I had been standing behind everyone at the funeral. The time was somewhere around 6pm and the bright sun was shining in the faces of the attendees, making me wonder if the sunglasses were serving a purpose this one time. I didn’t want to get near the casket. My sister’s dying face was already etched into my brain. No need to get in there to watch her “rest in peace” with makeup and nice clothes. She wouldn’t have been wearing whatever clothes my mom had picked, anyway. I had been wanting a nice rainy, depressing day, like those portrayed in movies, where people stand around under their umbrellas crying – tears falling away and dissipating into the earth. As it was, though, it was more annoying than sad. The sun burnt my face, and my armpits had started to drip and no matter how much I shuffled around, there didn’t seem to be any comfortable position. And why hadn’t anyone thought of bringing some god damned water?
My phone began vibrating in my pocket. I looked at it. It was an incoming call, but I had to unblock it to see who it was. People had begun to glance at me. A woman had made the effort to turn around almost all the way to see what I was doing, wondering, likely, what kind of sister I even was. I put the phone in my pocket, where it vibrated a few more times.
Someone at the front was saying some nice words about my sister and I could hear my mother crying. It irritated me. Somehow, the sun had wrapped around my neck and back, stinging me. My back dripped with sweat and I shuffled some more. I swallowed, trying to get some moisture around my throat, and I sighed. The woman in front of me turned to me again and made a shushing sound. I didn’t even know who she was. Her ugly face judged me with a frown.
“You shut the fuck up,” I whispered and walked away.
I didn’t think about it until later, but the fact that she hadn’t said anything made me angrier. I couldn’t even come up with a decent comeback.
I drove home and took a couple of sleeping pills, and drifted off thinking about the hot summer, and the sun, and the dripping sweat.
A loud buzzing started under my pillow – my phone vibrating again. I shot upright and blinked. Mark was calling me.
“Hello?” Before Mark could say anything, I noticed the hour on my bedside clock: 1:23AM.
“Jen! Are you awake?”
“No.”
“Shut up! Are you ready to hear this?” His voice was giddy and excited.
“What is happening?” I asked.
“We did it!”
“Where are you?” I asked, wondering if I had just asked the same question twice. “You did what? Are you drunk?”
“Jen, you’re not gonna believe this. We did it. My dad’s quantum radio—it’s actually working! We’re picking up speech! I’m at the lab right now and you’ve got to come hear this. I can swing by and grab you, or just get dressed and head over. Seriously, you need to hear this.”
“It’s working?” I stood up and turned the lights on in my room – the adrenaline in my bloodstream picking up steam.
“Yes! Listen to it, listen!”
Through the speaker on my phone came a strange, distorted sound. White noise crackled, interspersed with a deeper bubbling noise that reminded me of an old 80s tv show.
“Do you hear it?” He asked me.
“Yeah!” I lied. “I… I can’t hear it very well through the phone… but you want me to come over?”
“Yeah, come over — and hey, grab a couple of beers on your way will ya? This is gonna blow your mind.”
He hung up after I agreed and I stared at the wall in my bedroom, plain white. If what he was telling me was right, the news could be bigger than anyone imagined. Alien speech recorded for the first time. My brain was still unfolding itself from its stupor – the sun somehow still burning the small of my back.
I looked at the clock again. It read 01:26. My sister was smiling next to it inside a reflective frame. I smiled back at her.
It was the middle of summer and I drove to Mark’s lab with open windows. The strong gushes of wind hit my face, sending my pony tail flying in all directions.
The meaning of Mark’s call had only just settled in. I hadn’t had the heart to tell him, but I had never thought his work would bring about anything interesting. His father had started before him, many years ago, and even then, as young as I was, I didn’t think it would work. Or, I guess, I didn’t think it could work. Aliens? Sounds from distant interstellar events? Maybe, but aliens? I didn’t think there’d be any. I thought we were alone.
A smell of a natural spice from a plant or tree came in through the window and I was suddenly without thought. The road was dark and my ears vibrated with the sound of air and the tires on the pavement below. It was quiet, in a sense, devoid of the sounds of the everyday commutes and the city, and the myriad other people running around me like it doesn’t matter. As if the world hadn’t just ended, as if we weren’t living in a now unending nightmare. With the windows open, and the wind rushing in around my face, my tears were thrown away and dissipated, destroyed by the impact. I sped up, making sure to keep my eyes open, drying them out in the moving world. Through the deafening roar around me, my sister’s voice echoed somewhere in the chaos.
