Monday at High School No 7 began with a bell that sounded like a jammed kettle. The corridors smelled of wet jackets and fresh photocopying, and the radio room, although it had ambitions to be the heart of the school, looked like the heart of an old dachshund: it loved but happened to cough. In the studio lay three microphones with characters more whimsical than the daily canteen schedule, the bent cables resembled noodles, and on the windowsill stood a plastic cactus with a 'Do not water - irony' sticker. Nina Koral, class 3C, chewed on a pencil, which made her look like a thinking beaver. She liked things that had keys and could be silenced: foam, a laptop, a talking Boris. Boris April, on the other hand, was a man with a heart on his hand and headphones around his neck. An optimist by birth, a sound engineer by choice, an announcer by necessity, because 'someone has to, and you have radio laughs'. "Ready?" - Boris tapped his finger on the mixing table as if waking a sleeping monster. "I was born ready. Then it got a bit worse." - muttered Nina and corrected her hair in the glass, which, to be honest, was not a mirror but a soundproofing glass, so it reflected her like a clue. ON AIR lit up on the red light. Boris took a breath, but before he could say "Good morning, seven!" a jingle blared through the speakers. Not their jingle. It sounded like a chewing gum commercial from 1998, except that the voice sounded like Nina. Only sort of calmer, with that slight hoarseness that Nina only had after her third hour of Polish. "This is Radio Seven, morning programme - Tuesday, seven zero seven. On the programme: predictions hit the spot and a change in the bell grid. Please unstick the bubble tea straws from the floor before Mr Director.... well, you'll see," said this Nino-like person, and then a song from a decade ago about life being like pizza flew. Nina and Boris looked at each other. For a second, all they could hear was an old fan making a "rrrrrrr" sound, as if wondering if he was entitled to a pension. "Which one is it today?" - Boris asked and immediately looked at his watch. "Monday." Nina glanced at the monitor. The programme planner on their programme looked as it always did: three news items, two advertisements for interest groups, a song by the teacher's band The Chalk. Except that a new folder appeared next to it: 'Tomorrow-1'. "Who uploaded this?" - Nina clicked. Inside were audio files with names that sounded like inside jokes: "7_07_Tuesday_jingle", "9_12_slide", "13_13_shurping". The time of their creation: today, but as if from the future. The system showed the dates 24 hours ahead, which gave Boris and Nina the same kind of goosebumps as an eight o'clock Monday morning lecture on romanticism. "It's a prank. On the bank. Someone's playing with the system date," Boris muttered, though his voice trembled like a projector image when touched. "Or... there's a second option, which we don't voice because it'll sound too serious and end up making a meme with the moon," said Nina. "Listen to this file at nine twelve. The title sounds like an offence against health and safety." Nina turned on "nine_12_slide". From the speakers came the sound of footsteps on the rubberoleum, a scuffle and a cry that could have belonged to the director, or could have been the sound of a terrified flamingo. Then a very clear, not very radio-like text: "Oh no, those straws again!". "Cool. The only person in this school who uses the word 'straws' with such drama. What now?" - Boris asked. "Now... now we wait. It's eight fifteen. At nine twelve we're going under the office. If nothing happens, we'll high-five the IT guy for a clever joke. If something happens..." - Nina didn't finish. Instead, she pulled sticky tape and a "Attention: threshold!" sign from a drawer, then looked at it as if it were an amulet. They spent the rest of the first lesson listening to the buzzing of fluorescent lights and gossip through the thin walls: someone had lost their P.E. T-shirt, someone else got a five in biology "for their eyes". There was this strange tension hovering in the radio room that makes even the clock tick like a dramatic actor. At nine eleven, Nina and Boris were standing opposite the headmaster's office, trying to look as if they weren't standing there at all. That is: Nina was staring at a poster about the school's career advice ("Become yourself! Or someone with a good salary."), and Boris was pretending to rummage through his backpack. People from the junior classes walked past, dropping a bubble tea straw every