by Lee McGeorge
television. Their questions were laced with fear and anxiety. “Professor Spectrometer,” one man called. “You tell us that media changes the physical structure of the brain; but how will it change it? And how will it affect the brains of our children?”
TV cameras swooped in to record his response and the words came to him as part of the vision, glorious words to live by. “The video-word will be our new televisual religion. The video-signals of Veraceo will be our new gospels.”
Interesting that these strange thoughts often came to him whilst driving. He often felt that the car had become, for many people, a protective shell from reality; it was the last and only place where many could be alone to think.
He was then hit with a profound sense that he was not inside a car looking through the window, but rather inside a television set, looking out through the screen; and instead of the road he saw the hotel audience, sitting and listening to him with trepidation. It was like he was inside a television, talking to the people outside.
“The cathode ray tube,” he said to his viewers, “is an extension of the mind’s eye and therefore part of the human brain. There is no distinction between what is shown on television and the thoughts of those who watch it.”
The words rattled around in his head.
The vision of being inside a television, on a stage, before a questioning audience brought a new idea, a powerful idea. “Television is reality,” he said aloud. “And reality is less than television.”
----- X -----
At home he poured himself a large whisky, kicked off his shoes and took a seat in front of the television. The tape played in the VCR. The Double Interracial tape, now with Veraceo-Two embedded. It dawned on him that this was his first attempt at watching a pre-recorded cassette in home surroundings. This is how most people would see Veraceo. In the comfort of their own home, curled up on the sofa with a drink in their hand.
For fifteen minutes the couple onscreen coughed and choked as the Punishers whipped them. One part in particular spiked in eroticism for him. The woman had been taking her turn at breathing. The sliding mechanism that controlled who had an open airway shifted back to the black man when one of the Punishers whipped the soles of the girl’s bare feet. She yelped and jerked the mechanism back just as the man was trying to breathe. Involuntarily, she snatched the breath from him. She jumped so much her tits bounced and he could almost feel one of her nipples in his mouth, covered in whisky.
Then the hallucination erupted.
The Pittsburgh set expanded through the television screen to spread through Brian’s home. He felt as though he was rising in his chair to sit above his subjects, like Caesar looking down on the commoners. Slaves tied together, stripped naked to be whipped and flogged for his personal amusement.
He liked that idea.
Then another vision came.
He saw himself in the clothing of a Roman politician, standing on the floor of the Senate to address the elite of ancient Rome. Senators in their togas sat in the stone theatre of politics. “The discarnate TV user lives in a world between fantasy and dream,” he said to those assembled. It dawned on him these ancient politicians had never seen a TV and so willed one to appear beside him. A regular 1970’s family set materialised beside him. It was showing The Muppet Show with the sound turned low. He gestured towards it. “The television user is in a typically hypnotic state, which is the ultimate form and level of participation.”
The Senators seated on the steps seemed to agree with him. Their elbows on their knees, as they leaned forward to watch Miss Piggy abuse and violently assault Kermit the Frog.
Then the vision changed.
He was inside the Pittsburgh set. Deep red walls and an oiled bullwhip in his hand. Footsteps came from behind and with them walked Deborah, the sadomasochism expert he had hallucinated with. She disrobed as she walked, sliding the shoulders of her dress away to allow the garment to fall to the floor. She wore nothing underneath. She walked to the steel mesh and clung to it with arms outstretched.
The vision continued…
The vision...
“I must speak my learnings,” he said aloud to Deborah. She didn’t respond. She clung to the steel mesh, her back and buttocks presented as the target for the whip in his hands. “The knowledge of Brian Spectrometer must be shared. But my learnings cannot be written, they must be spoken through the cathode ray tube. The gospels must be spoken through the new medium.”
Deborah let go of the mesh and rotated to face him. Her breasts more swollen and her figure more curvy in his fantasy than how she was in real life. She reached her hands out to each side and gripped the steel mesh.
