Story: Of Sound Mind

[DRAFT]

• Background on this story:

This story started as a very thin idea: a character who hears things. I let it sit for a while–what does he hear? Why? It came together very suddenly with the idea that he winds up sharing his experience with someone.

It started with what people often call ‘ringing in the ears’. But that’s not exactly what I hear. It's more...complicated than that.

It goes like this: I hear a brief tone, medium to high, rich-sounding. Sometimes like one of those alert tones; sometimes thinner. Just a tone, mostly lasting less than two seconds.

In between tones? Silence. Almost like my ears are turned off. Then it either continues–more notes–or stops.

The tones are not really notes; they vary continuously in pitch and duration. No fixed interval; no fixed pitches. They are not musical pitches. This goes on for seconds, or minutes, or hours. I never know. Night or day. Whatever I happen to be doing has to stop, because I can’t speak or hear in the real world while this is going on. I'm a grad student; on some level this is interesting and tolerable. On another, it's absolute holy fucking shit.

It might as well be random transmissions from some other planet for how much sense it makes.

I can have two of these in an hour; I can have two of these in a month. They can start any time of the day or night. During the day—I’m used to this now—I can just drop what I’m doing and close my eyes; it’s going to go on as long as it does, and then I can get back to my life.

Aside: my life is pretty sparse anyway. I moved here; it started after the move. It’s not a big, huge thing. But it could be real trouble if I had more friends, a lover, whatever. But, yeah, I don’t have a life because of these interruptions.

Despite the randomness of the 'tunes'–no, they are not tunes. They verge on noise, though I find myself trying to make sense of them. I can’t record them. They are not physical—I tried putting a tiny mic in my ear and recording; I captured silence and a tiny bit of room noise. Nothing of what I heard.

So it’s in my mind, maybe. I think sometimes about seeing a professional, but tell me, exactly what profession is it that helps you out with things that sound like alien meeting notes playing in your head?

My initial reaction was to be patient, wait for some kind of insight or revelation. ‘We interrupt this broadcast to explain what the fuck we’re doing inside your head.’ ‘Ah, these passages would make the foundation of a wonderful symphony.’
I need data. I’m made an arrangement with a grad student who works in the audio labs at Fathwell University. She’s going to do some recordings of brain activity, and try to catch one of these episodes. At the very least, we’ll get some baseline data, and I hope she can explain to me what the traces mean. I'd ike to learn something about filters and wavelengths and variations, because in a way it's sort of like tuning in to an avant-garde station on an old analog radio.

We, well, she, did get some actual data. She recorded about twenty minutes of empty baseline, and we waited around an hour after that to see if the familiar tones came along. She had already started cleaning up her lab when they started—I lifted an arm to let her know. She stared at the screen to watch the traces; I closed my eyes and listened. She only told me later that her software lost the ability to decode my brainwaves. They were no longer in a form that the software recognized.
She was super excited about that. I would have like something more useful, more ordinary. She—her name is Deb Stackwell—says she can try to make some filters to try to root out the differences.

It is interesting to see someone else obsessing over my strange sounds. It feels a little bit more real this way. Not that a mind full of sounds isn’t a real experience, but it’s somehow reassuring that my brain is readable as different when this happens. That’s something. Of course, maybe it's a disease! I doubt that--I have to doubt that, it's not sane to want to hear bad news.

The sounds at this point are so well-defined. It's so clear that they exist, even if only as brainwaves. My gut tells me it’s more, but we’ll see.

Deb has run the data from the first properly filtered traces through some fancy filters. She was very excited when I got to her lab.

“Sit, Gary. I want to play something for you.”

“What?”

“What do you think?”

“Come on, tell me. I’m no scientist.”

“Your sounds! I’ve think I’ve been able to pull the sounds you heard out of the raw brainwave data. The corrected data, which I'm calling baseline two.”

“Really? You know, I can’t remember them very well…”

“Forget about that. Just listen to this, and tell me if it even resembles what you hear.”

She tapped a key on her console, and sound—my sounds—came out of the little speakers.

