Tap-Tap
The switchboard looked the same.
Clara knew it shouldn't. Not after what she'd seen in Room 217—rows of humming consoles blinking without operators, without lines. A voice that repeated her designation like a ritual. A file with her own name marked unstable. But now, seated back at her assigned board in the main floor room, everything looked perfectly ordinary. The jacks were in place. The indicator lights idled like lazy fireflies. Betty was humming off-key three stations down. The smell of burnt coffee lingered in the air.
She plugged in.
Her headset slipped over one ear. The cord coiled once around her elbow. The static was faint, polite. Familiar.
The binder from Room 217 sat wrapped in a grocery bag tucked inside her coat, folded over her lap under the desk. She hadn't opened it again. Couldn't, not yet. The phrases inside—*Voice confirmed. Memory loop unstable.*—were still burning behind her eyes.
"Morning," Ruth said without looking up. Her fingers danced across her board like a typist mid-love letter
Clara's hands trembled inside her coat pockets.
The binder was still there, pressed flat against her ribs, the cover warm from her body heat. She hadn't dared to open it again. Not on the walk back. Not in the elevator. Not even now, as she sat at her station and stared at the ordinary switchboard in front of her—the one that wasn't alive with blue light or voices that looped in slow motion.
Just wires. Jacks. Dials.
Ordinary.
She plugged in.
The familiar click of the line sliding into the socket should have felt like a return to normal. But the silence that followed didn't settle. It waited.
Clara flexed her fingers. Her nails were still dusty from the floor in Room 217. Her heart hadn't stopped its slow percussion since she left.
Behind her, Betty laughed at something across the aisle. Someone's lunch sandwich had gone missing. No one noticed Clara's expression. No one ever did.
The line blinked.
Line 3. Routine.
She connected.
"Operator," she said, voice steady. "How may I assist?"
There was a pause.
Then: tap… tap… tap.
Not a voice. No static. No breath. Just precise, mechanical taps.
Clara waited.
More tapping.
Tap. Tap. Tap-tap.
She frowned. It wasn't a stuck key. It wasn't the sound of a dropped receiver. The rhythm was… intentional. Spaced. Repeating.
"Hello?" she said cautiously.
No response.
Just another burst:
Tap… tap-tap-tap… tap. Tap.
Then silence.
The call disconnected itself.
She unplugged, staring down at her console.
That hadn't been a mistake.
That had been a message.
For several long seconds, Clara didn't move.
Then she reached for her notepad—not the black notebook with its creeping self-written entries, but a clean pad. She wrote down the taps phonetically:
> .–.. .. ... – . -. / -... .- -.-. -.-
She didn't know Morse. Not really. A few letters. Enough from old signal manuals in her training packet.
But even before she translated it, she could feel what it said.
Listen back.
She circled the words.
And slowly, without meaning to, whispered aloud:
> "Oh no."
Because if someone was telling her to listen back… it meant she'd already heard something she wasn't supposed to.
It happened again the next night.
The board was quiet, routine. Clara had completed three uneventful calls and filed a complaint form about Line 9, which had begun humming like a drunk harmonica. No one else seemed to care.
At 2:13 a.m., Line 6 blinked.
She connected.
"Operator speaking."
No reply.
Then: tap… tap… tap-tap-tap.
Clara's hand froze on the plug.
Tap. Tap-tap.
The same spacing. Not random. Not garbled.
She leaned slightly closer to the speaker.
The rhythm was identical. Three long bursts. A pause. Then two short ones. Same cadence as the night before.
She didn't bother asking if anyone was there. She knew the answer.
Instead, she reached down to her pad and began scribbling as the sound played out. Dots. Dashes. Short pauses. Longer ones. Her symbols weren't perfect, but the pattern was.
When the line cut again — no click, no dial-tone — she tore off the sheet and held it up beside the one from last night.
Identical.
LISTEN BACK.
She didn't sleep when she got home.
She sat at her tiny kitchen table with both sheets, cross-referencing them against a hand-drawn Morse key she found in an old Boy Scout manual Eddie had once lent her, tucked into a drawer beneath her coffee tin.
She translated it again.
> .–.. .. ... – . -. / -... .- -.-. -.-
L-I-S-T-E-N B-A-C-K.
She rubbed her eyes. The clock on her wall said 4:17 a.m. Her heart felt like it had lodged somewhere behind her throat.
She didn't remember the first time she heard the tapping. It could have been weeks ago. Months. Had she ignored it?
Or had she already listened?
Already followed?
She turned to her notebook — the black one.
Flipping past the front pages, she searched the entries. Every call, every anomaly, every phrase logged neatly. Except…
Halfway through, between two notes about the name "Hal" and an anonymous voice that said "Operator awake," was a single line written in different pen pressure.
