Greyline, BC – August 6, 2025 — 12:57 AM
Sora didn't believe in ghosts, but she was starting to believe in ghost files.
The email came at 12:57 AM, no sender address, no subject line—just a glitchy .wav attachment named static_report-6A.wav. The kind of thing you'd assume was spam. Except it wasn't.
The body of the message read:
Version 6-A / Subject Drift Confirmed / Hostile Trace Detected
Listen carefully. Not all versions sing the same.
Sora stared at it for ten full seconds before her curiosity overruled her survival instinct.
She pressed Play.
What came out of her laptop speakers didn't feel like sound. It felt like memory scraped raw.
It started with a low hiss, then layered vocals — her voice, unmistakably hers — whispering something backwards. Then a sharper spike: another voice, male, buried in static, calling her name. Leo's voice.
Her breath caught.
The file glitched, reversed, then looped a distorted line:
"You weren't supposed to remember the water."
A metallic screech cut in. Then silence. Dead silence.
She dragged the track into her audio editor, scanned the waveform. Hidden under normal frequencies was a second layer—folded, encrypted. Like it was designed not to be heard but decoded.
She ran a filter.
The embedded data said:
Captured: 1:13 AM – Greyline Café, Subject: SORA L. / Hostile Trace: ECHO-DELTA / Loop Integrity: FRAGMENTED
"What the hell is this?" she whispered.
And then—right on cue—
1:13 AM.
The Static dropped like a hammer.
No warning this time. No creeping quiet. Just sudden, absolute stillness.
She stood up slowly. Her laptop was frozen mid-waveform. The clock had stopped at 1:13:47, exactly the same second as last time.
Outside the window, the streetlamp stuttered once — like it was thinking twice — then snapped back to stillness. A moth hovered midair, jittering like static, then vanished as if rewound.
Sora moved through her apartment like she was afraid to break it. She touched her mirror — no delay this time. Her reflection moved in sync.
The city beyond the window was frozen again.
She left her apartment.
The world was stuck, again — Greyline in soft pause. Cars suspended mid-turn. A man with a vape halfway to his lips. A bus with its doors open, nobody boarding.
The café was lit.
Inside, Emil stood behind the counter.
He wasn't frozen.
He looked up the second she stepped inside.
"You weren't supposed to survive the first loop."
His voice was calm. Flat. Not quite robotic, but too smooth. Like he'd rehearsed it thousands of times.
YOU ARE READING
Static Hours
Mystery / ThrillerEvery night at exactly 1:13 AM, time stops in Greyline. No sound. No movement. No escape. For Sora Lin - a deadbeat musician with a dead brother and a notebook full of unreleased songs - the Static Hour is a gift. A space to breathe. To record. To c...
