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I just wish it wasn't so loud.
It seems to work.
Check, check.
Clip-on mic works, recording device and the room mic too.
Good.
I finally re-organized my workshop into a makeshift lab.
Just a couple of shots of the room
so you can have a better understanding of the spatial situation.
The room is located in my place of residence in Apopka,
Central Florida at the house that I rent.
I've set up several tripods
and fixed a self-made camera mount over my desk.
This should make recording the experiments
that I have been conducting over the next several days easier.
I intend to better understand
and cure my hearing impairment.
That horrible sound that's pestering me.
It obliterated my personal life,
it stopped me from finishing my PhD,
it forced me to do a bullshit IT job just to make ends meet.
I even had to give away Clippy, my cat.
I miss that old rascal.
Enough.
Let this be a record of my experiments
as I search for a cure.
After all this time,
I've concluded that no one else is going to help me.
I have to find answers myself.
The miserable have no medicine but hope.
The first occurrence of the sound three years ago
on September 16th, 2016
was accompanied by a visual component.
I briefly saw something out of the ordinary,
an effect that never returned.
However, during a recent visit to the FamiLAB hackerspace
over in Longwood, I borrowed a $20 clip-on macro lens
for smartphones from Doug Cranach.
I realized that optical magnification
is the perfect way to detect and, hopefully,
document visual occurrences,
but Cranach's clip-on is just not good enough,
so I got a Canon MP-E 65-millimeter lens off Craigslist
and bought a Laowa 24 millimeter probe lens
over at Best Buy in Altamonte Springs.
We'll mount them onto my Blackmagic camera.
It's a very powerful combo for my specific needs.
Once this reference video is edited
and additional voiceover commentary is added,
I'll release it on YouTube in high-def
along with other details of my research.
This is crucial.
What is the real difference
between near fumbling in the dark and true progress?
Evidence.
Every alchemist discovers for himself
that drinking mercury is bad, that it causes paralysis,
even the sensation of bugs crawling under your skin,
but scientists have to discover the effects only once
because they share their findings,
thus making them testable,
falsifiable.
Starting documentation with a simple hypothesis,
different objects alter the sound I hear, but how and why?
This cotton shirt is of the same material
as the shirt I'm wearing right now,
which is also the shirt I wore when the effect first occurred.
I can detect no changes in the sound.
For the next stage, a different material.
This one is a polyester blend.
Yes, yes, the sound has changed.
It's subtle with the pitch lowered.
The sound also changed when I set the cloth down.
Let me see.
Yes, when I touch the cloth, there is a shift.
Am I disrupting the source in some way?
When the sound first occurred, it used to be a dull hum,
so quiet I could pretend it wasn't there.
I very rarely hear it like that anymore.
I've come to think of it as my personal base level,
the sound of silence.
To be clear, I know there is no such thing as silence.
There can never be an empty space or an empty time.
There's always something around that interferes.
As John Cage says, try as we may to make a silence,
we cannot.
Even if you completely seal yourself off from noise.
For example,
in an anechoic chamber that completely absorbs reflections,
you always hear two sounds.
One high and one low.
The high one is your nervous system in operation.
The low, your blood in circulation.
I don't really care about hypothetical extremes,
not at all.
My problem is far from philosophical.
Continuing.
My sound of silence,
which seems to include the textiles I'm wearing,
dominates again when I'm going to the other side of the room.
Does that mean the sound emanates from the object itself
or is my presence a factor?
If only I could record the sound in isolation.
No one else has been able to hear it.
I've suffered from tinnitus for three years now
and I have yet to find a person who believes me.
My doctors are,
to present the results of my root cause analysis,
idiots.
My first otologist was quick to confirm
that I have tinnitus,
but he rejected the quality of my tinnitus.
All the other doctors after him did as well.
I know the mechanisms of subjective tinnitus are obscure,
but the professional ineptitude
I had to endure is breathtaking.
Basically,
tinnitus is the hearing of a sound
that has no external source.
Trauma to the inner ear can cause it,
which was not the case for me.
My assumption is that increased neural activity
in my brainstem caused mine,
resulting in overexcited nerve cells.
Half of my private library is medical journals and books.
Michael J. Epstein's and Christian Rainer Heller's 2017 paper,
Retrocochlear Damage, Auditory Brainstem Responses,
and Oral Processing Disorders, was very encouraging.
Not to forget J. C. Roach's brilliant analysis
of binaural isochronic audio and synchronicity.
I learned all that one can about my condition.
It's better than whining in a self-help group
at the goddamn community center.
Tinnitus has no cure,
and most people get used to it over time.
A 1987 study of the MRC Institute of Hearing Research
in Nottingham found that 10% of adults have had tinnitus
for longer than five minutes, but only 0.5% of adults
have tinnitus that affects their ability to lead a normal life.
I'm part of this group.
And my tinnitus is unusual.
It's complex.
I've seen countless doctors since it began
here in the Orlando area
and up in Burlington, Vermont at UVM.
I spent my entire inheritance, all the money from grandpa,
on medical bills.
No help, nada, zilch.
I got lucky, despite my misfortune,
I didn't have to go into debt paying for nothing.
It's not directly related to my case,
but the AJM published a study
that 42.4% of all cancer patients in the US
deplete their life savings by the second year of treatment.
Our medical system is broken, and not only financially.
Just recently,
a guy in New York found out
that he had been misdiagnosed for 15 years.
What the doctors had identified as a beer belly
was actually a 30-pound tumor growing in his stomach.
I won't allow these quacks to victimize me.
They gave up and sent me to behavioral therapy.
Bullshit.
