Chapter 2. The Second Call

Yernar could not touch the button at first. His trembling finger missed it twice.

“Balam?” Kulzhan-apa appeared on-screen alive, annoyed, and perfectly calm. “Why are you shouting?”

Yernar sat down right there on the floor.

“You… fell.”

“I’m sitting.”

“There were people there.”

“What people?”

“Soldiers. Behind you.”

His grandmother looked around. The room was empty.

“It’s just me and the kettle. The kettle isn’t in uniform.”

Someone in the office gave an awkward laugh. The department head came closer, but Yernar held up a hand: not now.

“Show me the table.”

“Why?”

“Just show me.”

Kulzhan-apa panned the camera. A cup, a saucer of candy, and an old radio sat on the oilcloth. No blood. No bullet hole in the wall. The phone was not on the floor because it was still in her hand.

“The signal dropped,” she said. “I called back. You’re looking at me as if you’ve already buried me.”

Yernar zoomed in on the call recording. The system had saved the last twenty seconds to a local cache. He saw his grandmother smile, the soldiers raise their rifles, and her body fall. It was all there.

“Azhe, don’t leave the house. I’m coming.”

“Today?”

“Now.”

“It’ll be dark soon.”

“Now.”

He ended the call and stood. Half the office had already gathered around him. Someone was recording through a contact lens. Yernar swiped sharply in front of the lens.

“Delete it.”

“I’m not—”

“Your indicator’s blinking.”

His manager, Temirlan, led him into a meeting room. The walls turned opaque.

“Show me the recording.”

Yernar sent the file to an isolated display. The video played without sound. Temirlan watched closely, but by the end his expression had become guarded—the way people looked at a colleague who might be having a breakdown.

“Deepfake,” he said.

“In real time?”

“A malicious filter. A substituted video stream. You’re the one who taught us anything is possible.”

“Not everything.”

“Or your implant’s been compromised.”

Yernar automatically touched the small scar behind his ear. His neural interface had two parts: an implanted neural port and a detachable behind-the-ear module used for secure work authentication, audio, and screen control. He hated having devices touch his brain, but without the neural port he would never have been cleared for national infrastructure.

“I’ll check the logs,” he said.

“You’re taking the day off.”

“A base station is failing in the aul.”

“The technicians will go in the morning.”

“I’m going now.”

Temirlan let out a heavy breath.

“You can’t take the secure work terminal with you.”

“I don’t need the terminal.”

“You need a doctor.”

Yernar stood.

“Put me on unpaid leave.”

“Yernar…”

“Or fire me. Pick whichever one loads faster.”

Aigerim called him in the elevator. Her face appeared on the inner surface of his lens: short dark hair, tired eyes, a white coat. Robotic hospital gurneys moved behind her.

“Someone messaged me and said you made a scene,” she said.

“Gossip travels faster than light.”

“What happened?”

He wanted to tell her. Instead he said:

“My grandmother’s having network problems. I’m heading to the aul.”

Aigerim was quiet longer than usual.

“We’re meeting the wedding coordinator today.”

“Reschedule.”

“You picked this date yourself.”

“This is urgent.”

“Everything is urgent to you except the people standing right beside you.”

The elevator doors opened. In the lobby, people walked through advertising holograms without looking up from their personalized feeds.

“I’ll call from the road,” Yernar said.

“You always call from the road. You never actually show up.”

The call ended.

In the parking garage, an autonomous vehicle asked for a destination. Yernar gave it Karasu. The system warned him that the digital map had not been verified for the final forty kilometers.

“Proceed?” the car asked.

“Yes.”

“Network coverage at the destination is unstable. Some functions will be unavailable.”

“I know how to drive.”

“According to your profile, you last drove manually eleven years ago.”

“I’ll remember how today.”

Once the car was outside the city, Yernar opened the call recording again.

This time, after the lieutenant gave the order, his grandmother did not fall.

She slowly raised her head and looked into the camera.

Her lips formed the words without sound:

DON’T BRING THEM THE SIGNAL.

Chapter 3. The Road Off the Map

Until dawn, the car behaved perfectly. Then the navigation system began inventing junctions that did not exist in the steppe.

Translucent arrows appeared on the windshield: turn right in one hundred meters, take the side road, keep left. To the right lay only a dry ravine. To the left, a field overgrown with wormwood.

Yernar disabled augmented reality and took control.

At first his hands rested uncertainly on the wheel. Ten minutes later, his body remembered what his father had once taught him: do not stare at the road just beyond the hood, feel where the rear wheels are, and do not fight the road.

His father had disappeared when Yernar was seven. His grandmother said Serik had left to find work and never returned. His mother moved to the city afterward, while Yernar stayed with Kulzhan-apa until he finished school. Years later, his mother died after a short illness, when he was already at university. He had stopped asking questions long ago. A disappearance without an answer was a wound he had learned to call a statistic.

The phone on the passenger seat flashed.

NEW MESSAGE FROM: DAD.

Yernar slammed on the brakes.

The car skidded on the gravel and stopped sideways across the road.

The notification vanished.

He checked the log. Empty. The cloud—empty. The local cache—empty.

“Phantom alert,” Yernar said aloud.

The words sounded convincing until a man’s voice came from the switched-off audio system:

“Easy on the turns, balam.”

Yernar ripped out the power module. The display went dark. The voice stopped.

He drove on in silence.

The first houses appeared at noon. The aul of Karasu lay between low hills as though hiding from the wind. Above the roofs rose the tower—not the narrow wartime structure Yernar remembered from archive photographs. The old metal body had grown layers of panels, antennas, and amplifier rings. A laser relay rotated at the top. White base-station pods hung below. It all glittered in the sun like an artificial bone driven through the earth.

A line of cars stood at the entrance.

People were arguing at an automated barrier. It would not open without network authorization, and the guard refused to raise it manually because the rules forbade him.

“My medication is stuck in the delivery locker!” a woman shouted.

“My pass is valid!”

“The checkout charged me, but it won’t show the payment!”

“Open the thing, ata!”

The guard, a wiry old man in a worn padded jacket, calmly drank tea from a metal mug.

Yernar got out, found the mechanical lock beneath the panel and tore off the plastic seal.

“You’ll get a fine,” the guard warned.

“They can send me a notification.”

The old man chuckled.

“Then there won’t be one.”

The barrier rose. People surged forward without so much as looking at Yernar. Every one of them stared at a screen, checking whether the signal had returned.

Only the guard asked:

“Are you Kulzhan’s boy?”

“Her grandson.”

“You look like your father.”

Yernar froze.

“You knew him?”

“Everyone used to know everyone here. Then phones taught us how to forget.”

“What’s wrong with the tower?”

The old man looked toward the metal cutting through the sky.

“It isn’t breaking down. It’s waking up.”

Yernar was about to ask what he meant when cheers erupted behind him. Someone’s phone had picked up a single bar. People raised their devices over their heads and ran toward the rise.

The guard set his mug on the ground.

“People used to run to the radio like that when they were waiting for news from the front,” he said. “Back then, they were afraid of hearing something bad. Now they’re afraid of hearing nothing at all.”

Yernar’s phone vibrated.

A message from his grandmother filled the screen:

DON’T COME INSIDE. I’M NOT ALONE.