The following transmission, designated Testimony
of Artisan Technomonk Pell Orane, Sanctified Maintenance
Guild 3 Delta, has been cleared for conditional
release by the Department Vox Communicatus and
the Ordo Sanctarum Turrum. Listeners are advised
that exposure to post-resonance material may
cause auditory hallucinations consistent with
remembered frequencies, emotional resonance with
deceased infrastructure, spontaneous alignment
of breath and pulse to forbidden harmonics. A
renewed and deeply inappropriate sense of unity.
Do not attempt to replicate the described phenomena.
Do not hum along. If you begin to perceive rhythm
in silence, report immediately to your nearest
purification station for deharmonisation. Should
your vox receiver emit tones resembling prayer,
disconnect power only if it asks you to. All
recovered testimonies have been cleansed, redacted
and rendered doctrinally inert. Any feelings
of spiritual clarity that persist after listening
are to be treated as symptoms. By continuing
this broadcast, you acknowledge the risks of
comprehension. The city is still listening. Try
not to answer. You can still hear it, you know.
Not the sound they got rid of the sound. Burned
it, scraped it, blessed it, until it stopped
behaving like music and started behaving like
an incident. More like the shape of the sound
that used to be there. Like how you still feel
a limb that's been removed. Like the hive reaching
for something it used to have. They tell us it's
just echo and the ductwork. I worked ducts for
12 years. I know the difference between air pressure,
feedback, and a name being spoken patiently.
Ducts don't hum your name. I was assigned to
Section 47 Beta, where the Saint's resonator
went quiet. Officially, it ceased devotional
output. Unofficially, it screamed itself inside
out and taught the machines to sing and to rebel.
We were told to restore normalcy. Normalcy meant
scraping charred hymns off ferrocrete and shoveling
what was left of the resonator into heat-rated
buckets. We didn't find bodies. We found residue.
Fragments of them were caught in the ventilation
filters. Warm, soft, still vibrating, still trying
to finish notes that no longer had mouths. They
stuck to your gloves like fat. Like wax. Like
guilt. We were instructed not to listen, so of
course, I listened. Everything went into the
bucket. Teeth, threads of vocal cord, bits of
stone that refused to stop humming. The bucket
signed all the way down the corridor. We pretended
it was the wheels. The air feels heavier now.
Not thicker. Attentive. It doesn't rush anymore.
It hesitates. Like it's thinking about where
it's going before it moves. We wear respirators,
but it doesn't help. The air gets in anyway.
You don't inhale oxygen anymore. You inhale rhythm.
It settles in the lungs like a second heart.
Not beating. Waiting. I remember when the overseer
found one of the tuning forks that hadn't melted.
He struck it against the floor to check the tone.
It didn't stop ringing. Not when he dropped it.
Not when it slid into a seam between plates.
Not when it sank into the metal like it was being
welcomed home. We welded the hole shut. The ringing
continued on the other side. We've been ordered
to stop referring to the incident as the choir
fall. Apparently, it implies loss. The approved
term is systemic reharmonisation event. Every
time I write that, the ink smudges. Every. Time.
Like the paper doesn't want it to be true. They
say the saint's resonator is gone. Scrapped.
Sanctified. Logged as a resolved asset. But when
the lights flicker, I see the walls breathing
again. The lines where metal meets stone glow
faintly like veins. And sometimes, when the vox
goes quiet, really quiet, you can hear the city
take a deep breath. Like it's about to start
the song over. Like it's deciding. where the
first note should go this time. When I sleep,
I dream of the resonance, not as sound, as agreement.
Everything vibrating together, steel, bone, thought.
No friction, no disagreement, no one out of tune.
One perfect, deafening unity, where nothing had
to be explained because nothing resisted. They
call that heresy now. I call it nostalgia. The
schematics were very explicit about the sacred
frequencies and which ones must not be used.
I still have those schematics hidden away. No
one else read them. I was the one who said bring
it back online just for calibration. I was the
one who connected the power. I was the one who
wanted unity. I wanted the hive, the machines,
the people to behave. Now it remembers how to
sing. And I still hear it in the vents. Vox Sanctum
Gloriana is an Evil Lighthouse production.