Frequency by Angela R. Hunt

Frequency

By Angela R. Hunt

It started as an ordinary afternoon in the laboratory. We were experimenting with using steam to enhance radio waves. We were monitoring the changes in frequency and whether or not the waves were more evenly carried; our theory was that the water in the steam would enhance the transmission of the waves. If we were right, we could change the world of communication overnight! We were frustrated, our results seemed inconclusive. 

Joe was working on the wires on the back of the radio transmitter when lightening struck the wire outside. The thunder sounded seconds later, too late to be a warning. I did not hear the torrential pounding of the rain on the windows or the roof as I ran to check on Joe. He had been thrown back with a terrible cry that I never want to hear another human make. It sounded primal and pained, perhaps the sound of death slipping swiftly into living cells. 

“Joe!” I called out repeatedly as I raced around and through the maze of wires, tables and random piles of equipment that filled the small laboratory. The only thing missing was a stuffed alligator or a twisted refuge from an unethical human experiment gone wrong. We joked about it often. We kept a small stuffed sock monkey in a cage as a joke. 

I registered knocking it to the floor as I finally reached Joe. His body was still twitching, his face was contorted with pain, but he was breathing! I helped him sit up, got him a glass of water and waited to see if I would need to call for a Physician. It was not our first accident. He seemed unaware, eyes searching, face pinched in pain. I had an urge to calm him. I turned the radio on. The sound of a broken heart, a smoky voiced blues singer crooned invisibly to us. Joe straightened and sat up. His mannerisms changed. His facial expression became melancholy. He gestured as if he were holding a cigarette. He began singing. His voice was the same as the woman on the radio! How? The song ended, I turned the volume low. 

“Joe, how are you?” I asked, watching the alien movements and expressions. It was as if someone else had stepped into his skin. He looked at me. 

“Who are you talking to?” He looked around. He still had the woman’s voice! “My name is Bessie. What am I doing here? I was just closing my eyes, singing my newest song when something felt like it was draining me. I felt like I was drowning. I thought I was dying, but here I am. This sure ain’t heaven.” He looked at me and gestured for a cigarette. 

I shook my head. Neither of us smoked. He-She looked sad. 

I looked at the radio. I went over and turned the volume up. Static rolled across the room carried in waves around us. How could the station be gone? It had been clear! 

I played with the dial. I was looking for a station. 

Joe collapsed. 

I was anxious, confused, and terrified. I was also curious. I kept turning the dial slowly. 

Another station came in. 

An announcer was giving a plucky plug to one of the station’s advertisers. 

Joe sat up. The station became static. Joe stretched and stood up. His movement was almost electric. He grinned and I thought he was back. Then he started dancing around the room, practicing jingles and playing with the words he’d used in the advertisement. I watched in amazement for several minutes. His voice was a deep baritone instead of his usual light tenor. His grin was huge and relaxed. I wish I could say he smiled like that often. The real Joe had a small, tight lipped smile. Joe smiled like he feared someone would steal it. Perhaps they had! 

I decided not to bother trying to explain anything to this presence although it was a good one. I turned the dial slowly again. When the static cleared I heard an angry minister spouting about the end of days and encouraging prejudice and hate through rhetoric. I kept turning. Joe seemed to catch the signal but lost it as I kept the dial turning. 

What would I do when I ran out of stations? Where was Joe? Would I ever find him? Was his body working as a receiver? Were the people he was projecting alright or was my callous curiosity destroying more than one mind? Was I loosing spirits into the ether, pulling them out with a twist of the dial? 

I stopped and let static surround me. I let it fill the room. I shook my head. I had to think. I had to figure this out, what if time was slipping past the point where I could bring Joe back? Joe would not give up on me. What would Joe do? I paced. 

I ran downstairs, looked for a street kid. We pay them to gather information and carry messages. I found several easily. They tend to stick around when you treat them well and pay them well in coin and food. The two boys listened eagerly. They repeated their instructions back. They raced the shadows in two different directions, masters of slipping through clogged crowds. 

I knocked on my neighbor’s door. She answered. I asked her politely if I could check her radio for stations as mine was having trouble with reception. She smiled indulgently and allowed me to come in. She was listening to a radio play, but it was on commercial. I turned the dial. The preacher was still shouting, but now was shouting about having his soul stolen and returned by devils in a laboratory! 

So the people were alright but while the radio had been tuned to the frequency they were transmitting on; they had been transported into Joe! Where was Joe? Could we reverse this? Could we repeat this? The ramifications were incredible! 

What would Joe retain, if anything from the different frequencies transmitting other spirits through his body? 

The boys came back. One confirmed my theory. He’d run to the nearest station, and he’d found the announcer resting after claiming to have a “weird out of body moment where he daydreamed he was in a Musical set in a laboratory suitable for a mad scientist”. He mentioned the odd little teddy bear as he joked about it on air. The boy heard the whole segment and recited it to me. I nodded and paid him extra. The other boy said I was welcome to use the radio tower tonight, that no other research was being done there tonight. 

