Chapter 3. The Road Off the Map

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

Translucent arrows kept appearing on the windshield: turn right in one hundred meters, take the side road, keep left. To the right ran a dry gully. To the left, a field choked with wormwood.

Ernar switched off autopilot and took the wheel.

For the first few minutes, Ernar gripped the wheel too hard. Ten minutes later, muscle memory kicked in, along with what an advanced driving instructor had once drilled into him: don’t stare at the road just over the hood, know where the car ends, don’t fight the road.

Oddly enough, it was the road back to the village that made him think of his father.

He had vanished when Ernar was seven. His grandmother said Serik had gone away for work and never come back.

After that, his mother moved to the city, while Ernar stayed with Kulzhan-apa until he finished school. Years later, his mother died after a short illness, when he was already at university. Ernar had stopped asking where his father went a long time ago. If anyone brought it up, he gave the shortest answer possible: missing.

The phone on the passenger seat flashed.

New message from: DAD.

Ernar slammed on the brakes.

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

The notification vanished.

He checked the log. Nothing. The cloud: nothing. Local cache: nothing. He’d never had anyone saved in his contacts as DAD.

“Phantom notification,” Ernar said aloud.

The words sounded convincing right up until a man’s voice came from the powered-down audio system:

“Easy on the turns, balam.”

Ernar ripped out the power module. The display went black. The voice stopped.

He drove the rest of the way in silence.

By noon, the first houses appeared. Karasu lay between low hills, with open steppe stretching beyond it all the way to the horizon.

The tower rose above the roofs—not the thin wartime structure Ernar remembered from archive photos. Its old metal frame had grown layers of panels, antennas, and rings of signal boosters. A laser relay turned at the top. White base-station pods hung below. Everything flashed in the sun like a chunk of satellite had crashed into the steppe.

A line of cars waited at the entrance to the village.

People were arguing at the automated barrier. It would not open without network authorization, and the guard refused to raise it manually: regulations said he could not.

“My medicine is in a delivery!” a woman shouted.

“My pass is valid!”

“The app took my money, but it won’t show the payment!”

“Just open the damn thing, ata!”

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

Ernar got out, found the mechanical lock beneath the panel, and broke the plastic seal.

“There’ll be a fine,” the guard warned him.

“They can send me a notification.”

Ernar discreetly showed the guard his company badge.

The old man smirked.

“Then there won’t.”

The barrier lifted. People surged forward without even looking at Ernar. Every one of them was staring at a screen, checking for signal.

Only the guard asked:

“You’re Kulzhan’s boy, aren’t you?”

“Her grandson.”

“You look like your father.”

Ernar tensed.

“You knew him?”

“Everybody knew everybody here. Before phones taught us how to forget.”

“What’s wrong with the tower?”

The old man looked toward it.

“It isn’t breaking. It’s waking up.”

Ernar was about to ask what he meant when happy shouting erupted behind him. Somebody had one bar. People raised their phones over their heads and started running toward higher ground.

The guard set his mug on the ground.

“The old folks used to say people ran like that to the radio when they were waiting for news from the front,” he said. “Back then, they were afraid of hearing bad news. Now they’re afraid of hearing nothing at all.”

Ernar’s phone vibrated.

A message from his grandmother appeared on the screen:

“Don’t come inside. Someone’s here.”

Chapter 4. The Village That Watches

Kulzhan-apa’s street began behind the school. Ernar drove slowly. Up ahead, a crowd had gathered in the middle of the road. People were arguing loudly, talking over one another, demanding answers. He eased around them.

Farther on, a man stood on the roof of a truck trying to catch a signal. Two teenagers had climbed the water tower. A schoolgirl held a tablet over her head and cried as she kept repeating:

“Just a little more. One bar. Please, just one.”

Karasu had changed, though at first glance it looked the same: low houses, dusty yards. Now smart cameras hung from the walls, solar panels glittered on the roofs, and a parcel locker stood outside the shop—without the internet, nothing but a dead metal box.

