The insistent buzz of his phone alarm dragged Mateo from a deep sleep. He slapped blindly at the bedside table, knocking over a half-empty glass of water before his fingers found the offending device. 6:30 AM. Thursday. The screen glowed accusingly.
He groaned, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. The apartment was quiet, unusually so. Normally, the sounds of Buenos Aires starting its day would filter up – the rumble of buses on Avenida Santa Fe, the distant shouting of vendors, the general thrum of a city waking. Today, silence pressed in.
He swung his legs out of bed, the cool wood floor a familiar shock. He padded towards the kitchen, expecting the aroma of coffee from Señora Alvarez's apartment downstairs, a smell that reliably started his mornings. Nothing. Just the stale air of his own flat.
He filled the kettle, flicked the switch, and waited for the comforting click and gurgle. The silence persisted, thick and unnatural. It wasn't just quiet; it felt empty.
Mateo went to the window overlooking the street. Cars were parked haphazardly, some with doors still ajar. A taxi sat angled against the curb, its meter visibly running inside the vacant cabin. A crumpled newspaper lay on the pavement, caught by a slight breeze – the only movement.
No people. Not a single soul walked the sidewalks, no cars moved, no horns blared. It was like a photograph, static and unreal. A prickle of unease traced its way up his spine.
"Hello?" he called out, his voice sounding loud and intrusive in the stillness. He opened his apartment door, peering into the hallway. Empty. He walked to the elevator, pressed the button. The mechanism whirred, the car arrived with a soft ding. Empty.
He descended to the ground floor. The lobby, usually bustling with neighbors heading to work or walking dogs, was deserted. The concierge's desk stood unmanned, a half-eaten medialuna sitting beside a lukewarm cup of coffee.
He pushed open the heavy glass doors and stepped onto the sidewalk. The morning sun cast long shadows down the street, highlighting the absolute absence of life. A child's bicycle lay on its side near a doorway.
Further down, a delivery truck was stopped mid-intersection, its back doors open, revealing stacks of bottled water. Mateo's heart began to pound, a heavy, insistent drum against his ribs. This wasn't right. This wasn't a holiday, wasn't some strange early morning lull. This was wrong.
"Is anyone there?" he shouted, louder this time, his voice echoing strangely between the buildings. No answer.
He walked down the street, peering into shop windows. A bakery with pastries still warm on the racks.
A bookstore with a "Back in 5 Minutes" sign hanging crookedly on the door. Inside cafes, tables held remnants of breakfast – plates, cups, abandoned newspapers. Everything looked as if people had simply vanished mid-action.
He pulled out his phone. No signal bars. "Dead?" he muttered, tapping the screen uselessly. He tried calling his sister, Ana, who lived across the city in Palermo. The call wouldn't connect. He tried his parents in Mendoza. Nothing. Panic started to churn in his stomach, cold and sharp.
He jogged towards the nearest subway station, hoping to find people underground, maybe a service disruption explanation.
The entrance gaped open, stairs descending into darkness. Emergency lights flickered weakly below. He hesitated, then took the steps down. The usual cacophony of the Subte – screeching trains, announcements, hurried footsteps, musicians – was replaced by a profound, echoing silence.
A train sat idle at the platform, doors open, carriages completely empty. Advertisements glowed eerily on digital screens, playing to no one. He walked the length of the platform, his footsteps the only sound. He checked the ticket booths, the control rooms. All empty.
Back on the street, the scale of the emptiness began to dawn on him. This wasn't just his neighborhood. He started walking faster, breaking into a run towards Avenida 9 de Julio. The widest avenue in the world, normally choked with traffic day and night, was now a vast, silent expanse of stationary vehicles.
Cars, buses, motorcycles, trucks – all frozen in time, their drivers and passengers gone. Some engines were still running, pitifully consuming the last of their fuel.
He stood in the middle of the avenue, turning slowly, taking in the impossible panorama. The Obelisco pierced the clear blue sky, a silent monument in a dead city. Tears welled in his eyes, not from sadness yet, but from sheer, overwhelming terror and disbelief. Where was everyone? What had happened? He felt incredibly small, terribly alone.
He spent the rest of the day traversing the city, a frantic, desperate search. He checked hospitals – empty beds, blinking monitors, half-finished surgeries in vacant operating rooms. He tried police stations – unmanned desks, open cell doors, radios crackling with static.
Government buildings stood silent and imposing. He shouted into apartment blocks, hammered on doors. Nothing. Only the echo of his own voice, his own fear.