now and then. The floor really was strewn with transparent tubes, like evidence that physics and logistics are just theory at this school. The clock moved to 9:12 a.m. The office door opened. The headmaster slipped out like a nose out of a book and took the first step. Then the second. On the third, his sole met a plastic fate. It wasn't a catastrophe - more like a gentle pirouette from a man who had been in trouble in his youth at PE. He furrowed his eyebrows, looked at the floor, uttered the phrase about straws with the same intonation they had heard in the recording, and decided: "From now on, no more straws on the school grounds. Please announce it on the radio station." Boris and Nina looked at each other in a way that, if their gaze had been a meme, would have had the caption "well there you go". "I don't like being right when it's not my right," Nina said, and her voice hung in her throat. By twelve o'clock, the radio station was busy as in a beeless hive: a couple of people from the journalism club, the president of the local government, even the lady teacher - all popping in to say "Did you hear that?" and add "It's definitely someone from Fourth D". Everyone had a theory, and none sounded better than the previous one. In the 'Memetic Council' chat room, someone uploaded a screenshot of the server: the word 'Yesterday++' was scrolling in the logs. The IT guy wrote: "Not to worry. Maybe it's an upgrade. Or a ghost." He added an emoticon that made it hard to tell if he was joking. "Let's go down to the archive," Nina decided. "If this folder occurred out of nothingness, then nothingness is sitting somewhere between the tape recorders and the cobwebs." The stairs to the basement were cool and had a built-in echo-bonus: every word came back like a late text message. The door to the radio archives opened hard, as if memories had been pumped inside. It smelled of dust and old vinyl. On the shelves stood black boxes of tapes - descriptions from a time when you drew letters a bit like flowers: "Prom '02", "Environmental Appeal" (an error in the label gave the tools of correct Polish a nervous attack), "Interview with a graduate's grandfather". In the middle, on a trolley, stood a reel-to-reel tape recorder that nobody had touched for years. Only now the NAGR light on it was glowing, as if the old equipment was taking a selfie. The reel slowly rotated, making a sound that sounded like trying to pronounce 'rhubarb' after too much tea. "Someone tell me it doesn't work on its own," - whispered Boris. Nina stepped closer. On a sticky note was a title written in thick marker: 'Tomorrow Morning, Episode 1'. Next to it someone had scrawled: "Do not rewind". "Surely the IT guy is having fun. Or the history master, he likes jokes like that," Nina tried, but it sounded as convincing as a six o'clock Saturday wake-up plan. "Let's do it professionally. I'll put my headphones on. You press PLAY when I say." - Boris pulled a pair of over-ear headphones out of his pocket that remembered a time when no one called music "content". "On three?" "On three." "Once." "Two." "Tr..." The NAGR light blinked harder, as if the tape recorder itself wanted to take matters into its own rolls. A slight crackle went from the speaker, then someone's quiet breathing and Nina's voice - again, that of tomorrow, sure but anxious: "If you can hear that, it means events are going their way. At thirteen thirteen enter the hall. Don't be late, or else..." The words broke off for a second, in which another sound rang out in the archives: a subtle knocking from the side of a metal cupboard of technical junk. Nina and Boris looked there simultaneously. The knock was repeated, a fraction of a tone louder, as if something - or someone - was trying to align the rhythm with their pulse. "...Or else you won't have time to register what's about to burst" - finished the voice in the headphones, and the old fluorescent lights above their heads began to flicker slightly. Boris swallowed his saliva so loudly that it echoed. Nina tightened her fingers on the "Attention: threshold!" sign, as if to serve as a shield. A third sound came from the cupboard, definitely stronger. This time it wasn't a knock. It was the rasp of a lock that had just... was turning. They both took half a step backwards. The tape recorder emitted a screech, the tape tightened like a nerve before a class and everything in the archive - the dust, the smell, the light - suddenly froze for a split second. Then someone from inside started pressing on the door of a metal cupboard.