He drove through the city every night because he could never sleep.

At first it was only noise — traffic lights changing for nobody, distant sirens, rain moving across the windshield and radio stations fading in and out between tunnels and empty intersections.

The deeper he moved into the city, the stranger everything felt. Streets repeated themselves. Buildings looked unfamiliar even though he had passed them a hundred times before. Sometimes he stopped at red lights and had the feeling that the entire city had frozen around him.

Around 3AM he began hearing a voice through the radio static.

At first he thought it was interference. Fragments of words. Soft laughter. Half-finished sentences. But every night the signal became clearer. The voice spoke about dancing, about the weather outside, about dreams, about love. Sometimes she laughed for no reason at all. Sometimes she sounded close enough to touch.

So he kept driving.

Through underpasses. Through industrial districts. Past vending machines glowing in empty streets. Past train stations where nobody entered or left.

The city slowly changed with the night. The cold concrete reflections turned warm. The darkness became softer. For the first time in years he no longer felt alone inside the silence.

Just before sunrise he finally found the source of the signal somewhere beneath Shibuya.

But when he stepped out of the car, the streets were empty.

Only the sound of the waking city remained — and somehow, he no longer wanted to disappear with the night.