“I must spread the new gospels,” he called to her. “The gospels of the video-word shall be carried forth not in books, but by the Prophet of Television.”
The bullwhip seemed to fuse with his hand, becoming an extension of his own body, his own nerves extending into the whip. The body of a female S&M expert presented as his target. He uncoiled the whip behind him and readied to throw his arm and strike her.
“Pornography and violence,” he said, “are by-products of societies in which private identity has been destroyed.”
She said nothing.
He threw the whip, lashing the skin across her stomach. She shrieked in pain, her fists gripping the mesh tighter. “It is the reality of the video-word,” he said as he recovered the whip. “Violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and meaning.” He threw the whip again, this time catching across her left breast with an instant branding of the skin and a terrible cry of pain. “Any loss of identity prompts people to seek the reassurance and rediscovery of themselves through violence.” He recovered the whip, coiling it in then casting it back out behind him. “Today, the electric revolution, the wired planet, and the information environment involves everybody to the point where individual identity is extinguished.” He threw the whip again to elicit the fiercest cry of terror yet from the woman. “Through violence we shall regain our purpose.”
He threw the whip again… again… again…
Then the vision changed. The woman with her skin whipped into angry welts lay on the floor, curled into a foetal position. Brian stood over her with the bullwhip clenched in his fist. “Television has robbed us of our identity. But through violence, we can retain our sense of identity and purpose. Violence shall be the labour to restore our weakened psyche… And we will see violence. By the flickering light of the cathode ray, we will see violence.”
----- X -----
Brian kept himself away from any TV screens after the experience of the Double Interracial tape. The crazy visions triggered by watching the programme had been so startling and long lasting he decided his first order of business was to create a Veraceo detector. His daily routine constantly exposed him to low levels of the signal, but that tape had left him with a splitting headache and residual hallucinations that he was unwilling to repeat. After all, the last thing the whisky maker needs is to be drunk at work.
The way Veraceo worked was to begin with a rotating spiral image in black and white that was converted to a zero-light image recognised only by the parietal lobe. The zero-light radiation pulsed from the screen at twenty eight kilohertz.
His detector was an easy electronics hack requiring barely a few hours to construct. He took the lens off a CCTV camera so that the tube and photosensitive plate were exposed to the unfocused and blurred light from a cathode ray tube; he then connected the camera output to an oscilloscope. When a standard TV signal was played the oscilloscope showed a wide band of frequencies in use. When a Veraceo signal was played, the bandwidth use showed a clear excess around 28 kHz. The human eye may not be able to see Veraceo, but the oscilloscope sure could.
It saw something else… Harmonics. Veraceo worked at 28 kHz but it produced harmonics at 56 kHz and 112 kHz.
Harmonics… why hadn’t he thought of that before?
Why have one zero-light image when he could have two or three at
different frequencies? The eye wouldn’t notice the difference, but if he ran three Veraceo signals in sympathy with one another, it would turn the steady flow into a powerful tsunami.
He found Peter Fluorite on the testing floor. “Peter, I’ve built something that I want you to try and shrink and replicate.”
“Si, Pátron. What’s on your mind?”
Brian took him into the workshop and ran the Pittsburgh tape ahead of the detector. Brian traced his finger across the oscilloscope display. “Veraceo works on 28 kHz. I want detectors made so we’re not accidentally exposed. We need a detector circuit that can see this 28 kHz resonance.”
Peter looked at the oscilloscope image. “That’s just a hacked camera, right? And all you need is to know if there’s a constant squeal around 28 kHz? No problemo. I should be able to fabricate a board in a couple of hours.”
----- X -----
Brian had three Veraceo signal boards crammed into the signal generator housing. It was time to test his theory of harmonics. Could people see three overlapping signals at once?
The first test subject was a frail looking girl. Barely eighteen, with thin straw hair and translucent skin. “Hi, what’s your name?”
“Suzanne Webster,” she said quietly.
He sat her in the room beside the workshop ahead of a television showing standard colour bars. He