created 2025-03-12, & modified, =this.modified
I answered a phone call because I thought it might be someone from work. What it ended up being was about five seconds of silence while I waited for someone to speak. At the end I said “hello?” and stopped.
After hanging up, I understood it wasn’t an important call but I thought about it and wondered the purpose of it before carrying on with my day. It’s not like there’s some phantom call, like some circuit gone awry that suddenly activates a call between two otherwise unconnected people.
Or, I had this fragment of a thought.
What if the entity on the other end got precisely what they wanted when I said “hello?”
What if that entity is just harvesting voice samples, or silence or breath?
If you had access to a phone call generating device but no voice, you could at once have a number of voices collected. Sampling humanity.
But then I thought of this: what if it was a phantom call of stranger, but a stranger without an identity. A phantom phone call that rings through the lines of the earth, at once hearing my voice and then the next and the next, and the next. It’s not connecting voices, or collecting voices. It’s just listening. Always in the present. It’s either a glitch from the early days, or some property of communication systems that they cannot suppress, or something new altogether.
But then what of this. A phantom phone call that does transmit through the wires. What it does is record what was said, and then transmits that to the next call. So someone, somewhere, answered the phone and heard my answer.
“… hello?” “hey?” “… hello?” “… hello?” “… hello?”
How long before the call would deviate from hellos? How long before the chain morphed to a sentence? Might it be the call from someone you know, fully constructed and equivalent? Find the seed of your voice warped years later when it calls you. The voice of you as a child.