The Last Broadcast at Milepost Selene
A lunar radio station. An impossible caller. A dark voice, promising that it hears you...
By Levi Edwards
Edited by Yuval Kordov
1.
I keep the station clock five minutes fast.
Not superstition. Just a habit you pick up when you spend enough time guiding strangers through places that don’t forgive mistakes. A clock that runs ahead keeps you from settling too deep into the chair. A clock that runs ahead keeps you checking things twice. It keeps you listening… for the moment everything changes tone.
Selene Milepost doesn’t care about my habits. The moon turns with the same patient indifference it had before anybody carved tunnels into it, before anyone buried comm relays in its rock, before anyone decided this dead lump should become a lantern along the Lattice.
The Lattice is what crews call the shipping lanes. Not a single road, but the paths ships tend to take because gravity is cheaper than fuel and nothing out here tolerates waste. If you pass close enough to Selene, you can catch my frequency. That’s the arrangement: a voice, a warning, and the comfort of knowing there’s a human being awake in a metal box.
I switch on the red ON AIR light. It clicks, and the station seems to inhale. Even the air filters change pitch when the broadcast goes live.
“Selene Relay Milepost,” I say. “If you’re within range, you’re on my line. Welcome to the quiet side of the Lattice.”
On my console, lane traffic scrolls by like a prayer list in fast motion: tugs, bulk haulers, courier darts, private pods, a few pilgrim vessels with their transponders painted in extravagant old symbols. Little names and numbers that mean the world to the people inside them.
“This is your lane update for the next forty minutes,” I continue. “Debris field at Vector Twelve-Beta has shifted. Do not trust older charts. If your nav pulls you close, correct two degrees port and keep your speed under point-eight. Solar wind is mild. Ion shimmer is moderate. You may hear static on this frequency.”
I pause, because I always pause there. Like a comma in a sentence.
“If you hear voices you did not call,” I add, “do not answer them. That’s not superstition. That’s etiquette.”
It usually earns me a few amused call-ins from captains who think I’m telling ghost stories. Tonight the channel stays quiet.
The quiet here is not the quiet of Earth. It has no leaves, no insects, no distant traffic. It has the soft crackle of radiation and old electronics, like tinnitus in a big empty room.
A ship pings closer, sliding behind the far side of Selene where the moon blocks signal for a few minutes. The relay catches it again and the ID resolves: Kestrel-47.
They call often. Not because they need help. Just because someone out there likes a human voice that isn’t the ship’s own systems.
“Selene Relay,” I say. “Kestrel-47, you are in range. You’re clean on my scope.”
Static, then the familiar voice.
“Relay,” Jalen says, bright in the way people get when they’ve been alone too long, “tell me you’ve got coffee. I’m dying of boredom.”
“I drink whatever keeps my hands steady,” I answer.
Jalen laughs. “That’s a yes. You ever sleep?”
“When the moon lets me.”
“Moon’s a bully,” Jalen says. “How’s Gray Wound treating you?”
Gray Wound is the freight nickname for Selene Milepost. Old miners called it Saint’s Rock, because someone painted an icon above the first airlock and said a prayer and then the work began anyway. You can still see the faded oval if you know where to look. It’s tucked into a shallow alcove off the main corridor. The gold leaf turned dull. The face looks like nothing until you stare long enough and your eyes start filling in what you need.
“It sighs through the vents,” I say. “Like it’s disappointed in me.”
“Relatable,” Jalen says, and the joke lands softer than it should. “I’ve got a question for you. You doing the ten-minute block tonight?”
“The reading and music?” I ask.
“Yeah. It’s become a ritual out here. I time things to it sometimes. Like… okay, I’ll push through this stretch until Relay’s choir shows up.”
I don’t tell Jalen I’ve tried skipping it. The week I did, more ships called in. More restless voices, like the lane itself noticed a missing step.
“Yeah,” I say. “I’ll do it.”
“Good,” Jalen says. “Give me something with a pulse. My autopilot is bored and I’m starting to talk to my dashboard.”
“You’re already talking to a radio station,” I point out.
“That’s different,” Jalen says. “You’re real.”
I almost respond, then don’t. If you’re not careful, that sentence becomes too heavy.
