I used to be a meteorological technician out in the field. I manned an atmospheric relay site up in the alpha-echo location during the summer. Summer is the off-season, and I was usually by myself in total remote solitude for a few months out of the year. I know a lot of people would hate it, but I looked forward to the quiet reflection time.
The station was built because of regional shifts in weather patterns unrelated to climate change. These shifts were far from subtle. During the summer, upper-atmosphere scans sometimes showed alpine storm cells forming exactly where they should. Textbook summer systems. And then ten minutes later, equatorial convection rainfall would hit, way too dense and sustained. It was like the scans were suddenly showing the Congo during the rainy season. But this would only last for a couple of minutes before the scans would shift back to non-anomalous patterns.
The summer shifts were nothing compared to the winter ones. Satellites showed compact snowfall cells forming in seconds. Hyper-localized blizzards. No front movement, no pressure drop, just a pocket of dense moisture spiraling out of nowhere. Sometimes they’d sit over the same peak for hours without moving or dissipating.
The second year the station was open, dispatch lost contact with a winter team of three meteorologists during one of these events. There was no sign of them by the time the weather was clear enough for Search and Rescue. No tracks, no wreckage, no gear. Officials assumed they got caught in the storm and froze to death, and then animals got to them when it warmed up.
You probably think I’m an idiot for sticking with the gig after that story, but the strange weather patterns disappeared along with those researchers. In the years after, winter teams reported nothing but typical storm behavior. And other than brief, single-cell popcorns, summer is practically sleepy.
Until my last year on site.
The season started off like any other, with the helicopter dropping me and my supplies off. Settling in was one of my favorite parts. I liked organizing the food, putting away my things, airing out the stale interior, and of course, cleaning up after the winter crew. The cleanup should have pissed me off, but it gave me something to do, and I actually enjoyed looking through their journals and data and reading through all of the silly Post-it notes they left for each other:
In the utensil drawer: Congrats, there are no clean spoons. Dish duty 4U.
On the french press: You BOIL the water, not summon Satan with it. RIP tongue.
On the coffee table in the common room: If I’m still snoozing on the couch, don’t wake me. Carl chain-farted in his sleep and I was up all night.
I especially enjoyed the notes they sometimes left me: Summer Guy, If the barometer drops to 700 and the station starts smelling like toast, you’re probably just having a stroke. Best of luck! —Team Winter
So on my first day, after unpacking, I found all the sticky notes, created a collage with them on the first page of my new field journal, and then started making dinner with the small cooler of fresh groceries I brought for the first night. That year, I brought some bacon, eggs, parmesan, and parsley for a bastardized carbonara, plus some cut watermelon for dessert. Enjoying the food, the sunset, and a heavy pour of whiskey on the station’s small porch was always the highlight of the season.
The first couple of weeks were a lot like the previous years: calibrating the instruments outside, collecting the data, and sending it to dispatch. Satellite internet was always tricky, but that’s just part of the job. Sometimes it’s there, sometimes it’s not, but luckily, dispatch knows that.
I remember it was a Monday when I woke up, feeling like something was wrong. My hand-held was chirping in the common room, and I stumbled from the bunks, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes as I tried to find where I’d thrown my pants the day before. That’s the one thing about being by yourself… there’s no one to hold you accountable, which is why I don’t get mad at the winter team for leaving the place a little disheveled.
I finally found my pants and the radio, pried it off my belt, and answered.
“Atmospheric pressure’s dropping over there. What do you see?”
Well, I hadn’t seen shit, since I’d just woken up, but I wasn’t about to relay that to my superior.
“Give me a second.” I ran outside and squinted into the clear dawn. It was soft purple in the west, where the sky hadn’t woken up yet. But there was something else in the sky, too, a couple miles out, toward the western mountains.
I blinked and gently swiped my eyes with my fingers, wondering if there was dirt sitting on top of my corneas, but that wasn’t it. It was dark enough to be a crow flying in the air, but it wasn’t moving, just hovering. It was so far away that I couldn’t tell how big it was, only that from a distance, it was dead black, like an ink spill in the sky.