“It sounds a little thin…”

“And noisy,” she said, “early days. Is this at least like what you hear?”

“Yep. Thinner, not as rich, and the tempo feels a little off.”

“OK, great!” she said. “I want to take more recordings, try to generate a clean snapshot of what you’re experiencing.

“Can you come here every afternoon for a while? At least an hour a day. Bring a book or something, I’ll be working on my normal stuff, and when you get an episode, I'll record it.

“I’ll leave the recorder on continuously, of course, which might be uncomfortable if we do too much at once. An hour? Two? Really as much as you can stand.

“Then I’d like to automate the analysis–really, I'm talking about automating how the analysis expands, using algorithms and triggers–and then see how close I can get to a decoder that will operate—I hope!—somewhere near real time.”

“Wow, yeah, that’d be great. I’m between jobs, this is almost a disability, I can’t work when these sounds hit." I wasn't sure she'd take it, but I told her I was a trust-fund baby. She just said, "oh, cool, you're available then."

"They’re very front and center.”

“Literally, like front and center of your thoughts, or of your cranium?”

“Both, kind of. It’s not stereo, but it’s not exactly like mono, either. The tones are very clear, very prefect, unwavering, quite a bit different from the recordings, but they are in the ballpark. In real time, I can’t even guess at the notes or tones, so I would like to be able to listen to them after, you know?”

“Sure, yeah, well, we’ll see what we can learn. The obvious guess is something in the brain that’s hard-wired to do this, unique to you, but I’d like to keep an open mind about this. I won’t even rule out alien transmissions for now.”

She smiled broadly. Clearly her idea of a joke. It almost made me cry; I don’t want to be a freak. So I told her that.

“Please, don’t worry about it. I have all kinds of people coming through the lab for data, and you’d be very surprised what people hear. None of it is anything like yours, though.”

“Maybe it’s a language,” I said, the idle thought wandering into my mind on the spur of the moment.”

“If it is, then someone is broadcasting, but you presumably know, that’s by far the least likely cause. It's too complicated.”

She probably saw the terror in my eyes. “Yeah, yeah,” I said. “I’d just like to be able to, you know, keep a little hope that this is something wonderful and not some horrible disease. I'd hope we can rule out 'aliens attack' early in the process.”
She patted my arm. “Well, yeah, anything is possible, but look how normal and balanced you are. How could it be some brain disease? You’re healthy, you’re–"
“Don’t patronize me, Deb. We both know this is pretty strange. I just don’t want to talk about the negatives right now. Or maybe ever. I don’t want to be that strange. I don’t want to be a patient.”

“I understand,” she said, but it was clear that she didn’t. It was kind of disgusting that she saw me as just a source of maybe some career-making data for her to investigate. But I wasn’t repelled by that, because, deep down, I was scared as shit.
I could see from her face she thought she had ruined the whole thing with what she’d said. I wrote it off as classic techie insensitivity.

“Even if I freak out,” I said, “I want to keep going. I want to know what this is.”
She said nothing, but looked relieved. Ah, well, I thought, at least I might learn something about myself. On the other hand, from that moment on, I felt like such a god damn freak. It was not at all comforting that a wannabe scientist found me curious.

So it was a bit of a battle on the walk home. I really wanted to walk away from her. But then a wonderful series of sounds hit me, no harder than usual but for once extremely expressive and beautiful. Not random at all; a music of the spheres, sort of. Transcendent. Evoking wonder, dreams—I had to sit at a bus stop for a while or I would have fallen down in my ecstasy.

A picture formed in my head then, and it never left: I wanted to thank the ‘friend’ that had sent that, as if the source were somehow sensitive to my fear and insecurity.

By the time I got back to my apartment, though, I was dismissing that whole thread as delusional. I wanted answers, and by definition reality is never dreamy-cool.

“I just would like to know if I can trust my own mind,” I said, the next time I went to her lab. She seemed somewhat impressed that I had come back after the previous visit.

“And I was overwhelmed myself by the data,” she said. “I don't know what I was expecting. It’s unfortunate, but sometimes I can get lost in the science and forget that I’m working with a real human being.”

