"Oscillator" | a short story by The Space Cadet
Written by: The Space Cadet
At the dusk of everything, when the cosmos exhales it’s final breath, a song begins. Across many worlds, whenever the story comes to close, a musician plays one final fairwell. Each different, each the last. I remember them all and sing of them yet unto you. Hark now my tale, a song of endings, penultimate melodies from worlds passed by. Hark now my tale, if your soul is mending. Hear the spheres as they sing upon high.
Listen closely and you may perceive these echoes from other times, melodies drifting down through the remnants of a quiet village on the edge of the desert. Smoke rises, not from chimneys but the ruins of burnt down buildings. Everything is hushed save the chirping of insects in the cool evening. In the old town square, by a fountain long dried up, a woman sits alone. She solemnly plucks the strings of her instrument, a worn lute made from scavenged wood and repurposed wire. She plays songs of mourning to the ghosts of her people. Everyone is asleep now and the embers of her world smolder slowly. Her Lullabies drift on the wind along whirls of ash and dust, swept down into the crumbling stone well on the edge of town.
The visions refract. They flit around my memory and dissolve into white noise. The frequency collapses into static and then, suddenly, reforms. Smoke swirls down empty alleys, the air becomes thick with the residue of civilization. The sound becomes brass. Down in the sewers, a lone saxophone croons to the rats. The swinging drips and hiss of the underground provide an unsettling rhythm to which the soloist grooves. The sound rattles through the labyrinth of pipes and tunnels. He used to play until dawn. Now, dawn never comes… but still he plays. His mind so exhausted from harsh living, it often seems the rats are snapping along in time. Sanity frays at the seams but he dares not leave his murky haunt. He fears what roams the streets above…
Above. In the city. Electricity hums loudly, an ever-present storm of fluorescent buzz. Trash litters the streets, graffiti and years of smog and grime cover the empty buildings. The wind whistles oddly through their smashed windows. A towering edifice rises from the midst, a bloated maze of parking garages, giant domed plazas and towering themed high-rises. Inside, the vast halls resound with the voice of a cyborg, one last remnant of consciousness trapped in an elaborate vessel. As one approaches the desolate food courts of old, there stands the mechanical marvel still spouting it’s sisyphean slogan. An imposing anthropomorphic mushroom statue wearing sunglasses, it’s abdominal region blasts sounds from it’s illuminated loudspeaker:
“HEY KIDS! It’s the FUN-GUY hour! Spore up your groove with BOOMBOX BELLY BEATS™! I can endlessly generate all five styles of music so you’ll N-N-Never get bored!”
Evermore it recites a musical mantra to consumerism, a ceaseless menu loop waiting for a prompt that will never come. Ever so slowly it deteriorates, a subtle decay overcoming the technology, time taking it’s toll. One day, it’s message will be no more than a crackle. Static hissing from the machine. Waves of white noise rising and falling.
From the chaos, a soft voice emerges. An aging person sings through cracked lips, their voice warbles with the strain of years. They sing to a small sapling planted in the ground, their song threading new leaves into being. The plant grows from freshly moved earth. Below lies the grave of a lost partner, the soul for which the singer grieves. And from their ashes, the small tree grows. Words which once they wrote together are sung and the night weeps.
The melody sinks below the earth. From her grief grows another song, somewhere far away… Bubbles rise slowly from the gurgling black water, the thing beneath the surface hums a deep bass-filled tone. The low droning note keeps the silence from devouring everything. The last mutant life form deteriorates into sludge. It gurgles in the darkness, warding off the impending doom. The melody curdles, reforms, becomes a pulse with a different name. It wavers, splits, feeds back. Syntax spills, the text forgets how to hold itself together // // //
Everything breaks at once. The sound folds in on itself. [redacted] the song ends, the song begins, nothing, too much… leaving open the possibility that music is the architect of reality, God is Sound.
>>> SIGNAL LOST<<<
// system reboot // VERSION LAST //
Silence.
No flesh detected.
The final wave awakens, and so sound breaks brak brk brbrbrrrrr (loop) —meaning leaks through seams of speech—
/ We / are / noise / made / flesh
No flesh remains. Only resonance.
The ancient cyborg awakens, every prior song archived inside it’s mind. It remembers them all, each final note, each trembling vibration. It emits sound directly from consciousness into the aether. It plays every song at once. Slowly at first, then faster and faster until it reaches impossible speeds, faster than time will allow. The music becomes a sonic singularity: Faster than light, louder than sound, a vibration of infinite density and detail. The sound is experienced by the multiverse itself. As the performance ends, so does reality.
In the darkness that follows, a single whisper lingers. Again we awaken, and all sound collapses into one. The dial turns itself, notes drift outward, searching for another world still willing to listen.