“It’s okay.” She used to say.
My eyes filled up again, but the world took care of them, scattering my sadness into the back of the car and the road outside. I held in a sob, and I pushed my foot into the accelerator again, gritting my teeth.
I had been to the lab before. Mostly, Mark used me as the proverbial rubber duck – just sitting there, sipping on some coffee after another sleepless night. He asked me questions I didn’t understand and then came up with answers on his own, bouncing ideas off me. I arrived with a six-pack in my hands, forgetting that my eyes must have been swollen like a toad’s.
“Hey Jen.” He hugged me. “Are you doing okay? I’m sorry I woke you. I should be more… mindful, you know. I forgot… you know… I forgot about your…”
“It’s okay. Show me the recording again. I couldn’t hear it well over the phone.”
Mark paused a bit and looked at me.
“Okay yeah! Things are going crazy right now. I’ve called everyone, so others are going to be joining soon.”
“Oh.”
“Come listen to this. Just… since I’ve called you, I’ve managed to clean up the signal. I don’t know what happened. I think this must be a freak coincidence. I don’t think we touched anything.”
“So… aliens?” I asked, still not convinced.
“Jen. What else can this be? We’re pointing directly at Proxima Centauri. What else can it possibly be? Just… shh! Listen.”
He grabbed my hand and pulled me to a speaker in the middle of a hundred different devices. I almost knew them by name. The waveguide, directing waves to who knows where; the spectrum analyzer, doing whatever spectrum analyzers do; the cryogenic cooler, sitting there like it had nothing better to freeze; and a bunch of other whirring, pulsing, shiny things.
Mark turned a knob.
“It hasn’t stopped… and it’s getting clearer.”
The recording began again. A white noise crackled through the speaker, and then the voices began. The odd bubbling sound had been transformed into a dull mumbling. We were listening to new sounds, unheard anywhere this side of the galaxy. My heart started racing.
“Mark!” I gasped.
The recording continued. Two different voices mumbled our way from another star. Mark looked at me with a stupid, wide grin. I grinned too, stupidly.
“That!” a chubby guy walking into the room said, pointing to me and Mark and the speaker, to which we stupidly grinned. “That is human speech.”
“No fucking way.” Mark said. “How do you know that? Do you know where we’re listening? I triple checked already. I checked it many times.”
The chubby guy sat down at a desk and put on some headphones, listening to the live signal as it came in through the quantum radio. With his hand in the air, he waved us away.
Minutes dragged. I learned that the chubby guy was Gary, and he was a linguistics expert. Mark’s and my excitement had died down since Gary had pointed out the cadence and rhythm of the sounds we were hearing. He had distorted recordings of random people talking off of YouTube in a similar way to what we were hearing on the quantum radio. I had sat down, now wearing headphones, not interested anymore, making time until the sun rose and I could head back home and feel like crap the rest of the day, as the lord intended. My phone’s screen didn’t seem to glow right, though, and my eyes kept blinking and squinting as I adjusted the brightness and scrolled through photos of my dead sister.
A couple of others had come to the lab but had left soon after when they learned we’d been listening to human voices. Gary stayed, though, intrigued by the matter of the origin of the recordings.
I closed my eyes and listened to my music – some old school Britney Spears never hurt anyone, and I drifted through the minutes half asleep, half dreaming. Delilah popped up in my mind’s eye. Her image consumed me, forming among the blotches of darkness as I drifted, her memory haunting my waking mind. A particular conversation was playing on repeat.
“You’re not gonna forget me, are you?” I had asked her as she lay in bed, bald now, and very thin.
The question hadn’t made sense. It’s as if I wanted her to ask me.
“I’ll never forget you.”
I had smiled at her, frustrated. I had been sitting by her side that day for hours and I didn’t know what else to say.
“Why do you have to die?” I asked.
“Why do you have to live?”
I think she was joking, giving me a response to a question without one. She died the following night. I’m not sure if I did, though. I might have.
“Mark!” Gary’s voice was strained. “Come here!”
I took my headphones off and watched as Mark joined Gary.
“Look!” Gary said again, “Look! I don’t know. It’s my grandma in there.”
“What?”
“It’s… it’s my grandma’s voice. I swear, she’s… she’s talking to me!” He wiped his eyes, his voice trembling. “I haven’t heard her in years, but it’s her, I know it. She’s saying… things she used to say, things no one else would know.”
