Heterogeneous World - Chapter 3
3
Stepping out of the car and into the chilly winter afternoon, Lilly hummed the tune that had been stuck in her head all day. She couldn’t even remember who the artist was, some band from her youth that years of opioid addiction had painted over.
“Come sail away, come sail away, come sail away with me, yea…” she sang as she fumbled with her keys. “Something, something, angels, appeared inside my head. The sang something, something, and this is what the-ey said…”
Her pitch was off. She had never been musical, but that didn’t matter to Lilly since she did what she wanted, when she wanted. She was a punk, a free spirit, which is why it was so strange that she had found herself stuck with such an anal retentive husband. Langston was a scientist, but not the kind that expanded humanity’s view of the universe like Einstein, Tesla, or…. She stopped and thought for a moment, unable to come up with another scientist’s name. Whatever, she thought, he’s not that kind.
Her husband was the kind that took other people’s visionary work and exploited it for corrupt governments and multi-national corporations. He was more of a strip miner than an innovator, blowing the top off of beautiful mountains to get at the coal underneath. Despite all of this, she loved him and, for reasons she could not clearly articulate, wanted him to love her back. Shaking her head in disgust, she glided towards the door to the community center where her group was meeting.
Through the doors and into the maze of halls of the community center where her writer’s group was held she moved, still humming the nameless tune, until she reached conference room 144. Peering in through the thin strip of glass in the door, she saw that most of crew had already arrived. Glancing at her watch, she was surprised to see that it was already ten after, so with a dramatic flourish she swung the door wide and entered, pulling everyone’s attention away from the discussion as she did. It was a small group, averaging around six people per session, and acted more as a support group for the neurodivergent than anything else. While they published an agenda, which consisted of critiques, presentations, and readings, the meetings generally devolved into therapy sessions after the first thirty minutes. Nevertheless, it was the highlight of Lilly’s week and she never missed.
“Good evening, Lilly,” the group said in concert.
“Good evening, you masters of prose and poetry. Except, of course, for you, Bernard,” she said with a playful laugh.
Bernard was an older man, in his mid fifties, tall and handsome with a head full of silvery hair. He was, in fact, the only published writer in the group besides Lilly, having written several strange books that evaded categorization. She was not a fan of speculative-type fiction, but genuinely enjoyed Bernard’s stories. His prose was elegant, almost poetic, and although strange in subject matter, seemed to evoke deeper questions that were common to the human condition. Lilly, on the other hand, was primarily a poet. She had published her work in variety of notable magazines and had recently released her first full length book titled “No Hands Clapping”, a collection of poetic Zen koans.
“We were wondering when you might show up,” Bernard chided.
“Well, I’m here now,” she replied, screwing up her face in faux anger.
Lilly sat down, feeling the vicodins that she had taken in the car kicking in. The warm opiate fingers were creeping up the back of her head into her brain, giving her the sense that everything was smooth and comfortable. The group picked up their discussion where they had left off, talking about the religious overtones in Bernard’s latest short story. He was a Christian and had a tendency to weave the spiritual into his work. He did it effectively, but she didn’t like it.
Lilly was agnostic, believing that, while there was more to the universe than just the physical, God was unknowable and most certainly uninterested in mankind. She had most recently been playing around with various forms of magic—Wicca, Tarot, and Kabbalah—in an effort to infuse power into her poetry. In fact, she believed that poetry was a form of magic, conjuring up the elemental powers represented in emotions from the depths of the human soul. Bernard and the rest of the group loved her, but knew that her beliefs tended to shift from day to day and were inconsistent at best, contradictory at worst—but this was Lilly.
“Religion, or rather, the search for God, is at the foundation of all of the important questions we are seeking to answer in life,” Bernard continued. “For example, if I’m writing a story about transferring human consciousness into robots, we might say the story is about what it means to be human. However, I believe that what underpins our questions about being human requires the existence of God. The question is really about how this transfer of consciousness impacts our relationship with the divine. Where is the soul? Does it get lost in the exchange? Being human means nothing without the existence of the deity. If there is no God, then there is no objective truth and no intrinsic value in existence. Without these things, the term human is just a label like any other meaningless label.”