As dusk began to settle, painting the sky in hues of orange and purple, the emptiness took on a new, more menacing quality. Shadows lengthened, turning familiar streets into alien landscapes.
The silence deepened, broken only by the wind whistling through the concrete canyons and the occasional car alarm finally dying out.
Mateo found himself back in his own neighborhood, drawn by a primal need for the familiar, even if the familiar was now terrifyingly hollow.
He entered a small supermarket, the automatic doors sighing open. Aisles were perfectly stocked. A shopping cart stood abandoned mid-aisle, filled with groceries. He picked up a bottle of water, his thirst suddenly acute. He needed supplies.
He grabbed canned goods, crackers, batteries, a powerful flashlight. There was no one to pay. The absurdity of it almost made him laugh, a hysterical sound that caught in his throat.
He returned to his apartment building, the silence inside even more oppressive than outside. He barricaded his door, not knowing why, just needing the illusion of security. He sat on his sofa, the bag of scavenged goods at his feet, and tried to think. An attack? A disease? Some kind of bizarre mass abduction?
Nothing made sense. There were no signs of struggle, no bodies, no destruction beyond the abandoned vehicles and minor signs of sudden departure. People were just… gone.
Days turned into weeks. Mateo established a routine. Scavenge for food and water during daylight hours, return to the apartment before dark. He explored further afield, driving abandoned cars until they ran out of gas, then finding another.
He went to Ezeiza Airport. Planes sat motionless on the tarmac, connected to jet bridges leading to empty terminals.
Luggage circled endlessly on carousels. Security checkpoints stood unmanned, trays filled with laptops, belts, and shoes left behind.
He found working radios, broadcasting only static or automated emergency signals that eventually fell silent.
He tried accessing the internet, hoping for news from other countries, but networks were down, infrastructure failing without maintenance. Was it just Argentina? Or the whole world? The not knowing was a torment.
He talked to himself constantly, a running commentary on his actions, his fears, his memories. He recounted stories of his childhood, described architectural plans he'd once drafted, argued with imaginary colleagues.
Sometimes he'd stop mid-sentence, horrified by the sound of his own voice in the vast emptiness, the confirmation of his solitude.
Loneliness became a physical ache, a crushing weight. He started seeing things in the periphery – flickers of movement, shadows that seemed to detach themselves from walls. He heard phantom sounds – whispers on the wind, footsteps in the corridor outside his apartment, the distant laughter of children. He knew they weren't real, but they chipped away at his sanity nonetheless.
One afternoon, exploring the Recoleta district, he found himself standing before the entrance to the famous cemetery. Hesitantly, he pushed open the heavy iron gates. Inside, the city of the dead was as silent as the city of the living. Elaborate mausoleums stood like miniature, empty houses.
He wandered the narrow pathways, reading the names of families long gone, their final resting places now seemingly no different from the world outside.
He found a small, unlocked chapel within the cemetery grounds. Inside, dust motes danced in the light filtering through stained-glass windows.
He sat on a wooden pew, the silence profound. He wasn't religious, hadn't been inside a church in years, but he stayed there for hours, absorbing the stillness, a different kind of quiet than the fearful silence of the city. It felt ancient, resigned.
Months bled into a year. Seasons changed. Weeds pushed up through cracks in the pavement. Dust gathered everywhere. Buildings began to show subtle signs of decay without human upkeep. Mateo's scavenging trips became less frequent. He had stockpiled enough non-perishables to last years.
His movements became slower, his purpose dwindling. The initial terror had subsided, replaced by a deep, pervasive melancholy.
He spent hours looking at old photographs, remnants of a world that felt increasingly dreamlike. His sister smiling at her wedding. His parents laughing on a beach. Friends gathered around a table, sharing wine and conversation. Each image was a stab of pain, a reminder of everything lost.
He sometimes spoke to the photos, telling them about his day, apologising for not being able to find them.
He found a projector and reels of old home movies in an abandoned apartment. He set it up in his living room, casting flickering images onto the wall. Children playing in a park, a family barbecue, blurry footage of holidays.
He watched them over and over, the whirring of the projector a comforting sound, the silent, moving figures a ghostly company.
One day, driven by a need to understand, however futile, he sought out a university research center on the outskirts of the city.
He knew it was a long shot, but he remembered news reports about atmospheric studies being conducted there. The building was modern, glass and steel, now looking forlorn. He broke a window to get inside.
