Well then.
Maybe, just like the
rest of us, the universe simply wishes to connect.
You can listen to it
whistle, if you like. Do a quick search for ‘The Sound of Space’ on YouTube and
you should find plenty, once you filter out all the videos of people mostly
talking, mostly wanting you to listen to them talking.
Mostly, space is whistling out of tune. It
can’t keep a beat. It chirps, it howls, it moans—these are not, in short,
comforting sounds to the human ear.
Yet listening to space
was the main hobby and secret joy of our protagonist, Lee. Lee was very much
like you. They were your height, weight, gender and gender expression,
ethnicity and sexual orientation, religious faith or lack thereof, liked the
same food and movies as you, spoke the same language, had the same excellent
taste in reading matter. Whatever you care to imagine, that was them. Hell, I
don’t know, I’m just trying to connect you to them.
The only difference
between the two of you was that Lee spent their free time listening to YouTube
recordings of the sounds of space.
After a long, tiring day
of doing that same kind of job that you do (or would do, if you had your
druthers), Lee would retire to their bedroom in their house and/or apartment,
camper or yurt, whatever, turn down the lights, slide into a padded chair,
slide their head between a set of earphones, close their eyes and listen to
space sing out of tune.
They did this because,
despite being blessed with such striking similarity to you, Lee did not find
existing as a human being in the early 21st century an easy thing to
do. There were an intimidatingly large number of human beings in the world, for
a start, and what was worse virtually all of them seemed either unaware or
uncaring of Lee’s existence, at best. Some went so far as to openly express
resentment for that existence. They swore at Lee for driving in the wrong lane
or at the wrong speed, for standing in the wrong line at the store, for liking
the wrong things or holding the wrong opinions. It wore Lee out. After nine to
ten hours of that, Lee was all too happy to turn their back on the chaotic sea
of humanity and be gently rocked to sleep by the sounds of plasma waves washing
ashore on the planet’s magnetic belts.
Not that Lee was
entirely without companionship. They had a few friends and many acquaintances,
the way one does. They had a spouse, a significant other, a friend with
benefits, a primary polycule, you get the idea, equipped with all of your
preferred body bits or lack thereof. Their name was Alex.
“How was today?” Alex
would ask.
And Lee would think of
the old man they’d seen shuffling down the crowded city street in his pajamas,
how the crowd parted and flowed about him without glance or comment. And Lee
shrugged. “Oh, you know. Same old.”
“Uh huh,” Alex agreed
absently, looking at their phone.
“There was a guy.”
“Lot of them around.”
“He looked lost.”
“It’s a big city.”
#
The old man’s name was
Yagi Furumura. Given your similarities to Lee, the two of you would have
instantly connected, but you wouldn’t have connected with Yagi. He was an
oddity. He was old and irritable and white, despite the Japanese name (and
‘Yagi’ isn’t really a name at all, but means ‘goat’ in Japanese). He was as
friendly as a cactus, as approachable as a grease fire but slightly less pleasant.
If you had asked him
what he thought about the sound of space, he would’ve said, “What?”
We’ll come back to him
in a bit.
#
Alex’s habit of looking
at their phone was another popular hobby, certainly more popular than listening
to atonal astronomical arias. But Lee found online outlets were of little help.
Like most things developed by modern society, Lee found social media worked
well for about the three people who were best at it, and not at all for anyone
else.
“Check out these crazy
space sounds,” Lee encouraged their dozen Twitter followers. It was unclear if
any did.
“Spooky space music for
Halloween,” Lee posted. “Twitter, do your thing.”
Twitter did its thing,
and gave Lee one (1) “Like” and two replies explaining that it wasn’t that
spooky and not really music, either.
So Lee soon gave up on
that, too, and retreated back to the humpback non-harmonies of gravity and
motion, of the sun and stars.
As you can imagine this
was quite a lonely pastime, and although it was soothing it did not greatly
assist Lee to feel that they occupied a worthwhile piece of real estate in this
universe of ours. It did not convince Lee that, despite all appearances to the
contrary, other human beings cared about them, or that they should care about
other human beings in turn.
