Analog SFF, May 2010

by Dell Magazine Authors

  There was a faint click, and then the room was filled with the strings-heavy recorded sound of a characterless pop-style orchestral piece that would've served equally well as background music in a shopping mall or elevator. While everyone waited for the president's voice to appear on the speakerphone, the secretary said, “Dr. Steaman, could you tell us what preventive measures you have in mind?"

  Steaman nodded. “Earplugs alone aren't good enough. It's not only inconvenient but potentially even dangerous for people who are used to hearing to be suddenly deprived of that sense. For example, not hearing a car honking or a siren sounding could lead to disaster. The best thing to do would be to remove all potential sources of music that could infect people...."

  The secretary tried to focus on the neuroscientist's suggestions while also listening for the president's voice to appear on the speakerphone. But both intentions faded as his attention drifted toward the music percolating from the device in front of him. Despite himself he found himself fascinated by its perky melody. His fingertips beat softly against the tabletop, trying to imitate its enthralling rhythm...

  Steaman continued, “. . . sources of infected music are ubiquitous and will be difficult to weed out. But I don't see any alternative—"

  * * * *

  He stopped—frowning at the other people in the room. For an instant the thought flashed through his mind that what he was saying couldn't be that boring. But then the true meaning of the glazed expressions on all those faces struck him with horrifying clarity. He scanned his surroundings—desperately looking for the source of danger. With sudden insight his gaze settled on the speakerphone. He jumped up, yanked out the cord snaking from its back, and smashed the device again and again against the hard tabletop.

  But as he looked at the other people in the room—their mouths tightly set in painted grins as they hummed the same hypnotic song—Steaman realized he was too late.

  * * * *

  The president of the United States looked despondent. Sharing a private audience with him in the Oval Office, Steaman was surprised at how old and tired the nation's commander-in-chief looked in person. The tall man seated on the other side of the desk always looked so dynamic and, though ten years older than Steaman's own five-and-a-fraction decades, even youthful on TV.

  Now new wrinkles and worry lines seemed to be popping out of the leader's sagging face. Steaman leaned forward in his chair and said, “I don't see any other choice, Mr. President. The measures I've recommended will be difficult to implement. Some people will resist them either passively or with violence. But until we have a cure for this condition, I see no other alternative."

  The president's eyes glistened. His thin lips quivered as he replied, “We lost a lot of good people today, Dr. Steaman. Not just at that meeting you were at this morning—many other top-level people here in Washington, included several of my closest friends, were caught by the infected music on our telephone system before it was taken off line."

  "That's why it's so important you act quickly, sir. Everything that could potentially make music well enough to reproduce one of these super earworms must be confiscated or destroyed. Members of the public should be ordered to turn off and disable their radios immediately. All commercial radio stations, whether broadcasting over the air or via satellite, must be shut down as soon as possible. Radio communication systems for police, firefighters, and other public service workers must have their transceivers filtered so that only the narrowest range of audio frequencies needed for intelligible human speech—no wider than about 500 to 1500 Hz, significantly less than on a conventional telephone handset—can be transmitted or received.

  "I think that frequency range is too narrow to effectively reproduce a super earworm. To be safer, however, it would be prudent to teach Morse code to as many people as possible. Code is transmitted using a continuous wave signal that has a constant amplitude and frequency. The signal is combined in a receiver with a heterodyne signal to produce an audible tone with an essentially fixed frequency. That method of communication would be the safest since it has the least ability to transmit music."

  The president grinned weakly. “At least people can keep their televisions as long as they turn the volume down all the way. Closed captioning is so common nowadays that they won't be totally deprived of information."

  "Yes. It's also impractical to stop all landline telephone services. Despite what happened today, their loss could cause greater harm due to the inability to report emergencies or communicate other essential information than the risk of inadvertently being exposed to infected music would be. Conventional phone lines can also be used to safely send faxes. However, people with cell phones should be encouraged to use them instead of a landline phone, but only with their text-based functions—nothing that involves voice or music. Even a ringtone might be dangerous.

  "But most importantly, the public needs to know that anything that stores or accesses music in a digital format could be a threat. Every portable music player, every computer with a speaker is a potential source of exposure. Likewise, no music files or any video that could contain music should be downloaded or available for download anymore. While older ones are presumably safe, it's possible the most recently released commercial CDs and DVDs—to say nothing of pirated ones—may also have been contaminated with super earworms. In short, any digital device that can play sound in any format must either be eliminated or, in the case of computers and other multifunction devices, have its ability to produce sound disabled."

  Steaman sighed. “And although musicians are the most vulnerable to this threat, I suspect they'll be the most upset about what else needs to be done...."

  * * * *

  Harold James sat in his small brick house in a suburb of Atlanta and turned off the muted TV in front of him. Every day brought more depressing closed-captioned news on its screen. While the number of cases of what the media called “sound sickness” and “music mania” had decreased, the repercussions of this catastrophe were still rippling around the world. Hospitals were overloaded with the fallen. Whole families and towns had been laid low. The economic impact of all that sudden illness and loss of human resources was plunging the country into a new depression.

