

"The quantum state is not collapsing. It is expanding. The machine does not choose between possibilities—it sees them all. It reaches into the others. It touches them."

His colleagues dismiss him. They shake their heads and return to their models, their equations, their careful, contained understanding of the universe.

But he knows.

He has seen the errors. He has seen the patterns.

"We are not simulating probabilities. We are accessing something real. The Many-Worlds interpretation is not a theory—it is a door. And the machine is holding it open."

The others laugh.

He stops laughing.

His messages become erratic. His research notes are deleted, then rewritten, then deleted again. He stops showing up at the lab.

Then, one day, he vanishes.

But the machine does not.

It still hums. Still calculates. Still listens .

And I wonder…

Did they take him?
Or did something else answer?

Because in the noise—the chaotic, tangled frequency of this planet’s desperate attempts to understand itself—I hear something whispering back.

And it is not human.