Power was intermittent, emergency generators kicking in sporadically. He navigated darkened corridors, guided by his flashlight beam, until he found a laboratory complex. Computers were off, servers silent. He searched for backup power sources, following thick cables, until he found a generator room with fuel still in the tanks.
With trembling hands, he managed to start one.
Lights flickered on in the main lab. Screens booted up, displaying error messages and interrupted processes. Mateo, an architect with a decent grasp of technology but no specialized knowledge, spent days trying to access data, navigating complex systems, piecing together fragments.
He found research logs, sensor readings, spectral analysis charts. Much of it was incomprehensible jargon.
Then, he found it. A data file labeled "Event Capture - Unscheduled." Dated the morning everyone disappeared. It contained sensor readings from multiple instruments and, crucially, an audio recording from an extremely sensitive microphone array designed to capture infrasound.
He clicked play.
At first, there was just the low background hum of equipment. Then, exactly timestamped to the estimated moment of the disappearance, a new sound emerged. It wasn't loud.
It was a deep, pervasive, multi-layered hum, below the normal range of human hearing but captured by the instruments. It grew rapidly in intensity, not in volume, but in complexity, a resonant frequency that seemed to vibrate in his bones even through the recording.
It lasted precisely seven seconds. Then, silence. Utter, complete silence, except for the unchanged hum of the lab equipment.
Accompanying the audio were energy readings. A massive, coordinated wave of an unknown energy type had swept across the continent, coinciding perfectly with the sound. The researchers' notes, cut off mid-sentence, hypothesized it wasn't targeted, wasn't an attack. It was more like a... field interaction. An effect.
The final, incomplete entry read: "Possible resonance cascade affecting complex organic molecular structures? Seems selective. Non-destructive to inorganic matter. Like tuning forks..."
Mateo sat back, the blood draining from his face. It wasn't aliens, wasn't a weapon, wasn't divine judgment. It was physics. Some cosmic event, some passing wave, some natural phenomenon on a scale beyond comprehension had simply... resonated life out of existence. Like static wiping a tape.
Indifferent. Accidental. Meaningless. Humanity hadn't been conquered or punished; it had just been in the way of something else, something vast and uncaring. All the love, the history, the art, the struggle – erased like a stray mark.
The knowledge was worse than the not knowing. It offered no enemy to hate, no reason to mourn, only the crushing confirmation of utter insignificance. He sat there for a long time, the hum from the recording seeming to echo in the empty room, in the empty city, in the empty world.
He left the research center, leaving the generator running, the screen displaying the final, chilling data. He drove back to the heart of Buenos Aires, not to his apartment, but to the Teatro Colón, the grand opera house. He forced his way inside, the opulent interior thick with dust.
He walked onto the main stage, standing beneath the proscenium arch, looking out at the rows upon rows of empty velvet seats.
He had found a working broadcast system weeks ago at a radio station, figured out how to patch audio through. He'd considered broadcasting messages, pleas for survivors, but never had. Now, he knew what he wanted to broadcast. He drove to the station, retrieved the digital audio file from the research center computer using a portable drive, and returned to the theatre.
He managed to connect the drive to the theatre's powerful sound system, rigging it to play on a loop.
He stood on the stage again as the sound began. Not loud enough to damage the structure, but pervasive. The deep, complex, seven-second hum filled the vast space, the sound of unmaking, the frequency of absence.
It pulsed through the empty seats, resonated against the gilded balconies, echoed in the cavernous hall. The sound of humanity's silent, indifferent erasure.
Mateo walked out of the Teatro Colón, leaving the sound playing on repeat, broadcasting itself faintly into the deserted Plaza Lavalle through the open doors. A monument of noise signifying absolute silence.
He walked towards the waterfront, towards the murky brown expanse of the Río de la Plata. He didn't stop at the edge. He kept walking, the cold water soaking his trousers, then his shirt. He didn't swim. He just walked forward, the riverbed sloping downwards.
The water reached his chest, then his neck. He thought of the hum, the indifferent wave, the cosmic accident. He thought of Señora Alvarez's coffee, his sister's laugh, the weight of his father's hand on his shoulder. Gone. All tuned out of existence.
The cold water closed over his head. There was no struggle, no final gasp for air. Just a quiet acceptance, a final surrender to the overwhelming silence, becoming one more particle of organic matter reclaimed by an uncaring universe.
Back at the Teatro Colón, the hum played on, a seven-second loop echoing through the empty grandeur, the only sound in a city, a country, perhaps a world, that no longer was.