The Hush Protocol

The city’s winter hum is gone. Not quiet, but absent—swallowed by a silence deeper than any snow could create.

It begins not with a sound, but with the perfection of its absence. A subtraction so complete it becomes a presence. I am at my desk, the one crammed into the corner of my bachelor apartment on Spence Street, a fortress of textbooks and dog-eared journals. Outside, the snow falls in thick, silent columns, each flake an emissary of quiet, burying the city in a shroud of white. This is normal. The Winnipeg winter is a master of muting the world. The drone of traffic on Portage Avenue becomes a distant shush, the shouts of students heading home from the bars are eaten by the drifts. I know this quiet. I have studied its physics, the way the crystalline structures of snow capture and scatter sound waves, creating a natural anechoic chamber of the outdoors. This is different.

Tonight, the silence has volume. It has pressure. It is a physical thing that pushes against the triple-pane glass of my window and seeps through the weather stripping. My ears feel strange, a subtle fullness, the same sensation you get when a plane descends too quickly. I strain to hear the familiar thrum of the ancient refrigerator in my kitchenette, the one that usually cycles on with the groan of a dying animal. Nothing. I tilt my head, listening for the low-frequency hum of the building’s heating system, the hiss of steam through century-old pipes. Silence. The digital clock on my microwave flips from 1:16 to 1:17 AM. I did not hear the subtle click.

This is the moment of perception. The first data point. My brain, a pattern-seeking machine, flags an anomaly. The city's ambient noise floor, a constant symphony of sixty-cycle hum, distant sirens, the aggregate rumble of a million lives lived in close proximity, has not been dampened. It has been canceled out. I stand up, my chair legs scraping against the worn hardwood. The sound is shockingly loud, a violation. It feels obscene in the profound stillness, and it dies the instant it is made, with no echo, no reverberation, no tail. It is simply there, and then it is gone, consumed by the void.

My heart rate accelerates. This is not psychology. This is not the ‘winter madness’ my mother worries about over the phone, her voice tinny from a thousand kilometers away. This is physics. A standing wave of destructive interference could, in theory, create a null point, a zone of absolute silence. But for it to cover an entire city block? To cancel out a broadband spectrum of frequencies from the deep sub-bass of a passing bus to the high-pitched whine of a faulty streetlight? The energy required would be astronomical. The precision, impossible. It would defy everything I have learned in my four years of study at the university, everything Dr. Kim has ever taught me about the elegant, predictable chaos of wave mechanics.

I pull on my boots, my fingers fumbling with the laces. The simple act feels monumental. Each rustle of my parka is an explosion in the stillness. I wrap my scarf around the lower half of my face, the coarse wool scratching my skin. The cold hits me the moment I step into the hallway of my building. But the sound does not. The hallway, usually an echo chamber of slamming doors and muffled conversations, is as dead as the inside of a vacuum bell. I can hear the blood pulsing in my ears, a wet, rhythmic pump that has been there my entire life but which I have never truly noticed until this moment, until it is the only sound left.

Outside, the world is a photograph. The snow is pristine, a thick, pristine layer over everything. Streetlights cast cones of orange-yellow light onto the street, but their characteristic buzz is gone. I stand on the sidewalk, a solitary figure in a world that has been muted. A car turns the corner at the end of the block, its tires making no sound on the compressed snow. Its engine is utterly silent. I see the exhaust plume from its tailpipe, a ghostly white cloud in the frigid air, but there is no corresponding rumble. It glides past like a spectre, a phantom of motion without its auditory component. My breath catches in my throat, a cloud of vapour hanging in front of my face. The sheer impossibility of it is a physical weight. I feel a primal fear, the kind that whispers of things that are not merely unknown, but unknowable.

The walk to the university is a pilgrimage into the heart of this new, impossible silence. Every step is a conscious act of defiance against an unseen force. The normal crunch of my boots on snow is gone. I feel the compression under my feet, the shift of the crystals, but the sound is absent. It is like walking on cotton batting. I pass other buildings, apartment blocks with lights on in the windows, but the usual signs of life—a distant television, a barking dog, the clatter of a dish dropped in a sink—are gone. The city is a diorama, a perfect, silent model of itself.

