In this issue: With connectivity hard-fought and scarce, our protagonist longs for the most painful information that one could receive. Will he find it, in the rubble and scrap of this strange world? Welcome Charlie Sanders, a new contributor to Protocolized.
The sound began not as a whine, but as a change in air pressure – a high-frequency vibration felt in the teeth before it was heard. The feeling was pervasive, inserting an insistent, electric scream that promised either fire from the sky or a filament of salvation.
Tom’s hand, resting on the flaking paint of his porch rail, tightened. The rust felt like grit beneath his palm. He’d been alone for months, ever since Jacob had departed on a humanitarian mission in a nearby settlement. If luck still counted for anything, his son might be alive.
The porch itself was barely standing, its joists warped and split from years of neglect, yet Tom clung to it as though it were the last post holding up his world. From his house, built upon the highest hill in town (if one still called the settlement a town), he could see much of Providence. Roofs sagged beneath patchwork tarps, smoke leaked thinly from chimneys that should have been condemned, and the main thoroughfare was a scar of cracked stone lined with stalls that rarely held more than boiled roots or scavenged wire.
He remembered when those streets had been filled with color and noise. Jacob and the other boys raced bicycles between market tables, voices echoing off the rail yard. His wife leaned over their balcony, waving him inside before dinner went cold. That world had died by increments, until even memory felt dangerous, a soft indulgence in a place that allowed none.
Still, traces clung. The neighbor’s child, Mira, drew chalk figures on the wall opposite his porch, their crude lines washed away by the next rain. Someone had planted potatoes in an old oil drum. A faded mural of birds stretched across one building, now streaked with soot. Reminders that Providence had not entirely forgotten how to live, but had forgotten how to expect more.
Tom’s chest tightened at the thought of Jacob somewhere out there, walking through landscapes more broken than this one. The rail bit into his palm, anchoring him in the present as the rattling air built toward its promise.
The compound was quieter now than it used to be, he thought as he listened carefully. Before the Invasion, Tom had lived near a train yard, and even after the railroads were bombed, other sounds had replaced the ghost noise of locomotives: the thump of people in the streets, market chatter, a bicycle bell. Now the only sound was the creak of boards under his neighbor’s steps overhead, followed by the faint clink of a kettle lid.
A shout from the watch post cut through the drone’s building cry. “Profile is a quad! Repeat, quad-rotor, not a Kestrel. I see extended battery packs. No ordnance. It’s a Runner!”
Providence released its collective breath in a ragged sigh. A woman carrying a bundle of herbs unconsciously let her shoulders drop. A man leaned against a wall, pressing a hand to his chest. The tension did not vanish, but it transmuted into something sharper: a desperate, clawing anticipation.
The drone, its matte-grey fuselage scored and pitted from countless journeys through contested airspace, swept over the compound wall. It descended with unnerving intelligence, optical sensors mapping the debris field that had once been the town square. It settled in a clear patch beside the decapitated bronze figure of a forgotten statue, its motors spinning down with a final, sighing buzz.
The square had once been the heart of Providence. Before the barricades rose, Tom remembered it as a place where the train workers would gather after shift, trading laughter for bread and tobacco, where Jacob once clambered onto the statue’s pedestal to shout imaginary speeches to passersby. Now the statue’s head lay face down in a drift of ash, its green patina worn smooth by years of acid rain. Weed tufts sprouted between fractured paving stones, and the basin of the old fountain had become a catchment for rust-brown runoff. Beyond the barricades, the forest loomed, its treeline a serrated wall of chlorophyll so dark it seemed to drink the light. Tom always felt as if the trees listened. On quiet nights, when the wind shifted, he could swear he heard breathing from within their ranks.
People gazed at the drone as though it were a relic, their faces taut with reverence and fear. A woman in a coat stitched from two different uniforms clasped a pendant in her hands, lips moving in a private prayer. Children craned their necks to glimpse the machine, their eyes wide, though none dared step forward.
From an armored housing bolted to the underside of the drone, a silica filament, no thicker than one of Jacob’s hairs, spooled outward, vanishing into the treeline toward a faraway relay.