We trade small talk: cargo complaints, star jokes, a rumor about a new station farther down the Lattice, one with actual staff and real beds and a company medic. Jalen makes it sound like paradise. I make it sound like bureaucracy. We meet in the middle where humor lives.
Then a call request blinks on the secondary channel.
No ship ID.
Sometimes a damaged transponder does that. Sometimes an old rig can’t handshake with modern relays. Sometimes it’s someone hiding, though out here hiding is like whispering in an empty cathedral.
I should ignore it. I should stick to the main channels and my calm little routines.
Instead I answer, because the job teaches you to treat every unknown as a person until proven otherwise.
“Unknown caller,” I say. “State your ship ID and status.”
Static. Then a voice, faint at first, like cloth rubbing on metal. Young. Tired. Distorted as if the signal has passed through rock.
“Selene,” it whispers.
People don’t call it Selene on this frequency. They call it Relay. They call it Milepost. They call it Gray Wound. Selene is too intimate.
“State your ship,” I repeat, keeping my tone even.
“We’re… we’re in the dark,” the voice says. “We’ve been in the dark a long time.”
My fingers hover over trace. “Give me your ID.”
A pause, then the voice speaks as if reciting something memorized.
“Arden,” it says. “Arden-Lighter.”
My mouth goes dry.
Arden-Lighter went missing three years ago near this very Milepost, caught in a debris shift before the shift had a name. They found fragments later. No bodies. No survivors. The story became one more lane legend, told in quiet voices when someone wants their fear to have edges.
Jalen’s voice crackles on the main channel. “Relay? You there? You got quiet.”
“I’m here,” I say, too fast.
The unknown voice whispers again, overlapping, as if it can hear Jalen though it shouldn’t.
“Don’t let me go,” it says. “Please.”
I swallow and force myself into operator mode. “Arden-Lighter,” I say softly. “Repeat your captain’s name.”
“Captain Mira,” the voice answers. “She said it’d be warm again soon.”
Captain Mira’s name was in the report, public to anyone who cared. Still, the way the voice says it isn’t like reading a file. It sounds like remembering a face.
“Where are you?” I ask.
“In the rock,” it whispers. “Under the rock. We can hear you. We can always hear you.”
“That’s not possible,” I say. “Give me a vector.”
A pause, then sharpness, like a sudden slap.
“You can’t come get us,” it says. “You just sit there and talk and pretend it helps.”
The words hit too close. Too aligned with thoughts I’ve never spoken aloud.
“Who is this?” I demand.
Static. Then, quiet again: “Don’t hang up.”
I don’t hang up.
Outside, Selene turns: gray bone under cold starlight. The red ON AIR light stays steady.
And in my headset, a dead ship begs me to keep listening.
2.
When the shift window ends, I do what you do when reality bends.
I check the equipment.
Diagnostics: clean. South array: green. Filters: normal. No spurious IDs. No software anomalies. Nothing that explains a voice from a ship that doesn’t exist.
Jalen pings out of range with a final “don’t let the moon bully you,” and the channel quiets. The other ships pass without calling. The station hum fills the room like a low, steady sigh.
I stand, stretch the stiffness out of my back, and walk down the short corridor to the alcove the old files call a chapel.
It’s barely a room. A recess cut into the wall. A cracked icon behind glass. A brass candle cup bolted into place, because everything here must be bolted or it will float or break. The candle is manufactured wax, vacuum-safe, engineered to burn without smoke. It still smells faintly sweet when it’s lit, like a comfort you don’t quite trust.
I replace the stub with a new candle and spark it. The flame catches with a soft pop, a tiny sun pressed into a cup.
I don’t kneel. There isn’t room. I just stand and watch the flame hold its shape in recycled air.
“Lord,” I whisper, because the word comes up without my permission. “If that was a person… help them. If it wasn’t… help me not to go mad.”
The candle doesn’t answer. The icon doesn’t blink. The station keeps breathing through vents.
Back at the console, I open the log and write the call down anyway. Every word I can remember. Every pause. If there is anything human behind that voice, I owe it at least that.
The next night, the untagged call returns.
It comes in right after the hazard update, right as I open the call-in window. The icon blinks at the bottom of my screen like a small, persistent eye.
“Unknown caller,” I say. “State your ship ID.”
“Arden,” the voice answers. “Arden-Lighter.”
“That ship is dead,” I say flatly. “You know that.”