  And even the most optimistic government officials couldn't predict if or when a cure might be found.

  James settled back in his easy chair in the living room. Though the human cost of this disaster was admittedly far worse, he still winced when he saw images on the TV of musical instruments being confiscated or destroyed. One insensitive newspaper pundit had dubbed that wholesale seizure of anything that might produce a maddening pattern of sound the “bonfire of the violins.” Even owning a child's toy xylophone was now illegal.

  Music had been one of his greatest pleasures throughout his eighty-plus years—and now it was gone. He'd dutifully surrendered his entire collection of CDs and DVDs—even obsolete audio cassettes and videotapes—when the newly formed neighborhood watch groups had come to confiscate them. With unnecessary thoroughness those local vigilantes had also removed all the radios from his house, despite the fact that for days he'd heard only static from their speakers during his furtive searches to see if all AM and FM stations had indeed gone silent. There was even a large empty space here in the living room where his old upright piano once sat.

  But he'd kept the most precious part of his music collection. Surely that source of enjoyment was safe—and it was definitely irreplaceable.

  Though the sun was setting, it was still light enough outside for him to get up and close the blinds of the room's picture window so none of his neighbors could see what he was doing. Then he walked over to open the door of a low cabinet. A turntable and small amplifier rested on a shelf. He turned on both devices, plugged a set of headphones into the amplifier, and searched through a stack of records sequestered in one of the cabinet's drawers.

  While most of his record collection was still hidden in the basement, these discs were his favorites. Some
were so old they'd been bought decades ago with precious pennies and nickels he'd saved as a boy. The oldest ones had been part of his long-deceased father's collection. Those had to be handled with the utmost delicacy. For many years he'd rarely dared to play them. But these were extraordinary times.

  James carefully placed the tone arm over the outer edge of the original Victor 78 rpm record spinning on the platter. The stylus descended into the disc's groove and filled his headphones with the mellow sounds of Hoagy Carmichael and His Orchestra's rendition of “Georgia on My Mind.” He carefully laid the long cord connecting the headphones and amplifier in a path back to his easy chair. Settling into the seat, he waited for Bix Beiderbecke's muted cornet to transport him to a happier time.

  As the recording ended James heard a muffled pounding through his headphones. He took them off—and realized the noise was coming from his front door. Before he could rise the door flew open. Two police officers with guns drawn burst into the room.

  One of the policemen said, “I'm sorry, sir. A neighbor reported that you might be using illegal equipment. We've had your house staked out, and when we saw you pull the blinds down we had probable cause to enter. It looks like our tip was right."

  James recovered slightly and said, “But these records aren't dangerous, officer! They're not like a hard drive or—what do you call it—flash memory that anybody can put music on!"

  He pointed toward the rotating platter. “They're just discs with grooves cut into them! They don't sound as good as a music player or CD, but they have one big advantage over them. There's no possible way my old records could become infected!"

  The police officer looked about twenty-five years old. James continued, “You do know what a record is, don't you?"

  "Yes, I've heard of them. Never seen one before. But we can't take any chances."

  The younger man's reflexes were much quicker than James's. In one swift motion the officer lifted the rare record cut in 1930 off the turntable and smashed it against the cabinet. The other policeman restrained the octogenarian homeowner as he shouted and struggled. But his fellow officer ignored the old man's pleas, throwing all the precious discs on the floor and crushing them beneath his heels.

  Finally the sickening cracking sounds ended. Before they took him away, the policemen let their handcuffed prisoner kneel among the vinyl and shellac shards for a moment to weep over his loss.

  * * * *

  "Isn't there anything you can do for him, doctor?"

  The elderly woman looked up pleadingly at Steaman from her chair at the patient's bedside. The gray-bearded man lying impassively on the hospital bed with IVs in his arms and a feeding tube snaked through his nose hummed the same hypnotic melody he'd done for the last three weeks. Occasionally his hands rose up briefly in front of his chest to finger the valves of an imaginary trumpet, then drifted back to his sides.

  Here, as one of dozens of subjects provided to the Institute, he was “Patient SS1944.” But to this woman he was clearly someone special. The official rules stated that, to facilitate study and testing of patients, they weren't allowed to have visitors. But because of her tearful insistence through letters, e-mails, and telephone calls to his staff, Steaman had bent his own regulations for her sake.

  Mrs. Roosevelt sniffled into a silk handkerchief. “I made life miserable for him. Every time he tried to practice his trumpet I'd complain or beat my cane against his wall. I even lied to him and told him I went to bed every night at 8 p.m. as a reason why I didn't want him to play. Truth is, I always watch TV till midnight.

  "And do you know why I treated him so poorly? I was jealous! He had an ability I wanted but could never have! So, like the proverbial dog in the manger, because I wasn't able to do what he could I tried to deprive him of using and enjoying his talent too."

  She sighed. “You're a doctor. I imagine you can guess why I was so envious of him."

  "Yes. It's the same reason you were immune to the music that affected him."

  Mrs. Roosevelt looked at Steaman sympathetically. “I thought I had a cross to bear. But I should have remembered what my mother used to tell me—'There's always someone worse off than you.'