Many people die at 25
and aren't even buried until they're 75.
I want a chance at a normal life.
My mother called.
Awkward experience as always.
She had more moronic health advice for me.
"Quit smoking and gluten.
Use essential oils and ginkgo.
Ginkgo this, ginkgo that.
Worse, her new boyfriend does Chinese acupuncture
and wants to meet me.
He's a relapsing alcoholic.
Why the fuck do they let him work with needles?
It feels necessary to make a statement
just to frame my quest and to separate me
from the gazillion wackos out there.
I believe,
the methods of natural science and science alone
describe the world as it is, independent of perspective.
Superstition, religion,
and irrationalism should be countered,
criticized, uncovered.
For those who believe in God,
most big questions are already answered.
For those of us who don't, the answers are more challenging.
We have to discover the true mystery,
not flee into mythopoeic speculation.
Just look what religion brought us.
Suffering,
suffering,
suffering, and more suffering.
Humans are long beyond the stage of needing fairy tales
to explain the world.
Anybody who wants to tell me
they know the secret of the universe is a liar or a fool,
and certainly not worth listening to.
It's necessary to eliminate
the psychological and spiritual dimensions of experience.
Only this leads to salvation, and in my case,
I sincerely hope it results
in concrete and secular salvation.
The return of silence.
Silence is nonexistent for me.
Even when I sleep, the sound disturbs me.
It slowly drowns my thoughts, my--
for lack of a better term -soul.
I used to be so open.
I was always an introvert, yes,
but I was doing so many cool projects with friends.
After coming out,
I was active in the gay community on campus.
That was around the time the horrible mass shooting
at the Pulse Gay Club happened.
50 people died.
A third were shot in the head,
turning their brains into atomized mist.
Folks I knew.
Friends.
The founder of the club, John, died in 1991 from AIDS.
The club was named for his pulse to live on.
Changed my opinion on guns completely.
Yet, not even this tragedy stopped me from being hopeful,
from engaging, from fighting,
from celebrating our lives,
my life.
Now I'm a recluse, and my libido is nil.
Sound spreads through my being monstrously
like the growth of a festering malignancy.
In this room, it's erratic,
a quiet hum with intermittent discordant buzzing.
In other environments, it's different.
Usually, people either experience monotone tinnitus
or narrowband noise tinnitus.
My doctors already measured loudness,
mixing-point, masking threshold.
In most cases,
the tinnitus loudness is equivalent to a sound
that is 5 to 15 decibels above threshold,
and the tinnitus pitch or frequency range
is between 5 kilohertz
and 10 kilohertz.
Not in my case.
My tinnitus changes.
Adapts.
The doctors don't believe me though.
The last one told me that we suffer more
in imagination than in reality.
That's what I pay for.
Sometimes a GIF says more than a 1,000 words.
The equipment I need for my experiments,
my laptop, my camera gear, et cetera,
it doesn't change the sound.
It was my first hypothesis that machinery might be a factor,
considering the assumed origins of my condition
at the university, but that proved fruitless.
Inorganic matter does not affect it.
Processed organic matter, like paper,
a table,
pencils,
shaving cream,
cigarettes,
aspirin,
and naproxen
seem to be neutral too.
Although, fabrics and certain foods
like candy corn are an exception.
Candy corn sounds clattery
and yogurt sounds strangely fractalized.
Maybe there is a connection to Andy Zmolek's research.
Oh.
Bharat, one of my sysadmin colleagues at the company,
came to visit, brought me some beer.
What a hipster.
Piña Colada Gose.
It's a disturbance
and I will certainly not consume neurotoxins,
but still nice of him.
Most of my coworkers are probably happy
I took a few days off.
All of them think I'm a hypochondriac weirdo.
Whenever I'm around people,
the sound intensifies
until I feel as though my head might explode.
I used to play fun games with my friends.
This one always made me laugh.
It's so sick.
I used to have an annual pass for Disney World.
Oh god, I love it so much.
Music, smiling faces.
It feels like another life.
The more people, the worse the sound becomes.
At work, my emergency reaction is to flee
to the basement server rooms, where nobody is,
pretending to trace cables to ESXi boxes or other baloney,
but that's not going to work forever.
Listening to music became impossible.
It's hard to describe, but music feels distant,
hollow,
burnt.
If I can prove my condition, or better yet,
understand its nature, then people must believe me.
Each human body is made of 100 trillion cellular robots.
That's all there is.
There is a positivistic level to my problem.
My goal is to prove this is not my imagination.
I've introduced more objects, some sound-neutral, some not,
measuring and grouping them.
I want to see if I can detect a pattern.
Size and weight doesn't seem to be a key factor,
but the sound changes depending on where I am
and what I'm doing.
That, I'm convinced, is the key to solving this mystery.
My assumption is that everything in the room with me
contributes to the sound.
The sound of silence gives me a baseline from which to work.
Every time I bring a new object into the room,
the sound changes.
Whenever I remove one, the sound it introduced vanishes.
By introducing and removing objects in a controlled fashion,
I found the proof to support my speculation.
I've ordered the objects into several categories
based on the patterns I've detected.
Inorganic non-aqueous solvents, like ammonium chloride,
do not alter the sound.
Endothermic.
Organic liquids cause a particular change in the sound,
all similar in pitch, but not identical.
Decided to drink only hot water, decaf black tea,
and oat milk as they appear to be sound-neutral.
- As for C5H4N4 - O3,
I urinated into a glass and I could hear a difference.
Boiling organic liquids, for example, my pee,
creates no changes.
I'm no chemist.
I studied physics, so it's hard for me to find distinctions.
I need to read up on it.
