Transmission: A Supernatural Thriller

by Ambrose Ibsen

  Kenji wasn't listening, however. As the download for the audio editing software finished, a strong dread washed over him. Something told him that cleaning up the sound and listening to the woman's voice without the obscuring background noise may not be the wisest idea; that it may reveal to them something better left hidden.

  “When we're done with this and we find it's just some basic, occult bullshit, I wanna grab some wings. You game?” Dylan turned and cracked a grin. “Oh, I forgot, your folks just sent you a bunch of money, didn't they? I guess that means it'll be your treat, since I'm being a swell guy and helping you with this, eh?”

  Kenji held his breath for a bit, giving a little shake of the head. “Sure, whatever.”

  Turning back to the computer, Dylan started into his work.

  Gripping his comforter, Kenji watched as the MP3 file was loaded into the audio editing software. It was displayed as a single bar alight in wavelengths of different heights.

  This was his last chance to turn back, to call off the whole thing. The dread washed over him again, stirred his senses to life. A knot of fear in his stomach rose up his throat as though it were an elevator and settled there. His hands trembled a bit as he sat upright and watched the screen.

  But he said nothing. He didn't ask Dylan to stop. He observed, wide-eyed, as Dylan began tinkering with the file.

  Something, though he couldn't say just what, was about to be set in motion.

  He felt certain.

  THREE

  Dylan busied himself at the laptop for more than a half hour, dragging, cutting and pasting till he had something workable. All the while, he explained his process with a hint of pride, as though he were a professor giving a lecture. Dylan was a Chemistry major, and loved to get into the more analytical aspects of the things he took an interest in. In this case, discussing the finer details of the audio editing software was endlessly entertaining to him.

  Dylan continued. “So, as you can see, it's pretty easy to do. They make the software damn intuitive these days. In the past, you'd have had to have access to an entire studio, but now a laptop and an internet connection will do.” He turned a bit in the chair so that he was facing Kenji. “First we boot up the audio editor. Then we upload the mp3 in question. All of these different wavelengths look like a complicated mess, but we have an option here, see, to sample certain sounds. We find the part we want to clear up and merely sample the specific sounds we want to minimize. In this case, we want to minimize anything that isn't that woman's voice, right? So, the barking dogs, the fountain noises, the crowd-- all of that gets sampled and then we lower its volume as far as it'll go, stripping the file down to just the woman's voice. It still won't be a hundred percent clear, but it should be worlds better than what we started off with.” Looking at the screen, Dylan clicked around a short while and then pulled up a new, shorter snippet of sound. “All right. It's all set. I've isolated the woman's voice, lowered the volume of everything else and the resulting recording is right here. Ready?”

  Kenji would have been lying if he'd said he was ready to listen to the woman's voice without any interference. While watching Dylan work over the past half hour, he'd grappled with continuous unease. Now that the job was done and he had a finished product he could listen to with the stroke of a single key, he felt his apprehensions mount a thousandfold. Still, he issued a slow nod and Dylan hit the space bar, playing the edited audio.

  The sample, of nearly thirty seconds' duration, indeed featured a woman speaking. The voice was undoubtedly feminine, though it was marred by a slight echo, and various sound artifacts came in around the edges, muddying it further. Nevertheless, it was clear enough to understand now, and as the woman spoke, the air in the dorm room became awfully stifling for Kenji. He wished he could open a window, let in some of the fresh, winter air, but there was no window to be found in their little room. He leaned forward, eyes focused on the carpet, and listened while the woman spoke. She repeated the same thing a total of three times, with only a brief pause between each instance.

  The meaning of the woman's message was something of a mystery, a jumble of seemingly random letters and numbers that went so:

  EN17DA43TU85

  There was then a pause. Then the sequence was repeated a second time, followed by another pause. After the third and final repetition of the cryptic message, there was silence.