My mind races, flipping through equations and theories. Could it be a meteorological phenomenon? A temperature inversion of such extreme magnitude that it’s refracting all sound waves upwards, into the void of space? Unlikely. The effect would be frequency-dependent; high-pitched sounds would be affected differently than low-pitched ones. This… this is uniform. A total, indiscriminate erasure. It isn’t refraction. It isn’t absorption. It feels like consumption. As if the sound energy is being actively harvested, drawn into a sinkhole of perfect stillness. This thought, unbidden and deeply unscientific, sends a tremor of cold through me that has nothing to do with the minus-thirty-degree air.

The campus is deserted, a collection of brutalist concrete monoliths sleeping under a blanket of white. I have a key card. Not for the main doors, but for a service entrance to the Centennial Hall science complex. A privilege granted to a handful of senior physics students, a trust I have never betrayed. Until now. The electronic lock beeps, a pitifully small sound that is immediately devoured by the quiet. I slip inside, the warmth of the building a welcome shock. But the silence follows me in. The twenty-four-hour hum of the ventilation system, the buzz of the fluorescent lights, the clicking and whirring of a dozen server rooms—all of it, gone.

The Applied Electromagnetics Lab is in the sub-basement. My sanctuary. My playground. It smells of ozone, solder, and old coffee. I don't turn on the main overhead lights, using only the glow from the equipment racks to see. The green and amber LEDs of spectrum analyzers, oscilloscopes, and power supplies cast long, dancing shadows. These machines are designed to listen to the universe, to decode the whispers of pulsars and the background radiation of the Big Bang. Tonight, I will point them at the heart of my own city.

My hands are shaking, but my mind is sharp, focused. Adrenaline, I suppose. I bypass the main network, slaving a portable data acquisition unit directly to the array of wide-spectrum acoustic sensors I’d helped Dr. Kim build last summer. They were designed for a project on urban noise pollution, mapping the decibel levels across the city. They are sensitive enough to pick up a conversation from a kilometer away. I power up the system. The fans in the rack server spin up, but I hear nothing. I only see the indicator lights flicker to life. The software boots, lines of code scrolling silently up the terminal screen.

I pull up the live feed from the sensor mounted on the roof of this very building. The waveform on the screen should be a chaotic, jagged line—the city's acoustic fingerprint. Instead, it is a perfectly flat, horizontal line at zero. Not near zero. Precisely zero. A perfect, digital, impossible zero. A value that should not exist outside of a simulated environment or a deep-space vacuum. It's like looking at the cardiogram of a dead man. I feel a wave of nausea. This is wrong. Deeply, fundamentally wrong.

I have to triangulate. One sensor tells me nothing about the source. I need a position. I need a shape. My fingers fly across the keyboard, my formal education and a thousand hours of late-night coding taking over. I write a quick script to poll the other four sensors we have deployed across the downtown core: one on the Richardson Building, one near the Human Rights Museum, one on the Bell MTS Place, and another on the roof of the Union Station. My code is clumsy, brute-force, but it works. The data begins to stream in, populating a spreadsheet with columns of raw numbers.

Each sensor reports the same thing: a near-total absence of ambient sound. But it's not a uniform absence. There are minute variations, numbers deep in the negative decibel range, statistical ghosts that the software should be rounding down to zero. My program flags them as errors. They are not errors. They are the signal. The noise floor hasn't just dropped; it's been pulled down, creating a negative acoustic pressure. A vacuum. The silence isn't an absence of sound; it's the presence of an active, sound-consuming force.

I re-task my script, instructing it to map the intensity of these negative readings, to treat the lowest value as the epicenter. I need a visual. I pipe the output to a topographical mapping program. The screen flickers, and a wireframe map of downtown Winnipeg appears. And then, the data points begin to populate the map, color-coded. A cold, deep blue spreads across the screen, centered around my own location. But as more data comes in from the other sensors, a pattern emerges. The deepest blue, the point of most intense acoustic absorption, is not here. It is southeast of my position.

My breath fogs the screen as I lean closer. The blue converges, darkening to an almost black indigo, a void on the map. The shape is a circle. A near-perfect circle, its edges clean and sharply defined. It is expanding. I watch, mesmerized, as the circle's radius grows pixel by pixel, slowly, methodically. It washes over a city block, then another. The algorithm calculates the center of the phenomenon, the point of origin. A red crosshair appears on the map, blinking with dreadful finality.