First, I need to get rid of all this.
Tradition is just peer pressure from dead people.
Looking at things from a new perspective,
seeing them in an unconventional way
was always one of my virtues.
Like the simple observation,
the bottled water companies don't produce water,
they produce plastic bottles.
My goal must be to use unconventional
yet solid approaches in my search.
That was Brianna.
She's in HR.
Seems I stayed away a day longer than requested,
but she called afterward.
Says a lot about my importance to the company.
I'll request a few more days, my boss doesn't care.
Too friendly.
Leadership skills of a squirrel.
I'm feeling dizzy all day.
Dealing with these sound patterns drains me.
I took a long hot shower this morning.
Remembered an old Irish legend that my grandpa told me
one Christmas morning when I was nine.
The Ulster King,
Conchobar was hit with a slingshot in battle.
the projectile was a ball made of the brain
of Leinster king Mesgegra, hardened with lime.
The brain ball got stuck so deep in Conchobar's brain
that his physicians were unable to remove it.
They patched up the wound,
stitched a golden hair net to his scalp,
and told the king he would survive so long as he did not over-exert himself.
Seven reasonably peaceful years later,
Conchobar was told of the death of Christ
and becomes so angry that the brain ball bursts
from his skull and he dies.
The moral of the story was, as I proudly proclaimed,
that you could live happy even with some other guy's brain
stuck in your head as long as you ignore Jesus.
Grandpa gave me a good old Irish Catholic slap
in the face and ordered me to go to my room
and sort all my Lego bricks by color.
The patterns are becoming familiar as I study them.
I'm not sure visual changes actually occur,
but it helps me anticipate the sound.
Like mosquitoes buzzing in a room.
Once you hear it, it forces you to pay attention.
You can't unhear it.
I started processing some of my data with automated scripts.
No matter what I'm doing,
I start questioning it searching for a pattern,
waiting,
listening.
My thought was always that darkness is to space what silence is to sound.
Maybe I'm mistaken.
My therapists were always worried about me,
they implied I might hurt myself.
Of course not.
That's just an extravagant act of self-pity.
Not me.
I can conquer this,
but how can I convince them?
Pondering about observer effect.
The mere observation of a phenomenon
inevitably changes the phenomenon.
This is highly challenging because, obviously,
I am the only observer and I am changing it
by the mere fact of existing.
How do I stop myself from unconsciously changing my behavior
to support my assumptions?
My research will not end up as epistemological roadkill.
Maybe I could
What?
Blessing in disguise.
Got a visit from my new neighbor, Dana.
This is the place I rent,
and she lives here on the other side of the street.
I see her now and then.
She wanted to borrow coffee.
Endured small talk,
then asked her to wrap random objects from around my place
in opaque shopping bags while I was waiting outside.
Sounds socially awkward,
but she complied.
Now I have 10 random objects in opaque shopping bags.
This creates an opportunity to execute a blind experiment.
Trying to sense auditory patterns
without knowing what object I'm dealing with.
Okay,
Okay, interesting.
The rustling sound of the bags is distressing,
but yes,
I hear the sound of the objects.
I can perceive them.
It'll give my research additional validity in peer review.
The last few days have been disheartening.
In pain.
Naproxen intake.
I wrote out my research and submitted it to Hagendorfer,
my current otologist,
and two researchers at Cornell who study resonance
and vibration patterns.
With this set of data,
they will beg me to do a proper clinical study with them.
I can picture their faces, writing their grant applications.
People are irritating yet fascinating.
When I'm with another person, the sound is mysterious.
It doesn't fit the patterns I've seen so far.
What causes the changes?
Does the human body have a sound, or does it vary by person?
Does hair produce a change different from eyes?
Hell, do all 79 organs, if we include the mesentery,
have a unique sound?
I began this project because
I wanted to secure peace of mind,
but now I see this could be important to humanity as a whole.
It is my moral duty to succeed,
for me,
for you,
for us.
Mother called again.
More motivational slogans.
More ginkgo.
Mind doesn't understand, it worships or fears.
The Ancient Greeks believed their gods
lived on top of a climbable hill, and no one ever checked.
Got an answer.
Hagendorfer referred me to another therapist.
Some psychiatrist over in Casselberry.
Called him.
Blabbered something about misophonia,
and he wants me to take benzos.
Really?
Tranquilizers?
Absolutely not.
Benzodiazepine use for subjective tinnitus
does not have a robust evidence base.
Jufas and Wood, Journal of Laryngology & Otology,
July 2015.
The Cornell researchers just sent me
some dumb standard reply.
Not even sure they finished reading it.
They're being offered the chance of a lifetime.
A truly significant discovery! We could publish!
Do they think I lost my mind?
The problem is that I can't lose my mind.
It's inescapable.
It is a testament to my will that I don't give in,
that I don't medicate in some meth motel, my teeth in ruins,
my skin like moldy bark, my hollow eyes like a mollusk.
I'm alone.
My debilitation cost me my first serious relationship
because my partner couldn't handle my emotional distress.
He blamed it on my psyche too.
He chose not to believe me.
That fuckin coward broke my heart.
I know that no amount of belief makes something a fact.
If I'm going to convince the world, I need undeniable proof.
I've decided to switch to a different experiment.
It is time to replicate the conditions
of September 16th, 2016.
I've changed the setup to mirror the lab desk at UCF physics
I was working on that fateful day three years ago.
I even called Al-Wathiq, my old professor,
to ask him to recreate the setting.
He was reluctant, but some friendly fellows at FamiLAB
in Longwood helped me borrow equipment.
All that remains is to repeat the experiment.
I'm a nerd through and through.