I relayed this to dispatch.
The radio crackled. “I don’t know why that would cause the readings we’re getting. Can you check the instruments and send over the data?”
I hurried back inside and sat at the data hub in the corner of the common room, aka the messy desk with loose papers, batteries, and tools scattered between the indoor equipment. At that moment, I wished we hadn’t kept things so chaotic. I skimmed through the last hour of data and couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
Barometric pressure dropped from 714.6 hPa to 660.3 hPa in under 30 seconds. A couple minutes later, it returned to exactly 714.6 hPa. At the same time, humidity spiked from 15% to 220% before the sensor errored out.
“Broken piece of shit,” I muttered, but then I saw the precipitation rate: 5 mm/hr.
“I need to do a manual check,” I told dispatch as I headed outside. “Readings say the dew point is higher than the ambient air.” I get that may not mean a lot to you, but let me just say this: that reading is impossible. It’s like saying water’s boiling at below freezing. The math doesn’t work.
Dispatch swore, then sighed. “I bet you anything there’s no budget to replace that equipment.”
But the equipment all seemed fine. I checked everything on the station mast, and all the probes and sensors looked to be in perfect working order. Nothing iced over. No loose cabling. Nothing out of alignment.
But then I looked up, and radioed to dispatch, “I think I have a problem.”
That black in the sky was getting closer. I could see it more clearly now. It looked like a cumulonimbus, except for the color. I’ve never seen a cloud so black. It was darker than smoke.
I racked my brain, trying to think of any gaseous substance that could have such an appearance. Nothing matched. Not industrial burn-off, not wildland fire haze, not volcanic ash. I explained the thing to dispatch. She had me re-explain a few times, and I could hear how skeptical she was, but then again, she was the one who had woken me up with alerts about the readings. There was nothing else weird about the day.
“Keep an eye on it. Call me if it gets any closer.”
Well, I had nothing better to do than grab a chair from inside, move it to the porch, and watch the cloud, or the gas, or whatever the hell this thing was. But when I re-entered the cabin, I noticed a Post-it on the coffee table, which was weird, because I could have sworn I grabbed all of them the first night. And if I hadn’t grabbed them then, I definitely would have seen it in the first couple of weeks I’d been living at the station.
I peeled the note off the table and read the number: 39.2128° N, 120.3201° W - Coordinates. They were close by, but I couldn’t remember off the top of my head any landmarks specific to those points. Curious, I checked the weathered map tacked to the wall and found the rough location.
Then I went back outside and shielded my eyes. The black cloud was hovering over the coordinates I’d found on the Post-it note.
I had no idea what that meant. Clearly, I didn’t write the Post-it note, and whoever did had to have written it months and months ago. What did those coordinates and the black cloud mean, then? Did it mean that there was something at those coordinates that was creating the cloud in the sky?
It didn’t seem like such a far stretch, because the cloud didn’t look natural. The gas had to have been created from the ground, right?
I let dispatch know this over the radio.
“Keep an eye on it, but don’t try finding the source,” she said. “I’m going to call this in, see if we can get some satellite imagery on the ground. Don’t do anything but monitor until you hear from me again. Do you understand?”
I told her I understood, a little off-put by the fact that she seemed genuinely worried. Then again, it had only been a few years since a team of five had disappeared into a blizzard at this very station, so I guess her hesitancy was warranted. As much as I wanted to investigate, I knew she was right. I should stay put.
I went back inside. Glancing around the room, I was filled with an unease that churned my stomach. I remember thinking that maybe I was losing it, or maybe this was a dream and I just needed to wake up.
All of the Post-it notes I had pulled off the appliances, walls, and equipment a couple of weeks ago had returned.
It wasn’t just the one on the table.
I peeled off the note left on the coffee pot: Don’t drink the water.
And then the one on the monitor at the data station: Refractive boundary not spatially constrained. DO NOT ASSUME STRUCTURAL CONTAINMENT.
In the corner of that note, someone else had written: r we fucked?
I didn’t know what any of these meant, but they weren’t the kind of friendly notes the team normally left. These weren’t jokes. These felt more like warnings. Urgent. A little rushed.