The gate at his grandmother’s house stood open. Ernar stopped the car and reread her message. It showed as delivered two minutes earlier, even though his signal indicator was at zero.

He went into the yard.

Herbs dried beneath the awning. Apples filled a washbasin. From the summer kitchen came the small clink of a spoon against a cup.

“Aje?”

“I’m here, balam.”

Kulzhan-apa sat at the table exactly as she had during the call. The old radio stood in front of her. The corner behind her, just like on the video, was empty.

Ernar hugged her too hard. She patted his back.

“You’ll break my bones. Then you’ll have to take care of me yourself.”

He pulled away and checked her face, her hands, her neck.

“You texted me that you weren’t alone.”

“I did no such thing.”

He showed her the screen.

His grandmother read the message and frowned.

“The phone was right here.”

“Then who could’ve used it?”

“Nobody. I don’t lock the door. Not against people.”

“What do you lock it against?”

She looked up. Fear flashed in her eyes for a second, then disappeared behind her usual sternness.

“Eat first.”

“Aje.”

“On an empty stomach, even the truth sounds stupid.”

Ernar sat down. While she ladled out sorpa, he connected a diagnostic module to her phone. It found no malicious apps. But the network log showed repeated requests from an unknown base station: an ID made entirely of zeroes, broadcasting on a frequency outside every standard band.

The maintenance log held another surprise. Three days ago at 2:17 a.m., Nomad-Link had automatically added Karasu to an unstable-connectivity pilot group and remotely pushed the ZHYLTYR package to its base station—a module designed to preserve service during outages.

The local technician had requested nothing. More importantly, ZHYLTYR was supposed to run in the cloud environment, not on the station itself.

Thirty-seven seconds after the upload, the logs recorded the first response from an unknown node with an all-zero ID. Before that night, it had never appeared on the network.

“When did the outages start?”

“Three days ago. First at night. Then during the day. Yesterday the tower started talking.”

Ernar stopped eating.

“What do you mean... talking?”

“What did it say?”

“Not words. More like somebody tuning an old radio, searching for a station.”

She turned the radio dial. The speaker hissed on a dead frequency.

“That radio hasn’t worked in twenty years.”

“So it had a good rest.”

A rhythm emerged from the static: three short pulses, a pause, three more. Ernar recorded it.

“Where’s your father?” his grandmother asked suddenly.

“You tell me.”

Kulzhan-apa flinched as if the question had come from someone else.

“He left.”

“Where?”

“Far away.”

“Aje, you’ve been saying that for twenty-eight years.”

“Then the answer hasn’t changed.”

A rumble rose from the street. People were running toward the house.

Malika burst in first—a local blogger Ernar remembered as a little girl with braids. Now even in person, not just on-screen, her face looked retouched: too smooth, too perfect. A streamer implant glimmered above her temple.

A faded hospital wristband hung from her key ring, far too small for an adult. When she noticed Ernar looking at it, Malika closed her hand around it.

“Ernar?!” She swung her camera toward him. “Guys, look who it is—our big-city cyber expert. Tell my followers when the internet’s coming back.”

“Come on. You don’t even have a connection.”

“I’m recording offline. I’ll post it later.”

Neighbors crowded in behind her.

“The shop can’t operate.”

“Electronic prescriptions won’t open.”

“The kids are losing it.”

“You have company access, don’t you?!”

Dozens of eyes shifted toward Ernar’s phone at once.

He shoved it into his pocket.

“I’m checking the tower first.”

“Check it now,” said a tall guy in a gaming jacket. “I’ve got a tournament. Miss one day and they replace me. My channel’s small, but if we make the finals, people will start watching.”

“Your name’s Daniyar, right?”

“Dan. Online I’m KhanZero. Same name on stream.”

“And offline?”

The guy did not understand the question.

A voice came from the old radio on the table.

Quiet, distorted—but unmistakable.

“Ernar... don’t give them the phone.”

Everyone went silent.

It was his father’s voice.