> "The tapping says listen."
Clara hadn't written that.
At least, not that night.
She ran her finger over it. It was her handwriting. Her slope. Her curled lowercase "e." But the ink was slightly darker, as if newer. Fresher.
Or… overwritten.
She stood abruptly, pushing her chair back hard enough to rattle the kitchen stool. Her mind buzzed, not with adrenaline, but with a new kind of tension: internal vibration. Like her brain was tuning to a signal it hadn't consented to.
What if the message wasn't just telling her to replay tapes?
What if it was telling her to replay herself?
That night, she returned to the Bell building thirty minutes early.
No one stopped her. Overnight techs barely made eye contact anymore.
She bypassed the main console and walked straight to her desk, where she opened the lower drawer and removed a small metal case — her own personal toolkit. Screwdriver, coil-cutter, and a compact reel-to-reel recorder she'd kept from an old side project.
She unscrewed the console's backing plate, quietly, and fed the recorder's line into the auxiliary output.
It wasn't part of standard routing.
But Clara wasn't following protocol anymore.
She was building her own.
And if someone wanted her to listen back…
Then she was going to record everything.
Clara worked in silence, fingers steady, movements practiced.
She hadn't done a full console bypass before—but she'd seen enough from watching the technicians, especially the ones Bell sent without names on their shirts. The screws were loose in the back panel, almost as if someone had done this before. The wiring was brittle but familiar: copper veins of a living machine she'd spent years tending like a reluctant nurse.
She fed the output cable through the interior slot, gently, looping it behind the secondary switch matrix. Her reel-to-reel recorder clicked softly as she secured the final connection beneath the desk.
To anyone walking by, her board looked untouched.
But the moment she plugged in her headset and activated Line 5, a second, fainter click answered her beneath the desk—the reel engaging, the magnetic tape turning in secret.
She logged two hours of standard calls.
Weather. Directory assistance. A misdialed complaint to Sears. Clara responded calmly, formally. Her voice felt mechanical. It was easier that way.
At 3:07 a.m., Line 9 buzzed.
She connected.
Silence.
She waited ten seconds.
Then a tap.
One. Two.
A pause.
Three more.
She didn't write it down this time. She let it play. The rhythm, already memorized, drifted through her like an echo on a lake. It was comforting now. A reminder.
LISTEN BACK.
When her shift ended, she didn't clock out.
She stayed behind as the room cleared, only the low buzz of fluorescent lights keeping her company. She slid the recorder from beneath the desk, rewound the reel, and attached her personal headphones—older, heavier, the kind with a slight hiss even in silence.
She pressed play.
The first few recordings were clean.
Her voice. Standard calls. Timed perfectly.
Then… the tape fuzzed.
Not skipped—drifted.
A warping, like time had crumpled at the edge of the reel. The tone wavered. A recorded voice played back at half speed, deep and slow.
> "Directory assistance… I'm sorry… could you repeat that?"
That wasn't her voice.
And it wasn't any caller she remembered.
The call wasn't logged.
She fast-forwarded, carefully.
More static.
Then:
> "Clara."
Her name.
Spoken clearly.
By a woman.
The voice wasn't hers. It was older, smoother. The cadence familiar—but not recent. Not anyone from Bell's current roster.
She rewound.
Played again.
> "Clara."
The speaker paused, then added:
> "You've already taken this call."
Clara's skin prickled.
She didn't recall any part of that call. Not the voice. Not the message. Not even the timestamp. The voice had come through without her memory.
She pressed stop.
Checked the timestamp burned into the tape.
2:41 a.m.
She opened her desk ledger.
No entry.
She was sure she'd been at her console then. Alert. Listening.
How could she have patched a call she never heard?
Unless…
Unless the recorder captured more than she did.
She pressed play again.
> "Some echoes don't repeat," the voice said.
> "Some precede."
The line fuzzed. Then died.
Clara sat back.
The tape turned slowly.
Her mind spun faster.
Clara rewound the reel with deliberate slowness, her thumb hovering near the stop switch.
The room was almost completely dark now. Only one desk lamp remained lit near the far end of the operator floor. She hadn't turned it on—it had been glowing quietly when the last technician left, like a watchtower she hadn't noticed until everyone else was gone.
She slid on her headphones again and pressed play.
The tape whirred. Soft, warm, magnetic.
She tuned her breathing to the rhythm of the reel—inhale, listen; exhale, wait.
The call that played first was ordinary. A woman asking for a florist on South Racine. Clara's recorded voice gave her the number with practiced cheer. She sounded like someone else—an earlier version, untouched by shadowed rooms and echoing names.
