BONUS: This 396 Hz DemiPhase Frequency Formula is a “character” in the story.

Listen to “Solfeggio Frequency 396-Hz for Grounded Connectivity PLUS Healing from Fear, Guilt and Shame” on Spreaker.

RESIDUAL FREQUENCY

The problem with proving a theory about the fundamental nature of consciousness, Dr. Hakeem Alexander decided, was the paperwork.

A stack of peer-review critiques sat beside his elbow, a monument to small-mindedness written in Times New Roman. The air in his university office was stale, recycled through vents that carried the faint, psychic residue of a century’s worth of academic anxiety—a dry, confining silence. He tapped his pen—a precise, metronomic click-click-click—against the mahogany desk, a failed attempt to sync with a rhythm the world seemed to have lost.

Boredom. It wasn’t an absence of activity, but a density of meaninglessness. His work on the Eternality Axiom was complete, published, and now languished in the metaphysical sciences equivalent of a sensory deprivation tank: ignored. The Meta Framework was elegant, the math was sound, and yet, his life remained stubbornly, insultingly linear. No lab accidents here. No cosmic rays. Just the slow, quiet suffocation of being right about how the universe might grant miracles, while living a life entirely devoid of them.

His phone buzzed, shattering the silence. A news alert. He almost dismissed it, but the headline snagged his eye: “Phantom of the Boardwalk Strikes Again: Assailants Found ‘Sonic-Stunned’ at Oceanfront.”

A wisp of something—not interest, but a vague, professional irritation—stirred. The article was sensationalist trash, of course. It quoted baffled police and theorized about “ultrasonic weapons” and “vigilante justice.” Hakeem’s mind, trained to dissect anomalies, automatically parsed the data. Non-lethal incapacitation. Focused acoustic energy. Theoretical, but within the bounds of the Eternality Axiom’s implications for directed consciousness affecting local wave-functions…

He stopped the thought. That was the path to madness. Chasing ghosts in news reports was for conspiracy theorists, not PhDs. With a deliberate motion, he closed the browser tab. The silence rushed back in, heavier than before.

He needed caffeine, and light, and the sound of something other than his own circling thoughts. He needed Buzzy’s.

The coffee shop was an ecosystem of gentle chaos. The grinder’s roar, the steam wand’s shriek, the low hum of a dozen separate conversations—it was a tapestry of noise that, for reasons Hakeem could never articulate, calmed the staticky hum of existential boredom in his own mind. It felt real in a way his office did not, a barrier against a deeper quiet he preferred not to name.

Jesse was at the register, her fiery red curls a vibrant shock against the warm wood and green plants. She was laughing at something a customer said, her face alight. Hakeem felt the familiar, careful internal shift—the donning of the “Dr. Alexander” persona. Slightly formal, kindly avuncular, a man of measured intellect.

“The usual, Doctor H?” Jesse asked, her smile turning toward him. It was a smile that always felt like a sunbeam breaking through cloud cover—warm, but momentarily blinding.

“Please, Jesse. And call me Hakeem. The title just makes me feel old.”

“You are old,” she said, her eyes sparkling as she started the pour-over. “But in a wise, wizardy way. Perfect for my book.” She nodded to the laptop open on a nearby table, dense with lines of text. “My main knight just got his mentor figure. A grumpy scholar who knows the secret history of the realm.”

“Grumpy?” Hakeem raised an eyebrow, leaning against the counter. The posture was calculated—open, but not too familiar. “I prefer ‘rigorously skeptical.’”

“See? Wizard talk.” She slid his cup across. The dark roast smelled of earth and certainty. “You’re my muse for rationality in a world of magic swords.”

“An ignoble fate.” He took the cup, letting the heat seep into his fingers. Their dialogue, as always, was a sidestep. They weren’t really talking about wizards or coffee. They were performing a familiar, comforting dance where she was the promising creative and he was the grounded guide. The subtext—his quiet admiration for her vitality, her unspoken curiosity about his secluded life—thrummed beneath the surface, unheard.

“Ignoble? I’ll have you know Ser Kylar values his grumpy wizard immensely.” She leaned forward, lowering her voice conspiratorially. “He’s based on you, you know. The way he folds his notes into little birds when he’s thinking.”

Hakeem blinked. “I don’t do that.”

“You totally do. I’ve seen them in your trash bin. Little paper cranes, made from that heavy, creamy paper—like from a fancy journal.” She grinned, a flash of triumph. “It’s adorable. And very wizard-core.”

A strange, cold trickle seeped into his gut. He had no memory of folding paper cranes. None. He must have been distracted, doodling while on a call… The explanation felt thin, a sheet of paper over a hole in his recall.

“Adorable is not a quality I cultivate,” he said, the words coming out stiffer than intended. He took a sip of coffee to cover the lapse.