Inside the station dimmed suddenly, and I realized all the lights were off. Because it’s such a low-energy station, and we have to be very careful with our electricity, that meant one thing: the light outside had dropped significantly.
I looked out the window, and the hairs on my neck stood on end. For a moment, I didn’t know what to do, then I ran outside to verify what I was witnessing.
The cloud was huge now. And not only that, but it had sunk toward the mountain. It must have spanned one, maybe two miles across, and was rolling toward me slowly, like a lethargic tsunami. Like seaside fog, but it was too dark. Too black. And I was nowhere near sea level.
“Dispatch, something’s happening. Dispatch, can you read me?”
I waited a few moments and tried again. Still nothing.
I paced back and forth on the porch of the station, watching in horror as the black cloud loomed ever nearer.
“Dispatch, please pick up,” I cried into the radio.
Silence.
It was so hard to think through that moment. There was no protocol for this. I didn’t know what to do. I had no idea what kind of substance was in that black cloud. Was I just supposed to sit and wait for it to wash over me?
What if it was dangerous?
This was summer. The only thing dangerous that happened in summer were thunderstorms. But generally, we were fine as long as we stayed inside.
The same was true in winter. In winter, there was a protocol for when storms approached. The team followed a checklist to prepare the station and themselves to stay indoors for up to two weeks at a time.
Whatever was coming at me wasn’t a winter storm, but I knew I couldn’t stay out here. That wasn’t the smart thing to do. I had to prepare, but unfortunately, my neurons weren’t firing right. But I knew if I followed the winter checklist, it might at least give me some footing.
I ran back inside, tore the clipboard from the wall, and skimmed the notes. Most of it involved preventing lines or equipment from freezing, but the other items were more general: check supplies, secure windows and doors, confirm generator readiness.
I had enough food for a couple weeks. Same with the water tanks. But the generator…
It was the only thing on the list that I could still do, so I bolted back outside, circling the cabin toward the shed, when I froze. My eyes locked skyward.
The air. There was something about the air that felt off. And I know that’s not scientific. I know I should be able to quantify it. Temperature, humidity, pressure. But I couldn’t. Still can’t. It was a feeling. Maybe the air was too warm, or too heavy. I don’t know. But the one thing I remember is how still it was. Like the air itself had forgotten how to move, not just at the station but over the entire range. Nothing stirred or rustled.
I forced myself to move, ducked into the shed, and got to work. The generator had been drained at the end of last season, just as protocol required, but the fuel cans were full. I filled the tank as fast as I could, hands trembling, trying not to slosh gas everywhere. Then I ran back inside and locked the door behind me.
I turned to the window. The black cloud was still coming, slow and steady. I knew I was forgetting something critical, but I couldn’t focus on what. I grabbed the radio and tried dispatch again. Nothing. Just static.
The cloud touched the mountainside and then pillowed forward, like ink dropped into water. It swelled and bloomed before rolling toward me.
I took several deep breaths, wondering if they were my last. Was the cloud toxic? Radioactive? Biological? There was no time to guess.
As the cloud struck the station, it was like being swallowed. My sight vanished. Even the lights I’d just turned on were gone.
The data station beeped sharply. Power loss. A mechanical whir sounded before the generator kicked in, and the data station blinked on, casting a faint green glow across the common room.
I could’ve turned on the overheads, but something stopped me. Fear, maybe. Or instinct. I didn’t want to drown it out. I wanted to see what was happening, but through the window, there was nothing. No outlines. No gradations. Just black. For a second, I wondered if this wasn’t a cloud at all. What if it wasn’t gas, but liquid? But nothing seeped in. No drips under the door. No leaks.
In the dim green light of the data station, I spotted a Post-it note on one of the monitors. The same Post-it I had peeled off earlier. I walked over slowly, heart pounding, and peeled it from the monitor again.
3.975 MHz (LSB)
It took me a moment to place it. That was a ham radio frequency. A low-band HF channel.
I couldn’t reach dispatch. And I certainly wasn’t going outside. So I powered up the ham radio and tuned the dial, then paused for a long moment, just listening.