“You’re always concerned with the walls of the box instead of the space that gives those walls value, Bernard,” Lilly chimed in.
“Is that so?” Bernard said, a smile creeping onto the corner of his mouth.
“What I mean, is that you’re concerned with concepts that break the connection between what we know and those things that we don’t know. Like, in your example about how transferring consciousness, what we know, might have implications because of the existence of a soul and its relationship with some deity beyond space and time, things we don’t know.”
“And what should I be concerned with?” Bernard asked, one eyebrow lifted quizzically.
“What’s happening inside the box. Look, there’s food in the refrigerator, Bernard, stop wondering about how the damn thing works and make yourself a sandwich,” Lilly said.
Bernard laughed, “Is that what your poetry is, Lilly? A sandwich?”
“No, not the sandwich alone. It’s all of it. It is gratitude for the ingredients, the miracle of sandwich making, and awe for the sandwich itself. I’m not concerned with when the ingredients become a sandwich or if the sandwich exists after it’s my stomach. In my art, in my world, those questions are foreign, unincorporated with what is real and true: the ingredients, the making, and the sandwich itself. My world, with all of its weirdness, is integrated, homogeneous.”
Chuck shook his head. “The world is heterogeneous whether we like it or not, Lilly. I can understand your need to integrate, to find the connections between these things, but be careful not to assume that everything fits together in a neat little package or you may be in for a shock someday.”
“Well, I’m just saying, I, personally, haven’t found anything that I haven’t been able to integrate,” she added.
Chuck looked up as if trying to remember something, “How does the Lovecraft quote go? ‘The most merciful thing in the world is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.’”
Lilly looked up, one arm across her chest, the other hand on her chin, as if watching something drift through the air.
After a moment she nodded and then, as if remembering something, said, “Oh yea, by the way, I’ve decided to try sex magic. Maybe I’ll find something in that.”
The group burst out in laughter.
“You’re so strange, Lilly,” one of the other women said, tears of laughter rolling down her face, and the rest of the group nodded their heads in agreement.
***
The Doctor was seated in his reading chair, thumbing through a book when he heard his wife fumbling with her keys at the front door. His heart raced in excitement. He spoke to himself in gentle tones in an effort to calm his nerves, but the more he reminded himself of what he had done, the more nervous energy he had. Moeller was a terrible actor and worse liar. He had always been very matter-of-fact in his demeanor and had not spent the requisite time to develop the interpersonal skills of deception. Subterfuge was a different story though. The military had trained him well in that area and he had further honed the skill throughout his career working in academia and for the government.
People often think of spies as sexy men and women gallivanting around the world on action filled missions, but true spy craft was much more subtle—hacking, remote data collection, analysis. These were the skills that Moeller had in abundance and constantly put them to good use. He had, in fact, been responsible for his last boss’s resignation, though this was known only to him. Using a bit of spy craft, the Doctor had determined that the woman had been leaking information to a certain up-and-coming politician in exchange for favors. It was a common gambit, trading in political futures, and could be very effective if you were discreet, but his boss had not been. Moeller had assumed that he was the next in line for the program’s leadership, but had been wrong. So, in the end he had traded a director he was on good terms with for one he despised. It had been a bad deal through and through, but there was no one to blame except for himself.
By the time his wife finally found her key and unlocked the door, his heart rate had dropped and he felt more calm. It seemed that thinking about past victories was an effective form of mindfulness for the Doctor. Lilly burst through the door cursing the key and the lock she had been struggling with.
“Why do I have so many goddamn keys? Langston! What are all of these for,” she barked, coming around the corner into the den, jingling her key ring in front of her face.