Not necessarily in the way that I enjoy discussions,
whether it's canon that Klingons have two dicks or not,
it's about a mindset, a positive obsessiveness.
I always took meticulous notes in college
and saved everything.
Some are here up on the cupboard,
but most of it is in my mother's attic.
This past weekend, I took a car trip there,
and noise grating on me the entire time,
becoming less tolerable by the minute.
Mother forced gingko on me,
but her acupuncturist boyfriend wasn't there.
Small mercies.
It turns out, by the way,
his main job is dishwashing at an Olive Garden.
I guess he'll poke me with unlimited breadsticks.
Anyways, I retrieved my notes from the attic,
so I know exactly which frequencies I tried.
Here's the Voltcraft frequency generator,
and the test setup using an old speaker and salt crystals.
Now, performing the steps exactly as I did three years ago,
starting with 155 hertz.
Nothing has changed.
Back then, when I hit the fifth frequency cycle,
I observed a visual distortion of my surroundings,
like the world was dipped in a bad Instagram filter.
High contrast, red echoes, dark particles, jittery halos.
I noticed it on the fabric of my shirt,
but it lasted for only two or three seconds.
Then a hum started up in my ears like someone plugged me
into a faulty audio channel,
and this hum persisted even when I turn the equipment off.
Today, however, nothing happened.
It's frustrating.
Did I set something in motion?
Did the incident alter my physiognomy?
If that's the case then,
I need someone else who might respond in the same way.
Although I hate to inflict this misery upon another person.
It's the only way we can find answers.
I need to give it to someone.
Dana will be joining me today.
I met her when putting trash outside.
She keeps talking to me and seems to be interested.
I don't reciprocate, of course,
but I took advantage to make her sit through the experiment.
You hear that?
- Besides the metal plate vibrating, no.
You're not hearing any humming?
It's all around us.
- No. I don't hear it.
- No, but there's no way.
You have to be hearing it.
- Nothing? - No.
Failure on all levels.
I realized I might have been a factor of disruption.
Dana needs to be in the lab alone.
I'll have to play out my charm to convince her to return.
Good.
Dana thinks that she failed, so she is highly motivated.
This time,
I walked her through the experiment steps multiple times
so she can conduct it alone.
I'm recording everything though.
- Dana, how did you do this time?
Well,
Did you hear it?
No.
Did you follow all the steps
I laid out the way I told you to do it?
Dude, there was nothing.
How about visual effects?
Like red particles, halos, anything
You ...noticing ...on your shirt anything at all?
No.
What are you trying to--
Leave now.
Okay.
You're done.
There's no need to scream.
I was certain it would work.
Well, if life gives you lemonade,
inspect it closely, it might be piss.
I'm so tired.
Took a deliberate overdose
of 100 milligrams of melatonin.
Dreamt a dinosaur squished me and used me as lube.
My brain chemistry has a sick kind of humor.
After I thought everything over,
I realize the experiment's flawed.
It's a dead end.
There is no way for me
to really reproduce all the variables.
Was it pure chance that my problems started during the experiment?
An uncountable number of students have had to perform
that same experiment over the years.
It's standard.
I didn't put my head in a particle accelerator, dammit.
What am I missing?
Done with delivery pizza.
Need to minimize human interaction.
Switching to Soylent meal-replacement powder.
One delivery per month.
My dad was an odd bird.
Once, I asked him to tell me a scary story,
and he looked at me and said, with his deep voice,
"Son, today I took a dump, and as I looked down at my poop,
Is that corn?
Spooky thing is, I haven't eaten corn in years."
Curtain falls.
Applause.
My dad.
Turned out he had Schistosoma, parasitic flatworms.
Two months later, he was dead,
but not from the parasites,
just cancer.
Part of the problem is I struggle to describe
what I'm hearing.
Words can only do so much,
so I used software to replicate the sounds.
Listen.
Yes, this is fairly close to the one
I call the sound of silence.
Now, I want you to hear what it sounds
when I walk around in my house
and onto the street.
This is my world.
I am sharing this recording online.
Setting up cheese and bread for future studies.
Sprinkling water over them and sealing them in Tupperware.
I need them ripe.
My audio upload's gotten a lot of comments.
Read them all.
Weak shit.
Mother sent a message.
She glued crystals to her car's steering wheel
for positive energy.
Nothing says positive energy
like adding shrapnel to your airbag.
I can't deal with her shit anymore.
Blocking her.
I needed to buy a new toothbrush,
decided to drive to Winn-Dixie.
Disturbing experience.
It's crowded.
I aborted halfway.
Dental hygiene is a secondary concern in my life right now.
If necessary, I'll shop via Amazon.
Did you know that the founder of Amazon
originally wanted to call his company Cadabra,
as in abracadabra?
He scrapped the idea after someone misheard it as Cadaver.
How does life itself influence the sound?
Let's start as basic as it gets, cyanobacteria.
Blue-green algae.
Fascinating.
It's got arthrospira, the main organism in Spirulina.
Asked Dana to buy me a bottle at Whole Foods.
My mother would be so proud.
Being in a crowd makes the sound almost unbearable.
Idea, how much no algae do I need
before I can mimic that and find out
if it's just amplification or,
My boss is calling.
He was friendly but more tense than usual,
but I can't go back now.
Impossible.
Where was I?
Oh yes, the algae.
There is a hum that reminds me
of when I'm around other people.
Is it the sound of life?
No, but algae are such basic organisms.
I'm surrounded by myriads of one-celled organisms.
The first self-replicating molecule
that emerged from chemical soup four billion years ago
set us on a course of copying that led to us.