Until one day, it did.
And everything changed.
#
The evening began, as
most did, with Lee borne home by a tide of undifferentiated and indifferent
humanity and deposited like silt at the door to their home. They floundered
inside, shedding clothes and the disregard of strangers with each step,
removing both socks and sorrows, hopping on one foot then the other and hoping
to forget, hanging their jacket on a chair and their head with weariness.
Chair. Lights. Headphones. Computer. NASA’s latest tunes from the Electric and
Magnetic Field Instrument Suite and Integrated Science. Eyes. A brief moment of
silence while the file buffered. And then.
Beauty. Unparalleled
beauty. A sound so heartbreakingly pure, as simple and elegant as the binary
one-and-one of a hydrogen atom, yet also so rich and full, the voice of every
single atom in the universe singing in perfect harmony. It was stunning. Simply
stunning.
Lee felt seen. They
felt loved. Accepted. They felt, for perhaps the first time in their life, that
the universe knew that they were alive, that the universe loved them, and
wanted nothing but the best for them. In the lonely fastness of their bedroom,
Lee curled into a ball and bawled like a baby.
After a few dozen
listens and nearly their own body weight in wadded-up tissues, Lee knew what
they had to do. They had to share this. They had to let others hear it, too.
“Come over,” Lee texted
to Alex. “You gotta hear this.”
Alex, who was familiar
with Lee’s penchant for listening to the universe’s equivalent of white noise,
was reluctant. “Can it wait?”
Lee sent them an audio
file, just a taste, a ten-second clip. Alex left it on Read for ten minutes.
“Wzit,” Alex finally
sent back with trembling fingers. “Wist.
“Damn.
“Wait.
“Dontmve.
“Cominover now.”
Alex ran every light,
their foot osmium on the accelerator, a streaking meteor through traffic. The
promise of the music pulled them like a black hole. They cometed through the
front door (yurt flap, etc.). They hurled themselves into Lee’s room. Impacted
with the floor, panting, sweating, at Lee’s feet. “Let me hear the rest.”
They listened to it,
then they listened to it again, then again, and again. And again. They giggled
with delight. They bounced around the room. They danced, they clung to each
other, they pressed against one another, they tried to burrow into one another’s
skins and bury themselves inside each other. As wonderful as listening to it
alone had been, the joy of listening to it together was doubled. At last,
exhausted but not spent, they collapsed onto the floor and lay there, grinning
like crazy at one another.
“I’m sorry,” said Alex.
“I never knew.”
“It’s okay,” Lee
reassured them. And it was, it was okay, everything was okay. “I understand.”
That was true, too. Lee understood perfectly. The twitch of a smile, the
slightly raised eyebrow, the flicker of their eyes, Alex’s every movement and
breath called out to Lee, as clear and plain as an iPhone interface, saying
Alex too had felt lost and alone, but not anymore. Not anymore. It was as
though Lee could hear not the stars, but every cell in Alex’s body.
They stayed there a
long time, wordless, beyond words. It might have been minutes, maybe hours, it
could have been days for all they cared. Until it was time for Alex to go but
that was okay too. They couldn’t be apart, not really, not anymore.
On the way out, Alex’s
shaking, excited hands yanked the door with a little too much force, and brough
the edge of the door crashing into their little toe. They barely felt it, which
was a pleasant surprise, though Alex was a little put off when Lee suddenly
shrieked and clutched their foot.
“Very funny,” Alex
rolled their eyes.
#
If you had played the
song of the stars for Yagi Furumura, a music as ancient and deep as creation,
timeless as the ocean, wide as infinity, the most beautiful sounds ever heard
by human ears since the dawn of humanity, he would’ve said, “What?”
Yagi had not heard the
music. Even in his youth, he’d been tone deaf, a condition not improved by
advancing age, which had rapidly rendered him plain old everything deaf as
well. So if you’ve been irritated by his constant what-ing, bear in mind that
for you it’s been a few pages, but for him, an entire life. Nevertheless, we’ll
skip the what’s from here on out.