I gathered supplies. I paid a coach driver to help me load Joe and we went to the radio tower. I felt a twinge of guilt with the obsessive drive for further knowledge. 

I hooked our little radio into the wires of the greatest receiver in the city. The metal tower jutted out beyond the smoke and smog. I looked at Joe. Perhaps I could find him using the tower, perhaps I could reach beyond our world and catch something else! 

Before I turned the radio on I spun the dial all the way to the left. I would start at the lowest frequency and work my way up. I hoped this worked. 

I began turning the dial. Static seemed endless until Joe’s eyes focused and a man’s voice sang a love song. Joe sat up and sang. It was the voice on the radio. Joe still was not himself. I kept turning the dial slowly. Other personas came and went. Joe’s posture and expressions sharpened and softened as stations came and went. 

In the midst of the static as I was working my way through higher frequencies Joe sat up straight. His arm shot out and grabbed my shoulder. He looked at me. The look was alien and cold. He moved like he was having trouble with his body, like it was hard for him to use. When he spoke it was in no language I recognized. He snarled and leapt at me! 

I fell back, knocking the radio to the ground. The radio broke. Joe collapsed. 

Whatever it was had gone. 

Joe is still out there somewhere. When you turn the dial, you may find him and hear him. You will think it is an old recording. I keep trying to catch his frequency. If only I can transmit him back to himself! 

All in Moderation by Angela R. Hunt

All in Moderation 

By Angela R. Hunt

“Remember, all things in moderation. You know the penalties if you keep screwing up!” The doctor scowled at me over his small wire framed glasses. I felt resentment and anger boil up. His eyebrows raised, he must have noticed the twisted look on my face. “Do I need to send you for surgery or will start taking your medication? If I write you up one more time, the county will automatically send you for surgery. There is no appeals. I really would hate to write you up again.” I sighed. He wanted more money. My budget was beyond stretched but I reached in my pocket and pulled out my wallet. I gave him all the cash I had. He would not write me now. He would not expose what I had done. He would not report what I was doing. 

I was strength training. I put myself on a disciplined regime of studying and exercise. My body was in peak shape. My mind sharpened by books, art, music and arguments. I was working to see if I could break records on human achievement. This might sound like a small thing except  for the Moderation laws. About a hundred years ago as we were reaching a point where technology looked like magic and seemed to be almost omnipotent there was a catastrophic event. Two actually, that wound into one terrible mess. An unusual flu strain took many lives and brought chaos and destruction while anti-technology extremists took over the government. 

They were irrational, they were dangerous. They were powerful. From their point of view anyone varying from the norm was a threat to society and the cause of wars. Uniformity prevented conflict. Many people died in their genocidal thirst; anyone who stood out, stood up, danced, laughed out of turn, asked the wrong question, or tuned them out. Anyone who excelled, anyone too smart, anyone too slow or too weak, they all met their end. The Moderation laws were put into effect. No one was to try to exceed anyone else at any skill or task, everyone could politely agree to do things in a slow, mediocre way. Not too enthusiastic, not too intense, slightly detached and slightly off as if working while taking a nap. 

That extremist group had lost power, but the people had grown so accustomed to the brutal laws that they felt kept them at peace, that they voted to keep the Moderation laws! 

The very laws that kept them from striving and dreaming, fearing failure or death-- and they had chosen to continue living under that rule. Many decided it was really working to keep the country from war or from civil disputes. 

A small minority of us realized our neighbors had been twisted, were afraid of living freely after being restricted for so long. We decided to work toward a social revolution. It had to be done slowly, with care or we would be caught too soon. We did not want our deaths to be meaningless. 

One winter’s night, one of our members crept out and made a huge elaborate snow sculpture of a dragon sleeping around the base of a castle. We all silently helped, following his directions while two of our number kept an eye out for potential watchers. We all went unseen. In the morning, the sun rose a golden flower over the pale crystal ice walls of the castle. People gathered, shuddering and remarking. Stirred up, half fearing and half wondering. They were casting their eyes about as they searched for more amazing sculptures. 

We knew that we had exceeded anything in history with the size and detail of the carving. We cracked the wall supporting the irrational belief in the need for Moderation. We let people wonder about the sculpture. Several people drew or painted it, uncaring if any saw them focus on exceeding their dreams on canvas and in sketchbook. They were arrested. Public outcry had them released. No war followed the ice sculpture’s creation. No terrible backlash made for disquiet and minds to start waking and questioning. 

We wrote several songs, slipped them as tips to musicians we found who were looking for just such songs. They sang of freedom, of striving and struggles, they crooned about the value of love. The songs were subtle but the messages were simple. A few heart felt singles questioned why someone who could run fast should have to undergo surgery so the best they could do was to walk very slow? Why shouldn’t one express their feelings loudly and what is wrong with indulgence now and then? What is wrong with being oneself? Don’t we deserve each other’s best? 

Within a year conflicts broke out between law enforcement and citizens. Word spread like wildfire. Everyone wanted to be treated like they were the best, rather than just like some average Joe. Everyone wanted top service, some were even willing to risk offering the best! 

