DOPAMINE

Chapter 6. Grandma

Yernar lunged forward and threw up his arms as if he could catch a falling body.

No one fell.

Flakes of rust drifted down from above. Sunlight slashed across his eyes. The beam was empty.

“What did you see?” Malika had already pushed her camera between the bars of the fence.

Yernar tore off the headphones. The world tilted. People stood beyond the fence, but for a few seconds their faces looked like flat icons: anxiety, interest, mockery. The emotion-recognition system in his lens was trying to label everyone even though he had switched it off on the road.

MALIKA — ENGAGEMENT 91%.

DANIYAR — AGGRESSION 63%.

MURAT — FEAR 78%.

The label above a teenager in a red cap flickered:

USER NOT FOUND.

Yernar blinked, and it all vanished.

“Nothing,” he said. “Visual-channel error.”

“You called someone Dad,” Daniyar pointed out.

“Error.”

“Convenient word.”

Yernar disconnected the terminal from the station. The folder dated 1942 was gone. The audio file wasn’t even in the cache. But the unknown frequency kept tapping through the diagnostics: three pulses, pause, three.

He stepped back outside the fence.

“The tower is technically fine. The problem isn’t the hardware.”

“Then what is it?” Murat the teacher asked.

“I don’t know yet.”

“How long?” someone shouted.

“An hour? A day?”

“Will food deliveries get through?”

“My kid is on remote medical treatment!”

Malika turned the camera on herself.

“We are at the epicenter of a digital collapse,” she said in her presenter voice. “A Nomad-Link expert refuses to give us a timeline—”

Yernar covered the lens with his palm.

“Don’t start a panic.”

“The panic’s already here. I’m making content.”

“No network means no one can see it.”

Malika smiled.

“We’ll see.”

On the way back, Daniyar caught up with Yernar.

“You’ve got a connection, don’t you?”

“No.”

“Company channel.”

“No.”

“Then why did your phone show a notification outside the house?”

Yernar stopped.

“You were looking at my screen?”

“Everyone was.”

“Don’t.”

“You scared we’ll see the truth?”

“I’m scared you’ll see something that isn’t there.”

Daniyar smirked, but there was still hunger in his eyes.

Back in the yard, Grandma was crouched beside the garden bed pulling up dry stalks. As if there were no tower, no voice of Yernar’s father, no crowd.

“Let’s go inside,” Yernar said.

“Wash your hands first.”

“Grandma, I saw Dad.”

Her fingers froze in the soil.

“Where?”

“At the tower.”

Grandma Kulzhan slowly straightened. There was no surprise on her face. Only the exhaustion of someone who had spent too long waiting for an inevitable question.

“He saw it too,” she said.

“When?”

“The night he disappeared.”

“You knew.”

“I knew he went there.”

“And you told me he abandoned us.”

“I told you he left.”

“You let me hate him for twenty-eight years.”

“Hating him kept you away from the tower.”

“Didn’t work.”

Grandma looked at the iron structure above the rooftops.

“Then it called louder.”

“What is it?”

Grandma Kulzhan wiped her hands on her apron.

“Not what. It doesn’t have a body. There’s only a place where people have spent too long waiting for something.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only one I have.”

She went inside and came back with a tin box. Inside lay an old cassette tape, a faded photograph, and a folded sheet of paper. In the photo, a young Grandma Kulzhan held baby Serik in her arms. Beside her stood the same condemned man from the recording, only older.

On the back, in Grandma’s handwriting, it said: “Grandpa Tulegen, my grandfather. 1978. Do not listen after sunset.”

“Your grandfather?”

“My grandfather. Your great-great-grandfather. I kept quiet because it called to us more strongly than to anyone else. Tulegen used to say that anyone who waits too long near this place becomes a node for the signal. And our family has been waiting here for generations.”

Yernar wanted to ask why their family, but Grandma went on:

“He lived almost forty more years after that day,” Grandma Kulzhan said. “But every evening he heard the command that was never given.”

The radio crackled again.

Then Serik’s voice said:

“Mom, open the door this time.”

Chapter 7. Three Bars

Grandma Kulzhan went pale but didn’t move toward the door.