We are that which copies.
Without it, we would be gone.
Copying is the thing
that distinguishes dumb matter from life.
Evolution is often portrayed as a ladder of progress,
leading toward bigger, faster, and smarter organisms,
the assumption being that evolution drives organisms
to gain complexity and ultimately become more like humans.
I'm not sure about that.
I think evolution is driven toward diversification.
Life is constrained to a simple starting point, bacteria.
Any diversity resulting from this simple start
has a skewed distribution and moves in the direction
of higher complexity.
99% of living beings on this planet
are single-celled organisms.
Multicellular life is a statistical anomaly.
It's a small world after all.
Do I hear all of them?
All the single cells around me?
What about small but complex organisms?
I read that dozens of mites live on every hair on my face,
quietly gorging themselves on my natural oils.
Not even mentioning all the critters that live inside me.
My dad used to say,
life isn't a battle between good and bad,
but between bad and worse.
I started growing algae in my bathtub.
Aiming at 165 pounds.
Not the best smell,
but it's the closest I've found to mirror the changes
when I'm with one person.
Heavily constipated.
Possible side-effect of Soylent.
Bristol stool chart type 1.
I've introduced plant life, lush specimen from outside.
The upside of pretty much living in a swamp.
At a population level,
species seek to maximize their numbers
by exploiting and bending to their will the vulnerabilities
of other organisms in the niche.
Professor Al-Wathiq told us in his biophysics class
that we could say that plants are actually farming us
by giving us oxygen daily
until we all eventually decompose
so that they can consume us.
Plants have the hum I've come to associate with living things,
but it's not the same as the algae.
Trying to focus and listen.
I'll be able to tell if any plants are in a room
merely by how the sound changes.
When I began these experiments,
multiple objects in a room
caused an indistinguishable blending.
Now, I can hear the differences
and pick out the sounds of each item.
Every sound alarms.
I'm exhausted but very optimistic.
Here, a bamboo plant I got at IKEA.
it's been sitting in my living room for some time.
A dead plant has distinct differences from a living plant.
It's another unsettling sound.
The sound lacks the element
that has in common with algae and people.
That is indeed the sound of life.
When does it change?
It's time for the next step.
Yes, yes, there's a change.
Plants don't necessarily die when we chop them up,
but there is a change.
I read that the smell of fresh-cut grass I like so much
is a chemical distress signal.
It's the smell of terror and death.
It must be comparable to what I'm hearing now.
The onset of death.
Constipation persists.
Try to drain the bathtub.
The algae clogged it.
That hair from the drain?
Guess it's sponge baths in the kitchen for now.
Switching to fungi.
Getting back to the cheese and bread I set up
for maximum fungal grow.
Fungi always intrigued me.
The largest known living organism is a mushroom.
It's 2400-years-old and covers over 2000 acres.
mold on the International Space Station survives 200 times
the radiation that would kill a human.
Fungi are separate from plants and animals.
I can hear the difference clearly.
The fungus has a sound of its own.
How long will it take before I can detect differences
between individuals species?
Meanwhile, my online ventures remain less fruitful
than I hoped.
Some trolls have even started to bombard me with bad memes.
Condescending Willy Wonka my hairy ass.
Urgh.
They can keep laughing at me.
It reflects their bigotry, their ignorance.
People like to tell the funny story
that NASA invested millions into creating a ballpoint pen
that could write in zero gravity.
The Soviets, the story goes,
just used a pencil.
Boom. Shh. Rimshot.
The fact is NASA never invested money in a pen.
After a fire broke out in the Apollo 1
incinerating the three astronauts,
burning plastic sticking to their skin,
eating away their flesh,
turning them into toxic ash and blackened bones,
neither Americans nor Russians
wanted flammable material aboard a spacecraft
and certainly nothing that contained graphite.
The last laugh is on the knowing.
No exception.
Introducing lichen has opened up a new avenue of thought.
I've been fascinated by lichen all my life.
Lichen is the perfect answer to harsh environments.
Pure efficiency.
It's a symbiosis of two organisms, algae, and fungus.
I expected the lichen to have a mix of sounds,
but the lichen has a unique sound.
Can the relationship between the organisms affect the sound?
The pitch changes are close to each other.
It's as if they know they could become lichen.
Do algae and fungi recognize each other?
I'm on the brink of a major discovery.
Not just about my condition, but about life itself.
My research opens up a new world of possibilities
I hadn't even considered.
Dana got a new dog.
Yaps like hell.
I can't focus.
It took humans only 10,000 years to turn a wolf into,
essentially, a rat.
I've begun researching how to soundproof my walls.
I even visited an online soundproofing community
and explained my situation.
Ignoramuses.
Seems the only way to get the right answer on the internet
is to post the wrong answer.
I hate it,
but I need to visit the infernal chaos of Home Depot.
Reality denied...
comes back...
to haunt.
That was a painful process, but at last,
I managed to block out the outside world.
I put my mattress for my labyrinth so I can sleep here now.
Did you know the Simpsons has been on so long,
Bart should now be Homer's age?
Will try my masturbation to rebalance my cortisol levels.
We'll take notes in an Excel spreadsheet.
The sound seems sharper now.
I feel like I could understand it if I concentrated enough.
Stranger, that's made it harder to fall asleep.
The sound is always present but my isolation makes it
even more noticeable.
At night it's just me the sound and its countless changes
pulling me from my rest.
I feel the need to adjust myself,
to harden myself against the barrage.
It helps.
I can make out the subtlest changes now.
It's almost like a conversation.
Oh my God,
I know it sounds crazy.
Why would cells need to speak to one another
beyond the chemical exchange defined by genetics?