It is located at the confluence of the Red and Assiniboine rivers. The Forks. An ancient meeting place, the heart of the city. Now, it is the heart of this… this silence. The field, this circle of absolute quiet, is emanating from there, growing at a steady, measurable rate. I run a projection. Based on its current expansion, it will consume the entire downtown core in seventy-two hours. The entire city within a week.

A cold sweat trickles down my spine. This is not a natural phenomenon. Natural phenomena are messy, chaotic, governed by fractals and unpredictable variables. They do not produce perfect, expanding circles of negative energy. This is artificial. It is controlled. It is a machine, or a weapon, or… something else. Something utterly alien. The word hangs in the silent air of the lab, terrifying and liberating all at once. It’s the only explanation that fits the impossible data glowing on my screen.

I spend the next few hours in a feverish trance, running every diagnostic I can think of. I analyze the edges of the field. The fall-off is incredibly sharp. The transition from normal ambient sound to the null zone occurs over a space of less than a meter. It’s a wall. A wall of silence. I try to find a frequency that can penetrate it. I use a signal generator to broadcast sweeps of audio—from infrasonic rumbles below the range of human hearing to ultrasonic shrieks that would drive a dog insane. The sensors on the other side of the boundary report nothing. The wall absorbs it all. It feeds on it. The more energy I broadcast, the faster the field seems to expand, a tiny, almost imperceptible surge in its growth rate. My god. It’s eating. It’s feeding on sound.

The sun will be up in a few hours. I have to tell someone. I have to warn them. Dr. Kim. He has to see this. He’s the head of the department, a brilliant man whose papers on quantum acoustics were the reason I came to this university in the first place. He’ll understand the data. He won’t dismiss it. He can’t.

I save my findings to a secure data key, triple-encrypting the files out of a sudden, paranoid fear I can’t explain. I wipe my presence from the lab’s network logs, a trick I learned to cover up my late-night, unsanctioned experiments. I feel like a spy, a criminal. The silence of the building is no longer a curiosity; it is a threat. It feels like the silence of a predator, the stillness before the strike. I hurry through the empty corridors, the only sound the soft, unheard padding of my own boots.

The world outside is beginning to wake up. A few early-morning commuters are on the streets, their cars still gliding by in eerie silence. A woman walks her dog, her mouth moving, but no words come out. The dog’s tail is tucked between its legs, its ears flat against its head. The animals know. They can feel it. The people, cocooned in their warm cars and their own thoughts, are oblivious. They just think it’s a particularly quiet, snowy morning. How long before they notice? Before the silence becomes so profound it can’t be ignored? What happens when a mother tries to call out to her child and no sound comes out? What happens to the scream of a fire truck’s siren? What happens when the world goes permanently deaf?

I wait until nine o’clock, a respectable hour. I try to rehearse what I will say, but the words feel clumsy, insane. ‘Good morning, Dr. Kim. An extraterrestrial entity is currently consuming all acoustic energy in the city, starting with The Forks.’ He’ll have me committed. I have to present the data first. The data is pure. The data cannot be argued with.

His office is on the fourth floor of the Library, a cramped space with a view of the frozen, snow-covered quad. Books and journals are stacked in precarious towers on every available surface. Dr. Andy Kim is a small, neat man, his grey hair impeccably combed, his wire-rimmed glasses perched on the end of his nose. He looks up from a sheaf of papers as I knock on the open door, his expression one of mild, academic curiosity.

“Daniel,” he says. His voice sounds thin, distant, even from a few feet away. The silence is already creeping into the buildings, attenuating everything. “An early bird, are we? I trust you are making progress on your thesis simulations?”

“Doctor, something has happened. Something you need to see.” My own voice is a stranger’s, high and tight. I can feel the tremor in my hands as I hold out the data key.

“Indeed?” He gestures to the chair opposite his desk, a polite but dismissive motion. “Compose yourself, my boy. The end of the semester puts a strain on all of us. A surfeit of caffeine and a deficit of sleep can conjure all manner of spectres in the machine.”

I plug the key into his desktop computer, my movements jerky. I pull up the topographical map first, the stark, expanding circle of black-blue silence. “This is a live acoustic map of the downtown area,” I begin, trying to keep my voice steady, academic. “These are real-time readings from our five sensor arrays. As you can see, the ambient noise floor has dropped to zero across a significant and expanding radius.”