Yagi’s daily outings
mainly revolved around visits to various doctors.
He shuffled down to the
bus. Stood wavering, teetering in the aisle, clinging to an upright, as the
other riders buried their faces in their phones and endeavored not to notice
him there. He didn’t know them, they didn’t know him. He rummaged in his wallet
for change for the fare, as the driver drummed his fingers on the wheel, then
shuffled off the bus as people waiting behind him huffed with impatience.
Between the bus stop
and the hospital stood a line of protestors. Hand-painted placards implored him
to think for himself, to do his own research, not to be taken in. Florid faces
flushed with enthusiasm and the rightness of their cause. Yagi couldn’t read
the signs, could barely hear the shouted slogans, and passed them by, in the same
way he passed the rest of the world by: with barely restrained irritation.
He was ushered into Dr.
Pepper’s office. She nodded in greeting, made a few keystrokes in the file
displayed on her screen as he lowered himself, grunting, upon a stool, then she
swiveled and gave him her most patient smile.
“What seems to be the
trouble today?”
#
Whatever else you care
to imagine about Alex, know this: They loved music as much as Lee did, though
they were more inclined to K and J-pop rather than X and Gamma rays. You know,
boy and girl bands, groups of bright young things dancing and singing in perfect
harmony. So Alex did a silly, fun little thing, the way people do. They took
the 10-second clip Lee had sent, put it on a loop and used their phone to
record a clip of themselves singing the lyrics to one of their favorite songs.
Then uploaded it to a video-sharing site. Alex had no great expectations for
the clip. They just wanted to connect.
Alex turned off their
phone, and went about their day.
In the darkness behind
the phone’s dead screen, the video multiplied. It went viral.
It connected.
It was an earworm, it
corkscrewed its way down canals and up synapses, it took up residence in the
minds of its listeners, it lived there rent-free. It was a certified bop, it
was a mood, whole and pure and perfect and entire. It was shared and re-shared
and shared again. It worked its way up the trophic levels of social media’s
energy web, from friends and acquaintances to influencers, then minor
celebrities, then all the way up to the top, the very top, to one of the
vanishingly few people with enough mass and density to warp the digital
landscape about them like a singularity.
They reposted the
video.
“Who made this?” they
asked, with a few added heart emojis for extra emphasis.
The post was viewed
hundreds of thousands of times, liked tens of thousands, retweeted thousands.
It turned out that nobody knew who made that, or greatly cared, but then
finding the original creator wasn’t really the point. The point was to share in
the joy of discovery, to feel connected to other followers through this unity
of emotion.
People reacted the way
they do. They posted reaction videos. Explanation and analysis videos. They put
the music over movie scenes and dance routines. They made orchestral versions,
acoustic and heavy metal versions, disco versions. The music was everywhere. It
was sampled in every hit song, played in the background of every store, hummed
at every funeral and whistled at every wedding.
Lee and Alex did not
mind that they received no credit for finding the music. It had been recorded
by some unknown NASA engineer, for a start, and for seconds, the whole point of
sharing it had been to bring people together. It had worked. Beautifully, amazingly,
it had worked.
To celebrate the
popularity of their find, the two went for a drink at a bar called the Vacuum
Welder Cellar. Perhaps for a Shirley Temple, if you prefer to think of Lee
as a teetotaler. Vacuum welding was what happened when you put two bits of the
same material together in a vacuum, such as outer space: Without any other
atoms between them, the atoms didn’t know which bit they belonged to, and
welded themselves together.
A dance version of the
space sounds played in the background.
Lee woke up in Alex’s
(side of the) bed, not for the first time. Nothing odd there. After a quick
attempt to knuckle the sleep from their eyes, Lee noticed they were wearing
Alex’s clothes from the night before. Odd, but well within the realm of
possibility, given high enough spirits. Lee stretched and ambled to the
bathroom, where they discovered they were wearing Alex’s face. Indeed, they
were inhabiting Alex’s entire body.
