Whalesong Under Static

By the time the midnight freight groaned across the bridge, Nika Solberg had rewound the hydrophone file four times. The lab’s windows framed the fjord like a dark lung, the water breathing, the mountains holding their breath. A single desk lamp cut a cone through the room, pooling on a keyboard gritty with salt dust. Coffee steamed in a chipped mug near her elbow, its heat a faint comfort against the chill that crept off the glass.

She adjusted her headphones and watched the spectrogram scroll. Blues and greens slid like tides; whale arcs curving in steady sweeps; the sharp comb of a passing boat. And beneath it, something human—too thin to be voice, almost a filament of sound braided into the ocean’s own noise.

“Speak again,” she murmured, not certain if she meant the sea or the file. The cursor ticked along. A faint hiss. The kettle on the side table clicked, reminding her she’d poured nothing. She ignored it. On the screen, a barely-there whisper flitted in the low frequencies, where human ears were clumsy.

Her phone buzzed. Elias: You still at it? Her thumbs hovered. Found something. Think there’s embedded voice. There was a pause, then another text. Careful. People asking about the tunnel feed.

The collapsed tunnel was what everyone whispered about. A summer project to run a service conduit under the fjord, a freak landslide, two dead workers, one missing. The official story was fault lines, bad luck. Nika listened to the ocean for a living; luck had a sound. This had something else.

She isolated the suspected band with a practiced hand, narrowing the filter, lowering the gain. The lab hummed around her: a freezer’s gentle chug, the aquarium’s oxygen stone, the old building settling like a whale exhaling. At the edge of hearing, a pattern unfolded—clicks spaced like numbers, not the organic rhythm of echolocation.

Her shoulders tightened. She leaned forward, the cable of her headphones creaking. There, tucked under the bloom of a humpback’s call, a whisper: “Six… eight… east…” It broke, scattered by the wash of a passing boat, then returned: “…four nine… one north…”

Nika stopped breathing. Coordinates. The voice was frayed, each syllable dragged across pebbles. She highlighted the segment, copied it, looped it. After a few plays, the hair along her arms stood. Whoever was whispering was close to the hydrophone when the whales were around, or the file was doctored to hell. Either way, this was no natural artifact.

She pulled off the headphones. The quiet of the room pressed in, thick with brine and the hum of distant engines. Beyond the glass, a pale light touched the mountain ridge and fell away, the kind of not-quite-night that made time elastic up here. She texted Elias back: Coordinates. Could be a hoax. But it’s there.

Her phone lay still for a count of ten. Then: Don’t send this to the server. Got a visitor earlier. Don’t like him.

Nika swallowed. The mug warmed her fingers when she finally picked it up. She didn’t drink. She lowered the blinds instead, shutting out the fjord. The lab grew smaller. The recording kept playing, whispering under whalesong, drawing a line through the dark.