Langston held out his hands, gesturing for her to toss the keys over.
“What are you up to?” she said, squinting her eyes as if she were looking for something in his aura. “You look like you’ve been doing something devious.”
Moeller steeled himself for the difficult task of throwing her off the trail. Lilly was a natural empath and it was extremely difficult to get anything by her. Perhaps it came with her artistic streak, part of a package deal along with flakiness, lack of self control, and a notable lack of accountability, though she was not without her virtues. She was compassionate and quite a good poet, though he would never admit that to her. The problem with artists like Lilly was that they were an emotional bottomless pit and positive reinforcement only fed their insatiable need for attention.
“These are for your car, these go to the house,” Moeller said, looking at the half dozen other keys on her ring. “But these, I have no idea.”
“Great,” Lilly said sarcastically.
“Just take a logical approach to the problem, dear. First, remove the ones you don’t recognize and put them on a different ring in your purse. When you find you are somewhere where you need a key that is not on your main ring, simply try the others. Second, write what each key belongs to on some tape and wrap it around the bow. It’s pretty simple.”
“What’s a bow?”
“It’s the top of the key, dear. See, this part is the bow,” he told her holding up a key to illustrate. “Bow, shoulder, bitting and cuts, blade and tip.”
“Ugh, why do you know all that? What a waste of space in your brain,” she told him. “I don’t get you. You can tell me the anatomy of a key, but can’t describe the beauty in the world around you.”
“Or, maybe my brain is big enough for both,” he replied, a smug look on his face.
“Your fucking brain,” she said sardonically. “You truly are God’s gift to the world, Langston.”
This was how it always started. She was frustrated about something that had nothing to do with him, but would pick a fight to satisfy her need to have an emotional meltdown. Not tonight, he thought. Tonight he would not let her bait him into it. Moeller took a deep breath in an effort to calm the anger rising within his chest.
“Everything alright, dear? How was your group? How’s Bernard?”
This generally worked. If he could manage to turn the conversation back onto her, her frustration would implode. There would still be yelling and crying, but it wouldn’t be directed at him, which is all the Doctor really cared about. It’s self preservation, he thought.
“Don’t get me started on Bernard and his philosophizing.” she said. “I love the man, don’t get me wrong, but he’s like you, always asking the wrong goddam questions.”
“I like Bernard, he’s a smart man and a good writer. How many books does he have in print?”
Oops, he thought, wrong thing to say.
“You’re an asshole, Langston, a real fuckin’ asshole,” she said. “Success can’t be measured only in commercial terms—capitalist pig!”
“I didn’t mean it that way and you know it,” he retorted. “But…a writer that doesn’t get paid is just a hobbyist.”
Lilly pulled a pill out of her bag and popped it in her mouth. Moeller didn’t like her drug use and she knew it. He believed her phantom pains were just an excuse to get high and her doctor, little better than a drug dealer.
“There you go. Make the pain go away. Don’t face up to facts,” he said, a look of disapproval on his face. “Dear Lord Lilly, that stuff’ll kill you one day.”
“No, Langston, living with you is what’ll kill me,” she replied.
The fight had started. The Doctor had failed to avoid it. She had sucked him into it once more. He stared at the book in his hands, listening as she let loose a string of expletives and insults, and hoped that her pill would kick in quickly.
***
Moeller quivered with excitement in his chair as he monitored the conversation going on inside his house—the same conversation that had just sent Gil scrambling back to his lab. The Doctor had not gone to the desert to watch the stars as he did most Christmases. He was in a hotel room one town over running his surveillance operation against the two unsuspecting adulterers. Both the Doctor and the room were a mess, the man unshaven and red-eyed and the room was awash with leftover food, smelling of farts and bad breath. His focus had been singular for the last two days, watching and listening to everything that happened in the house, regardless of how painful or disgusting it was. Images of the sex and blood from the ritual flashed in his mind, but he pushed them away, focused on the jewel of a conversation that had just happened. As he watched Gil leave his house, he kissed the laptop screen in joy, so happy that he could barely contain himself.
