A Song in the Static E-Book

Margot Elise Winters

• Herausgeber: Twist & Tether Press
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Mara Vyne is alone at the edge of known space, stationed aboard Relay Ith-9—a forgotten satellite listening post where silence is standard. But when a faint melody filters through the static, everything changes. The song is unmistakably tied to Kael, her long-dead partner. It’s not just a voice. It’s his voice.
Desperate for answers, Mara defies protocol and begins tracing the signal. But the deeper she digs, the more her memories falter. Systems she hasn’t touched respond to her thoughts. Logs contain things she doesn’t remember saying. And the signal? It’s not coming from any known sector. It’s coming from inside the grid—and it knows her name.
Haunted by grief, guilt, and flashes of a life that no longer feels entirely her own, Mara enters a tightening spiral of memory and recursion. As her grip on reality begins to slip, she’s forced to confront an impossible question: What if she’s not chasing a ghost... but becoming one?
In this slow-burn sci-fi psychological thriller, memory is unstable, grief is weaponized, and identity is never quite what it seems.
How do you find the truth—
—when you’re no longer sure you were ever real?

Leseprobe

A Song in the Static

She Followed the Signal. Something Answered.

When the Stars Lied

Margot Elise Winters

Copyright © 2025 by Margot Elise Winters

All rights reserved. This book, including all individual stories and original content, is protected under international copyright law. No part of this publication may be copied, reproduced, distributed, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission from the author, except for brief excerpts used in reviews or academic commentary, which must be properly credited.

Fiction Disclaimer:

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.

Cover Image Notice:

The cover artwork for this book was created using licensed generative AI tools under commercial-use terms. It is an original, symbolic composition created specifically for this title. Any characters depicted are fictional and do not represent real individuals.

AI Tools Acknowledgement:

The cover image and/or illustrations were created using generative AI technology under appropriate commercial-use licensing. All visual elements are original compositions intended solely for this publication.

Thank you for reading this special collection. I hope you enjoy every story inside.

Table of Contents

A Song in the Static

Description

Chapter 1: The Echo Out There

Chapter 2: The Dead Don’t Speak

Chapter 3: Phase Drift

Chapter 4: In the Eye of the Memory

Chapter 5: Somewhere Between

Chapter 6: The Twist — You Were Never Alone

Chapter 7: The Stillness Beyond

A Song in the Static

Description

They told us the stars were maps. That they guided us, promised us destiny, and whispered truths too vast for mortal minds. But they lied.

In When the Stars Lied, each standalone story drifts through the cold silence of the cosmos—where identity crumbles, memories fracture, and reality collapses under the weight of something incomprehensibly vast. Time stretches. Love distorts. A message from nowhere might know your name before you do. Nothing here is what it seems—not the station, not the signal, not even yourself.

This isn’t horror that chases you. It waits—still, patient, embedded in static, orbit, and dream. It’s the soft terror of waking in the wrong timeline. The chill of a voice calling you home from inside a black hole. The beauty of something ancient wearing your memories like a mask.

These are stories of awe, collapse, and the quiet horror of knowing too much.

There are no endings here.

No truth without cost.

No way back.

When the stars lied, they didn’t whisper.

They sang.

And we’re still listening.

Chapter 1: The Echo Out There

The light in the maintenance corridor flickered, pulsing like a dying star in a forgotten corner of space. I reached up, flicked the panel twice, then gave it a sharp smack with the heel of my hand. It stabilized with a reluctant hum.

"Add it to the repair log," I muttered to no one. The system didn’t even beep in acknowledgment anymore.

Ith-9 had been silent for ninety-one days. Not silent silent—the low vibrations of the grav-balancers, the sharp clicks of cooling metal in the hull, the static hiss of space pressing its presence against every wall—those never stopped. But human silence? That was complete.

I pushed my cart forward, its rubber wheels squeaking as I moved past rows of relay cores blinking in erratic rhythms. They reminded me of heart monitors, each with its own arrhythmic beat. If I stopped walking and closed my eyes, I could almost believe they were alive—sick, maybe, but alive.

I stopped at junction node 12B. The diagnostics panel glowed a dull blue.

"Corrupted packet relay. Again."

I knelt, pried open the casing, and pulled the fiber-optic cord. The inner threads had blackened, like burnt nerves. I swapped them out with practiced hands. Three rotations ago, this would’ve taken me an hour. Now? Five minutes. Muscle memory and boredom made me faster.

Once the new cord was secured, I sealed the casing and tapped the command node. The panel reset, blinked three times, then turned green.

"One win today," I whispered.

And then the music started.

A melody.

A low hum of chords—crackled, like vinyl played through sand. Slow. Melancholy.

It came from the overhead comms. Just a few bars. Six notes.

Then silence.

I froze, hand still on the cart handle.

"Run that back," I said. "Playback last comms buffer."

The AI didn’t respond.

I turned back toward the core room, boots thudding against the metal deck, each step heavier than the last.

Inside, the main receiver panel glowed faint green. No external messages. No queued uplinks.

The relay was… clean.

"No open signals," I said aloud, trying to keep my voice steady. "Then where the hell did that come from?"

I accessed the buffer manually. Five seconds of silence. Then the sound.

The six notes.

I isolated the waveform. Played it again. Slowed it. Ran it through the spectral scrubber.

And there it was—beneath the melody.

A voice.

A voice I knew.

"…always find you."

My fingers went cold.

I hadn’t heard Kael’s voice in five years. Not since the crash. Not since the oxygen leak that suffocated his final breath before I could reach him.

I stared at the screen. The waveform pulsed, waiting.

No.

No way.

"That wasn’t him," I whispered.

But my chest clenched like it used to when he laughed. Like it did when he whispered my name into my neck under the stars of Vega Twelve.

I leaned closer. Ran a voiceprint check.

The system hesitated. I’d never seen that before—like it didn’t want to tell me.

Then, on the screen, a match: Kael Tovian – 87% confidence.

My breath caught.

"Where did it come from?"

The system began to triangulate. The screen displayed a radial map of nearby channels. Most were dead. One pulsed faintly, far on the edge of our scanning limit.

Sector E-57—an old beacon relay line. Discontinued.

That relay went offline years ago.

I opened the wide-band comms.

"Station Ith-9 to Echo Relay Net. Transmitting ping on all inactive channels. Respond if you copy."

Static.

Then, just before I shut it down—the same six-note melody.

But this time, it played in reverse.

***

I watched the playback six more times. The melody. The voice. The coordinates.

Everything pointed outward.

Everything pointed to Kael.

I stood, back aching, and walked the length of the comms room, eyes on the window.

Beyond the thick glass, the stars didn’t twinkle. They stared. Cold and fixed. Like they were watching me.

I grabbed the headset.

"Begin signal lock," I said. "Maximum gain."

The AI chirped.

"Warning: signal originates from deprecated comm relay. Uplink protocols unstable. Proceeding may result in system corruption."

"Proceed."

My hands trembled as the dish adjusted, its metal arms creaking as they rotated toward deep space.

The signal snapped into place.

And the static… changed.

Beneath it, just barely, I heard the beginning of the song.

The one Kael wrote for me.

"I am losing my mind," I muttered.

But I didn’t stop the connection.

Two hours later, I sat in my bunk, the lights dimmed. I played the loop over and over.

"…always find you…"

The words shifted each time. A different tone. A different rhythm.

Like it was adapting.

I pulled Kael’s old logs from the archive. Listened to them, one by one. Cross-checked them with the waveform.

The pitch. The cadence. The breath between syllables.

It wasn’t a match. It was a copy.

But not synthetic. Too flawed. Too human.