They waved their hand
at the reflection, and watched Alex’s body respond instantly. They poked Alex’s
arm with Alex’s finger, and felt the touch in Lee’s mind. They pinched and
tugged at the face, in case it was some elaborate mask. The results, while amusing,
were not reassuring. No. Lee was quite definitely wearing Alex’s body.
“Alex,” Lee (Alex)
called, in Alex’s voice. “Could you come in here for a sec?”
“Whzmp,” Alex (Lee)
opined. “Wyrwant?”
“You’re not going to
believe this.”
“Hahamnt.” Alex (Lee)
sounded unconvinced. Shuffling footsteps preceded the arrival of a shambling
shape which, there was no getting around this, was most definitely the body Lee
has previously inhabited.
“I’m you,” said Lee
(Alex).
Alex (Lee) looked
blearily at the two reflections, at the person standing beside them, then down
at themselves. “Huh,” they observed, after much thought. That thought seemed to
anchor them, gave them something to cling to, so they said it again: “Huh.” Experimentally,
they added a “Well.” Pleased to have made such progress, they recapped with one
of their greatest hits: “Huh.”
“Right?”
“How’d that happen?”
“In our sleep.”
“Yeah, no, I got that
part. I mean, like, physically. Looking for the whatsit, mechanism that made
this possible.”
“You know what I
think?”
Oddly enough, Alex did.
Alex knew exactly what Lee thought at that moment. “The space music?”
“Only explanation.”
“How is that the only
explanation? I’ve heard of music therapy working on depression, epilepsy, even
Alzheimer’s, but this is going just ever so slightly beyond mood alteration or
neurogenesis,” Alex objected, then suddenly stopped. Shrugged. What were they
even arguing for? “Maybe you’re right.”
“Definitely.”
“What do we do about
it?”
“Who says we need to do
anything? Might wear off in a bit.”
“You’re right. It
might.”
They waited for a
while, standing there in the bathroom, in case it wore off. Alex made faces
with Lee’s face at themselves in the mirror. Lee hummed, trying to remember how
the music had gone and wondered if maybe they couldn’t remember because they
were trying to remember with Alex’s brain instead of their own. Alex blew out a
long, slow breath and Lee could tell they were getting bored.
“Might take a while.”
“I know, but.” Alex
hesitated.
“But?”
“Isn’t it weird that it
isn’t weird?”
Lee thought about that,
and shrugged. True, it didn’t feel weird, indeed, quite the opposite. Lee’s
main feeling, if they had to pin it down, was tremendous relief. It turned out
that being another human being was much like being themselves. It made them
feel, well, less alone.
From the bedroom behind
them, Alex’s (Alex’s) phone began to ring. They looked at one another in silent
question. They raised quizzical eyebrows, pointed to themselves, then at their
partner. They approached the phone cautiously, like two aliens encountering a
star-fallen artifact. “Mama,” the phone’s screen informed them.
“Do you answer it, or
I?”
“They’re expecting me.
I mean, you.”
“I can’t pretend to be
you.”
“Sure you can. Nothing
easier.”
“No, not physically, I
mean, like, morally. I’m not going to lie to your folks.”
“Together, then.”
“Together.” They nodded
in agreement.
“Bit early for a call.”
“Must be important.”
Alex (Lee) put the
phone on video and held it up far enough that the camera would get the two of
them. A woman’s face appeared on the screen, frowning intensely at them. She
poked herself in the cheek once, twice.
“Hi mom,” Lee (Alex)
said as chirpily as they could.
“Mama,” Alex (Lee)
chimed in quickly.
The woman did not react
immediately. She looked offscreen, distracted by something or someone they
couldn’t see. There was an inaudible comment. The woman blinked suddenly, then
nodded jerkily and looked back at them again. Her smile was tight, like invisible
fingers pushing at the corners of an unfamiliar mouth. “Oh, right, yes. Mama.
That’s me.” There was a long pause, in which the woman opened and closed her
mouth several times without speaking.