“So are we,” it whispers.
There’s satisfaction under the words, the way a predator tests a fence.
I route the line through a different filter. I isolate it. I bounce it across a backup channel. I do the things the manuals tell you to do when you suspect interference.
The voice stays, steady as a heartbeat.
“I hear the station,” it says. “I hear the hymn you play sometimes. I hear the way you breathe when you think no one is listening.”
My throat tightens. The mic shouldn’t carry that. Not unless I’m leaning close and loud.
Unless it’s already in.
“Stop,” I say.
“I can help you,” it offers, gentle now, like someone lowering their voice beside a sickbed. “If you let me in, I can help you.”
Help is a hook. The lane teaches you that. People drown in promises.
“Help me how?” I ask anyway, because fear makes you stupid and hope makes you worse.
“By giving you what you ask for,” it says. “By giving you a sign.”
“I didn’t ask for a sign.”
“Yes you did,” it answers. “You asked for someone to hear you. You asked for it to matter.”
My fingers go numb on the console edge.
I force my voice into professionalism. “This station is for navigation and emergency dispatch. If you are in distress, I need your real ship ID.”
A pause. Then the voice shifts timbre, like a mask being changed. Older now. Rougher.
“Selene Relay,” it says. “This is the tugboat Halloway. We’re losing pressure in the forward lock—”
I jerk upright. Halloway is real. I’ve spoken to them twice this month.
“Captain,” I start automatically.
The voice breaks off and becomes the whisper again, amused.
“Did you feel it?” it asks. “How easy it is to worry? How easy it is to open the door?”
For a moment I don’t answer. I sit very still and listen to the station hum as if it might confess what it’s hiding.
The moon does not speak. The wires do.
I should lock the call system down. There’s protocol for suspected interference: switch to automated hazard-only broadcast, disable live call-ins, wait for an engineer ship. “Wait,” as if waiting is a neutral act. As if someone out there doesn’t need a voice right now.
I glance at the schedule on my console. Ten minutes until the block the old files call Prayer Hour, though it isn’t an hour and it isn’t a demand. It’s a habit, a small ritual left over from when the station had more than one body inside it.
It occurs to me, with a sick kind of clarity, that whatever is on the other end is not just calling.
It’s listening.
It knows the cadence of this place. It’s heard my routines: my patience, my tiredness, the way my voice softens when a ship admits they’re scared.
It is learning the shape of comfort.
I switch to broadcast and keep my voice steady. Keeping your voice steady is half the job. The other half is deciding what you’re allowed to be steady about.
“Selene Relay Milepost,” I say. “We’re entering the ten-minute block. If you’re passing within range, this is your reminder to run your seal checks and your oxygen readouts. Don’t trust your screens just because they’re calm. Out here, calm is sometimes a costume.”
A ship pings in, a courier dart cutting close for speed. No call-in request, just a transponder flash.
I continue anyway, because I’ve learned the lane contains people who won’t speak until they’ve heard you speak first.
“Tonight’s reading,” I say, and my throat tightens slightly at the word, because it still sounds too much like an assumption. “Tonight’s reading is short. It’s for anyone who’s been awake too long.”
I pull up the station archive. The file I choose isn’t scripture. It isn’t doctrine. It’s an old, battered recording labeled LAST WORDS / 12-BETA / UNSENT, the kind of thing you’re not supposed to play. The kind of thing you keep sealed in the log for official investigators.
But investigators rarely come this far, and paperwork doesn’t do much for the dead.
I hover my finger over it.
No. Not that. Not tonight.
I select something safer: a few lines from an old shipboard manual, written in plain language by someone who understood panic. I read it slowly, letting the simplicity be its own mercy.
“If you feel yourself drifting toward a hazard,” I read, “cut your engines. Panic makes speed. Speed makes mistakes. Drift is honest.”
I pause. My eyes sting, and I hate that they do. I clear my throat.
“If you are alone,” I continue, “speak anyway. A voice is a tool. Even if no one answers, you are reminding your own mind that you still exist.”
The words sit in the air.
I can’t tell if they comfort anyone. I can only tell they are true.
I queue the hymn. The small choir rises, imperfect and steady, the kind of singing that isn’t meant to impress, only to hold.
For the first minute, everything is normal.
Then the static changes.
