Picking up music from the past

Not sure how it was even possible, but we picked up an old radio transmission from Earth, and it was some really old music. It undulated and frizzled with static and distortion. Listening to it made me a little sleepy and I slapped my cheek a few times to stay awake.

”It sounds like the kind of thing you can buy from frizzlers at pon-stations,” said Lucie. Frizzlers were people who made music using outdated technology and pon-stations were floating transponders where you could lease bandwidth to transmit your shop catalog into the nearby space. Outdated technology was the kind where you moved blocks on the screen to put music together, without algorithms to smooth it out, or to pander to a wider range of tastes.

”Does it?” I disagreed. It sounded genuine, or at least I wanted to believe so. “Imagine what the people were like, those that listened to it."

"Like this part,” said Lucie, “Where it drags on too long. It’s like a boring sound from beyond and it makes its way into your field of hearing."

"Boring, you mean like not interesting?"

"No,” she said, “Like it’s digging through rock. Like whatever kind of rock they had on Earth, maybe it surrounded them and somebody imagined the music to be outside the rock and it makes its way to you. To tell you about itself. You know?"

"Do you think they lived inside rocks?"

"I don’t know,” she said. “To protect against radiation maybe. Before they could build shielding."

"Where did people come from, anyway?"

"Well,” she said, “It was like they evolved from lower forms of life. From apes."

"Inside the rocks?"

"In tunnels,” she said. “The Earth is was rocky planet and the animals had to huddle inside tunnels, and explore to look for water and other organic matter to eat. They fed off of each other. And then one of these animals had to awake one day a person."

"Man,” I said with awe, leaning back in my chair, “So they woke up in a dark tunnel and did not know where they came from, but they were not an animal anymore?"

"Yeah, they had to go on to thinking up ways to stay fed and come up with new ideas. They were in the tunnels a long time before they could bore out and fly out into space."

"And they listened to the music,” I said, “But why did they transmit it?"

"Before they could climb out of the gravitational well, they could send lighter things out. Like radio waves. So I bet one of them stuck an antenna out and said ‘Here, listen! This is our music!‘"

"How do you know all this, Lucie?” I asked.

”Well, it just follows from logic. Doesn’t it.”

And we continued our work.

Posted by: Paweł Kowaluk