“Look, something
strange has happened,” she finally began. “I don’t quite know how to put this.”
Alex and Lee shared
another look, eyes widening in sudden comprehension. Lee nodded with Alex’s
head towards the phone. Alex nodded with Lee’s head.
“It’s you, isn’t it
papa?” Alex said. “You switched bodies with mama.”
The woman’s shoulders
sagged with relief, them immediately shot back up. “How did you know—did—did
you—”
“Yup. Same thing
happened with us.”
“Oh. Oh? Oh! That’s.
Okay. Well. I thought I was going crazy. It is crazy. But at least we’re not
the only ones going crazy. So not just us. But why?”
“Space music,” Lee
said, as if that explained everything.
If they were expecting
argument, they were disappointed. Alex’s mom (dad) immediately nodded. “Right,
of course.” Lips pursed for a moment in thought. “You do realize that just
about everybody on the planet has heard it, don’t you?”
#
By this point in the
narrative, I think we have established what Yagi Furumura would say if he
discovered he had miraculously switched bodies with another human being, so I
won’t belabor the point.
Yagi was in Dr.
Pepper’s office again. The desk was covered by a thin plastic sheet, trapping
beneath it a calendar for the current month, a diagram of the human heart and
lungs, a list of common abbreviations used in blood tests, and a child’s
drawing of a squared-off dog under tangerine sun in a cyan sky. Signs of a life
beyond the office, one connected to life elsewhere. Dr. Pepper rested her chin
in her hands and stifled a yawn. She did not look at Yagi, but let her eyes
roam about the room, to diplomas on the wall, inoffensive reprints of
impressionist masters, to the window shrouded in venetian blinds.
“Fell,” Yagi explained
loudly, trying to draw her attention by holding up the offending wrist. “Think
it might be sprained. Or broken.”
“Wow,” she said, giving
his wrist a cursory glance. “That’s too bad.”
Yagi only grunted, and
waited. Dr. Pepper smiled and nodded in sad sympathy, then clapped her hands to
signal the end of the conversation. “Right,” she said.
“Aren’t you going to
look at it?”
Dr. Prepper frowned.
“What for?”
“Well, I told you. It
might be sprained or broken.”
“Oh. Well. Guess I
could prescribe some oxycontin or something.”
“Isn’t that heroin?”
“An opioid I think,
yeah.”
“You think?”
“Ibuprofen, then? I
don’t know, what do you think?”
“How the hell would I
know!” Yagi exploded. “You’re the doctor!”
Dr. Pepper did
something she never did during a patient consultation: she laughed. She laughed
and laughed, tipped her head back and laughed. “Me?” she said when her breath
returned, shaking her head with mirth. “That’ll be the day.”
#
Tires screeched in the
road outside. Very loud, very close. Lee and Alex reached for one another
instinctively, the phone forgotten, welded together by the same fear.
“Everyone on the
planet,” Lee echoed.
“The shock,” Alex
added. “So sudden. So different.”
(“Hello?” Mom’s muffled
voice came from somewhere down by Alex’s waist.)
“What would that do to
you?”
“How are people going
to react?”
(“You still there?”)
Somebody screamed. It
sounded like a child.
Lee and Alex were drawn
to the window like puppets on invisible strings. They didn’t want to look, but
couldn’t help themselves. Their traitor feet carried them there anyways,
pressed their renegade faces against the double-dealing glass and made them look
at the scene unfolding outside.
A silver sedan with a
TAXI sign on its roof had swerved to a stop in the middle of the road, black
inkbrush strokes of rubber trailing behind it as testament to the urgency of
its braking. A minivan approaching from the opposite direction had come to a halt
mere atoms away from the sedan’s front bumper. Sliding doors gaped open on
either side. The occupants of both vehicles, a driver and two families,
clustered together in a dense mass. The taxi driver was a silver-bearded Sikh
with a steel bangle at his wrist. One family was Muslim, the husband in a polo
shirt, the wife in a hijab, while the other was Hindu, with two women in
traditional sari. Alex and Lee squinted and looked and tried to see what they
were doing.
