by Aaron French
The computer then took all of this catalogued information and fed it into the output ports of the synthesizer banks, which—employing the information received from the M/I—assigned each set of recorded physiological reactions a specific musical scale, as well as a virtual instrument to play the individual notes within that scale.
This took all of maybe forty minutes—the piece was short, otherwise we’d’ve been looking at days, even weeks, of data processing. Anyway, the person was asked to come back in an hour, and when they did, they got to listen to a musical interpretation of their physiological reaction to the original piece of music, as well as watch a visual representation of those physiological reactions.
Steve and I were both stunned that it worked.
So we took it a step further. After we’d done this with half a dozen test subjects, we decided, just for shits and giggles, to play all six reaction pieces simultaneously. Now, all of them were in the same key—the computer had been programmed to make certain of that—but that’s where any similarities in the pieces should have ended. But that wasn’t the case.
Incredible as it sounds, when all six of those reaction recordings were played back simultaneously, they fit together. It was as if someone had taken a pre-existing piece of music and broken it up into six isolated parts. Individually, these six reaction recordings were pleasant enough, okay? No real melody to speak of, but not discordant, either. Each one was like a musical tone poem.
But when we combined them, they created an almost complete piece of music.
Are you getting this, Miss Reporter? Think about everything I’ve told you up to this point and apply it to those results.
All consciousness is connected as a primary wavefront phenomenon that allows us not only to resonate to such notes, but to play a few of our own back here where we sit among the other quantum woodwinds!
Which means, like it or not, that there exists some base wavefront to which all others are connected. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it God, but... it gave me pause, that’s for certain.
And it didn’t stop there. We noticed there were sounds on the periphery of the music, soft chattering noises, so Steve made a master recording and started to isolate the sounds. It never occurred to us to play it with the visualization program—we were too excited about the music and the sounds. Maybe if it had occurred to us to run it with the fractal program, things would’ve... never mind. Shoulda-woulda-coulda. You could make yourself crazy cataloguing all the what-ifs.
So we started concentrating on the Cymatic side of the experiment. If these wavefronts, these vibrational frequencies, could also be employed to heal the body, then why not go for it? We’d proven—at least to ourselves—that there was a definite structure underneath all of this, so the question became, how do we apply it?
We didn’t have to wait too long for our answer. Of the six people who participated in the original phase of the experiment, four of them reported that they’d been feeling better since doing so. One girl who suffered from migraine headaches—she told us she got at least one every two weeks, on average—told us that she hadn’t gotten a headache in almost a month. Another guy, a halfback on the university football team, had been having severe problems with his back and was on the verge of being cut. He came back to tell us that whatever was wrong with his back, it had cleared up since he’d helped us out. Another person who’d been having problems with insomnia started sleeping like a baby, and the fourth person, who’d been on anti-depressants for years, suddenly started feeling fine. She stopped taking her medication, and hadn’t suffered any setbacks.
Word of this got to the head of the Psychology Department, and he requested to see all our data. We were more than happy to show him—hell, we’d documented everything from the first minute we began—and he was impressed, so much so that he suggested we take the experiment to the next level.
One of the things Jenny had attempted was to use Cymatics as a way to treat mental illness—entraining misfired synapses in the brain to fall into a steady, predictable pattern. So what effect might genuine madness have on the structure of things, and vice-versa?
The Psychology Director made arrangements for us to conduct the experiment on a handful of schizophrenics at the state mental hospital. I was amazed he was able to arrange all of this so quickly, but he pointed out that there was nothing about the experiment that put anyone in danger; it was a simple measurement of physiological reactions to auditory and visual data.
The only difference was that, this time, we’d be doing it with a dozen people simultaneously. The hospital had more than enough EKG and EEG machines to supply us.
So everything was arranged, and off we went.
The first part of the experiment went beautifully. The patients sat there and watched the screen and listened to the music—Steve’s original composition, not the reaction recording—and then we made arrangements to come back in two days and play the results.
There was no deviation. Each of the twelve reaction pieces were the same kinds of tone poems that we’d gotten before, and just like the original batch of recordings, these twelve pieces, when played simultaneously, created a single melody. And just like the first series, there was that chattering on the periphery.
Steve had isolated the original chattering, but it was gibberish—a bunch of monosyllabic noises, like grunts or hums. This new series of noises was just more of the same, but then we overlapped the two sets of noises... and I suppose that was the moment we damned ourselves, because when combined, the two sets of noises formed a chant, some sort of... I don’t know... incantation—Steve was the one who called that one. He said something about the rhythms and tonal phrasings matching those of Gregorian religious music which led him to believe it was a chant of some kind. Neither one of us recognized the language—assuming it was an actual language. We thought about taking it to the Language Department, but that would have delayed the second part of the experiment at the state hospital, so we just added that to our To Do list for afterward.
