Text transcript
UVB-76, The Story
4625 kHz
A signal has buzzed on this frequency since the Cold War.
No government has ever claimed it. It buzzes, day and night, and no one will say why.
Novosibirsk
Daria studies signal processing, and prefers machines to people.
Then an email arrives, from an address ending in .mil. 'We have read your dissertation. We have a project.'
The taiga
Four hours by helicopter to a set of concrete blocks and antennas.
Barbed wire, not the theatrical kind, the practical kind, that says: we do not want anyone to come in. Or out.
Room 7
She hears it before she is told what it is.
Not through the walls. From the air itself. Bzt-bzt-bzt-bzt. Sixty milliseconds, a pause, ninety, a pause. Like a second heartbeat in the room.
19:41
The first message comes through in a man's voice.
'Power increased by 0.5 percent. Control stable.' The kind of message no one would understand, unless they already knew there was something that could be increased.
The experiment
'Everyone has arrived,' Dr Petrov says. 'The experiment can begin.'
Not 'project'. Not 'assignment'. Experiment. Four women, and a frequency. What happens when the body stops listening to the head.
The real history
Behind the fiction is a real, documented mystery.
UVB-76, 'The Buzzer', 4625 kHz. Buzzing since the 1970s, its callsigns changed, its transmitters moved, and never once explained.
Fact and fiction
The novel invents the station in the taiga. The signal it is built on is real.
This website is the research behind it: the Buzzer, the numbers stations, the jamming, the Dead Hand myth, every date checked.
“The humming is over. And the terrible thing about it: that is also the best thing about it.”