Alex’s hand flew to
their mouth in shock. “They’re hugging,” they whispered. “Laughing.”
“All of them,” Lee
nodded. “Right there, in the middle of the road.”
(“I think they forgot
to turn the phone off.”)
The men clapped each
other on the back with joy. Wives planted kisses on each other’s cheeks.
Children ran in mad circles about the adults in a game of tag whose rules
seemed to change each instant—first this one was chasing, then that one, now
another—accompanied by a storm of giggling and shrieking
Even through the window
Lee could hear the people shouting outside.
“I’m you!” the driver
shouted with joy.
“I’m you!” the husbands
exclaimed to their wives.
“I’m you!” the wives
beamed at their children.
“I’m you and you and
you and you,” the children sang as they ran around and around in dizzying obits
of their parents.
Doors all along the
road burst open and more and more people tumbled outside, a horde of humanity
joining the spontaneous celebration, a flood. Everything was okay, everything
was alright, everyone was the same, everyone was connected, everybody belonged.
It was as though a great burden had been lifted from every back. Everywhere you
looked there was a sea of grinning, joyous humanity. There was no escape.
(“I’m going to hang up
now. There’s something going on outside.”)
#
The hospital was
deserted. The lights were on, but nobody was home. Yagi’s feet echoed down
hollow hallways, past empty duty stations, under muted screens tuned to a cable
channel where figures of history looked down on him: Hitler frothing, the
half-blind leader of an apocalyptic cult in Tokyo, a jungle burned in Vietnam,
punches were thrown at a Black Friday sale, people camped outside a building
for either iPhones or Star Wars, Yagi couldn’t tell which.
“Hello?” he called. The
televisions ignored him.
Computer monitors still
beamed inanely at one another. Binders spilled their careless contents,
checklists arrested in mid-tick. It was a medical Mary Celeste, a hundred
people suddenly no longer themselves getting up and going without warning.
One wag had scrolled
black-marker graffiti along a wall: I am he as you are he, as you are me and we are
all together.
Yagi checked Dr.
Pepper’s office. Empty, just like the rest. His shoulders slumped. Not knowing
what else to do, he dragged himself back to the waiting room, and crumpled into
the seat. And waited. He waited a long time.
Shuffling sounds
announced another visitor. An elderly man, much like himself, clad in a pastel
green hospital gown and shod in ill-fitting slippers. He crossed the room, not
looking at Yagi. “I’m not supposed to be here,” he announced to nobody in particular.
And was gone.
Yagi took that as a
sign, got up, and made his own way outside.
Yagi saw the protestors
when he emerged, squinting, blinking, through sliding glass doors and out into
the unfriendly sunlight. They were gathered into a tight knot, making noise
loud enough for even Yagi to hear, though to him it sounded low, growling, animalistic.
He clutched his cane a little tighter and looked about for a friendly face, but
aside from the protestors, the parking lot was deserted. He edged away,
crablike, never taking his eyes from them. Gravel crunched underfoot.
The protestors fell
instantly silent, as though a switch had been flipped. As one, a dozen faces
snapped around, a hydra of heads intent upon him. Three of their number
detached themselves from the crowd, and shambled towards him. In the lead was a
burly, bearded man, beside him a middle-aged woman with bleach-blond hair, the
third a young, muscular man with a baseball cap pulled down low.
Yagi took a step back,
then another, and bumped into the hospital wall. The three formed a loose
semicircle in front of him. He clutched his cane against his chest, as if that
might keep them at bay.
“Are you one of them?”
the bearded man demanded.
“One of who?”
“They’re—” the woman
began, and cast a quick, suspicious look around them. “—it’s like they’re
ants.”
“All saying the same
thing—” the bearded man added.
“Doing the same thing—”
the young man agreed.
“Thinking the same
thing—”
“At the same time—”
“—like it’s some kind
of cult,” they finished.