The engineering team was already moving, their boots crunching on broken pavement. Lena, their technical lead, didn’t waste words. “Reyes, soldering iron and PCB. Anya, fire up the terminal. Let’s get a handshake before something in those woods gets possessive.”
The crowd pressed in, a silent, anxious ring of onlookers. They watched Lena’s bare, nimble fingers work on the drone’s housing as if she were performing a sacred rite. Reyes knelt beside her, soldering iron already in hand. “Easy with that,” Lena murmured, not looking up. “That thing could melt the fiber optic strand with a single flick.”
“Don’t worry,” Reyes muttered back, eyes narrowed in concentration as he finished connecting the fiber to the relay station. “I only melt the expensive stuff on Tuesdays.”
Tom’s heart hammered against his ribs. He felt the press of bodies around him, smelled the communal scent of damp wool, woodsmoke, and anticipation. Lena turned the terminal on. The screen blinked, then filled with lines of flowing green text, a digital prayer answered.
\text{INITIATE_HANDSHAKE: F-O_TETHER_7B41} \\
\text{SRC_NODE: FT_NC_04 (FORTITUDE)} \\
\text{DEST_NODE: PV_NC_02 (PROVIDENCE)} \\
\text{ENCRYPTION: AES-256_GCM} \\
\text{AUTHENTICATING...} \\
\text{SIGNAL_STRENGTH: 98.7\%} \\
\text{LINK_ESTABLISHED}
The text dissolved into a staticky image that coalesced into the face of a grim-looking man in a headset – the relay officer, Fortitude’s Caller. “Providence, you have the Tether. Fortitude is receiving. Clock is hot. Lena, you have the window.”
Lena stepped forward immediately. “Intel. We had a Kestrel patrol probing the eastern perimeter three days ago. Anything on your side?”
“Negative, Captain,” the Caller said. “West has been quiet. Advise you watch your six. Scavs are getting bold. Next.”
A young man shoved his way forward. “Message for Elara Vance! It’s Ben!”
The Caller’s face was replaced by a woman’s, gaunt but beautiful. “Ben! Are you okay? The fever…?”
“Broke yesterday,” he said, his voice cracking. “I’m okay. I love you. I…”
“Time,” the Caller stated, his face reappearing. He wasn’t cruel, just a metronome for their fleeting connection. “Next.”
A mother showed her husband the first drawing their daughter had ever made. A mechanic asked about the voltage tolerance on a salvaged condenser. Each exchange was a frantic burst of data, months of longing compressed into ten tightly policed seconds.
Tom felt Captain Rostova’s hand on his arm, guiding him forward.
“Request from Providence for an update on Jacob,” the Caller announced.
The screen shifted. The face that appeared was Elias, Jacob’s old squadmate. He looked ten years older than the last time Tom had seen him. The hope in Tom’s chest became a cold, heavy stone. He saw the answer in the pity etched around Elias’s eyes.
“Elias,” Tom breathed, his voice a dry rasp. “It’s Tom. Tell me.”
Elias’s mouth opened, forming words Tom already knew. “Tom, I… we went out to the northern pass. The Ranger team he was supposed to meet…”
A terrible low-frequency thrum vibrated up from the distant forest. It was not a sound, but a physical force. Lena, watching the tension monitor on the cable anchor, screamed a single word: “Snag!”
The silica fiber, which had hung with a gentle curve toward the forest, snapped guitar-string taut. On the screen, Elias’s grieving face fractured into a million dying pixels of light. The anchor port snapped as it was ripped from the terminal, the cable connector whipping past Lena’s head.
Later, long after the square had emptied and Providence had settled back into its uneasy rhythms, fragments of the shattered silica fiber would be found scattered among the underbrush at the forest’s edge. The tiny glints of filament caught the wind, trailing like silver threads through moss and bracken, reminders of the connection that had been cruelly brief.
Tom thought of Elias’s words, halting, heavy with grief – but unfinished. He hadn’t said Jacob was gone. And that pause, that small, aching ambiguity, would drive Tom to keep listening hopefully for that next telltale whir.
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