Her speech wasn’t dramatically reassuring, but it was somewhat reassuring to know that she could at least care a little bit about her subject. I looked her in the eye and said, “This is terrifying.”

She literally fell back in her chair when I said that, and covered her mouth with her hand. She stared at me, I guess I had really shocked her. It did feel good to tell her that, though. I realized I’d been terrified from the get-go, but had never admitted it to myself.

“Maybe we shouldn’t go through with this,” I said.

“I, um, I, well,” she stumbled like a schoolgirl.

I felt pretty good to see that. It was probably the most normal thing she'd said so far. “If you can jut keep in mind that this is as terrifying for me as it is interesting for you…”

“Oh,” she said, and slowly dropped her hand away from her jaw. After a moment, she said, “OK, I kind of get it. I’m not really very good with people skills. I’m sorry.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Don’t hesitate to stop me when I get too sciencey or personal or geeky, OK? I don’t mean you any harm. But I’m curious as hell about this.”

“I’ve had some doctors who were similar,” I said, hoping that was reasonably neutral way to say, “I’ve seen worse, but not very often.”

“Maybe you should see a hearing specialist,” she said. “Is this...thing getting stronger?”

I noticed that she didn’t say ‘getting worse’. “It hit me originally...the types of sound, the nature of the sounds, the ‘volume’ (I used air quotes), et cetera, all pretty much the same, I think. I am terrified occasionally, yes. But mostly I’d just like to know what it is.”

“If you’ll permit me, I’d like to keep working on recording good data. To develop filters, modifiers, who knows what. But it might, it could be wise to seek medical help. I’m not medical. I’m a scientist. I will share what I know, what I learn, but I repeat: you should seriously consider medical help if you feel the need.”

“So, how unusual is this?”

“OK, I’ll be frank. pretty unusual, but I think you need to know your way around the field to understand that, put it in context. Although you hear these sounds clearly, they are not clearly sounds as I normally encounter them in recordings of neural activity. The data is, pardon my French, freakishly interesting in its nuances and complexity. I'm picking this stuff out of your brain, not tapping on an audial nerve. Do you know what I mean by that distinction?”

“I do! Thanks for that insight.” I smiled a little. “Don’t know why, but I’m thinking I'd like to have transcriptions of these sounds. It feels like a really important thing to do. I am hesitant to go to a hearing specialist—they deal in things like signal to noise and amplification. This is not about that.”

“It could be something organic in your hearing physics. It could be entirely in your brain. Technically, it could even be aliens transmitting into your brain, or maybe slightly more rationally, you overhearing some kind of, if not alien, then sophisticated audio signals, or even other kinds of signals that stimulate your audio receptors. Or, you know, something purely in your mind.”

“That’s so reassuring.”

She laughed. “My bedside manner is shit, I know it.” She swallowed heard. “So can you work with me? I learn how to trasnscribe this, and we figure out where to go from there. In the meantime, you remain your own person, you can see anyone you want about this, you can stop me any time.”

I sighed pretty loudly. “I suppose.”

“I do the boring portions of my record keeping after 3pm nearly every day. You can come in around then on any given day.”

“Do you at least take weekends off?”

“I’m a researcher. I don’t take ‘time off’. I will let you know if I won’t be around here on a given day, though. Worst case, I’ll put a note on the door. Or if you trust me, give me your phone number or email.”

"Why wouldn't I trust you?"

"I might be a spy???" She shrugged.

I guess that was the moment when I realized how desperate I actually was to know what was going on with my hearing. I wasn't afraid; I felt awfully damn lucky to get any help I could that wasn't institutional.

She made recordings for weeks. I was able to come in at least a couple of days each week. She said she couldn’t really handle more than that; she was apparently spending a lot of time refining her signal-processing code for her primary research. She said that alone was worthwhile for her.

“These algorithms that I'm developing are fascinating,” she said, in one of her 'personal' moments. But I had to admit: she was a careful worker. “Never interpolating, always working from the signal,” she said of her approach. I think that means she was working pretty hard on it.