I leaned forward and spoke.
“Hello?” My voice cracked. Definitely not ham radio etiquette. But I couldn’t remember the proper call sign, and I had no idea if this was even a repeater band.
I searched through the scattered papers for our station’s call sign, trying to reorient myself. Trying to act like a professional again.
The radio crackled. “Hello?” A woman’s voice.
“Yes! Hello?” I answered, dumbfounded.
On the other end, she released a cry of either relief or agony. “Who is this? Who am I talking to?”
I quickly rattled off my name and explained that I was the summer tech stationed up at the weather relay.
“Oh my god. Oh my god. Listen to me. Listen to me. Are you there? You need to listen to me, please.” The words tumbled from her. “We don’t have much time. I used to be the winter tech at the station where you are right now. But something happened to us.”
No. That couldn’t be. Was I talking to one of the meteorologists who’d vanished in the blizzard? The ones presumed dead?
“Where are you?” I cried into the radio.
“You have to listen to me right now,” she said, voice sharp with urgency. “We don’t have much time. I can’t explain everything. What’s happening to you right now? In the station… what do you see?”
I stammered, trying to organize my thoughts.
“A black cloud rolled in. It’s… it’s pitch black. Midnight-dark. I can’t even see out the windows.”
“Okay… okay. Listen. I need you to do exactly what I say,” she said. “The station has a standard set of tools, right?”
“I know where the tools are,” I replied. “What do I need to do?”
“You have to go outside, and fix the frequency amplifier.”
The… what? I had no idea what a frequency amplifier was. “What are you talking about? What piece of equipment is that?”
“You’ll see it when you go outside. It needs to be turned back on. We’re trapped here. We’ve been stuck here for years, and unless—”
The radio cut off.
“Hello? Do you copy? Hello?”
The station was silent. No radio hiss, no hum from the lights. Not even static. I looked at the radio, then around the room.
The power had gone out again. How? The generator should’ve kicked in. I’d just primed it.
I swore, my voice cracking in a sob, and I immediately felt embarrassed. I was unraveling. I took a shaky breath, wiped my face with both hands, and started fumbling through the drawers until my fingers closed around the rubber grip of a flashlight.
I had no idea what an amplifier was supposed to be. But I had a light. That meant I could find the tools. That meant I could try to help.
Help. The winter tech wanted me to go outside.
I sat there, frozen, the flashlight clenched in my hand. I don’t know how long I stayed that way. Minutes. Maybe hours. There was no clock, no light, no sound. Just that suffocating black and my own shaking breath. What would happen if I opened the door? Would I vanish like they did? Would I even find anything out there? And had that really been her? Had I really heard what I thought I did?
What if I’m going crazy?
Maybe I was having a psychotic break, some kind of high-altitude delirium.
Eventually, I clicked the flashlight on and stood up. The beam sliced through the dark, and I blinked.
The air was glittering.
When I shifted my vision, I could just barely see pinpricks of light flickering in the corners of my eyes. Not dust, but something else. Something I couldn’t touch. When I reached out, nothing landed on my hand or brushed against my skin.
I focused on the task. The small toolset was kept under the first aid kit near the door. I knelt down and opened the container. The larger tools were in the shed, but there was no way in hell I was going to waste more time outside than I had to.
I still didn’t know what the amplifier was. Maybe she meant an RF transceiver? It didn’t make sense. We used standard names for everything and there was no amplifier in the outdoor equipment.
I felt a numb clarity wash over me. If it wasn’t safe in here, it probably wasn’t any safer out there either. And maybe if I found the amplifier, or whatever she meant by that, I could fix this. Maybe I could rescue them.
I turned the handle and stepped outside, into a void.
I had the strangest, most horrifying thought: What if reality had ended?
Maybe this was it. Maybe the radio call had been some final flicker of celestial consciousness. The universe’s death rattle. Maybe she wasn’t real. Maybe I wasn’t anymore either.
Then the quiet hit me. Vacuum-quiet.