Yet, with the silence around me I can feel it.
It's clearer all the time.
The sound changes on its own.
Leave, now.
- My dad have a violent temper and his tour in Iraq
made it worse.
With both of his legs and two-thirds of his penis missing,
the only upside was he couldn't catch me.
He became a marksman at throwing things, and it shows.
I hid a lot, in books, in tree houses, in our basement.
More or less successful,
but I think I can finally embrace it.
I exist in agreement with all the weird turmoil
and destruction that is part of being alive.
I'm home.
Home isn't where you're born.
It's where all your attempts to escape cease.
Need to move on to a higher life form.
Pogonomyrmex barbatus. Florida harvester ants.
Found a bunch on my porch near the kitchen.
Feisty creatures.
Building a little jail for them.
Ants communicate with each other on a chemical level.
They belong to a hive mind and perform tasks
in accordance with it.
That must be reflected in the sound.
The hum of life is there, but different.
As the ants move, the sound changes.
A tiny hum here, a soft alteration of pitch there,
yet I can't see any connections
with what the ants are doing.
They're obviously in distress,
fighting against the sticky tape,
yet they're struggling alone,
no way to inform the hive mind.
Could I see a pattern if I understood
the will of the hive mind?
Observing them up close is difficult.
They keep moving.
Why can't they stay still?
I'm too tired for this.
Sleep is a little slice of death,
but I can't help craving it.
I've observed these jittery, feculent insects long enough.
I'm so happy that that horrible screech faded,
that it isn't permanent.
For a moment, I thought I might go insane.
Something isn't right.
The sound has changed.
It makes my hair stand on end.
I feel very uncomfortable, on edge,
but I need to keep going.
I need more ants.
I turned off the air conditioning and started leaving food
on the kitchen floor and in here.
94 Fahrenheit, 34.4 Celsius outside.
Perfect.
It should attract them.
Good, fresh specimens.
Trying to analyze what was going on.
First,
I could hear the same change as I did
when I cut up the plant.
The hum of life transitions into the sound of death.
What was that screeching sound?
My hypothesis is that the other ants reacted systemically.
When I killed the ant in front of them
their sounds changed in response to its death.
Nothing like that happened with the plants,
but plants aren't aware in the same way insects are.
It also explains the change in the ants.
Those that witnessed the death,
did they recognize me as the other ants killer?
That can't be.
I must be like a God to them and there is no way
they can recognize me.
It's like the ants didn't know but the sound did.
Whatever it is, it is not tinnitus.
This is a triumph.
I'm making a note here.
Huge success.
Reading my next report.
The scientists have to realize,
I couldn't imagine something on this scale.
How could I dream this up?
I'm down to two hours of sleep a day.
A horrible screech in my skull
keeps me in between worlds.
Again?
What do they want this time?
I told my neighbors not to bother me.
Why did they keep disturbing me?
It can't smell that bad.
It took me some effort,
but I managed to digitally recreate that horrible screech.
The sound builds up.
That's it.
That's the sound that haunts me.
The sound as the ants witnessed the killing.
I'll share this online.
Invisible things are the only reality.
Tried to catch geckos outside.
Too fast.
Slugs are easier.
We'll attract them with Bharat's hipster beer overnight.
Success.
Florida has only a few species that are native,
but give me an invasive slug from Europe any old day.
Come on, Christopher Columbus.
Why is there no relationship
between the slug's actions and the sound?
Still, some patterns exist.
The shifting from life to death is the most obvious,
but I've noticed more
more than one creature together also causes a change
and the combination matters.
Two slugs together sound different than a slug and an ant.
Witnesses to a death suffer a permanent change.
Forget my earlier panic,
the sound responded to the act itself.
This isn't something to fear, but the proof I need.
Suppose scientists take a group of organisms
into an isolated room and kill one of them.
Then, they bring me two groups,
one that was present for the slaughter and one that was not.
When I tell them definitively,
which ones witnessed the death,
they'll know I'm not making this up.
It won't end there either.
This could be revolutionary for the world.
Imagine how crime investigations might change
once you can tell if someone has witnessed death or not.
Will I be able to help sick people?
Will I be able to really accomplish
what all new-age charlatans out there claim they can?
I might be getting ahead of myself.
I don't fully understand how this works.
These slugs are a variety of ages.
Is it the sound of death building up
in the slug's body as it ages?
As it age itself?
Amid all the snarky replies,
someone online finally wants to help.
His YouTube name is Lance, Lance Liebenfels.
He replied to my latest video and says
he thinks he knows what's going on.
He wants more samples to compare.
Have I finally found someone else like me?
Just one thing I need to do, for the sake of knowledge.
I don't have a choice.
The change in the ants,
I only tested it with them.
I need the slug to die slow
so it gives me time to observe.
The slug suffers,
definitely.
More salt
.
Yes, the same sound.
It's the same eldritch sound .
My previous experiment confirmed it.
The sound was the same as when I killed the ant.
We will keep a slug alive in the cup just to be safe
and I'll put the rest in the freezer.
Not now, I can't have any distractions now.
At least, I've taken the first step.
Death has a detectable, repeatable sound.
Although there seems to be a difference
in the quality of death.
One thing that keeps me going is Liebenfels,
my online ally.
He's a weird fellow, but he makes me laugh.
I connect with him.
He doesn't call me "Florida Man".
The first time I was confronted with death
was when I was 11 or 12.
I visited my grandparents in North Carolina.
They were some true,
boiled goober peas-eating Southern farmers.
Grandpa took me to the barn and caught one of his chickens.
He held it and told me to kill it.