Once her lover had left, Lilly wandered around aimlessly, suffering from the kind of emotional hangover she tended to get after she indulged herself. He had a kind of pity for her. She was pathetic and predictable, but she did have potential, not that she would ever use it. He knew their relationship was a game to her, a kind of agonistic contest to see who was in control. Moeller was also convinced that her attraction to him was primarily due to the fact that he withheld all positive reinforcement from her.
It wasn’t out of vindictiveness that he denied her encouragement, it was out of self preservation. If he were to compliment her or give into her unquenchable need for affirmation, the need would only continue to grow; Lilly was a psychic Wendigo, an insatiable and greedy creature that fed off of the good will of other people. The only weapon that was effective against her was apathy. She slept with other men not because she hated him, but because she loved him, and his unwillingness to care caused her more pain than anything he could say or do in retaliation. As he watched her mill around, he knew that she deserved pity, but he could not be the one to give it to her.
Rolling through the transcription of the conversation between Gil and Lilly, he found the timestamp for the section he was looking for and reversed the video. When he found it, he hit play.
“Right before it happened, the frequency started moving down the spectrum. You know, like a glissando down piano keys, anyway, it went from the frequency we’ve been monitoring, 1.44 GHz, all the way down to 14.4 MHz, and then, just, stayed there—very strange behavior,” the recording said.
“1.44 GHz down to 14.4 MHz, that is strange indeed,” the Doctor said to himself, scratching his head.
There was only one real explanation for the strange parity between the frequency numbers, but he did not like the implication. Something intelligent must have been controlling the signal. Anyone could transmit on HF radio at 14 MHz, but what kind of being could transfigure a signal coming from a star to an earth bound one while perfectly reducing it by two orders of magnitude? No, he did not like the implication. Moeller was a cold and logical scientist, not some tinfoil-hat-wearing hack and there was no way he could believe that this represented anything other than some previously undiscovered natural phenomenon.
On his laptop, he logged in to his radio equipment and began to tune the equipment to the new frequency that Gil had described. Sure enough, at 14.4 MHz he heard the humming of the frequency. It was a bizarre penetrating sound like nothing he had ever heard before. As he listened, he began to feel the sound in his body as if every cell had begun to resonate with it. He switched between bands and was surprised to hear that the transmission was consistent both on the side bands and the carrier band equally, not hard to do with the right equipment, but not common for natural phenomena. Whatever was generating the signal had to be extremely powerful to maintain full frequency saturation this consistently.
The pain in his side made him stop what he was doing and double over. He had suffered this strange phantom pain since he was a child, but it had been largely absent for the last few years. He could feel the resonance of the frequency there, sharp and focused, as if stabbing him with an electromagnetic sword. Reaching up with his arm, he switched off the sound on his computer and felt the pain fade away. Bizarre, he thought. They had never been able to identify the source of the pain, which seemed to drift around from his pelvis to the area around his kidneys. Medical doctors, in Moeller’s opinion, were barely an improvement over tribal shaman, ordering tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of painful tests and procedures, and in the end prescribing some drug that does more damage than good.
Plugging his headphones in, the Doctor turned the sound back on and waited for the pain—nothing. He breathed a sigh of relief. Although it was interesting that the sound had a physical effect on his body, he had more important things to investigate if his plan was to come to fruition. Contacting his large network of amateur ham operators, he put out a call for help with direction finding so that he could triangulate the signal’s source. It would take Gil weeks to figure out what he needed to do to identify where the frequency was being transmitted from. Moeller felt the pressure to make the find, partly out of excitement, partly from a desire to embarrass the scoundrel that he now knew had stolen his initial discovery. The faster he was at identifying the source the more time he would have to write a paper that he would be proud to put his name on.
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