She let the tape continue.
Another call. A man requesting an out-of-state operator transfer.
Then… something below it.
Faint.
She turned the volume up a notch.
The background static wasn't static.
It was breathing.
Not mechanical. Not tape noise.
Inhale. Exhale.
Then, layered beneath Clara's own recorded words:
> "Don't forget the door."
The phrase was whispered under the directory listing.
She blinked.
Rewound ten seconds. Played it again.
> "Don't forget the door."
She checked her transcript log.
Nothing like it. She never heard it during the live call.
She fast-forwarded again. Let the reel roll.
At 2:57 a.m., a man's voice came through—deep, smooth, and purposeful. Clara's memory jolted.
She hadn't patched a call to this number. She would've remembered his tone.
He said:
> "Confirming access to Operator Echo. Authorization holds. Begin Phase Three."
Clara's recorded voice didn't answer.
Instead, another voice—also female, similar to hers but flatter—replied:
> "Operator Fourteen. Signal integrity at 81%. Memory buffer unstable."
Clara jerked her headphones off.
The tape kept spinning.
She pulled it from the recorder and laid it on her desk, breathing hard.
Voices beneath voices.
Calls beneath calls.
She hadn't just recorded what she'd heard.
She'd recorded what she'd missed.
The phone lines weren't just transmitting sound. They were transmitting timing. Memory. And now, with her recorder wired to the bare output feed, she had tapped into the layer Bell had built beneath her.
She leaned forward, pressed her palm flat against the switchboard.
It was silent.
But it felt warm.
Like something was still moving beneath the surface—waiting for the next patch, the next breath, the next sentence to twist back in on itself.
She whispered:
> "You're still listening, aren't you?"
The console didn't blink.
But her headset—disconnected—shifted slightly on the desk.
Not a breeze.
A twitch.
Clara waited until the building emptied again.
She was developing a sense for it now—the lull in foot traffic, the drop in pressure, the shift in the air when Bell went quiet enough to breathe without anyone noticing. These were the hours when whispers could pass as protocol, and no one would ask why her station hummed when her headset wasn't plugged in.
She returned to her recorder.
The first reel lay flat on the desk, label peeled back slightly from how many times she'd pressed rewind. She started a second one—clean, unmarked—and slid it onto the spindle with hands that no longer shook.
This time, she adjusted the gain differently.
Instead of the headset line, she patched into the carrier feed—the signal layer that Bell used for background integrity checks. It wasn't meant to transmit voice. Just pulses. Confirmations. System-to-system chatter, invisible to human ears.
Except… something had been whispering through it anyway.
She let the recorder run.
Half an hour.
No calls taken.
Just ambient hum.
She made coffee in the breakroom and watched the machine whirr, tape pulling thin magnetic secrets onto itself.
Then she rewound.
And listened.
Static at first.
Then, layered deep within the ambient pulses—almost imperceptible—taps.
But they weren't like the earlier ones.
They were tighter.
Faster.
Shorter gaps.
She grabbed her Morse sheet, the one she kept now taped to the edge of her drawer, and began transcribing.
First sequence:
> .--. ..- .-.. .-.. / .--. .... .- ... . / - .... .-. . .
She wrote it out letter by letter.
PULL PHASE THREE
Her stomach turned.
Second burst:
> -.- .. .-.. .-.. / .-.. .. -. . / ..-. --- ..- .-. - . . -.
KILL LINE FOURTEEN
She read it three times.
Then a fourth.
The pencil dropped from her hand.
They weren't warning her.
They weren't looping her thoughts.
They were sending instructions.
Not to her.
About her.
Line Fourteen was hers. Always had been.
She reached instinctively for the patch cable—then paused.
The line wasn't active. It hadn't been touched since she wired the recorder. And yet, somehow, the command was issued.
She checked the timestamp.
4:00 a.m.
She looked at the wall clock.
3:57.
The message hadn't been recorded in the past.
It was from now.
Or… three minutes from now.
She pushed back from the console and stood.
Walked three slow steps to the far end of the room. Just past the coat rack.
From here, she could see her desk clearly.
The reel still spinning. Headset resting. Switchboard inert.
A machine like any other.
Until it was told otherwise.
She glanced down at the sheet in her hand.
"PULL PHASE THREE / KILL LINE FOURTEEN"
She didn't know what Phase Three was.
But she was certain she didn't want to find out the hard way.
She returned to the desk.
Unplugged the recorder.
Slid the reel into her bag.
And for the first time since she'd joined Bell, she unplugged her own line from the console.
If the system wanted her signal—
It would have to listen somewhere else.