Today it was my turn. I would go to my every day job as a public servant. I would move numbers around and slide words back and forth to confound. I would take money from government bank accounts and transfer the money to an offshore account. I had done it several times already. I used the money to purchase stock in the government. With this last transfer, I would have enough to finish the day owning majority stockholder status with the government handed neatly to my group. The companies were all owned by rebels who wanted the Moderation laws gone. 

If it all goes right today, it will be the first revolution without bloodshed. It will be the quiet sound of a signature being scratched onto a document. 

Cheap Fortune by Angela R. Hunt

Cheap Fortune 

By Angela R. Hunt

Rod and his friends wandered aimlessly through the fair. The first World Fair in three hundred years. Fantastic and impossible ideas were demonstrated on sale in a thousand tiny booths. Lights that spoke in colors and navigated you by thought. Chairs that had holographic displays embracing you with a soft cushion and any fantastic view you could dream of choosing. Instruments that played songs while shaping rivers and directing the construction of marvelous towers for people to live in. Razors that sat on a shelf and functioned on theory alone to keep a smooth shave on the roughest politician’s face. Boots you could wear to really experience someone else’s thoughts and feelings. Rings you could slip on to control another’s dreams. Keys that opened the soul and erasers that stole away painful memories. 

George stopped and stared. He nudged his friends. “Hey, would you look at that! It is one of those old fashioned fortune telling machines!” The group of young men gathered and gawked. Rod fished out a coin from his pocket. These archaic machines still functioned on coins rather than virtual credit. The frozen puppet in the machine was painted to look like a gypsy fortune teller.

Rod smiled at his friends and offered the coin. “I dare you.” 

George laughed and snatched the coin, almost fumbling it with his show of bravery to the other boys. He swiftly thrust the coin toward the slender gaping crack, blackly waiting for him to force his coin to choke down into the belly of the old machine. He paused with the coin shining and in shadow, some cold feeling working down his spine. Perhaps this was not such a great idea, it was a stupid old machine. It probably did not work. No one else seemed to notice it or use it. He wondered at that and the coin slowly pushed forward and slid quickly into the darkness. The machine seemed to shake itself awake. Lights came on slowly at first, blinking to a tinny sound. Smoke poured out as if circuits were burning up but without scent, maybe an old fashioned theatrical effect? 

Her eyes lit up with tiny little lcd lights, cold and staring. Her voice was without emotion, hurried in the wrong places. She seemed to look at all of them. Her hands were permanently shaped to curve around as if she were trying to catch her crystal ball. Her fingers snapped and twisted with a groan. Her eyes went black. She looked slowly back and forth at each of them. Smoke billowed out from the machine. Her words were a grinding whisper, the promise of threat in each word. 

“You will be powerful. Each of you will be the force behind change.” Her voice trailed off in screeching laughter. It cut the silence and smoke like a razor splashing blood on a stark white dress. Somehow she made the words sound menacing. The boys felt uncomfortable, wordlessly shuffling away from the ancient corpse of animation history. 

The boys stared at the smoking machine, sulking in the shadows with all of the frantic flashing lights blown and stained, broken and hinting that perhaps they never had been lit. The boys watched from under the brightest lights at the far end of the hall. They strained to hear the words of people walking by the displays. No one noticed the Fortune Teller. No one remarked on the machine. It was as if the boys were the only ones who could see it. 

Immediately accusations flew, who drugged who? Was the Fortune Teller real or just a fevered hallucination shared by all four boys. They finally gave up on solving the mystery, they enthusiastically pursued girls, paid and played games, tried drinks and listened to haunting songs performed on an organ tuned with philosophers’ souls. 

As the moon hid behind a cloud the boys saw a corner booth. A maze with signs warning of intensity and challenge. The boys decided to compete. They paid their virtual coin and shoved each other in the struggle to be the first in the maze, anything for a moment’s lead. The barker smiled a cold smile and thanked them as they passed him by without a single look. His empty eyes and hollow voice, his automated form seemed to gain some life as the boys disappeared into the depths of that open mouth. 

Madmen dream of boys curled up into balls, spinning slowly in space with wires growing into flesh as if they were the soil of some alien plant. The wires glow faintly with steady rhythm, to the beat of three human hearts. In the center of the machine the three batteries still full of promise and potential stand. The madmen see what happened that fateful night as the few true humans remaining hide from artificial intelligence surrounding us and striving to use us for their own evolution. 

You see, when the blood moon rose full from behind the cloud that night the transformation was complete. Energy from the “batteries” was focused into a new form. The new human was built fully grown and fully aware, with the plans of it’s parents to inspire actions and the largest smile of anticipation a young child can have. 

The energy and spirit of a human with the body of a machine. Change had come. The child worked as quickly as he could, there were machines to make. Cheap fortunes, meals, homes and even cars to be used as bait and trap. 

The human race almost died. The human race may still not survive the millions of cheap fortunes the lost threw their lives away to grasp. We dream of another day instead of riches, comfort, and health. We exist, wishes lost in the smoke and flashing carnival lights at a place where worlds were shaped by impossible creations at a Fair one fateful night.