Just a quick note that this is a horror shot
RE: Facsimile received on the 8th of July 2005
Hey Tony, me again.
Still nothing much on the missing person case, we had a few more interviews with Janet but she was struggling to remember much. We did have to remind her about Haraway a few times, and there was a point where she somehow forgot the names of her friends: which is leading me to the side of ending the investigation.
Since our original interviews, Mrs Liu has been reporting prank calls and is reporting to have trouble sleeping, which isn’t really anything; I’m thinking, after your approval, of transitioning her over to a psychiatrist and probably leave it there.
I went the work-site last week, as you suggested, and spoke to an, Arthur Peatling, who was working for the RTA. He was pretty helpful but didn’t report anything too strange around the old Haraway building at the time of its demolishing.
He did note that a few digital files and a batch of floppy disks had all lost their memory while stored in his site-office, so I’ve sent them over to you for analysis.
Arthur reported that the corrupted files are mostly just jumbled numbers, but we’re getting a coffee together on Wednesday, so I ask more then~.
Let me know how you go,
Gale.
—
Note.txt Data retrieved from the notebook of ##*#Y. It begins as all things do, blind, without voice, and surrounded by sound: the first gift that man could understand. ‘If One Thousand voices all spoke your name at once, which do you listen to? Which would be the voice that calls out the loudest? Language can so easily be lost within the cacophony of sound. This un-harmonized world can be so brutal with the life that creates, the dripping malice of senseless creation, the terror in not understanding a purpose. But what if one voice could be heard above the rest? What if it was that voice which followed you from birth, always calling your name, always whispering secret things as you slept each night? This voice, this sound, it is consciousness, it beckons us into action, it reflects upon every moment and dredges up forgotten trinkets of time and of memory. One Thousand voices will cry in unison, 'come and see!' and we cannot, for we do not know what to look for- -not yet. Subconscious thought is many things to us. Its essence, its very foundation lays within the echoes of a simple sound. The quiet sounds: a murmur that only we can hear; the loud bellowing sounds that are beyond what even God is capable of yelling. I once found them a distraction, these thoughts in my head, I would pick at them, wish that I could pull them from my ear as if they were on a string, but the more as I began to listen, these sounds would clearer they became v i v i d. Have you ever watched a tree caught by the pull of the wind? Hundreds of leaves twisting, being dragged without control. To watch this process, to see each leaf as the sum of its whole, this allows you take in the art of what I am trying to achieve, the beauty of more than one voice speaking in unison, the ambrosia of something that could become infinite. The wind passes and the leaves become still, it's perfect in many ways, a connected network that exists without control. It is perfect. A thought is sound, and numbers comprise their data; with binary we have been able to isolate numbers into words, but without the connecting tree these words lay dying upon the ground, there's no sustenance for them, they are doomed to decay, they are adrift without reason. It is senseless, IT IS WRONG. I have been thinking about memory, I have been thinking about the sounds of memory. This information that can be so fragile and lost so easily. It is sound, it is brainwaves that our subconscious will draw itself back to seemingly at random, and like all sound...that can be manipulated. If sound is collected as a single entity, it shall be the trunk, and memory shall form its branches, thoughts are but leaves…and I know how to move the roots. For weeks I've been experimenting on my staff, recording their memories from phonelines, modifying them, re-looping them back so that they are different. In one day, I changed their names; in one week, I made them siblings; and it did not take long at all to make them forget that they had even existed. A shame to lose such a good worker, and I may well edit my own memory later, I can forget where they are buried for example, but a good scientist will always remember his favourite experiments. I do not believe in luck; it is such an unseemly device that the foolish believe that they can harness; but to have a telephone exchange one mere brick wall away from my office is too beautiful a circumstance to ever comprehend. I heard it here first, this whisper in the wire, the being that became my running thoughts. Quiet of night and absent of home I listened to the noise from behind my office wall, and could hear the clatter of the relays beyond, hundreds of voices, talking, babbling inanely to each other, One Thousand voices all speaking my name at unison. In the static, in that wailing moan, terror became the primal voice that we call out though. I had captured my spark; Prometheus lay upon the shoreline. Money cannot create an idea, but it can build a door, it can strip bare the weak flesh of humanity and allow me to become sound, to become the fabric of memory. Quiet are the roots of the tree that listens from the shadows and silent is the joy that all life that shall grow from them. I am connected. I am one with the static. I'm glad that you've read this Tony. I'm so very glad that you too will hear the numbers within the static like I do now, for once they are heard, for once they begin, it is done. There is no assistant named Gale, Tony, you have created a ghost to delude yourself. Speeches, faxes, computer terminals, they've all just been in your head, and your memories that mean nothing. You are alone. But do not worry because soon it shall be done. So very soon all sound ShaLL FLoW thRoUgh mE aNd I ShaLL Bec0me ALL…. YOU WILL FORGET MY NAME AND I SHALL BECOME TOTALITY, I SHALL ENCOMPASE THE SKY, AND I SHALL BECOME INFINATE!
Join me in the clouds, won’t you?
J. McCray
2021
Sunday Short Stories 