He leans forward, peering at the screen over his glasses. He hums thoughtfully. “A system-wide malfunction, perhaps? A calibration error in the pre-amps? We are using experimental hardware, after all. It is not outside the realm of possibility that a sudden drop in temperature has affected the entire network simultaneously.”

“No, sir. I’ve run every diagnostic. The hardware is functioning perfectly. This isn’t a malfunction. It’s a reading. The data indicates an active field of acoustic absorption. The negative decibel values here,” I point to the epicenter, “they’re not just noise. They indicate that sound energy is being… removed from the environment.”

“Removed,” he repeats, the word flat. He leans back in his chair, steepling his fingers. It is his lecture hall pose, the one he assumes before dismantling a student’s flawed hypothesis. “Daniel, you are a gifted student. One of the best I have had in years. But you possess a tendency toward the… theatrical. You see grand conspiracies in anomalous data points. Last year, it was cosmic rays masquerading as data ghosts in the cloud chamber. The year before, it was a supposed gravitational wave signature from a passing truck.”

“This is different,” I insist, my voice rising. The sound is immediately dampened by the oppressive quiet in the room. “Look at the shape, the expansion rate. It’s not random. It’s precise. It’s artificial. It is centered on The Forks, and it is growing. I broadcast test signals at it—it absorbs them all. It even appears to feed on them; the expansion rate correlates with the energy I transmit.”

Dr. Kim sighs, a soft, tired sound. He removes his glasses and begins to polish them with a small cloth. It is a gesture of profound, paternal disappointment. “You were in the lab last night, weren’t you? Unsanctioned. Broadcasting high-energy signals from university equipment.” It is not a question.

My blood runs cold. “I… yes. I had to. I had to understand what was happening.”

“What is happening, Daniel,” he says, placing his glasses back on with deliberate care, “is that you are exhausted. You are under immense pressure. This city, in the depths of winter, can play tricks on the mind. The silence, the isolation… it can be profound. Your mind has latched onto an equipment glitch and built a narrative around it. A fantastical narrative.” He turns the monitor off. The glowing map disappears, plunging the room into the dim, grey light of the winter morning.

“But the data—”

“The data is incomplete and your interpretation is… fanciful. An energy field that consumes sound? An expanding circle of silence? Daniel, it sounds like the premise of a rather overwrought science fiction story, does it not? I would suggest you go home. Get some sleep. When you return, we can run a full diagnostic on the sensor network together. I am sure we will find a perfectly rational explanation. A software bug. A cascading hardware failure.”

His tone is gentle, but his words are a wall. He is not listening. He is diagnosing me, not the data. He sees a stressed-out student, not a witness. The formality of his speech, the theatricality of his dismissal, it’s a shield. He has already categorized my warning, filed it under ‘student burnout,’ and moved on.

“And what if you’re wrong?” I ask, my voice barely a whisper. “What if, by the time we run your diagnostics, the field has grown so large it can no longer be ignored? What happens then?”

“Then,” Dr. Kim says with a thin, condescending smile, “I shall be the first to tender my apologies and nominate your paper for the Ellison Prize. Now, if you will excuse me, I have actual, verifiable work to attend to.”

The interview is over. I stand there for a moment, the data key clutched in my fist. He has built a wall of reason and condescension around himself, a wall more impenetrable than the one of silence currently swallowing the city. I am alone. The thought is colder and more terrifying than the winter air outside. I am the only one who sees the wolf at the door. Everyone else is admiring the quiet beauty of the snow.

I walk out of his office, through the library where students are studying in a quiet that is no longer scholarly, but absolute. I walk back to my apartment through a city that is holding its breath. The fear is gone, replaced by a cold, hard certainty. No one is coming to help. No one will believe me until it is too late. If something is to be done, I have to do it.

Back in my apartment, I work with a desperate, furious energy. The thing at The Forks is a consumer of energy. It feeds on sound. So, what is the opposite of a feast? Starvation? No. That would mean doing nothing, and the thing is already growing. The opposite of a feast is poison. I cannot fight it with silence. I must fight it with sound. But not just any sound. It cannot be a broadband blast; that would be like ringing a dinner bell. It needs to be a specific sound. A targeted frequency. A resonant frequency.