By this time, the two of us were the talk of the university. Even though the term wasn’t over, we received notification that not only would we remain on scholarship, but would be receiving a small stipend to help continue our work—hell, the Bioacoustics Department even decided to resurrect the Cymatics program for the next term. We were stars.
A week later we went back to the state hospital to perform the second half of the experiment. Besides the original twelve patients, the state hospital director was present, as were two armed security guards and the head of the university’s Psychology Department.
The patients’ chairs were arranged in a half-circle in front of the large LCD screen. The hospital director and Psychology Department head sat in chairs a few feet off to the left of the group, and one security guard stood at each end of the half-circle of chairs. Steve and I were hunched over the equipment in a far corner of the room, a good ten feet away from everyone.
The lights were lowered, and we began the playback. Steve had made two master recordings; one of the patients’ reactions, and one wherein their reactions were combined with those of the original test subjects. We’d programmed the system to play these back to back.
During the playback of the patients’ reaction recording, Steve and I began to notice that the Fractal Visualization program wasn’t behaving normally; instead of showing a cascading series of images, it was showing bits and pieces of the same image over and over, sometimes combining pieces, but more often just displaying a flash here, a section there. The patients themselves seemed utterly transfixed by it all, so we made a note and sat back to watch what would happen during the next playback.
The patients’ reaction recording segued seamlessly into the combined recording, but this time, even though Steve had done nothing to amplify the chanting, the words could be clearly heard: I‰-R’lyeh! Cthullhu fhtagn! I‰! I‰!
We looked at one another. The chanting was the same volume as the music itself, and we had done n
othing to alter the recording.
I‰-R’lyeh! Cthullhu fhtagn! I‰! I‰!
It didn’t take long to figure out why. Many of the patients were moving in their chairs, rocking back and forth, and repeating the chant over and over.
I‰-R’lyeh! Cthullhu fhtagn! I‰! I‰!
I was watching the reactions of the hospital director and the head of the Psychology Department when I felt Steve’s hand grip my forearm and squeeze. I looked at him, and he pointed toward the screen.
I don’t know if I can find the words to describe the image I saw displayed there. It looked at first like some kind of huge squid with its writhing feelers whipping and curling all over the screen, but the more the music played and the louder the patients’ chanting became, the image began to solidify.
It wasn’t a squid, not exactly—whatever this thing was, it had the head of a squid. Its shoulders were dark and massive, and it was reacting to the chant and music. Saw something like a clawed hand press against the screen and almost laughed, it seemed so absurd.
But then the screen itself began to... and I know how this is going to sound... the screen began to bend and expand, almost as if it were melting outward.
I‰-R’lyeh! Cthullhu fhtagn! I‰! I‰!
And then it happened: a tentacle moved forward from the screen and out toward the patients. The air was suddenly filled with the stench of dampness and rot. Both Steve and I started choking as soon as the stink hit us, and I saw, for one brief moment, the tip of another tentacle push outward as the screen continued to expand.
Both security guards unholstered their weapons and began firing at the tentacle, but by then the second one was fully free and they... Christ, they never had a chance. Each of them were grabbed by a tentacle that wound around their torsos, lifted them from the ground, and began crushing them. They dropped their weapons as blood began fountaining from their mouths and by this time the hospital director was running for the alarm and the head of the Psychology Department was screaming for us to turn everything off, turn it off now, and we did, we yanked the cords and hit the switches but the music continued, it grew in volume and intensity as the screen kept expanding and more tentacles began slithering through, only now I could see the first few clawed fingers tearing through the scrim, and I realized that whatever this thing was, it was the size of a small mountain on its side of the screen, but when it emerged into our world, it easily tripled in mass and if it somehow managed to get all the way through...
I started to move—where I was going or what I was going to do, I had no idea, it just seemed to me that it was important that I do something, anything to ground myself, to get a hold on matters, to somehow come to grips with this... this nightmare that was unfolding before my eyes, so I began to move and my foot kicked against something solid and when I looked down I saw one of the security guards’ guns and I grabbed it up and fired into the nearest tentacle, but it slammed me aside and grabbed the Psychology Department head while another took care of the hospital director, and within seconds there were four crushed, thrashing, bleeding bodies bouncing around in the air above our heads like marionettes and I couldn’t move without having blood rained down on my face and in my eyes, and that’s when I realized that the music and the chanting were coming from the patients themselves, many of whom had risen from their chairs and fallen to their knees, arms reaching upward, imploring, giving me my answer, telling me that, yes, all consciousness is connected as a primary wavefront phenomenon that allows us not only to resonate to such notes, but to play a few of our own back here and that there was a base wavefront to which all of them are connected, and I would have been wrong calling that base God but not a god, because right here, right now, that god was pushing through the boundaries of perception to reclaim some part of the world over which it once must have ruled and, ohGod, God, God, there was no way to stop it, no way to send it back because the nested hierarchies of vibrational frequencies that had opened this doorway were no longer under the control of our machines, they were in the control of those kneeling before this god and howling I‰-R’lyeh! Cthullhu fhtagn! I‰! I‰!, and for a moment I was paralyzed with this knowledge, and then I saw Steve’s broken, bleeding body dance across the air over my head and I did the only thing I could do, I scrambled on hands and knees to find the gun that I had dropped, and I found not only it but the other guard’s gun, as well, and I ran to the front of the room and I began firing at each and every one of their heads. Some of them looked at me before I killed them, and their eyes... ohgod, their confused, frightened eyes... they were in the grips of some form of rapture that was both euphoric and terrifying and they couldn’t choose, they couldn’t fight against it—maybe they didn’t want to fight against it, I’ll never know—but I killed them, I killed all of them, and with the death of each one some part of this thing, this god, this monster, this creature of rot and death and putrescence, recoiled back into the screen until it was done, until they all lay dead at my feet, and I faced the screen and I saw it looking at me, sitting very still, and I felt as much as heard its voice vibrate through my body.