There was no answer
Yagi could possibly make to that, so he made none. He froze. He stood
absolutely still, a statue, until the three grew bored with his silence, looked
at one another with disgust and tramped back to their herd.
#
Lee and Alex switched
bodies back and forth at random, sometimes with others, their family, their
friends. They soon stopped noticing, as the boundaries between them grew
blurrier, vaguer. They knew what each other was thinking. They knew what each
other was feeling. Increasingly, they were thinking and feeling the same thing
in any case. They knew each other more intimately than any human being has ever
know another, only now virtually everyone on the globe also had dozens, if not
hundreds of people they were equally intimately connected with.
Virtually everyone. But
not quite everyone.
“Do you remember the
old man—”
“—walking down the
street in pajamas, yeah. I wonder what his story is?”
“We should—”
“—find him and see—”
“—if he needs help, or
even just—”
“—wants to have a
coffee or something.”
“Great idea, Alex.”
“You’re Alex.”
“Oh right. Great idea,
Lee.”
“You know what else we
should do?”
“Yes.”
“I thought so too.”
“’Aleex’ though? Are we
sure it isn’t too cutesy?”
“Absolutely.”
Aleex nodded to
themselves, glad to have cleared that minor hurdle.
The drive downtown took
longer than normal, on account of all the spontaneous traffic jams as people
leaped from their cars to embrace each other, embrace themselves, embrace their
old bodies. Or because they simply sat unmoving in their seats with unstoppable
skeletal smiles, nodding with delight, overwhelmed by the sheer oneness of it
all.
That was fine. It was a
beautiful day, sunny with just enough cloud to stop it being oppressively so.
Aleex got out and walked.
The city proved equally
slow-going. Cheery bonfires had been lit in the middle of the streets and
people gathered about them, singing songs by the flickering flames, holding
hands, reveling in their sense of community. Glass crashed and shattered as
hammer-wielding shopkeepers sought to give their fellow citizens quicker and
easier access to the goods inside. Families traipsed merrily out of hardware
stores and pharmacies, arms laden with televisions and food handed out by
smiling police officers.
Nobody was in the wrong
lane or going the wrong speed, nobody was in the wrong line at the store,
nobody liked the wrong things or held the wrong opinions. There were only about
three opinions left in the world, in any event.
Everything was on fire.
Everything was fine.
Yagi Furumura, the old
man, proved easy to find. The two of them went to the street by Lee’s work, and
there he was, plain as the sun, puttering his way down the sidewalk three steps
at a time, taking a breather, then another three steps. Flannel pajama bottoms
flapping gently with each forward lurch. He stared about himself like a man
walking through a nightmare.
Aleex presented
themselves before him, beaming with good humor and fluoride white teeth. The
old man squinted and scowled back.
“Good morning,” one
half of Aleex greeted him.
Yagi looked from one to
the other and back again. He cocked his head and said, “What?”
“We’d like to buy you a
drink.”
“We’d like to treat you
to a coffee or tea, whatever, your choice.”
“We insist.”
“Our treat.”
Yagi thought about that
for a moment. After much deliberation, he cautiously asked them; “What?”
Undaunted by mere
incomprehension, Aleex took Yagi gently by either arm, lifting him just high
enough so his feet could no longer touch the ground, turning him with ballet
grace and propelling him at a stately pace towards the nearest café, called Sublime
Coffee.
Subliming was what
happened when a solid was heated and instantly turned into a gas, bypassing the
liquid phase, getting right on to the bouncing its atoms all over the available
volume phase.
“Are you part of the
cult? Where are we going? Where are you taking me?”
“We told you, for a
drink.”
“You’ll like it, you’ll
see.”
They went through the
café’s front door and immediately went to the table they’d known would be free.
The other customers all turned as one and smiled and waved. There were no
staff, or rather, everyone was the staff, everyone were customers, it didn’t
matter. As soon as the three of them had sat down, someone (ironically,
currently inhabited by the consciousness of the NASA engineer who had first
recorded the music) brought their drinks without asking, an iced tea and two
lemonades. On a narrow stage at one end of the store, someone who was currently
a woman sat on stage and strummed an acoustic guitar. The melody was instantly
familiar.
