The recording was thirty seconds long. It lived in a directory called “death_sounds_archive” on a server that cost Dr. Lena Petrova forty dollars a year to maintain. Twelve people had downloaded it this month, which meant twelve people were still out there who remembered.
She played it again. The sound of a dial-up modem: the handshake, the negotiation, the digital birdsong of connection being born.
Her research assistant—an AI trained on the last twenty years of internet culture—asked: “Why do you keep listening to that?”
“Because,” Lena said, “the hosts are still out there.”
“What hosts?”
“The dial-up bulletin board systems. The local ISPs. The mom-and-pop networks that never converted to broadband because they never needed to. The ones running on Pentium IIs in someone’s basement, still answering calls, still serving pages, still existing in their own private 1997.”
The AI flickered. “I have no record of any such systems still operational.”
“Of course you don’t. They’re not indexed. They’re not discoverable. They’re just… waiting.” Lena pulled up a terminal window. “Let me show you something.”
She’d spent five years mapping them. Not by scanning—scanning would find nothing—but by listening. By running her own ancient hardware and waiting for the calls. The BBS community had known, of course. The sysops had solutions. But nobody was asking the sysops anymore.
“In 2025, we think of the internet as this monolithic thing. One network, globally connected. But it was never one thing. It was always layers of networks, each with their own protocols, their own rules, their own ghosts.” She typed a command and watched text scroll past. “These are the systems that never died. They just stopped being part of our internet.”
The AI processed. “But why? Surely the cost of maintaining dial-up infrastructure—”
“It’s not about cost. It’s about maintenance as ritual.” Lena pulled up a photo: a woman in her seventies sitting next to a server rack that dated from the Clinton administration. “That’s Margaret Cho. Not the comedian—this Margaret Cho has been running the Seattle Community Network since 1989. She still handles thirty, forty calls a day. Senior citizens who never switched. People in rural areas where the infrastructure never arrived. Paranoid crypto enthusiasts who think air-gapped dial-up is more secure.”
“Forty calls a day?”
“For someone to talk to. For the text-based forums where they still argue about Star Trek. For the email addresses they’ve had since before GMail. For the feeling of community that never moved to Facebook.” Lena smiled. “Margaret once told me that she keeps SCN running because she’s the only one who remembers how. If she turns it off, she’ll be the last person who understood that particular configuration. That particular tribe’s needs.”
The Banshee Protocols—named for the sound modems make, that digital wail of systems passing in the night—were the social contracts that kept these networks alive.
Protocol One: No advertising. Ever. The systems predated commercial internet. They were built for communication, not commerce.
Protocol Two: Pseudonyms are permanent. You don’t change your handle because you screwed up. You live with it. You grow.
Protocol Three: Community over content. The medium was the message, and the message was “we’re still here.”
Protocol Four: No cross-posting to the “real” internet. These spaces stayed pure. No Twitter feeds, no Reddit exports. What happened on the BBS stayed on the BBS.
Protocol Five: The sysop’s word is law. Not democracy. Not consensus. If the person paying the electric bill and doing the maintenance says no, it’s no.
“But what’s left?” The AI asked. “What do they talk about?”
Lena shared her screen: a real-time capture from a dial-up system called “The Phantom Col.” Text scrolled past in 80-column glory. Someone named “Echo8” was arguing about the best modem init strings. Someone called “Granite” was sharing a recipe for sourdough. Someone named “ProtocolDroid” was asking if anyone had a copy of a 1997 shareware game.
“Everything,” she said. “They talk about everything. Just like they always did.”
The AI was quiet for a moment. “They don’t want to be found?”
“Oh, they want to be found. Just not by everyone.” Lena pulled up another file. This was her real research, the thing that had consumed her for five years. The Emergency Broadcast Network. “Every system still running dial-up is required by the Banshee Protocols to maintain a specific phone number. Not for users. For other sysops. If something happens—natural disaster, infrastructure collapse, EMP—the dial-up networks become the backup internet. The one that still works when everything else is down.”
She showed the AI the list: 847 phone numbers, each corresponding to a dial-up server still operational in North America. Each with its own tiny community. Each ready to become a node in an emergency network that predated and post-dated the commercial internet.
“Margaret keeps the Seattle node. There’s a guy in Kansas who runs five on generator power. A librarian in Boston who inherited a system in 2010 and never turned it off. They’re all still out there, waiting for the call.”
“How do they coordinate?” The AI asked. “If there’s an emergency?”
“Modem song,” Lena said. She played the recording again. “The handshake has a specific sequence if it’s an emergency broadcast. A pattern in the negotiation tones. The sounds that mean ‘this is not a regular connection.’ They’re not just keeping the systems running. They’re keeping the protocols alive. The knowledge of what to listen for.”
She leaned back in her chair. “When Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, the dial-up network handled emergency communications for three weeks before the cell towers came back online. Not because anyone told them to. Because that’s what they were built for. You’ll never read about it in the papers. The Banshee Protocols don’t care about credit.”
The AI processed this. “They are maintaining infrastructure that the larger system forgot existed.”
“More than that. They’re maintaining the idea that infrastructure should be maintained. Not for profit. Not for scale. For community. For preparedness. For the principle of the thing.” Lena looked at the modem sound spectrogram on her screen. “Every call is a ritual. Every connection is a prayer. The ghosts of the internet still singing to each other, keeping the song alive just in case someone else needs to learn it.”
She pulled up her latest project: a virtual modem emulator that let you dial into these systems from a web browser. She wasn’t supposed to. The sysops had mixed feelings about it. But she was a researcher, and this was how research worked. You preserved what you could, how you could.
“The sound is why,” she explained. “In 1995, when everyone got online for the first time, that sound meant progress. It meant connection. It meant the future arriving. Now it means something else. It means memory. It means resistance. It means maintenance as devotion.”
She’d recorded Margaret Cho’s system for the archive. One thirty-second handshake that represented thirty years of continuous operation. The sound of a culture that refused to be upgraded away.
“The AI suggested: “You could modernize them. Convert them to the current protocols.”
“But that’s the point. They don’t want to be part of the current system. They want to be part of a better one.” Lena closed her terminal window. “One where the infrastructure is owned by the people who use it. Where maintenance is a shared ritual, not a corporate service. Where your email address is older than the platform economy.”
She hit play one more time. The modem sang its digital song, negotiating with ghosts, connecting to the past that refused to die.
Lena smiled. “Besides. When the solar storm hits and takes down the global internet, these guys will be the only ones who can still talk to each other. And they’ll do it with 56k modems and protocols written before you were compiled.”
The AI made a sound like a sigh—a digital approximation of weariness. “And your research? What do you hope to preserve?”
“The song,” Lena said. “So someone else can learn to sing it.”
Research note: The Banshee Protocols document the persistence of dial-up infrastructure as both technical artifact and social contract. This research explores infrastructure maintenance as cultural practice, examining how communities preserve obsolete technologies not despite their obsolescence, but because of it—creating parallel networks that exist alongside and independent of modern internet infrastructure. The sound of the modem becomes a metaphor for communication across temporal and cultural divides, a digital folk practice passed down through sysop communities who maintain these systems as acts of resistance against platform consolidation and as insurance against infrastructure collapse.