As for me, as time passed, my ’symptoms’ didn’t change much. I just continued to hear all kinds of things, and there was quite a bit of novelty to it. If they had been musical compositions, perhaps I could have been another Mozart. But even after several months, the sounds never really became musical in any human sense of that term.

My most interesting fantasy was that an alien civilization had tuned into my mind and was trying to communicate with me. But Deb assured me that she had not found any order in the signal that suggested it was communication. “Not even the algorithms they use on coded transmissions suggest any of that.” She stared at me.

"Yeah, I ran some secret stuff on your stuff, but I didn't get any stuff out of it."
If anything, she did seem to get a little frustrated that my ‘signals’ didn’t change much, didn’t resolve into anything easier to understand.

On the plus side (maybe a plus), spending a few times a week with someone as intelligent (and driven) as Deb was an interesting experience in and of itself. I wished sometimes that I was more attracted to her. She was older than I had assumed—she was a genuine researcher, not the assistant or grad student I’d first assumed. She was a bit older than she looked, almost thirty. Skinny, bug-eyed a bit, not very feminine but also not masculine, more robot-like than any sexual stereotype.

She was not without feeling; she would erupt sometimes in passionate discourse about wavelengths and signals and stuff. She did touch me sometimes—I am not especially fond of being touched, but I did not hesitate to allow it with her. I think it was the way she did it. For example, we’d be talking about the refinements in signal processing—reducing noise levels, bridging obvious recording errors—and she would wrap her hand around my arm, very tightly, and lean toward me and speak passionately about this or that algorithm. It was…charming, in its way. I came to enjoy her company.

Even so, the first real conflict between us arose when I suggested that someone in some other speciality might find something in the signal that ‘we’ were missing. Oh, boy! The ‘we’ got her going, and the ‘someone else’ set her off like a stick of dynamite.

“You’re not a researcher. Not exactly a subject, either.

"You have no idea how fucking competitive it is! It’s crazy! Before you publish, you can’t talk to anyone, you’re always afraid they’ll steal your ideas, your methods. I even wonder sometimes about what I reveal in a published paper—is there a technique there that might land a government of industry contract?

“I guess I sound paranoid, but these are real concerns. Especially for a woman.” I could see her stumble emotionally when she said that. It really revealed to me what a woman deals with in a man’s world like research. But somehow I came away a bit skeptical of her professionalism. The way she treated me was most very personal. I guess she had some illusion of what I was worth to her. It made me doubt the personal ways we interacted. Or maybe I was just a lonely guy after all.

It wasn't easy to stay in her good graces. She was never sure that I respected her work.

“I suppose the fact that you’re working so hard on these recordings means that this research could be important.”

She grabbed my wrist. Again. Reeled me in. “Oh my god,” she said. “Yes! Yes! Do you hate me now?”

I laughed, which seemed to really irritate her. She let go of my arm. And swiveled toward her keyboard.

“No, no,” I said. “I’m a trust fund baby. Surely you’ve noticed how I have almost no personality. I have some kind of autism. No, not diagnosed autism, I just mean, I have some strange mental things that go on for me. Not autism, that's an old fear of mine.”

“Maybe obvious, not my speciality. But you are not average. You have some level places where I would expect mountains, and some depths that are just crazy.” She paused. “Not literally crazy, OK?”

I laughed, genuinely. “I’ve lived my whole life as myself. I’m used to it. Believe it or not, you are about as easy to get along with as anyone I’ve met. Oh, I’ve deployed my usual cautions, but I like you.”

She wheeled her chair closer, reached out a hand, and laid it gently against my cheek. She looked right at me, and it felt soothing. Then she took her hand away, turned back to her keyboard, and said, “Let’s record another. I feel motivated.”
That whole thing took only seconds, and I really didn’t feel afraid at all. I was pretty satisfied about that. I wasn’t sure I could be sure, but, maybe I had a friend.

We continued to do recording for several more weeks. Then Deb sat me down for a 'serious talk'.