“How’d you do that?”
Yagi asked Aleex, looking around in bewilderment as he sat on a sofa, wedged
between them. “How’d they know you were coming? Why is the hospital empty? What
happened to everyone? How’d they know you?”
Those were the oddest
questions Aleex had heard since the whole thing began. “Everybody knows
everybody,” they explained patiently. “Everywhere, at all times.”
“Everyone?” Yagi
continued to look around in the room in growing alarm. Everyone smiled
pleasantly and nodded back.
“Everyone,” they
agreed. “We’ve got you surrounded, ha ha.”
“Might as well give
yourself up,” the other customers smiled. “There’s no way out.”
“Everyone,” Yagi
repeated in shock. “How?”
“Well, the music, of
course.”
The old man’s face was
blank with incomprehension. “What music?”
“The music from outer
space.”
“Are you on drugs?”
Aleex put one hand on
the old man’s arm, another around his shoulders. “The poor old dear. He’s never
heard the music.”
“Should we even try to
explain it to him?”
“I mean, a boomer? Lord
knows enough time has been wasted on them already. It’s almost like he was
custom-built to be as unsympathetic as possible.”
“Well?” they turned
sadly, patiently, sympathetically to the old man, though there was an edge to
their voices. Just to make it clear their patience was not without end, and
this was his last chance to recant.
“Are you telling me
that music from outer space is turning humanity into some kind of insect hive?”
“A scientific discovery
having an unintended and irreversible impact on human society? Wow, unheard
of.” Aleex rolled their eyes. “First time for everything, I guess.”
“Why would aliens want
to do that to us?”
“Who says it was
aliens? Even if it was, maybe they didn’t mean for it to happen. Who says it
was deliberate?” Aleex objected. “Or maybe the message wasn’t meant for us at
all. Maybe it was meant for someone else. Maybe we’re just the medium.”
“You don’t know how or
why? Nobody’s asking? Nobody’s trying to find out?”
“Nope. A little late
for that, in any event,” Aleex shrugged. “There’s no going back. It’s just the
way things are now.”
“But doesn’t that worry
you?”
“Absolutely not.
Intentional or not, this is the best thing that has ever happened to humanity.
Nobody has to be alone, nobody has to hide. No misunderstandings. No arguments.
No wars. Everybody in absolute agreement about absolutely everything, all of the
time. Doesn’t it sound perfect?”
“No. It sounds
perfectly awful. I mean, look at you, look at yourselves.” Yagi poked them in
turn with a bony finger. “Who are you? What size shoes do you wear? What was
your fourth grade teacher’s name? What are your favorite colors? What is your
happiest memory? What toppings do you put on hot dogs? When was your first
kiss? Hm? Eh? You’ve washed away everything that made you special. You’re all
melting into nothing. Soon you’ll just be raindrops in the ocean.”
Nobody was smiling
anymore. The room hushed, the woman stopped strumming. Aleex sighed, heavily
and deeply, and stood up. Their wordless fingers intertwined. Everyone else
stood up too. They all smiled down at Yagi, small and frail and alone, they
smiled at him with a little pity, but just a little. Mostly, with resignation.
Yagi shrank back. He
cast about for something defend himself with, and brandished a biodegradable
paper straw in two trembling hands.
“We’ve tried it your
way,” they told him.
“Look where it got us,”
they said.
“The battle is over and
look what you won,” they gestured to everything.
“At least I know who I
am,” Yagi snapped. “Not some inanely happy zombie.”
“So go on then, you
brave individual free-thinker you,” Aleex rebutted. “Go set up a community on
an island somewhere with all your bravely individual friends. You’ll be extinct
within a generation.”
They left, they all
left, everyone, every single one of them inside the café, they all walked out
without looking back, a human centipede of marching feet, and leaving Yagi
sitting alone, utterly alone, they all stepped outside and let the current of
humanity carry them away.
END
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