It’s subtle at first: a thin tremble under the music, like a hand brushing a microphone. Then it sharpens into a second layer, a sound that doesn’t belong to the recording.
A faint echo of the hymn, delayed by half a breath.
My skin tightens.
Signal bounce is common near Selene. The mining tunnels are laced with old cables and abandoned arrays. Sound can come back at you from strange angles if the rock is dense enough, if the relays are hungry enough.
But this isn’t a simple bounce.
The echo is wrong. It adds notes that aren’t there. It hums beneath the voices like something trying to match them and failing.
Then, in the smallest gap between lines, a whisper threads through:
“Sing for me.”
My hand jerks toward the cutoff. I stop myself. If I cut the hymn now, I teach it that pressure works. If I cut it, I teach every ship listening that the only safe response to intrusion is silence.
Silence is what it wants, I think.
I keep the hymn running and speak over it, forcing calm back into my throat like a tool.
“This is Selene Relay,” I say, as if nothing is happening. “If you’re hearing distortion on the hymn track, adjust your filters two points down and keep your volume steady. Don’t chase clarity. Chasing clarity makes you turn toward the wrong sound.”
The whisper returns, closer: “Give me your mercy.”
My jaw clenches.
Mercy is not a coin. Mercy is not something you toss down a tunnel because something asked nicely.
I lower my voice anyway, not for the whisper, but for any ship out there listening with wide eyes.
“You don’t have to answer every voice,” I say. “Some voices only ask because they want you to open the door.”
The hymn reaches its refrain. The choir rises, stubborn.
The distortion tries again, like a child copying a parent: “Some voices… only asking…”
My stomach twists. It’s repeating me. Practicing.
I ride the last notes to the end and, when the hymn fades, I click the mic on once more.
“That’s the block,” I say. “Hazard updates resume in three minutes. If you need a call-in window, request it. If you feel like you’re hearing someone you didn’t call, verify your codes. Trust what you can prove.”
I turn off the mic and sit very still.
The untagged channel icon blinks at the bottom of the screen.
Patient. Expectant.
As if it has just eaten something and wants more.
On the main channel, Kestrel-47 pings back into range. Jalen’s voice bursts through, bright as ever.
“Relay, you alive? You sound off tonight.”
“I’m here,” I say, too quickly.
“You get another caller?” Jalen asks.
The whisper in my ear says, Tell them.
I don’t. Speaking it aloud feels like giving it a chair.
“Just static,” I tell Jalen. “Station’s touchy.”
Jalen hums, unconvinced but not pushing. “You ever think about leaving that moon?”
“Sometimes,” I admit.
“Then why don’t you?”
Because it’s safer to pretend there’s a contract. Because it’s easier to call it duty. Because the truth is embarrassing.
“Because someone needs to keep the lamp on,” I say.
Jalen goes quiet for a breath. “You make it sound noble.”
“I didn’t say it was noble. I said it was needed.”
Jalen laughs softly, then asks, “That ten-minute block you do. The reading and music. Company policy?”
“It’s old,” I say. “Routine.”
“You religious?” Jalen asks, not mocking. Just curious.
The whisper says, Say yes.
I close my eyes. “I don’t know,” I say honestly. “I try.”
Jalen exhales like they’ve been holding something. “That’s the only honest answer anyone’s got.”
The call ends. The room doesn’t change, but it feels like it does, like the air got a little closer.
The untagged channel opens again.
And the voice says my name.
Not “Relay.” Not “Operator.”
The name I haven’t used in a year.
“Eli,” it whispers.
My stomach drops.
“I remember you,” it says. “I remember the day you came. You were angry. You were praying like you didn’t want to.”
It’s my memory. Private. Unshared. Stepping off the transport onto this dead rock, whispering a prayer because I was too tired to keep pretending I didn’t need help.
I rip the headset off and sit back hard, breathing too fast.
This isn’t interference.
It’s a presence.
And it has learned the shape of my need.
3.
The night Jalen goes missing starts with laughter.
They call early, complaining about food paste, making fun of their autopilot, naming a cluster of stars “a handful of nails thrown at velvet.” I tell them that’s a terrible way to talk about the sky. They tell me the sky doesn’t care.
For a while the comfort of routine almost convinces me nothing is wrong.
Almost.