  Dylan frowned. “What the hell is that supposed to mean? Talk about a let-down.” He laughed, smacking Kenji's arm. “Don't look so disappointed. What did you think it was going to be? 'Now that you've listened to this, you will die in seven days'? I told you, man, these underground musicians put weird crap in their songs all the time, but it doesn't necessarily mean anything.”

  Though Dylan had misinterpreted it as such, it was not a look of disappointment that left Kenji's face a blank slate. It was intense curiosity. He'd heard a mysterious, muddled message in a song that evening. Now, with the audio cleaned up and the message made clear, he was met with an even greater riddle. He'd heard the message, could have no doubt about what had been said, but what in the world did it mean? He puzzled over it a time, then asked Dylan to play it again.

  Dylan complied, and the woman's breathy message drifted through the air afresh. As she spoke, Kenji suddenly stood up and took a notebook from his backpack. Listening closely, he jotted down the string of letters and numbers as neatly as he could despite the shaking of his hands. He muttered them under his breath as he wrote. “EN17DA43TU85”.

  Dylan scratched at his ear, looking up at Kenji quizzically. “Does this jumble mean something to you?”

  Kenji stared at the notebook in his hands, read the letters and numbers one at a time, and tried to parse some meaning from them. None presented itself. Chewing on the eraser of his pencil, he set the notebook on his bed and took to pacing around the room like a prisoner in a cramped cell.

  “Kenji?” interrupted Dylan. “Earth to Kenji? What's going on in that head of yours?”

  Kenji removed the pencil from his mouth and shrugged his shoulders. “I... I don't know what it means, but I also don't think it's bullshit. Why include something like that in a song if it's meaningless?”

  Dylan leaned back in the chair, sighing. “I dunno, dude. And I don't know why you give a damn, either. For all we know it's some Illuminati shit and we need to stay away.” His grin faded when he found no amusement in Kenji's narrow gaze. “Look, let's just drop it, yeah? It's probably nothing. I'd bet on it. People include all kinds of weird nonsense in songs because they want to give the illusion of deeper meaning. Who cares, man?” He motioned to the clock on the desk. “It's still early enough to get some wings, and I seem to remember someone in this room promising me a free meal.”

  Kenji stuck his hands in his pockets and nodded. “Yeah, all right. Let's get out of here, then.” The two of them found their shoes and put on their jackets, leaving the room and stopping only to lock the door. The march down to the exit was silent; Kenji was far too deep into his thoughts to make small-talk with Dylan as was usually his wont.

  Escaping into the deserted campus, which was dressed in thick shadow and revealed to them only by the orangish overhead lights, the pair made their way to the sidewalk that would lead them between the towering, adjacent faculty buildings and to the main drag. Their destination was The Wing Stop, a little restaurant that specialized in wings and burgers. Situated on the corner of the campus, it was usually crawling with customers from the minute it opened to the minute it closed, and it kept long hours, taking orders till four in the morning on the weekends. As the two of them left the shadow of the campus and started across the street towards the restaurant however, they saw not a soul. The shop's signs glowed in eerie hues of green and red, but there was no one else around to see them. Kenji buried his hands deeper into the pockets of his jacket and tried not to focus on the utter desertion that surrounded them.

  The wind was ice cold, and while Dylan bitched about it rele
ntlessly with every gust, Kenji found it a welcome change from the stuffy air he'd been breathing in the dormitory all day. His cheeks were flush and his hands almost numb by the time they reached the door.

  The bored-looking cashier took their order, looking as though he hadn't done a thing all night, and brought out their food shortly thereafter. He stayed at their table a bit, thankful for the distraction of customers, and even offered them a free dessert. The restaurant was very small; done up in a strange aerial theme, with pictures of old aviators and the propellor of an old plane hanging on the wall towards the back, there were only about ten small tables to be found. Every other table was empty, a stark contrast to the heaps of people who often occupied every single one on any other night.

