u/Proper-Stick4664

I rub my eyes in disbelief.

Silence.

Nothing.

No voices. No music. No news. No chatter humming at the edge of my mind.

Just the wind.

One week earlier.

Sunlight pushes through the curtains, warming my face before I open my eyes.

"I still can't believe you wake up without an alarm," Alex says. Out loud. Mouth actually moving, the way people only talk in this world when there's no signal between them.

"I don't know," I mumble, stretching. "Never needed one."

The sun does the job.

As soon as I step outside, I tune into my Freq. The rush of voices settles into the back of my mind, familiar and warm. My sister syncs in from Belgium, laughing about some new word game her office is testing. A Frequencer walks me through a recipe while I get dressed. A priority sync pulls me into work before I've even locked the door. A taxi already knows where I'm going before I do, the driver and I exchanging a good morning without either of our mouths moving.

Out the window, hundreds of people pass by, connected, silent, none of them looking at each other. Some are smiling. Some are arguing. All of it silent.

I find it beautiful, how all of it connects. We're all one, like a colony. Countless individuals moving together as one.

At the museum, I guide tour groups through the history of the Freq. I tell them how the first devices were external, clumsy, carried in pockets. How the technology got smaller, more personal, until the final step was obvious: why carry a connection when it could become part of you.

By the year 2140, implantation was available to everyone. Today, over ninety-nine percent of humanity is connected. A little girl in my tour group asks about the rest.

"Children raised without access to the Freq struggle to form meaningful relationships," I tell her, the way I always do. "Choosing not to connect is selfish. A punishable crime. Connection is a shared responsibility."

I've always loved that part.

That night, in bed, Alex asks me something else.

"Why don't you use your Freq alarm?"

"Because I wake up fine," I say, rolling my eyes.

"I know. But you don't need it to. Why do you trust yourself more than the sync?"

I don't have an answer. Not one I like, anyway.

"So now I'm a Non-Freq because I wake up with the sun?" I ask.

"No," he says. "I'm not saying that."

I lie back down. "Good. My body works. Why would I need a machine to tell me when to wake up?"

The irony of the sentence doesn't hit me. Not yet.

He looks at me. "Maybe that's exactly the question."

"What does that mean?"

He just smiles. "Nothing."

The next morning, I reach across the bed. Cold sheets.

"Alex?"

Nothing.

I connect, search his channels, his schedule, our shared frequency. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

Locate Alex.

Searching available frequencies.

A pause, longer than it should be.

Unable to locate.

I freeze. No active frequency. The words don't belong together. Everyone has an active frequency. Everyone.

At the support station, a woman named Mara sits across from me in a small room with no background frequencies, no announcements. Just us.

"Alex chose to disconnect," she says.

"No."

"We've reviewed his records. He was a Non-Freq."

"He had a Freq."

"Yes. Some people maintain connection while rejecting its purpose."

I think about the way he asked questions. The way he paused before answering. The way he looked at me when I said my body works, why would I need a machine to tell me when to wake up.

"Where did he go?" I ask.

She hesitates. "We believe outside the connected areas."

The dead zones. Places where the signal can't reach. Where, everyone says, without the Freq, without the connection, a person loses stability. Goes mad. Eventually dies.

That night I can't stop thinking about it. Alex knew the stories. He knew what happened to people who left.

And he still asked me, the night before he vanished: why do you trust yourself to wake up?

At the time, I thought it was a strange question.

For the first time in my life, I wonder what it sounds like when there is no one speaking at all.