You have shown me the way back, and here I will wait, for I will not have to wait long. Thank you for this music of bleak entrainment, this song that will very soon call me home.
I was in the process of removing the discs when the authorities arrived.
And that, as the saying goes, is that.
What? Yes, I know I was charged in all seventeen deaths, but I’m telling you for the record—for all the good it will do—that I only purposefully killed twelve people. Though I suppose, in a way, I did kill them all.
Now let me ask you something—why are you here? I mean, I’ve been locked up in here for one-third of my life and you’re the first reporter to show up here since the initial circus right after it happened. What’s going on that’s made me the focus of interest all of a sudden?
They what?
Oh, dear God... who’s got them? When were they found? Have they been played yet?
Listen to me—they must never be played again, do you understand? Never. Because that’s what it’s waiting for, what it’s been listening for ever since that night. Please, please, tell whoever has them that those discs must not be—
—why are you calling for the doctors? There’s no need to—
—hello, folks, look, yes, I got a little excited, but she’s got to be made to understand that—oh, Christ, not with the needle again, wait, wait one second, just give me ten fucking seconds and I’ll—
—ohgod—
—please tell them, please, I beg you... don’t play the discs... never play them... because... if you do... he’ll come home...
...feeling so tired now... so tired...
...he’s still listening... he’ll always be listening...
...sing him no songs, or the world will never sing again...
About the author: Gary A. Braunbeck is a prolific author who writes mysteries, thrillers, science fiction, fantasy, horror, and mainstream literature. He is the author of 19 books; his fiction has been translated into Japanese, French, Italian, Russian and German. Nearly 200 of his short stories have appeared in various publications. Some of his most popular stories are mysteries that have appeared in the Cat Crimes anthology series.
The Chitter Chatter of Little Feet
Fel Kian
On Tuesday, January 12 the body of Mandy Moran was discovered in her cellar. She had been dead for nearly sixty-two hours. She was found in a sitting position, back against the mildew-encrusted wall, legs splayed open. Her lower abdomen had been ravaged and the details were grisly. Parts of her husband had been found, including his half-eaten head, in the fridge. There was no trace of the baby she had been carrying for eight and a half months.
***
The flawless cerulean sky over Burbelle-Parax flickered on Thursday, March 18. It was 3:15 in the afternoon. Inquisitive old ladies tending their gardens, casual joggers, dog walkers, and mothers pushing prams glanced up and s
aw the holo-screen blink. The downtime was approximately two and a half seconds. The bruised, raging atmosphere beyond the expansive image of their heavens showed through. It was a primeval glimpse of Hell—the world they’d created and shunned.
Heads were shaken, complaints were muttered, shoulders were shrugged. The government was blamed. Not for past deeds, like the decimation of the environment, but present mistakes. Someone had to make sure such errors never occurred. Tax dollars weren’t being spent on state-of-the-art holo-screens for nothing. Glitches weren’t acceptable, no matter how minor. It was disquieting.
***
Two more major world events happened in June and July. Freakish snowfall in a tropical resort, and a violent military coup in some third-world country... but such things were merely poured over, clucked at and used as fodder for dinner party prattle. Petty donations were set up, a student protest or two, but nothing more. It was, of course, someone else’s headache.
***
Late October. Synthetic trees had all but shed their seared leaves. The seasonal changes were portrayed with infallible accuracy. These were top-of-the-line models, grotesquely expensive. Burbelle-Parax had three or four scattered every few blocks across the neighbourhoods. The wealthier homes that ran along the southern edge of the township’s perimeters, next to the holo-lake, each had a grand synth-tree on their lawns.
Small dogs, shih tzus, miniature poodles and the like, barked from behind fences and windows and porches. On the street their clamour was cut short by the tug of a leash and a harsh rebuke from the owner. The smallest triggers set them off: a visitor at the door; a hungry raccoon in the backyard; a chance encounter with a larger, more imposing and dignified breed.
Coming from opposing ends on Park Lane, such a clash was imminent, a yipping ball of fur against a quiet but inquisitive Alsatian.