Elias paused the audio. He was sitting in his apartment, but he suddenly felt the distinct vibration of a train beneath his floorboards. He lived nowhere near the tracks. He looked at the waveform on his screen. The peaks weren't jagged like normal noise; they were rounded, pulsing, like a heartbeat.
He wasn't in his apartment. He was in the carriage from the recording.
The train plunged into a tunnel, and the recording cut to static.
From the speaker came the sound of Elias’s own voice, recorded only seconds ago: "Give me a story."