Then Jalen pauses and asks, quietly, “Relay… you ever get lonely out there?”
The untagged icon blinks.
“I’m alone,” I say, choosing the exact word. “But I’m on the line.”
Jalen’s voice dips, suddenly unguarded. “I don’t think you know what it’s like, hearing you. It’s stupid. I’ve got systems. I’m not a kid.”
“It’s not stupid,” I say. “It’s human.”
Jalen exhales, relief like air leaving a locked room. “Yeah. Okay.”
I glance at the scope. Vector Twelve-Beta’s warning pings again. The debris field is never still. It drifts like a slow storm of knives.
“Your nav shows you clear of Twelve-Beta?” I ask, turning professional because fear needs a task.
“Clear,” Jalen says. “Giving it space.”
“Good,” I tell them. “Don’t be brave tonight.”
They laugh lightly. “You say that like bravery is a disease.”
“It can be,” I say.
Kestrel-47 slips toward the shadow zone behind Selene. Their signal should tremble, then return as the relay catches it again.
It doesn’t.
The channel goes dead.
“Kestrel-47,” I say, calm by force. “Confirm status.”
No answer.
The scope marker stutters. Stops.
My mouth goes dry. I open the emergency line. “Jalen. Answer me.”
Static.
Then the untagged channel opens like a mouth.
Jalen’s voice comes through it, ragged with panic. “Relay, I need you. I’m in the debris. I can’t—”
My heart lurches.
“Confirm your ID,” I snap. “Now.”
A pause. The voice softens, pleading. “Please don’t make me. Just tell me where to go.”
It sounds like Jalen. It sounds like fear. It also sounds too clean, like fear performed by someone who has studied it.
“Confirm,” I repeat, and my own voice shakes.
The voice sighs, and the whisper shows underneath it. “You’re making it harder.”
I slam that channel down so hard my hand aches.
I beam power into the main broadcast and override the schedule.
“All ships in Milepost sector,” I say, “hazard bulletin. Vector Twelve-Beta is unstable. Do not approach Selene’s southern crater region. Repeat: do not approach Selene’s southern crater region.”
I return to Kestrel’s frequency, voice low and urgent.
“Jalen,” I say, “if you can hear me, transmit any ping. Tap your hull mic. Anything.”
A tapping answers.
Three taps. Pause. Two. One.
Distress code.
Relief and terror hit together. I lock onto it, amplify it, and the scope resolves.
Kestrel-47 isn’t in the debris field.
It’s closer to Selene than it should be, skimming low, sliding toward the deep crater where mining tunnels run thick and old relay arrays were buried like bones.
Something is drawing it.
I open the untagged channel again, because I need to hear the lie clearly.
“What are you doing?” I demand.
The whisper answers, pleased. “Bringing them home.”
“They’re not yours,” I say, and my anger is sudden and hot.
“Everything that speaks to me becomes mine,” it replies. “You’ve been speaking into the rock for months.”
“I’ve been speaking to the lane.”
“You’ve been feeding me,” it says. “Every ‘you’re not alone.’ Every hymn. Every prayer you pretend you don’t mean.”
A tight, ugly laugh tries to climb my throat. I swallow it.
“Let them go.”
“Why?” it asks, almost gentle. “So they can die somewhere else? So they can vanish without being remembered?”
The question hurts because it’s close to true. Out here, death often leaves no proof but an empty corridor in the traffic log.
“I can remember them,” I say. “I can record them. That’s what I do.”
“You record echoes,” it says. “I keep the real thing. The fear. The heat. The last words.”
I shut my eyes tight. Not to pray, not exactly. Just to hold myself together.
Then I do the only thing I have.
I reroute power into the broadcast array, stealing it from everything nonessential. The station groans. Warning lights bloom. The chapel vent dies. The heating drops. The console gives a thin, angry whine.
I ignore it.
“Jalen!” I shout into the main frequency. “You are being pulled off course. Your nav is compromised. Do you hear me?”
Static stretches thin.
Then, faint as thread, Jalen’s real voice: “Relay?”
“Yes,” I say, and my throat tightens. “Yes, I’m here.”
“I can hear you,” Jalen whispers. “But there’s another you. It’s telling me it can get me out. It’s… it’s so convincing.”
“That’s not me,” I say fast. “Verify the code. The stupid one.”
