The Phantom Feed
It started with the anomaly.
At first, Miri chalked it up to noise — just another blip in the ocean of surveillance dodges, spoofed IPs, and scrambled packets that passed through the Circuit every hour. But this one… it didn't behave like the others.
It didn't scrape.
It didn't trace.
It covered them.
A ghost in the code.
Minjun stood over her shoulder the next morning, arms crossed, watching the lines scroll across her terminal in green on black like something out of an old spy film.
"You sure it wasn't just a relay bounce?" he asked.
"No relay I know does this," Miri replied, tapping rapidly. "It cloaked our outbound nodes mid-broadcast. It rotated IP masks in real-time. It even injected decoy noise into the Seoul DNS logs to divert trackers."
She stopped typing and leaned back in her camping chair.
"It was surgical. Clean. Like someone built a digital invisibility cloak."
Jiwoo, still groggy from a two-hour nap on a pile of coiled mic cables, groaned from the floor. "Are we being hacked by rooftop Batman now?"
"No," Minjun said slowly, "but someone is watching us. Helping us."
He looked back at the last line of the server log: an alphanumeric tag buried in the packet trail.
PHNTM42.
—
They dug for two days.
Miri ran the ID through every backchannel she had access to — old forums from the bootleg K-pop subcultures, abandoned trainee message boards, even underground hacker meetups with usernames like "MixtapeMurderer" and "Chan.exe."
Most had nothing.
Except one.
An old username match — PHNTM42 — popped up on a buried thread from five years ago on a now-defunct site called IdolRemixBoard.
The post was brief:
"Every rooftop is a frequency. You just need to hear between the bricks."
Below it: coordinates.
Minjun read them twice before realizing they weren't random.
"Map those," he told Miri.
Ten minutes later, they had it.
A rooftop in Sillim-dong.
Abandoned student housing. Top floor. No cameras. No security.
Minjun's heart kicked up a gear.
"Let's go."
—
They moved light.
No gear.
No mics.
Just burner phones and black hoodies.
They took two buses and walked the last stretch through sloping hills and silent alleys until the city gave way to quiet — the kind of quiet where every dog bark sounds like a gunshot.
The building was dead.
A ten-story concrete block with peeling paint and a busted elevator. Jiwoo kicked the front door until it opened.
Inside, it smelled of mold and empty ramen packets. Miri hacked the stairwell lock. They climbed.
At the top, the door was already open.
They stepped out into what looked like a time capsule.
The rooftop was clean.
Too clean.
Cables coiled neatly in milk crates. A perfectly mounted antenna jutting from a custom bracket. A folding table set against the far wall, holding an old laptop that still hummed like it had never powered off.
Jiwoo whispered, "Okay, this is starting to feel haunted."
Minjun stepped forward.
The laptop screen flared to life.
No password. Just a folder on the desktop labeled:
LISTEN.
—
He opened it.
Inside: audio files. Dozens.
Each file named with a date and a location. Some from months ago. Some from years back.
Some from rooftops they thought had been wiped.
He clicked on one: 2022_Seoul_LightShow3.wav
A beat played. Familiar. Jiwoo's old hand-drum rhythm. Minjun's voice, younger, rawer, sharper.
This was their second show.
The one they never streamed.
Minjun felt his pulse quicken.
"This person's been archiving us," he whispered.
Miri clicked open another folder: TEXT.
Inside — lyrics. Some were Minjun's. Others weren't. Bits and pieces of rooftop songs never recorded, just performed once and forgotten.
Until now.
They hadn't just been helping.
They'd been listening.
Cataloguing.
Documenting.
Watching.
Jiwoo looked around. "Where are they now?"
As if in response, the screen flickered.
A terminal window opened.
Four words appeared, typed by no visible hand:
I HEAR YOU TOO.
—
Minjun froze.
His mind raced — not out of fear, but recognition.
Whoever this was… they weren't an enemy.
They weren't a fan.
They were part of it.
"Who are you?" he typed.
The response came in five seconds:
SOMEONE WHO NEVER DEBUTED.
Then:
SOMEONE WHO NEVER STOPPED SINGING.
—
They stared at the screen. The cursor blinked like a heartbeat.
Miri whispered, "This is a whole other node. Off-grid. Pre-Circuit."
Minjun sat down, heart pounding. He typed:
WHY HELP US?
The reply came slower this time:
BECAUSE YOU SAID WHAT I NEVER COULD.BECAUSE YOUR NOISE WAS MY FREQUENCY.
Then:
YOU DON'T KNOW HOW BIG THIS IS YET.
The cursor paused.
Then:
BUT YOU WILL.
The screen went black.
—
They left the rooftop in silence.
Back on the bus, Jiwoo stared out the window. "So… what now?"
Minjun didn't answer right away.
Because part of him was terrified.
Not of the Phantom.
Not of being watched.
But of realizing that everything they'd built — all the rooftop riots, the sync drops, the noise — might be part of something older. Deeper.
Something buried in the cracks between rooftops long before they ever climbed them.
—
That night, back on their home base rooftop, Minjun looked out over Seoul.
The lights. The antennas. The shadows.
He imagined voices behind every ledge. Listeners in every alley.
And for the first time, he wondered if the rooftop was never theirs to begin with.
Maybe they were just tuning into a chorus that had always been there.
Waiting to be heard.