I went back through the recordings I made in the same month. Not systematically at first — just listening. Then I noticed it in the ambient recording I made at the bus stop: a small dropout at a point I had never paid attention to because it was not the recording I was analyzing. I pulled the waveform. The dropout is at nine seconds from a different reference point. Not nine seconds from the start of the recording. Nine seconds from a prior artifact I had not noticed on the first pass — a smaller one, the kind you ignore as a mic imperfection.

I checked two other recordings from that period. One of them had the same structure: a small artifact, then nine seconds later, the same dropout-type signature that the speech-to-text resolves to the same name. The second recording had neither artifact. It was made indoors, with a different device, in a different location. The pattern is in the outdoor recordings, on specific devices, in specific locations.

What this means: the signal was not in a single recording. The signal was in the environment at those locations, during those dates. Multiple recordings, multiple devices, same structured pattern. The source was ambient and location-specific. Not hardware failure. Not software. Something in the air at specific points in the city during a specific window, producing a structured nine-second signal that four different speech-to-text passes and two different recording devices all resolve to the same name. I do not have a hypothesis for this that I am comfortable documenting publicly. I have the recordings. They are not uploaded anywhere.