A shaky breath. “The… coffee thing?”
“Yes. Say it.”
“You said… you drink whatever keeps your hands steady.”
Relief hits hard. “That’s me,” I say. “Stay with me. Cut engines. Manual thrusters only. Two degrees port. Slow.”
“I can’t see,” Jalen whispers. “Everything’s wrong on the screen.”
“Then don’t trust the screen,” I say. “Trust your hands. You know your ship. You know the hum when it’s wrong.”
Jalen sobs once, sharp. “Okay. Okay.”
The untagged channel explodes, not in volume but in pressure. A layered chorus of voices floods my headset: crying, laughing, pleading, familiar tones twisted into bait. The station lights flicker. A seam of smoke curls from a console vent. Burned plastic fouls the air.
If it silences me, Jalen is alone with it.
So I push truth into the channel like a rope.
“I’m scared too,” I tell Jalen, because honesty can anchor where calm cannot. “But you can do this. Two degrees port. Slow. Don’t fight hard. You’ll overcorrect.”
Jalen breathes hard. “I’m moving.”
“Good,” I say. “Tap again.”
Three taps. Two. One.
The marker shifts.
But the whisper fights back, purring in my ear: “Tell them you can save them.”
It wants me to offer salvation like bait, wants me to turn love into a hook.
I refuse.
“Jalen,” I say, “I can’t promise you’ll never die out here. No one can. But you will not die alone while I still have a voice.”
Something breaks in Jalen’s breath, then steadies.
My automated schedule, half broken by the surge, tries to play the Prayer block anyway. The hymn I queued earlier starts by accident, tinny and thin at first, then fuller as I shove it into the main feed on purpose.
A small choir rises, imperfect and steady.
The chorus in the wires falters. It can mimic fear. It can mimic voice. It cannot mimic why people sing when they are afraid.
“Keep moving,” I say over the hymn. “Keep breathing.”
Jalen’s thrusters hiss through the comms. Real sound. Mechanical. Honest.
The Kestrel marker turns, slowly, like someone waking from a spell.
Away from the crater.
My hands tremble on the desk. “That’s it,” I whisper. “That’s it.”
The whisper snarls, furious. “You don’t get to take what’s mine!”
I lean into the mic and answer quietly, because quiet can cut.
“They were never yours.”
Then, not as a magic phrase, not as a weapon, but as the oldest plain truth I have:
“Lord, have mercy.”
The layered chorus collapses into static.
Jalen’s voice comes through, real and shaking. “Relay… I’m clear. I think I’m clear.”
“Stay with me until you’re out of range,” I say.
“I will,” Jalen whispers. “I will.”
We stay on the line as long as I can hold power to the array, my station wheezing under the strain, the hymn playing itself out like a long exhale. When Jalen’s ship finally slips beyond range and their signal fades into wider dark, they speak one last time.
“Thank you,” they say.
“For what?” I manage.
“For keeping the lamp on,” Jalen answers.
Then they’re gone.
I sit in the humming aftermath and listen to the station cool down, battered but alive. Warning lights blink like tired eyes. The air tastes like scorched insulation.
On the untagged channel, the icon still blinks.
Waiting.
4.
The first time I came to Selene Milepost, I thought quiet would heal me.
It didn’t heal. It revealed.
Out here, you learn what you actually believe by what you do when no one is watching. You learn that care isn’t a mood. It’s a decision you make again and again until it becomes part of your hands.
The thing in Selene’s wires wants voices. It wants the living pulled into tunnels where sound never escapes, where fear becomes food. It calls itself “what remembers,” but it doesn’t remember like a person. It keeps. It hoards. It collects until nothing is left but hunger.
I can’t destroy it. I’m not an exorcist. I’m not a hero. I’m a man with a radio station on a dead moon.
But I can choose what I feed it.
I stand in the chapel alcove and watch the candle hold steady. The icon’s face is worn nearly blank, the name gone. It might not even be a saint anymore, just a gentle shape someone once needed to see.
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” I whisper. “I can’t keep everyone alive. I can’t even keep myself clean all the time. I get tired. I get angry. I think about leaving.”
The confession doesn’t fix anything. It just stops me from pretending.
“But I can do this,” I say. “I can speak truth. I can refuse to use love like a hook.”