I walked closer to them.
“Give it to me,” said Mark, and placed the headphones on his head.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” Gary whispered, his eyes red and teary.
Mark made a shushing sound and closed his eyes, as if trying to listen to a sound coming from a remote, distant place.
“What are you listening to?” asked Mark, as he checked settings on a computer screen.
“It’s the quantum radio, man,” Gary said. “The source has been moving, look. I’ve been adjusting it.”
Mark turned to me with wide eyes. I wasn’t sure what his face meant. With the look of a frightened puppy, or some kind of deer in headlights, he held my gaze as he listened in on the signal.
“What?” I whispered, but his eyes didn’t move, lost, focused on some image beyond me. “What?” I said again, loud.
“It’s my dad,” he said, and turned back to the monitors.
“What’s your dad?” I screamed.
“My dad isn’t dead, listen. Listen!”
He disconnected the headphones on his head and the signal blared from a speaker on the side of the quantum radio.
‘… we had wanted to stay in the cabin, and the weather was good, but we kept finding…’
The signal came and went.
“What the fuck is happening!” Mark bent over the controls of the quantum radio.
I wasn’t sure what to say. It had been at least 10 years since I’d listened to Mark’s father.
“Mark? This could just be a recording, right?” But he didn’t hear me. Mark had gotten busy attaching a bunch of cables from one plastic box to another, grunting and making a mess of the place.
“Mark, what are you doing?” He didn’t even react to me.
“Mark, what the fuck are you doing!” He turned to me and grabbed me by my shoulders.
“The source is moving, Jen. If we don’t go now, it’ll be blocked by the mountain here in just a few minutes. We can’t lose it. Help me!”
He handed me heavy batteries and cables and he began pulling plugs from the wall, disconnecting the quantum radio from its usual position. I grabbed my backpack and stuffed it with whatever it was he was handing me.
“Where are we going?”
“We have to go up!”
Mark carried a backpack and the quantum radio in his arms. Disconnected from the monitoring devices, it seemed small.
“Let’s go!” He said and pointed with his head towards the exit.
We crammed everything into his truck outside, and he leapt into the passenger side.
“You drive.” He said.
I jumped into the driver’s seat and accelerated out of the parking lot. The sound from the quantum radio now mostly static.
“Where? Where are we going?”
“Here! Here, make a right. Up the mountain, Jen. As high as you can.”
The radio immediately began.
‘..love those summer nights when the fireflies would come out. We’d sit on the porch, and the sky would stretch on forever.
I remember one night, must’ve been eight or nine… I couldn’t sleep, so I went outside. Just sat on the steps, watching those fireflies blinking in the dark. No one else around. It was quiet.
It felt like the world was waiting for something. I didn’t know what, but I remember thinking if I sat there long enough, I might see something… at the edge of the forest.
It’s funny, you never think those nights mean anything. Just another summer evening. But they stick with you…‘
The radio broke up again, and I turned to Mark as I drove up a winding road.
“What is this, Mark?”
“It’s my dad, Jen. It’s him. He’s talking to me.”
Suddenly, a flash illuminated the world. For an instant, the midnight darkness was replaced with daylight. We looked outside to the sky. It was the stars. The dim twinkling of the stars, the usual sight of my recent sleepless nights, was changing. They were pulsing slowly, building in intensity again.
“Oh my god.” I said. My heart raced, and I opened my eyes wide, trying to adjust to darkness and daylight. Order was disappearing. The world had somehow changed before me, probably as I sat bored listening to oops, i did it again.
We caught up to the signal.
‘… can you hear me? It’s… been so long… …is not what you think. I’ve been watching you…’
I was sure then, as I heard the voice coming from the radio. It was Mark’s father. I turned to him, sitting in the passenger seat, holding on to the radio with his ear pressed against it.
“We can’t lose the signal, Jen.”
If Mark’s father was out there, and Gary’s grandma was out there. Was Delilah out there, too? A sudden swelling grew in my throat. I wasn’t expecting it. I wanted to swallow, but couldn’t. Tears filled my open eyes, and the world became a blur. The stars swelled with me, building up again until a tremendous flash filled the sky, exploding in a bright blue light. Mark sat next to me as we drove up, in the middle of the undoing of the world, absorbed by the voices coming from the radio. Outside, the road was barely visible. With my foot heavy on the pedal, we sped up the mountain, turning here and there and running over logs and stones and teetering on the edges of cliffs. I couldn’t think, neither of us could.