From the back, Amanda emerged, her arms laden with sacks of coffee beans. Her baggy, tie-dye sweater seemed to swallow the industrial lighting. She gave Hakeem a slow, knowing nod.

“Heard the new album from Vile Resonance?” she asked, her voice a low, calm contrast to the shop’s treble.

“The one that uses the 174 Hz Solfeggio frequency as a bass drone throughout?” Hakeem felt himself relax minutely. This was safer ground. “It’s… aggressive. Theoretically interesting for neuro-acoustic patterning, but harsh on the medial prefrontal cortex.”

Amanda hefted a bean sack onto a shelf with a soft thud. “You think too much with your cortex, Doc. You gotta feel it in your ribs. Let it fold you up.” She made a slow, pressing motion with her hands, as if compressing air. “Then you unfold again. Different.”

Her words landed with an uncanny weight. Fold. Unfold. They echoed Jesse’s observation and touched something formless and anxious deep within him, a muscle memory of pressure and release.

“I prefer my consciousness unfolded, thank you,” he said, forcing a dry tone.

“Suit yourself.” Amanda’s smile was cryptic. “Your loss. That album’s a sacrament.”

Jesse rolled her eyes with affection. “Don’t get him started on sonic sacrilege, Amanda. He’ll write a paper on it and I’ll have to read it.”

The familiar banter flowed around him, but Hakeem felt unmoored. The newspaper article, the paper cranes, Amanda’s metaphoric folding—they were disparate data points his mind, against his will, began trying to connect. It was nonsense. Synchronicity, not signal.

He paid, offered a final, practiced smile to Jesse, and took his coffee to a corner table, away from the sunbeam of her presence. He needed to anchor himself. He pulled out his personal journal, a sleek, black notebook, and opened it to a fresh page. He would write. He would impose order on the creeping chaos.

Journal Entry: 4:17 PM. Buzzy’s. Cognitive dissonance observed stemming from sleep deprivation and social overstimulation. The ‘vigilante’ phenomenon is a cultural meme infiltrating subjective experience. Note: Recalibrate DemiPhase meditation schedule. The ‘Solitude’ track (396 Hz) may be over-priming pattern-recognition in the temporoparietal junction…

His pen moved swiftly, the clinical language a bulwark. As he wrote, his left hand, seemingly of its own volition, drifted to the napkin dispenser. He pulled a single, coarse brown square free and set it beside the journal.

His right hand continued writing. His left hand began to fold.

He didn’t look down. His focus was on the sentence he was constructing about theta wave intrusion. But his fingers on the napkin moved with a life of their own, an autonomic fluency: a sharp crease here, a precise tuck there, the kinetics eerily efficient. It was a soothing, rhythmic counterpoint to the scritch of his pen.

Minutes passed. The journal entry concluded with a firm period. He looked down.

In the center of the table, beside his half-finished coffee, sat a perfect, intricate origami lotus flower. Its petals were sharply defined, layered with a complexity that spoke of immense, unconscious skill.

Hakeem stared at it. His breath hitched.

The ambient noise of the coffee shop—Jesse’s laugh, the clatter of cups, the indie folk from the speakers—seemed to warp for a single, dizzying second. It didn’t fade, but rather folded in upon itself, becoming a dense, silent kernel of pressure inside his skull. In that absolute, internal quiet, a single, foreign thought-image flashed, vivid and terrifying:

A darkened room. The deep hum of machinery dying. The terrifying, total absence of sound. A deep, resonant feeling of being unmade.

Then, the sound rushed back. The lotus sat there, innocent and impossible.

His heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic, disordered rhythm. With a sudden, violent sweep of his hand, he crushed the paper lotus into a tight ball. The sound of the crumpling napkin was obscenely loud in his ears, a dry, visceral tear that seemed to ripple outwards, making the lights in the café flicker—just for a fraction of a second—before steadying.

No one else noticed. Jesse was steaming milk. Amanda was weighing beans. The world had not changed.

But Hakeem Alexander sat very still, the crumpled ball of paper burning like a secret in his clenched fist. The boredom was gone. In its place was a cold, quantum void of possibility, and the first, terrifying tremor of a reality beginning to crack.

Want more?

You can read the entire Act I which includes the 1st 9 chapters of the novel here AXIOM ACT I

Dr. Hakeem Alexander, a metaphysical scientist, is frustrated that his elegant theory on consciousness is gathering dust. His life of ordered, linear research is shattered by a news report of a “phantom” vigilante, a simple question from a perceptive barista about folded paper cranes, and a horrifying moment of unconscious skill. As his own mind begins to betray him with actions he can’t recall, he is forced to confront a terrifying possibility: the “Axiom of the Self” is not just a theory. It is a crack in reality, and something is now hunting the signal he’s begun to emit. The first chapter of a genre-blending thriller where sound is a weapon, paper holds lethal secrets, and the deepest mystery is the man in the mirror