Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 1347: Producing the Silent Message

“Really?” Roland’s mood lifted immediately. Barov’s tone said plainly that getting here had not been simple. “You received the signal as well?”

The Iron Towers Project was the first step in Roland’s wireless communication plan. Long-wavelength radio transmission required large antennas, so the Ministry of Construction had erected towers nearly fifty meters tall between North Slope Mountain and Silver City. Most were slender poles — thick as a grown man, which made them look like needles from a distance. With hydrogen-filled aerial marker balls allowing metal wires to extend or contract, the antennas reached up to a hundred meters.

The towers themselves were straightforward enough. The construction had been unremarkable. But communications towers were systems engineering, not civil engineering, and the heart of the project was the transceivers at each base. Debugging them had sent multiple electromagnetic pulses into the air. Fortunately, in a world free from interference, everything that went out had come back clearly.

“Yes, Your Majesty.” Barov was nearly enthusiastic. “Exactly as you predicted — the system spontaneously generates a kind of magical response. I’m just not certain yet whether Silver City received it cleanly on their end.”

“I think we’ll have that answer very soon.” Roland was already reaching for his coat. “Tell the Administrative Office heads we’re leaving together. They won’t want to miss the chance to witness this.”

North Slope Mountain had changed. It had been a mine once — a few narrow passageways cut into rock, cold and dark and provisional. Now wide cemented paths and railroad tracks ran up its slopes, and the peak was accessible by train in a matter of minutes.

The Iron Tower facility itself was modest: a row of plain single-story brick buildings, low-roofed, icicles hanging from the corners. Nothing about it looked like the threshold of a new era. The grandeur of the new factories at the southern banks of the Redwater River had nothing to fear from it in terms of appearance.

Inside, Anna was directing members of the Society of Wondrous Crafts through the final preparations. When she caught sight of Roland, she gave a small, discreet gesture — everything is going smoothly — and returned immediately to her work.

He smiled.

The initial announcement of the electromagnetic wave project had stirred up considerable discussion at the Administrative Office. Most of the senior staff understood the implications clearly: if information could travel in real time, Neverwinter’s control over the territory and its battlefield coordination would improve in ways that were difficult to overstate. The telephone lines, aviation couriers, and Sigil of Listening had already demonstrated this — between the three, the old noble factions of Graycastle had never found an opening to regroup after their first defeat. Officials who had spent decades managing the slow erosion and recovery of centralized authority found themselves watching that entire historical pattern simply fail to start. When any emerging development could be met with the Second Army before it grew legs, and when the local police could shut down smaller formations before they reached critical mass, the traditional noble playbook had no viable opening move.

But the telephone lines were wired, and the other two methods were dependent on magic — things the officials could barely conceptualize. The Iron Towers had no wires at all and were theoretically more powerful than any magic-based system. This was harder to accept. Primary education textbooks covered electromagnetic wave basics, but a theory you cannot see or touch was, for many people, simply harder to believe in than biplanes, which at least made noise and fell from the sky when shot. In that specific sense, wireless communication was the stranger miracle.

None of it affected the project’s pace. Too many impossible things had become ordinary under Roland’s rule. Even if he had announced plans to reach the Bloody Moon, the Administrative Office would have organized the paperwork.

For his own part, Roland was more cautious than usual. Wireless communications was not his strongest area. The equipment was built entirely from prototypes developed by the Design Bureau — no one had tested whether it actually worked end-to-end. Anna’s quiet gesture told him they hadn’t failed visibly in debugging. That was different from knowing it worked.

“Then let’s begin,” he said.

He took Anna’s hand and led her to the transmitter.

“Roland?” She raised an eyebrow.

“You’ve been at the center of debugging from the beginning.” He gave her a look that managed to convey multiple things at once. “This is the Ministry of Engineering’s achievement — it should be yours to test first.” Whatever had been confirmed in debugging, only the official test would be written down.

He turned to the room. “For the receiver — who wants to go first?”

Every hand went up simultaneously.

The resulting debate was brief but earnest. The old director won on the strength of accumulated seniority, which he deployed without shame. Barov would be the receiver.

The test was simple in principle: the sender would transmit information unknown to the receiver, then the blindfolded receiver would relay it back. This proved not just that a signal had been sent, but that it had been received correctly by someone who couldn’t have known its content any other way. No one in the room had encountered wireless communications before. The only way to convince them was to make the demonstration undeniable.

After a brief explanation, Roland had the chief guard cover Barov’s eyes. Anna picked up a piece of chalk and drew three horizontal lines and two dots on the small blackboard — long tones, short tones. Everyone in the room confirmed what was on the board.

Anna pressed the switch.

Three long tones. Two short tones.

The moment the circuit closed, blue sparks bloomed in the center of the transmitter.

No buzz followed. No audible tone. The switch was not connected to any speaker. The spark died, the room stayed silent, and the transmitted signal was — nothing the senses could follow. Even those standing at the window could barely see the faint blue light, let alone Silver City, hundreds of kilometers away.

Everyone held their breath.

Roland felt goosebumps rise along his arms. He knew, rationally, that the sensation was a trick of the moment — under low power amplification, electromagnetic waves could not affect the human body. But in the silence, something in him mapped the invisible fact of what had just happened: the spark that died in a blink had actually set the electric current oscillating between inductor and capacitor, millions of times per second, the rapidly fluctuating field spreading outward in all directions from the antenna and the ground wire, into the quiet world, into every direction at once.

The first silent message humanity had ever made. No one could hear it. It was the loudest thing that had ever been transmitted.

It reached Silver City. It did not diminish.

Two receivers waited at the other end. The first was an ancient coherer — a glass tube filled with metal powder. When electromagnetic waves struck the tube, the powder cohered, lowering the circuit’s resistance and allowing the previously dead light bulb to glow warm yellow. That light meant: a message is in the air.

The second was the galena detector. No external power source — just a fragment of copper ore and a wire, a natural semiconductor that generated a weak current from incoming radiation. In the absence of any transmission it emitted a vague background buzz. When a message came in, the buzz clarified to distinct ticks, audible through a telephone receiver.

Anna repeated the message three times, then set the switch down.

A letter sent between Neverwinter and Silver City and returned took five to seven days. An aerial courier, a day at minimum.

The receiver lit up before Anna’s hand left the switch.

The entire exchange had taken seconds.

The room stirred — an involuntary collective motion, the sound of people who had been holding themselves still suddenly unable to.

Barov, still blindfolded, was listening with absolute attention. He wrote slowly. When he finally removed the blindfold and headset, he looked at the blackboard, at the paper in his hand, and then at the faces around him — and the shock on every face was, by itself, the answer.

On the paper: three horizontal lines and two dots.

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