I snapped my fingers. No slap of skin, just a muffled click. Half a second later, I heard the same click behind me, lower and flatter, like an aged echo warped through distance.
My flashlight had turned off. I didn’t remember doing that and clicked it back on, shining it into the haze. But instead of fading, the beam forked, splitting into three distinct paths that spiraled outward in a slow triple helix. They started white, then bled into color—one dark purple, another green, the last orange—like I was pointing my light into a twisted optical fiber.
I couldn’t see beyond the helix of color, but I felt the muggy, suffocating darkness. Except this cloud wasn’t particulate. Mist didn’t cling to my skin. I couldn’t smell ozone or dust, only the pressure of it.
The ground beneath my feet felt soft and spongy, but the station sits above the dry and rocky treeline. It didn’t make sense.
I counted my steps as I walked forward. I knew that if I had any hope of returning, I’d need to make a perfect 180 and walk the same number of steps back. It was a stupid, dangerous plan, but I didn’t have a better one.
The winter tech hadn’t lied. Eventually, I saw shapes ahead, shadows against the colored light. Equipment, but not mine. It had been dismantled and rebuilt into a Frankensteined tower. I could just make out the glint of the satellite uplink dish perched at the top.
A radio tower. No… the amplifier. This is what the winter tech meant. She’d said they were trapped. That they couldn’t come home unless the amplifier was turned on.
Trapped here? I thought. In this?
I sucked in air to call her name. Right as I was about to shout, I heard my voice behind me. Soft. Whisper-soft. And somehow her name felt like it was sucked from my own lungs, vanishing like smoke.
Panic pulverized my insides. I had to focus.
The flashlight beam was still spiraling, making it hard to see. I dropped to one knee, water soaking my pant leg, and scanned the base of the tower. No switch, no control box, just a battery strapped to one of the legs. A wire snaked upward for a few feet, then ended in a blackened coil. Melted. The other end began higher up the leg. Maybe all I had to do was reattach the wire and hope it didn’t fry me.
I set down my toolkit and opened it, digging through the tools until my fingers closed around the wire stripper. Then I lifted my light to the tower, and everything went flat. No reflections. No spectrum. The rainbow helix was gone. The light from my flashlight had shifted into a matte, depthless disk.
And then the darkness unzipped. The seam yawned open in front of my face and slowly peeled back. I blinked hard, trying to force my brain to parse what I was seeing.
Beyond the seam was a flickering image of blue sky, tinged red at the edges like a chromatic aberration. It looked like the colors were peeling away from each other.
The temperature plummeted. I shivered as the shape widened into a picture of the ridgeline. Then, the depth of the world snapped into place like a final jigsaw piece.
The sound returned in a single thunderclap. My ears rang. I gasped, sucking in cold, dry alpine air.
Morning sunlight cut through the thin air and a cloudless cyan sky. The radio tower was gone. In its place stood the station’s standard equipment, exactly as I’d left it. My flashlight lay next to the open toolbox.
Static blared from the radio on my belt. “Field Tech, do you copy?” said Dispatch.
I didn’t tell her what happened. I just said I was in an emergency situation and needed a chopper.
The rest of the call is a blur. She kept asking me to clarify, but I couldn’t. “I need evacuation,” I kept saying, over and over again. “I need evacuation now. Please. Please hurry.” And that’s all I kept saying until they sent a chopper.
Once I was home, my super put me on paid leave. Said I wasn’t allowed back until I gave a full report on what happened at the station and why I’d failed to complete the season. Why I’d triggered an emergency evac. Why I’d cost them thousands.
But I didn’t tell them. I’m a coward. I knew no one would believe me. If I relayed even a fraction of what happened, they’d force me into a psych eval.
At least, this is what I’ve told myself for years, ever since I quit my dream job and moved behind a desk at an auto insurance office. But that’s not the truth. The truth is that when the winter tech told me to find the amplifier, I hesitated. I sat there too long, paralyzed by fear. If I’d moved faster, maybe I could’ve helped her. Maybe I could’ve brought them back.
But I didn’t. And now they’re gone. Still out there, still trapped… if they’re even alive. Forever lost to the dark.
Access Granted