“Here’s an idea,” she said. “Just a random idea. There are two primary possibilities. The signal could come from outside you—a frequency resonance that stimulates your brain, say, and it causes these strange ‘signals to occur in your consciousness. That would be some mechanism I can’t even hypothesize about.
“Or it could be completely internal—anything from a casual malfunction to some profound musicality. Really anything. Not my field either.

“So do you agree with this statement: in either of those cases, it would be worth taking some risks in order to learn more.”

She stared at me intently. She swallowed hard, as if for a moment she’d forgotten how to do it.

“I think in all cases, it would be worth taking some risks in order to learn more.”

“OK. Obviously, by risk here, we don’t mean cutting open your brain or anything primitive like that! I mean gut-level risks. Like charging a machine-gun nest in some war. Like mixing chemicals that could be a little dicey. Risk. Taking a chance, so you can discover more. I’m at that point, Ed. But this is your life, your situation. I want you to decide. Do you need some time to think about it?”

I looked at her as if she was in some strange light. Her skin was pallid; her eyes were practically bulging out of her face. She was making fists with both hands. I said nothing, though, because I was…digesting the implications.

“Well?” she said.

“What kind of chances?”

She sat back, put both hands firmly against the sides of her head. As if squeezing it dry. Wanting to get every drop of sense out of her and into me. “I want you to take a chance,” she said. “I want to try stuffing some things into that brain of yours and see how it reacts. Does it fight me? Does it roll over and give up? Do you lose your beautiful sounds? Do you find something more? Change it up. Push back at this trick, the trippy power of yours. Make it work harder, I mean. Yes: that’s the real idea at the heart of all this nonsense I’ve been spouting. Make your brain try harder.”

I loved the idea; its sounded beautiful, poetic, forceful, you name it. “It scares the shit out of me,” I said.

“Good, good,” she said. “But you’ll do it with me, right?”

I nodded. My head felt like a bathtub full of whisky. Sloshing and stinking and eager as hell to get some kind of drunk that would be absolutely unique, absolutely me. Like tapping Mozart’s mind for music, like tapping Einstein’s brain for ideas on space and time.

The ego-trip struck me like a wind, blew right through me, clarified everything.
“I feel,” I said, “that there’s much more to this than what we’ve, what I’ve experienced so far.”

“Your eyes!” she said. “You look like a proper madman now. This is wonderful.”

I stared at her, as if I had just put my soul on the table in a poker game with the devil. “Maybe I should take that back.”

“No! No!” she said. “Go ahead, bet your soul! Who gets to do that?" Her eyes were moist all of a sudden. "I think it’s time for both of us to try much, much harder at this. I understand your mechanics, we have to find out what it means. We have to do it!”

“You mean, I have to do it,” I said, quietly. I felt so sober suddenly.

“No, no,” she said. “I haven’t told you, but now that the recordings are much clearer, I have been listening to them. Injecting them, you might say, right into my brain. They are…transformative.”

“Oh?” I said, in my sudden soberness. “What the–what do you mean? How so?”

“There is a language to it, I think. I listened, and after a few moments it was like a dream, like walking through the universe, well, more like stumbling. And I thought: we should try this together. I can't translate it on my own.”

I said nothing. All I could think about was that the stuff I was hearing was maybe more real than I had imagined. Why had I never really believed that? I had loved it, even—but as a fantasy, I guess.

But like all love, it was terrifying. I took a few steps backward, away from her. At the same time, I felt a completely new sensation of sound in my mind. Subtle, quiet, a pizzicato not of strings but of ideas.

“Fuck! Record this! Get me wired up!” I shouted.

About this story: Even as I started writing this, I had the idea that it might be the first chapter of a novel. But the idea seemed small, more appropriate for a short story, so I kept pushing it in that direction. As it progressed, however, I got the feeling there was more to this than I had originally known. Adding a second character stirred up some possibilities. This could well wind up as the first chapter of a novel–if I can pull in enough story to make it work. We'll see. For now, this is the first 'free sample' story on this blog. I hope you enjoy it. Feel free to chat with me about it.