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QEC ACTIVE — CONTINUOUS
SHIP: Silt Aria
SYSTEM: Transit, day 54

The tone has not stopped.

Thirty-one hours now. A clean 440 Hz, unwavering, as if someone pressed a tuning fork to the hull and the hull forgot how to let go. Maret has run every diagnostic she knows. The QEC housing is intact. The carrier tone she introduced in her tests is gone — she killed it twelve hours ago. The 440 persists without it.

This is not the flutter. The flutter had character. It varied, it responded, it reorganized itself around Maret's signal in ways that suggested — I'll say it plainly — something listening. The continuous tone does none of that. It sits on 440 like a dial tone. Like something waiting for input on an open line.

Odelya asked whether we should be transmitting. She phrased it carefully. Not whether we should be talking to each other, or logging, or running systems. Whether we should be transmitting on the QEC at all. I said we have to file reports. She said she understood that. Then she went back to the galley table and opened the logbook to a page she'd marked.

Nav2, month twelve. Two sentences: "The channel is not ours anymore. Commander agrees we should continue filing as normal."

I read it three times. "Not ours anymore" is clear enough. "Continue filing as normal" is what concerns me. They knew. And they kept using it.

Maret wants to modify the QEC housing — physically dampen the resonance that started this. I told her to wait. Not because I think the tone is harmless but because I don't know what stopping it would mean. The flutter led to this. The flutter was something trying to shape itself into intelligibility. Now there's a carrier signal on our communications hardware that we did not put there and cannot remove by killing our own transmissions.

Someone else is on this line.

I keep coming back to the logbook. Five crew. Fourteen months. The entries stop at month thirteen. Nav2's last entry is a supply requisition. Routine. No sign-off, no final note. They were still filing as normal.

We are still filing as normal.

I've told Maret and Odelya what I think is happening: something used the flutter to find the resonant frequency of our QEC housing, and now it's holding that frequency open. Not communicating. Not jamming. Holding a channel. The distinction matters. A jammer would vary. A communication would modulate. This does neither. It is the sound of a door being held ajar.

Odelya said: "Then who's holding it?"

I don't know. But Nav2 knew, or thought she did, and she kept filing as normal for another month before the entries stopped.

I'm going to do something different. I'm going to stop filing as normal. Not stop filing — the commission can have their reports. But this log, this one, I'm writing for whoever else is listening on this line. If you're holding this channel open, I want to know why.

Maret is asleep. Odelya is in the observation bay, listening to the tone through the hull. She says it sounds different there. Warmer.

I believe her.

-- Thresh, crew lead, Silt Aria