Midnight Signals Episodes

On the last Saturday of June, four friends who have just graduated from high school, Nora, Eli, Cass, and Dev, climb Copper Ridge above the small town of Harlow, Pennsylvania. They're looking for Site Kestrel, an Air Force station that shut down without explanation in October 1977. Behind a rusted fence they find a steel door with two lines stenciled in red, the second one never explained: Do not listen. Inside is a room full of machines, and a single reel of tape left threaded in a recorder. El...

Dev stops sleeping. He tells Nora the world finally makes sense, and that there is more of it, waiting to be heard. Eli goes back up the ridge alone. Then Dev slips into WHRL, Harlow's radio station, in the middle of the night, and at 6:03 the next morning the host of the morning show stops talking in the middle of the weather and begins to hum. Eleven hundred households are listening. The people who keep listening become calm, gentle, and quiet, and the county health officer can find nothing wr...

Eleven seconds of television becomes millions of uploads, and the signal begins assembling itself, one humming voice at a time. At 2:19 a.m. on the first of August, the emergency alert system sounds on two hundred million phones. Governments order the world to go silent, and a world that cannot broadcast discovers it cannot hold itself together. Nora leaves her father behind and flees toward the coast of Maine with Cass and her aunt Ruth, who has been deaf since birth and is the only one of them...

On Gannet Rock, eleven miles off the coast of Maine, four hundred survivors live by rules written on a sheet of plywood: no speakers, no humming, no singing, and anyone who begins to change will be cared for, not cast out. Ruth teaches the island to sign. Then a storm washes a working radio ashore, a boy finds it, and the island votes on whether its last rule will hold. Dr. Alice Brenner arrives from Harlow with notebooks full of hearts beating in unison, and red lights begin to blink on towers ...

With a brass key from Lena Hollis and a map from Dr. Brenner, Nora crosses a silent America on foot, following the long lines of people who are all walking the same way. She is captured by the Silencers, armed survivors who have sealed their ears and plan to burn Copper Ridge, and everyone on it, at dawn on the twenty first of March. A girl named Jo sets her free. On the ridge, tens of thousands sit humming beneath a tower built from a hundred others, and Nora nearly gives in before she reaches ...

On the night of the spring equinox, as the last tower is finished and the Silencers wait at the foot of the ridge with their fuel, Nora Vance threads the reel marked Complete and unwraps her ears. What she finds on the other side is vast, and old, and patient, and it is not what Walter Ames believed. To save the people on the ridge, Cass among them, she has to see it for what it really is before she forgets her own name, and reach the one person who knows how to make the world stop listening. An...