Central buzzed.
Not metaphorically, not anymore. The old transmission tower—rusting, once useless, crowned with pigeons and forgotten cables—had begun to hum again. It came on slow, like the sound of your own blood in a quiet room, then built to something undeniable. Somewhere between a melody and a warning.
Riley noticed it first while rinsing guano from her gloves near Shoal Creek. The signal buzzed against her jawbone, just behind the ear, like a loose dental filling reacting to some stray frequency. Echo circled above, jittery, letting out ultrasonic bursts that bounced strangely off the limestone bank. Something was on. Or awake.
They said it was Central's antenna, but Riley didn’t buy it. Not fully. Something else had switched on. Something that had always been there, waiting for alignment.
That same week, the fireflies came.
Thousands—maybe millions—dancing over downtown rooftops, through the alley gardens and bioswales and over the solar glass of old skyscrapers now overgrown with creeping fig and flowering sedum. Their light was too steady, too perfect, not like real fireflies. These had been bio-engineered by a ReLeaf affiliate. Luminescent, reliable, and docile.
The city was split. Half wanted to deploy them en masse—make them part of the night grid, a gentle, living alternative to electric streetlamps. But the others, the quiet ones mostly, asked if it was right to harvest beauty from a being just because it glowed.
"Do we know what they’re saying when they blink like that?" someone scrawled on the Community Mesh. "Maybe it’s not light—it’s language."
Down south, a group calling themselves the Beekeepers had already moved on. These weren’t hobbyists or farmers. They were nomads, technologists, visionaries. People who had lived through infrastructure collapse and learned not to trust silicon towers or fiber lines anymore. They came from the Global South with tech that was elegant in its simplicity and terrifying in its implications.
Nanobots. Millions of them. Patterned off bees—not just physically, but socially, intellectually. Each one dumb as a stone on its own, but together, a mind. A hive.
The Beekeepers called it a "soft net," a new internet rebuilt from the soil up, not the server down. It pulsed, moved, adapted, learned. It mapped and remembered. It gave people their information back—without requiring them to give up their privacy or autonomy.
At first, Riley was fascinated. Then she was unsettled. Because one night, Echo refused to land. Just hovered near her shoulder, echolocating frantically. That’s when she noticed the bots—tiny glints in the air, forming what looked like a spiral just beyond the path. They were studying her. Not hostile. Just curious.
The Beekeepers insisted the bots weren’t sentient. But they also stopped calling them "tools." They’d become something more. An ecology of thought. And as the line between man and machine blurred, some in Austin started whispering about ghosts in the bandwidth—encounters in the mesh-net of people who’d died but still showed up in text chains or video feeds. Echoes, they were called. Not like the bat—different. Lingering frequencies.
Even Riley had begun to feel it—when she'd climb the side of the Independent or walk Shoal at dusk, she'd catch glimmers of other timelines slipping in like condensation. A tower of fog that blinked and vanished. A child’s voice from around a corner where no one stood. Once, the smell of her father’s jacket, long after he’d passed.
Maybe the fireflies weren’t lights. Maybe they were tuning forks.
But while most of the city was intoxicated by this new interconnectedness, something else—something older—was taking advantage. There were patterns in the signal. Loops that didn’t come from any known AI architecture. Code signatures written in glyphs Riley couldn’t identify, embedded in the Beekeepers’ swarm.
And Shoal Creek kept whispering.
The limestone at its banks, always wet, always cool, had absorbed centuries of noise. Of screams. Of silence. Of footsteps from beings who’d crossed over only for a moment, synced up just long enough to leave an impression.
That night, Riley stood under the antenna as the fireflies pulsed overhead. Echo let out a single, steady chirp, not for her but for the sky. The buzz from Central seemed to stretch across the bandwidth, meeting another hum, deeper, older.
A second later, every light in the city blinked.
Not out. Not off.
Aligned.
What Riley Now Believes
- The bandwidth is not metaphor. It’s physics we haven’t understood yet.
- Fireflies speak a language we don’t have the receptors to hear.
- The Beekeepers’ swarm thinks, but not in lines. It dreams in loops.
- The limestone banks remember every frequency that has ever passed through them.
- Echo knows when something is watching.