Ghost Signal at Wombat Ridge — Shannon Jones and the Outback Frequency

It started with a crackly radio transmission from an abandoned research outpost deep in Wombat Ridge... a remote stretch of scrubland halfway between nowhere and the middle of it. The message was strange: bursts of static, a distorted voice muttering “loop… loop… loop…” followed by coordinates and then silence. Most dismissed it as sun-flared nonsense bouncing off the ionosphere. But Shannon Jones wasn’t most people.

By the next morning, Shannon had the Cruiser loaded and the usual suspects ready—Billo brought the gear, Coops packed the camp oven, and Zoe, now a full-fledged member of the crew, arrived with a portable spectrum analyzer and a suspicious amount of duct tape. “Let’s find out who, or what, is making that noise,” she said with a grin.

Wombat Ridge wasn’t just remote... it was forgotten. Overgrown tracks swallowed the tyres, and the only signs of life were roos, galahs, and the occasional curious wombat waddling across the trail. After hours of navigating the bush, they reached the crumbling shell of the outpost, sun-bleached and half-swallowed by red dust and vines.

Inside, it was like time had frozen. Desks lay covered in notebooks, wires, and half-built devices. But in the back room, something was still alive—a small transmitter blinking erratically.

“Still juiced after all these years?” Billo asked, wide-eyed.
“Or something turned it back on,” Shannon replied, carefully hooking into the console.

Zoe ran a signal trace. “This is on a tight loop repeating every 6 minutes, but not just noise. It’s data… compressed.”

They pieced together the code, revealing a message hidden in the static: “Prototype lost. Autonomous unit active. Approach with caution.”

“Autonomous what now?” Coops asked, gripping a torch like it was a cricket bat.

Just then, a low mechanical hum echoed from outside.

The crew stepped into the twilight to find a squat, dusty rover trundling toward them, its camera lens blinking. “That thing’s still running?” Zoe said, amazed. “Looks military, Cold War era, self-powered and running on old logic.”

The rover stopped a few metres away, scanned them, and played a distorted audio file: “...friendly… override… required…”

Zoe connected a patch cable and, after some finicky handshakes, disabled the auto-surveillance loop. “It thought we were intruders,” she muttered. “It was stuck in a feedback loop trying to identify anyone.”

Shannon shut the transmitter down and uploaded a fresh control protocol. “No more ghost signals,” he said.

That night, they camped near the ridge, surrounded by the silence of the Outback and the faint beeping of a reprogrammed rover gently rolling in circles nearby. Coops threw another log on the fire. “So what now? We take it back?”

Shannon smiled. “Nah. Let it patrol. Wombat Ridge just got itself a new caretaker.”

Just another strange day in the wilds for Shannon Jones and crew—where tech, mystery, and mateship always come together in the middle of nowhere.