  Dylan chatted with the cashier for a bit and then dug into his food with gusto. Taking advantage of his friend's windfall, he'd ordered a large platter of wings and fries, along with a large soda. Kenji, though, had ordered very conservatively and didn't much bother with his food, too lost in thought to eat.

  “What's the matter with your food?” asked Dylan, motioning to him with one of his freshly-cleaned wing bones. The corners of his mouth were covered in a thin layer of barbecue sauce.

  Kenji shook his head and took a disinterested bite. The food was fine, but he wasn't hungry. His mind was elsewhere, the sound of that woman's voice still pulsing in his ears. A Prince song came on overhead, and in its chorus he fancied he heard the recitation of those cryptic numbers and letters by the woman in the recording. He stifled a shudder and nibbled on one of his fries.

  “It's so dead around here,” offered Dylan, taking a swig of his soda. “Usually we have to wait to get a table, and there's a constant stream of people heading in and out. Campus, too. I haven't seen another person in, like, days. Wild, man. Just wild.” He took another pull from his soda and then crunched on an ice cube. “Have you ever seen campus this way?”

  Kenji shook his head. The more they discussed their isolation, the more unnerved he became. He didn't want to think about how alone they were. “I'm looking forward to classes starting back up,” he admitted.

  Dylan scoffed. “What's this? You're out of your mind, man. We only just started break and you want to go back to that grind?”

  It was all Kenji could do to ask for a distraction. Classwork and socializing could fill the gap as well as anything. At least, if his life returned to normal, he'd have no time to further fixate on this puzzling sequence of letters and numbers that presently dominated his consciousness and threatened to become an obsession.

  “You really made out like a bandit, eh? Your parents sending you all of that money. They wanted to make sure that their star student eats well, huh?” Dylan crushed up another piece of ice, then burped. “My folks couldn't give any less of a damn. They sent me a bit, enough for some gas, food and laundry, but they only did it because they don't want me home over the holidays. Probably like it better with me all the way out here. I have to say I prefer it, too. When I graduate and get a job, I'm moving far away from them. They'll probably never see me again.” Dylan had always had a rough relationship with his parents. Even when things were going well between them their dealings were strained.

  Not that Kenji was putting much thought into that. His eyes scanned the paper table mat, picking out certain letters and numbers along the way. Here was an 'E'... lower on the page, an 'N'. There was a '1', also. And a '7'. He shook his head. Everywhere he looked he was seeing that string of characters.

  By the time their meal had run its course Kenji had scarcely touched his food and was in the throes of an intense agitation. He didn't want to return to the dormitory, but with precious few options available he and Dylan left the restaurant and began their silent walk back. Sensing that his roommate was preoccupied, Dylan didn't strike up any conversation on the way and simply whistled a tune that rang out in the night and echoed discordantly against the brick buildings they passed on campus. The wind was every bit as biting, and Kenji's stomach seized in protest, balling itself tightly around the little bit of food he'd managed to eat.

  They arrived at their building and ascended the stairs. When they got to their room, Dylan sprawled out on his bed and patted his stomach. “Thanks for the meal, dude. I'm going to try and get some sleep. Maybe we can go see a movie tomorrow at the mall? My treat.”

  “Sure,” replied Kenji without really hearing what'd been said. From the start he marched towards the notebook where he'd recorded the cryptic message.

  With a sigh of resignation, Dylan took off his white-rimmed glasses and set them on his desk. Then he started playing games on his phone. “Whatever, man,” he muttered.

  Kenji picked up the notebook and had another look at the string of characters, puzzling over what meaning they might hold, if any. It made little sense to him that the artist would have included this soundbite in the song arbitrarily; surely it had some kind of meaning. Perhaps it was just some weird quirk included in the song to lend it an added depth, like Dylan had supposed, but Kenji couldn't believe that. When listening to it, even beneath the wall of sound, he'd felt like the speaker was struggling to be heard, as though he himself were being addressed by the woman. Who was she, and what had she hoped to convey in this message? He felt like he could puzzle over this question for a hundred years and never draw nearer to an answer.