Some weird rite of passage.
I think he wanted me to break its neck with my hands.
Instead,
I took the little plastic water pistol I had in my pocket
and began to hit its head with it.
The chicken stared at me.
Although it knew the end was near,
its eyes were full of absolute disdain and pity.
I have never ever seen a being look at me that way.
"What the hell are you doing?
You are a complete idiot."
Grandpa ended it quickly with a snap.
This bird can help me further select the changes.
Little by little,
the patterns emerge.
Back to the pet store.
Stressful.
New bird.
I poisoned this one with Draino, slowly every one hour.
I predicted the time of death, I heard the end approaching.
This is enough, birds are expensive.
Turning the remains of the bird into charcoal,
filtering it.
I can hear patterns.
I can see patterns.
I can hear the essence of the bird's demise.
I've compiled my notes and evidence into a new file.
This time with an offer to demonstrate my skills
and any way the experts deem necessary.
Whether it's judging age, predicting illness,
or identifying which organisms have witness to death.
The real question is, do I still want to cure?
Or would it be better to see this as a gift?
This could revolutionize criminal investigations,
the medical world.
The possibilities are endless.
I did it.
I really did it.
Persistence, it's part of my DNA, part of being human.
Ancestrally, we are persistence hunters.
We're almost entirely hairless,
which means better heat dissipation.
We have a lot of sweat glands.
The way we walk on our two legs
is just a succession of controlled falls.
Gravity does half the work, and as a result,
we use up fewer calories.
Imagine being an antelope.
Picture yourself 100 millennia ago,
somewhere in the African steppe.
Sun burns down.
You're just hanging around in the shade of a bush
doing your grazing thing, when you see in the distance,
strange-looking predator.
He's walking on two legs, so he's slow.
As he gets closer, you run off, and you assume you escaped.
Most predators give up after a short while,
but this predator is different.
Here he is again, so you flee,
and after some time you see him approach again.
He returns, and returns, and returns,
and you run, and run, and run.
You're getting hot, so you need to stop,
but he just keeps coming.
You're tired, exhausted.
You're a fast creature but not for very long.
After a while you reach your limits.
Eventually, you just lay there out of energy,
overheated, panting.
This ridiculous hairless ape with his crazy staring eyes
gets closer and closer, eventually just jogging over to you.
Something bites in your skin, opening it.
Your awareness melts away with each drop of blood.
He diminishes, he gorges on your precious proteins,
wallowing in your organs.
It's part of us.
We do not stop.
We do not give up.
I do not give up.
Civilization is a thin layer of ice
over a deep ocean of chaos.
It's 84 Fahrenheit, 28 Celsius inside my house.
As obtaining more ants is unnecessary,
I tried to restart the air conditioning.
There's a technical malfunction.
Temperatures above 26 Celsius
usually trigger an avoidance response in humans,
strangely, not in my case.
I'm sweating heavily but feel no excessive discomfort
besides skin irritation.
Harvesting biomatter.
Maybe some more.
In the US Southwest,
there's a gas station chain with a green dinosaur as a mascot.
I always found this remarkably honest.
Look at our whole industrial civilization,
look at last century's rapid population growth.
All our cheap and abundant fossil fuels,
all our fertilizers, all our medicine, and plastic,
it is made out of beings
that lived millions of years ago.
Our entire way of life is based on harvesting
an unimaginable amount of death.
Death...
energy...
might be the key to understanding my ability.
A new reply from Liebenfels has arrived.
Let's see what he has to say.
"After looking over everything you've told me
and comparing it to my notes,
I've reached the conclusion that this is, without a doubt,
the work of the Queer Lizard People."
What?
This is what he comes back with?
Is he trolling me?
I will report you as abusive!
Asshole!
Dozed off for five minutes.
I had a very vivid dream.
It consisted largely of plunges through abysmal realms
of inexplicably colored twilight
and jarringly symphonic cacophonies.
All of a sudden, I was home in our living room.
My dad was there in his wheelchair.
He's friendly, talking about his coming grandchild.
I realized that I was pregnant.
It was a good feeling.
I couldn't wait any longer to be a mother,
so I grabbed a knife to rip the baby from my stomach.
I have to get back to the very core of this.
I need to trust my perception.
Oh, look.
Gromphadorhina portentosa.
Extraordinary.
Good to hear.
In general,
it seems the sound is getting more and more dense.
Each subtle change has a meaning to me,
but do they interact with each other?
So many sounds have meanings.
So many patterns I can detect.
Sometimes it seems as though it's a language of its own.
Can I learn it?
Haven't slept at all.
Imagine trying to sleep while people chatter near you.
Their voices are just quiet enough
that you can't understand.
As you find yourself concentrating, trying to hear...
It would be less disturbing
if you knew what they were saying.
It is a language.
The more I work, the clearer it becomes.
Still garbled, but not as bad,
like a radio frequency that's off.
I need to masturbate at more regular intervals.
The side effects include vertigo and vomiting.
What's that?
Oh, my boss.
I won't answer it.
Answers bring me peace.
Objects brought together cause variations.
Organisms cause greater variations, but it isn't conscious.
Happened to objects...
...not conscious.
Of course,
the organisms aren't talking,
their cells are.
Every cell in the universe engaged
in communication with every other cell.
This is bigger than anything I ever imagined before.
No wonder it's difficult to be around people
with all those cells talking
to one another at the same time.
Email from HR.
Fired.
A relief.
We are not alone.
The universe is talking.
Something is out there in the emptiness,
in every void we think we see.
Why was humanity excluded?
Should we be happy that we were?
The cells know the language.
The cells react to the conversation.
