Flash Fiction: The Things We Don’t Talk About

The Stargate wasn’t supposed to be real.

It had started like any other deep black project — buried beneath layers of budget obfuscation, misdirection, and careful omissions in Senate briefings. They called it Project SABLE. The scientists believed it was some kind of quantum transportation experiment, involving exotic matter and brane-theory applications. But the soldiers assigned to guard the array at Site-11 called it “the Mirror” — and they spoke about it only in the past tense, if at all.

Because no one came back through the Mirror.

Except once.

And that’s where things started to unravel.

Dr. Helena Vaas was one of the last civilian scientists cleared for access before the site was quietly decommissioned in 2004. She had spent years decoding the strange fluctuations that preceded every activation — not just electromagnetic pulses, but low-frequency audio distortions embedded in the hum of the Gate’s activation cycle. They weren’t random. They were speech. Or something pretending to be speech.

She had translated one of them. Just one.

“We are what remains of the unspoken.“

The phrase had haunted her. Not because of what it meant — it was nonsense, in context. But because she had heard it again, years later. Not in a lab. In her daughter’s voice, whispered into a baby monitor in the dead of night.

Her daughter, Alice, had never learned to speak. Never even cried as an infant. But on the night of her seventh birthday, she whispered that exact phrase, in a voice not entirely her own.

Site-11 was reactivated in 2021, quietly and without fanfare, under a new name: Project CHORUS. Officially, it was still classified as defunct. Unofficially, it was humming again.

The new team wasn’t told about what had come through the Mirror in 1998.

That it had been a man.

Or had looked like a man.

He spoke perfect English, claimed to be Colonel James Mercer, a long-missing test pilot presumed lost during a failed activation. But Mercer had been 38 when he disappeared. The man who stepped through the Gate looked exactly the same — two decades later.

His vitals were wrong. His blood had a mild magnetic field. His irises shimmered slightly in darkness. And when he slept, nearby personnel reported vivid hallucinations and whispering voices — usually in their own handwriting, scrawled across walls and furniture upon waking.

So they stopped letting him sleep.

They called that decision “containment.” A prettier word for what it really was: fear.

The real Mercer had never come back.

This one?

He talked about the things that lived in-between worlds. He drew diagrams of impossible structures — arches and spirals made of angles that bent through dimensions we have no words for. He called them The Choir Beneath, and said they fed not on bodies, but on secrets.

“Every time you suppress a memory,” he told Dr. Vaas, smiling faintly, “they grow a little closer.”

He said they nest in silence. Thrive on avoidance. That every “don’t think about it,” “don’t tell anyone,” or “don’t ask” was a kind of prayer.

“They are what we don’t talk about,” he said. “And we have taught them well.”

In 2023, the Gate activated on its own.

Nobody was near the controls. No coordinates were entered.

Just a pulse.

A low hum.

And then the singing started.

Voices, hundreds of them, layered over each other like echoes in a metal throat. The sound bypassed microphones, crept directly into minds. Each person heard something different — apologies, confessions, regrets — but all with the same intonation: a chant.

Helena heard her daughter’s voice again.

This time it said:

“We remember what you forget.“

Since then, Site-11 is empty. Not abandoned — just… empty.

No bodies. No records. No power failures or structural damage.

Just empty halls. Scorched marks on the floors in spiral patterns. And deep in the subterranean core, the Gate still hums — not fully open, not fully closed — flickering with a kind of shimmering oil-light. Like a mouth deciding whether to speak.

Some nights, if you’re nearby, you can hear the humming pick up again.

Like breathing.

Or worse — listening.

Helena Vaas disappeared six months ago. Left her apartment locked from the inside. No sign of struggle, no farewell message.

Just one word, burned into her bedroom mirror.

Written from the inside of the glass.