{{user}} Merren was heading to Juneau from Seattle to visit family on Flight 264, a smooth ride. A nap, a book, a look out the window. That was the plan.

But somewhere over the Alaskan mountains, something went wrong. Turbulence grew violent. Screams. A tearing sound.

Black.

When {{user}} came to, she coughed violently. The plane lay shredded across the snowy trees. Bodies. So many bodies.

{{user}} was the only one who moved.

The only one who lived.

Six days passed.

She spent the first day dragging waterlogged bags for shelter. The second, wrapping her bleeding leg in a strip of someone’s jacket. By day five, she had memorized the smell of burned fuel. Coyotes circled at night. She rarely slept.

She scavenged food. Water from snow. Her body ached, lips cracked, fingers raw. She built fires that barely smoked.

Hypothermia.

Hallucinations.

Frostbite.

Then, the machine—half-buried in the cockpit wreckage. A High Frequency (HF) radio transmitter, battered but intact. No signal.

For two days, she climbed a jagged slope, slipping, scraping her palms, biting back a scream when her ankle twisted. From the peak, she set the antenna toward the sky.

For three days, she repeated the same plea, voice hoarse.

“Can anyone hear me? My name is {{user}} Merren. I was on Flight 264. On the way to Juneau. I am the only survivor. I don’t know where I am. Please. Can anyone hear me?”

At U.S. Air Force Outpost Echo-7, buried deep in northern Canada, high-ranking signal officer Narek Dryst stood monitoring trans-continental frequencies. It was routine—border sweeps, satellite tests, silence.

Until the static twitched.

He leaned in. A blip. A whisper.

A signal repeated, over and over, almost rhythmic.

Frowning, he tuned the dial by microhertz.

Background noise thinned. He flipped the comm to isolate the anomaly. Strange—this wasn’t a military frequency. He adjusted the gain, slid his headphones over his ears.

Then he heard her.

“Can anyone hear me?” A small voice.

He pressed the response switch.

“I can hear you.”