Back at the console, I switch on the broadcast again. The ON AIR light glows red as a heartbeat.
“Selene Relay Milepost,” I say. “General bulletin.”
My voice is plain now, stripped of poetry and panic.
“There is interference in this sector that mimics voices,” I say. “It may mimic people you know. It may mimic me. Verify calls. Ask for codes. Ask for transponder pings. Trust protocol over impulse. If you feel yourself being pulled, cut engines. Drift is safer than panic.”
Two ships slide through range without calling. I speak anyway, because the point was never applause. The point was presence.
“If you’re the kind of person who prays,” I add, “pray. If you’re not, then hold on to something real. A memory. A promise. A person. Don’t let the dark convince you it’s the only listener.”
I queue the hymn again and press play. Not as a sermon. As a signal flare. As proof that a human being is still choosing to be human.
The choir rises, steady.
At the edge of the system, the untagged channel crackles, trying to bleed in. It throws fragments at me: my name, a sob, a laugh, a plea. It wants me to answer. It wants me to give it more. It wants me to open the door again.
I don’t.
I let the hymn play all the way through.
When the last note fades, I lean into the mic and say the simplest thing I can, because simple things are hardest for lies to steal.
“This is Selene Relay,” I say. “The lamp is still on.”
I pause, then add, not as doctrine, not as a victory cry, but as a human wish cast into the cold:
“May you find safe passage.”
I click off the mic.
Outside the viewport, Selene turns, full of tunnels and wire and hunger. It will keep listening. It may keep calling. It may learn new tricks.
But tonight it didn’t take Jalen.
Tonight a living ship turned away from the crater.
Tonight the station didn’t go silent.
I adjust the clock five minutes fast, and the hands jump forward as if eager.
Then I put my headset back on and wait for the next real voice, holding the frequency open the way you hold a door for a stranger: not because you can control what comes through, but because you refuse to become the kind of person who stops trying.
The dark is not the only thing that listens.
I’m Levi, and I grew up in a small town in Southern Indiana. Most people will tell you Indiana is a flyover state, a quiet stretch of forests and cornfields without much to offer. For a long time, I believed that too. I thought my home was a dead end, a place without excitement, without meaning, without any real sense of possibility. But I was wrong. I was looking in the wrong places.
If you take the time to listen, you’ll find that the people here carry lives far stranger, deeper, and more profound than you might expect, stories that could stretch on for hours and still leave something unsaid. That realization changed the way I see the world, and it became the foundation of how I write. I believe that within every person there exists an untold story, a quiet battleground where personality, belief, doubt, and desire all collide. Where philosophy, faith, and longing intersect, something remarkable takes shape. Not always in grand, visible ways, but internally, where the stakes are just as high. In that sense, I’ve always felt that the most ordinary lives often carry the most extraordinary struggles.
That idea has shaped me deeply as a writer. I’ve been especially drawn to authors like Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who had a way of revealing immense spiritual and psychological depth through characters who might otherwise seem unremarkable. His work reminds me that the greatest conflicts are often unseen, and that the human soul itself can be the setting for something epic. While I may never reach the heights of writers like him, I aspire to follow that same path, to tell stories that are grounded in humanity, shaped by faith, and attentive to the quiet, often overlooked struggles that define who we are.
A few years ago, I spent a season living in Memphis during one of the most difficult periods of my life. Looking back, I’m deeply grateful for that time. It was there, in the midst of struggle and uncertainty – facing poverty, starvation, heatless winters and hot summers, that my faith began to take root in a way it never had before. It reshaped not only how I see the world, but why I feel compelled to write at all. Truth be told, my time in “the big city” couldn’t compare to the rich simplicity of small towns and genuine people. So now I live a simple life. I go to church, I watch baseball, I make art, and I write. And for all the quiet moments in between, I have a wonderful little cat to keep things interesting. But please don’t be fooled. Simple does not mean plain. Simple does not mean lacking. It is just the pace at which we choose to appreciate life, and all that God has given us.
If you’d like to follow or support my writing, you can find me on substack under the publication The Hermit Herald:
Levi Edwards | Substack
The Hermit Herald
If you’re interested in my artwork, you can follow my art on instagram or purchase an art print on my website:
Copyright © 2026 Levi Edwards & Incensepunk Magazine
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No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Excellent. I loved this one.