  Kenji sat down at his desk and stared at the string of characters he'd jotted down. As he did so, something caught his eye.

  The line of writing was circled.

  Tonguing his molars and studying the message scrawled on the page, he ran his fingers around the circle that encapsulated them and searched in his memory for a time.

  For some reason, he couldn't remember circling the message. He glanced at Dylan, finding him completely engrossed in his game.

  You must've circled it before you left, he told himself, flipping the page over and tossing the notebook aside. Perhaps it'd been the cold that had finally tired him out, however Kenji now felt himself capable of falling asleep.

  FOUR

  The ticking of the clock in the commons area swelled to a deafening height. To try and break up the silence, Kenji tapped his pencil against the tabletop, rapping out a clumsy beat.

  It didn't help.

  His sigh rustled the piece of crisp computer paper before him. On it, in large, neat characters of black ink, he'd copied the message he'd recorded in his notebook the night before. Next to it was that selfsame notebook, a once-clean page covered in crowded notes and attempts at code-breaking. Much of the writing was crossed out. He'd hit dead end after dead end in trying to make sense of the message.

  For two hours he'd been sitting undisturbed in the common room while Dylan slept in. He'd awoken that morning without his usual grogginess, and after ambling out to the bathroom and taking a quick shower, he'd taken his phone and notebook with him to the common room to begin the task of cracking the code.

  Because, unless Kenji was mistaken, the string of characters had to be a code of some sort.

  This message had to have significance to someone out there; that it was utterly random didn't seem a possibility to him. He'd Googled a few things, considered writing the artist, Jackal Priest, but discovered that the members of the group had died in a plane crash some years previous. They were independent artists, so they didn't have a record label he could send inquiries to. Also, being something of a niche group, they didn't have much of a presence online, and websites dedicated to them were sparse on details and few in number.

  The only avenue left to him if he was interested in figuring out the meaning of the code was to try and decipher it himself, then.

  Kenji had never considered himself to be much of a code-breaker; puzzle games and things of that sort had always been thoroughly annoying to him. His learning in the field of linguistics however gave him a decent background for this sort of work. Having studied language for some time, especially Italian, he was used to translating foreign
texts into English, and if he thought of this task as simply another translation job, it suddenly became easier for him.

  The question was, what kind of language was he dealing with?

  The cryptic line of text was a combination of letters and numbers, and no meaning or relationship could be found between them at a glance. Probably, then, this was a codified message. Thinking it a cipher, Kenji began to substitute the letters for numbers, dabbled in substituting the numbers for letters, and generally rearranged the characters to try and create something clear.

  Two hours into his work, the only thing he'd gained was a slight headache.

  Dylan walked in while Kenji had his head pressed to the tabletop and guffawed when he caught sight of the string of characters. “Man, you linguistics majors sure do get bored when classes are out of session, huh? You just never quit!” He was tugging on his jacket, and threw a thumb towards the doorway. “I'm going to catch a matinee. Wanna come with?”

  Kenji shook his head. “No, thanks. Come here and have a look at this, please.”

  Dylan sauntered to the table and sat on its edge, picking up the sheet of computer paper. “It's gibberish,” he said, without missing a beat. “Plain and simple. You think it's some secret message? Good luck making sense of it. I bet it's just crap.”

  Kenji snatched the paper from his grasp and held it up so that they could both see it. “I think it's a coded message. The only thing is that I don't know how it was encoded. If I could just crack the code, I'd find something readable in it. No way the artist just tossed this into the song for no reason. It's too... unnatural-sounding.”

  Dylan clapped, throwing his head back in callous laughter. “Listen to yourself. This fascination you have with a ridiculous song is what's unnatural. Come on, let's hit the movies. Some fresh air will help you come to your senses, I'll bet.”