The radio sat on the table. Its dial glowed a faint green even though the batteries had leaked dry years ago. Serik’s voice came through the static again:

“Mom... I’m cold.”

Yernar stepped toward the radio.

Grandma smacked his hand so fast he jerked back.

“Don’t answer.”

“It’s a recording.”

“A recording doesn’t know I’m in the house.”

“I can trace the source.”

“Your father wanted to trace it too.”

The voice sounded closer.

“Yernar, son. You’re all grown up?”

Yernar’s breath caught. The last time he had heard his father’s voice, he was seven—not the real voice anymore, just the memory of one, worn away and replaced by old family videos. But now every detail sounded real: the soft r, the short breath before a question.

“Turn it off,” Grandma whispered.

Yernar covered the radio with a metal saucepan. The static kept going. He wrapped the radio in a blanket, carried it outside, and put it inside the old stove. Only then did the voice stop.

In the kitchen, Grandma Kulzhan poured tea. Her hands were shaking, the spoon chiming against the glass.

“Tell me everything,” Yernar said.

“You can’t fit everything into words.”

“Start with Dad.”

She stared at the steam for a long time.

Serik had worked as a technician at the tower. In the late 2000s, the equipment was being replaced and the first digital line was being laid. He found an old cable inside the concrete foundation, running down into the ground. It wasn’t on any diagram. When they cut it, the whole village lost power for several minutes, and dozens of nonexistent phones rang at once.

After that, Serik began seeing a man in military uniform near the tower.

“The lieutenant?” Yernar asked.

“Sometimes the lieutenant. Sometimes his own father. Sometimes you as a grown man.”

“Me?”

“He said you were calling him from the future.”

A group of children ran past the window. They held phones in front of them and swiped their dead screens in the same rhythm.

“The night Serik disappeared, he came home and said he’d found a way to shut the signal down,” Grandma continued. “He wanted to reach the soldiers in 1942 and convince them not to give the command. He recorded everything he knew on a cassette, left it with me, and went to the tower. No one ever saw him again.”

“Why didn’t the police—”

“The police searched for Serik. They barely checked the tower back then.”

Yernar rubbed his temples.

“Grandma, this sounds like superstition.”

“Call it superstition if you want. I’ve seen what it does to people.”

The phone in his pocket gave a short vibration.

He took it out. The indicator showed three bars.

Not one. Not a weak emergency channel. Full signal.

“You’ve got a signal,” Grandma said.

“I shouldn’t.”

Yernar immediately switched to secure mode. Data packets were moving with no delay. There was no satellite fix; the phone believed it was connected to a base station called KARASU-0, the one with the zero identifier.

A message from Aigerim appeared:

Are you okay? I’m angry. But answer me.

He typed: Yes. Network’s unstable. Don’t come.

The message went through.

Grandma Kulzhan kept her eyes on him.

“Don’t show anyone.”

“Why?”

“Because a hungry person asks for a piece of bread first. Then he asks why you have the whole loaf.”

Footsteps sounded in the yard. Someone pounded on the gate.

“Yernar!” Malika shouted. “Open up! I just got a notification that you’re online.”

He looked at the screen. The bars were gone.

But people were already gathering outside the gate.

Chapter 8. A Voice in the Static

Yernar went out into the yard without his phone. He had left it beneath a floorboard in the bedroom, wrapped in shielding fabric from his work kit.

Malika, Daniyar, and about twenty other people stood outside the gate. Some held their devices out in front of them like compasses.

“What do you want?” Yernar asked.

“The network,” several voices answered at once.

Malika held up her screen. A system notification was displayed there:

USER ERNAR_S IS BACK ONLINE.

“I’m not registered under that name.”

“Everyone got it,” Daniyar said.

People nodded. The same message was on all their screens.

“Local broadcast. Fake notification.”

“But you sent a message,” Malika said.

“To who?”

“Doesn’t matter. We saw the outgoing packet.”

Yernar caught the word packet. Malika knew nothing about networking. Someone had fed her the term—or her device had shown her more than it should have.

“My work module sometimes catches a backup channel,” he lied. “It’s closed and only meant for diagnostics.”

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