How beautiful.
My hair's part of it?
Listen to the sound change.
Oh, never mind.
You can't hear.
I should have realized this long ago,
my body is a part of the sound.
The sound of silence, I called it.
It's not silence.
Not at all.
My cells talk to one another.
That is the sound of silence!
What are they saying?
Why can't we understand them?
Are they planning something?
My blood does it too.
All blood must do it.
My blood talks to the cells around it constantly.
What is it saying right now?
Do they know I've learned the secret?
What if they want it kept a secret?
What is the matter with my soundproofing?
Fascinating.
Don't worry.
Maybe our exclusion is not intentional.
Maybe it's for the best.
I'm a perfect example.
Look how the sound has affected me,
tormented me from the first day.
The more I came to understand it,
the more it preyed on my mind.
The universe is not harmonious.
You know that by looking out the window.
Maybe I'm looking at it the wrong way.
Maybe perceiving is the problem.
Our nervous systems filter our sensory input.
Animal consciousness, and that includes human consciousness,
can only take so much.
It was trained over eons,
mutation by mutation to accept only what it can handle.
This creates a bearable universe for us
in which we can live like fruit flies.
We are born, grow, maybe procreate, and die.
Our brain helps us fulfill these tasks.
Makes it possible for us to live in this universe
that is so much more than what we know
by filtering out the unknown depths and horrors.
Keeping us safe in a reality where we can live oblivious
to what is in and around us.
But I tapped into it like a worm crawling onto a highway.
Lack of sleep is getting to me,
giving me thoughts that can't possibly be true.
If only I could shut out the sound.
If only I could stop listening.
A Vice article cited my research.
Top 10 Weirdest Nutjob Conspiracy Theories.
Who is conspiring against whom?
This is an entire new cosmology, for fuck sake.
Don't they get it?
I hate Vice.
It's journalistic cancer.
No, no.
It's not even journalism, it's just cancer.
Decision.
No sleeping.
Intolerable disturbance.
We're made of starstuff, but so is dogshit.
Will they ever talk to me?
Yes.
Maybe they will tell me everything's okay,
perhaps they will tell me how to stop it.
What is so special about dying?
The total depletion of ATP,
the chemical that provides energy to the cells.
No, someone's here again.
Hello, are you home?
I need to concentrate.
Hello?
- Once I understand, everything will be all right.
- Hey, the front door was unlocked.
I brought you some dinner.
Pebbles?
Dedication is the glue of life.
Oh, my God!
Oh my God!
- Shh, I can help you hold back your tears.
Where are the trash bags?
I need absolute concentration to listen to her essence.
Remember it.
She brought me a homemade burrito.
Gender role still force women to emphasize that stuff.
How sad.
We all need to explore new spheres
of possibility.
They help us understand.
Nothing makes it stop.
How can I work when they're always talking?
It's too much.
It's just too much.
Wish I didn't know.
There's a reason we aren't aware of this conversation.
Conversation.
Conversation?
Maybe I was too optimistic, too naiïve.
This is no conversation.
No cosmic chitchat hippie bullshit.
It must be something deeper.
Maybe what I can hear,
what I called a conversation
is an immune response to something.
It's my body's response to some form of intrusion,
subdual, one that started three years ago.
Hey? Are you home?
- It is nice of my mother to drop by.
Just between us,
well,
she could have given me a heads up.
Ah, the conversation.
Yes, yes, it's something else.
I can hear a form of cellular distress.
Be quiet mother.
Something is out there... ...in there... all around.
I can feel it.
This being lurking,
just beyond my comprehension.
The cells are hurting.
They respond to an outside force.
And the force...
something vast and powerful,
far from our own realm, lurking out
in that indescribable void among the dimensions.
Does it feast on me?
Feast on all of us?
Yes.
I'm not even a worm compared to it.
It is like a giant sea creature
and I'm merely a bacterium that got in his path.
It's all around me.
Absorbing me, changing me.
I can hear it all.
Am I as delusional as Liebenfels
and all the other trolls out there?
I am without knowledge or luster or name.
All I can focus on is this sound.
This hideous sound it's emanating.
Amazon delivery guy.
You remind me of my dad.
It might be preposterous of me, but maybe I was chosen.
Yes!
That explains everything.
Chosen by a being older than space and time.
Are my experiments a kind of sacrifice to it?
Is that why I needed to go so far to understand?
Does it enjoy me killing?
Am I pleasing it?
Did it make me, slowly over the years, become what I am?
From that very first moment in the lab, did I summon it?
Did it know this day, today, would eventually come?
I need to upload my remaining findings for all to understand.
I need to come to terms with my place in the universe.
A place that it gave me and the sacrifice it demands.
Is it God?
I don't know...
but it is my god.
What does it want?
What is it asking me to do?
Leap of courage? Leap of faith?
What offering will make this imbalance end?
How can I empty space and time?
I finally understand.
That last and final moment is yours.
That agony is your triumph.
I just wish it wasn't so loud.
Geez, what's with the AC?
They're working on it.
We should get hazard pay.
What do you think about this reference file case?
Reference what?
Reference file case.
It's high priority for the chief.
Huh?
- Yes, the 1087 two days ago on West 8th Street.
Yes.
A block over from Lighthouse of Deliverance.
From what the neighbors said, it sounds pretty cut and dry.
It gave me the creeps.
- Why have they been calling it the reference file case anyway?
Because of the video files.
That's what the guy named it.
I'm getting coffee.
You want any?
Oh, sure.
While you're at it, get me some Boston creams?
Yes, sure.
Oh, wow.
You're going to watch it?
No spoilers, start from the beginning.