  "You see, my maiden name was Grant—as in Ulysses S. Yes, he was a distant relative of mine. Maybe you've familiar with what he said once—'I know only two tunes: One of them is Yankee Doodle and the other isn't.'

  "And I'm even more tone deaf than he was. I can't even make any sense out of Yankee Doodle! But the ironic thing is, if it weren't for that disability I'd be just like poor Mr. Scheidt...."

  * * * *

  Steaman sat alone in his dimly lit office late at night. He'd gone over the PET scans, MEGs, and other test results on the subjects under his care again and again. There was a distinct pattern in brain activity they all shared. In some ways it was if they were all having a seizure that never ended.

  But though he and his team had made progress on confirming the nature of the disease, figuring out how to treat it was a different matter. Administering potent anti-epileptic drugs, using psychoactive medicines like selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, and employing electroconvulsive therapy had all failed. Even placing headphones on subjects and exposing them to new music designed to cancel out the super earworms playing in their heads—a method roughly analogous to the way out-of-phase sound waves could produce destructive interference and a “dead spot” of quiet—also hadn't worked. Either the treatments they'd tried were simply ineffective—or they needed to use stronger doses. But there was no guarantee a dose powerful enough to work wouldn't also cause permanent damage to the patient.

  Then a memory stirred inside him. It was something one of the victims of that tragedy at the Homeland Security meeting said just before the attack via Muzak...

  For a long time Steaman mulled over the idea—unsure whether it was a lifeline or just a futile grasp at another straw. As he thought of ways to implement it he chuckled slightly at the tinge of black humor inherent in this method. But if his idea worked, people wouldn't care if it seemed ridiculous...

  "How are you feeling today?"

  Scheidt pushed the breakfast tray away and forced a grin. “I'm still getting used to the fact I've lost nearly a month of my life."

  Steaman nodded sympathetically from beside the hospital bed. “But the treatment did work. We believe you'll make a full recovery."

  "I appreciate what you've done, doctor. I just wish you could do something about the side effects."

  "We hope they'll eventually go away. It was necessary to treat you with the strongest ‘medicines’ we could find. As we discussed yesterday, one way a person can try to get rid of a conventional earworm is by thinking of another, equally catchy tune. The risk, of course, is that the new tune will simply replace the old one and become an earworm itself.

  "However, each of these super earworms was so tenacious that having you and the others listen to a single piece of music wasn't enough to dislodge it. Not only did we have to expose you repeatedly to a large number of these other tunes, but we had to use the most powerful ones we could find—like the catchiest jingles used in commercials or the most unforgettable TV show themes from what some consider the ‘golden age of musical schlock’ in the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s."

  The scientist kept talking, but Scheidt's attention wandered back to the struggle going on within his brain. He tried once more to drown out the vapid melodies echoing in his consciousness by recalling and concentrating on works of infinitely greater musical quality. Deep within his mind he played Handel's “Hallelujah” chorus . . . the arresting arpeggios of Bach's Prelude in C Major from Book I of The Well-Tempered Clavier . . . the surprising Andante from Haydn's Symphony No. 94 . . . the fanfarelike opening measures of Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik . . . and Beethoven's stirring setting of Schiller's “Ode to Joy."

  But even those masterworks weren't powerful enough to dislodge the tunes tormenting him. Over and over the “therapeutic” music stuck in his head made him pi
cture a white disc-shaped antacid plopping into a glass of water . . . listen to a grammatically incorrect statement describing how a particular brand of cigarette tasted “like” it should . . . and ponder the claim that by applying a certain cream to his scalp a man could induce nubile young women to run their fingers through his hair.

  Those jingles competed with theme music from ancient TV shows. His mind ached after listening again and again to the stirring tale of intrepid castaways on an uncharted desert isle . . . the story of a large blended family with six saccharine siblings . . . a friendly invitation to talk to a loquacious palomino . . . and the banjo-laced ballad about several reluctantly heroic gamblers in the Old West.

  But worst of all were the songs whose one-time popularity was an affront to anyone with the slightest musical taste. There was the honeyed lament for a lost lover abducted by angels . . . the rhythmic request for information about what person released a pack of canines . . . a young woman crooning to the individual who'd illuminated her existence . . . and others even worse. Sometimes they all swelled up together in a brain-splitting cacophony that made the most dissonant works of Schoenberg, Bartok, and Penderecki played simultaneously sound like a single first-grader singing Pop Goes the Weasel.

  As a hymn to global harmony lisped by multicultural dancing dolls at a West Coast amusement park reverberated inside his skull, Scheidt wondered if the cure was worse than the disease.

  * * * *

  "...and in a moment I'll turn the microphone over to a real American hero!"

  The room was packed with cameras and reporters for this important news conference. Nearly everyone there sported a small pair of newly mass-produced electronic earplugs that filtered out all but the narrowest range of frequencies needed to understand human speech. As he spoke the president showed some of his old vivacity, emphasizing the latest positive news. More and more victims were recovering after receiving the “Steaman Treatment.” Countermeasures against new infections were so effective only sporadic outbreaks were now being reported.