Every object, every system, has a resonant frequency. The note at which it vibrates most easily, most destructively. A singer can shatter a wine glass by matching its resonant frequency. An army marching in step can bring down a bridge. If this field, this entity, is a physical system, it must have a resonant frequency. If I can find that frequency and broadcast it in a high-energy, focused beam, I might be able to disrupt it. Overload it. Shatter it like a glass.

But how to find the frequency? The field absorbs everything I throw at it. It offers no reflection, no feedback. It is a perfect black body for acoustic energy. But… maybe not perfect. There must be imperfections. Fluctuations at the quantum level, perhaps. A subtle resonance that I could detect if I had the right equipment.

I don’t have the right equipment. Not here. Not at the university. But I can build it. I have the knowledge. My thesis project, the one Dr. Kim thought was so promising, involved creating a highly sensitive quantum tunneling resonator for detecting subtle shifts in magnetic fields. The principles were the same. I could adapt the design. I could tune it for acoustic resonance instead of magnetic.

For the rest of the day, I am a whirlwind of activity. I salvage parts from old stereos, from my microwave, from the spare electronics I keep in boxes under my bed. I need a powerful amplifier, a tunable signal generator, and a custom-built emitter dish. I work on my kitchen table, the floor around me littered with wires, circuit boards, and soldering tools. The silence of the apartment is a constant, pressing reminder of the deadline. Every so often, I look out the window. The city is slowing down. There is less traffic. People are staying indoors. The silence is becoming noticeable, a topic of confused posts on social media. ‘Weirdly quiet in Winnipeg today,’ one reads. ‘Anyone else’s ears feel weird?’ They are noticing. But they do not understand.

By evening, it is complete. It is a monstrous, ugly thing, a jury-rigged collection of electronics bolted to an aluminum frame, powered by a heavy lithium-ion battery pack I salvaged from an old electric scooter. A small, concave dish, made from the reflector of a discarded satellite dish, sits at the front, designed to focus the sonic energy into a tight beam. A handheld controller, tethered by a thick cable, holds the frequency modulator and a simple LCD screen. It hums with a faint, unheard energy when I power it on. I have no way of knowing if it will work. I have no way to test it. Its first and only trial will be on the battlefield.

I heave the device into a large hiking backpack. It is heavy, at least twenty kilograms. The weight settles onto my shoulders, a physical representation of the burden I carry. I zip up my parka, pull on my thickest gloves. One last look around my small apartment, this island of cluttered, messy life in a sea of encroaching nothingness.

The walk to The Forks is longer this time. The silence is deeper. The circle has grown. I am walking into the heart of the anomaly. The streets are almost entirely empty now. The few people I see hurry along, their faces tight with a new, unnamed anxiety. The silence is no longer a novelty. It is a menace.

As I get closer to the river, the pressure in my ears intensifies. I feel a strange vibration in the bones of my skull, a sub-sonic thrum that is not a sound but the ghost of one. The entity is active. It is feeding. The air is cold enough to freeze my lungs, but I am sweating under my layers of clothing. The straps of the backpack dig into my shoulders.

I stand on the grounds of The Forks, near the confluence. The area is deserted. The market building is dark. The iconic canopy is a skeleton against the night sky, which is filled with a dazzling, cold curtain of northern lights. The world is beautiful and terrible. The snow under my feet is a perfect, unbroken field of white. Ahead of me, the two rivers meet, a flat expanse of ice and snow. This is the epicenter. This is ground zero.

I shrug off the heavy pack, my muscles aching. I place the sonic resonator on the ground, pointing the emitter dish out toward the center of the frozen river. My hands tremble as I power up the system. The small LCD screen on the controller glows to life, displaying a frequency of 0.00 Hz. My thumb hovers over the dial that will control the sweep. I will start low, in the infrasonic range, and slowly sweep upwards, watching for any feedback, any change in the field, any sign that the entity has noticed me.

This is it. There is no one else. No cavalry is coming. Just me, a physics student armed with a desperate theory and a machine built from scrap metal and hope. I am about to make a very loud noise in the quietest place on Earth. It will either be the city’s salvation, the sound that breaks the spell and saves us all. Or it will be a dinner bell, drawing the immediate, lethal attention of a silent predator from beyond the stars. My own immediate demise.

My finger tightens on the activation switch. I take a deep breath, the frigid air burning my throat. The silence presses in, waiting. It feels ancient, hungry. And as I stand on the edge of the frozen river, I realize the most terrifying thing of all. The silence is not empty. It is watching me.