“What’s happening, Mark?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“What’s with the flashing of the sky? What did you do?” As I said that, the sky above us shifted. Strange dim shapes popped in and out of existence.
Mark looked at me – his eyes glowing with the blooming starlight. “We didn’t do anything. I don’t know either…”
“Why is your dad on the quantum radio? Didn’t he die? Didn’t you bury him?”
“I don’t know,” he said again.
“What the fuck do you know? What the fuck is going on? Where are we going?”
“I don’t know anything, Jen! Just drive! We were looking for audio from other star systems. Maybe we found audio from somewhere else.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? Somewhere else?”
“It’s my fucking dad, Jen! What do you want me to say? I have to know what this is. Just drive.” He went silent for a moment and then half whispered, “You should want to know, too.”
Wind from the outside rushed as the truck’s engine roared. Again, the world blew away my sadness – stored it somewhere in the darkness, and left with me a strange determination. The radio was dead again. White noise spilled out of its speaker and Mark watched me drive in silence. I wanted to yell at him. I wanted to scream. I didn’t though, and under the brief respite of the blooming sky, under the veil of darkness, I breathed – in and out, in and out. I breathed in again. Up ahead, the road was coming to an end. I breathed in again and again, my lungs filled. I sped up. The engine screamed. Mark’s eyes glowed, reflecting the swelling stars.
“Stop.” Someone whispered, and I stopped.
We ran up a wooden set of stairs that led to a lookout on the mountain’s top. As we hurried, the city in the distance seemed to have erupted into chaos. Red lights flooded the streets.
“Jen.” Mark paused after saying my name. “Look.”
He pointed to the sky where the stars were building up again. Oddly, right above our heads, a vast patch of the sky was devoid of light. The radio, which had been dead since the drive up, came alive again, loud.
“I’m coming, Mark. I have been searching for you. The ultimate transition… We were apart. We’ll be together now… Ready yourself for transport…”
“Mark, what the fuck?” I said. My heart was racing.
The sky erupted with light, searing our eyes, forcing us to look away.
“What do we do?” I screamed, but Mark didn’t reply.
Still blinded by the flash, I felt the air around me, searching for him. I didn’t want to move, afraid I might step on the stairs we had just climbed and tumble to my death.
“Mark!”
I looked up to find the void above us had widened, stars being extinguished as it grew. As the remaining stars bloomed, I closed my eyes, only to see through my eyelids that the world had begun to unravel. The stars were pulsating, and the time between each explosion of light was decreasing with every passing second.
Nature around us had gone wild. Thousands upon thousands of birds had taken to the sky, screaming and flapping with no direction. Somewhere nearby, coyotes were cackling. The sky had so sped up its pulsing that it now seemed to effect on the land a stroboscopic nightmare. Thunder roared.
I opened my eyes. Mark had run up another short flight of stairs and he yelled at something beyond my vision. My own movements slowed down by the incessant flashing of the world. He had left the quantum radio behind and it spat out the words of a mad crowd – unintelligible, urgent words.
I opened my mouth to scream, but nothing came out. My heart was beating fast, entranced by the pulsing stars and a shot of adrenaline my brain had decided to dose me with. I coughed, hyperventilating.
“Wait!” I wanted to say. I wanted to tell Mark to come get me, to bring me along with him to whatever it was he was seeing. I wanted to see, too.
From the sky, a giant hand emerged, its shape slowly materializing through the flashing chaos, fingers curling toward us like it had been waiting. It descended in deliberate, agonizing slowness, cutting through the air, enormous and overwhelming. My breath hitched, my body frozen in place as the ground seemed to shudder beneath me.
The hand wrapped around Mark, enclosing him completely. He didn’t scream, didn’t try to fight it. He just let it take him. I reached out instinctively, but it was too late and he was too far. It lifted him into the void, disappearing into the darkness above.
I had wanted to scream, to shout his name, but all I could do was stand there, trembling. Why had he left me here, alone? Why hadn’t he run? Why hadn’t he let me use the radio? Why hadn’t he let me talk to my sister?
When they disappeared again into the hole above us, the stars stopped flashing, the quantum radio stopped talking, and there, under the veil of the returned darkness, I cried.
I grabbed the silent radio.
“Delilah?” I asked, but there was no reply.