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Creating a Radio |
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Dismantling the vocal cords takes a decade, reforming them another one. When you're done, you've got a hard mass of flesh that was once capable of oscillating 440 times per second crystallized into a different kind of oscillator. The vagus nerve becomes a switch, controlling this new thing hanging in your albatross throat. Other parts are necessary. Try stomach as transformer, capillaries as radio wire. Rearrange bundles of nerves, places axons in specific places. Turn wild dendrites into ninety degree angles, solid copper conduits. Your body was wired for life but life wasn't what you were given, so wire yourself for this new kind of existence instead. Everything is made of something else so change yourself into what you need to be. * For decades there's nothing to hear and then there is a change in the static, a shortening or lengthening of radio waves. You detect -- What, exactly? Not brothers, but sisters. It takes a long time to figure this out because you never imagined the possibility that you could come back as a woman, that the form next to you could be a bitch instead of a bastard. You don't what to say to a woman, to these two women who are you too, so you say nothing and wait them out instead. They're gone in a moment, just a flash of strange life in a century of strange times. * It's exhausting, isn't it? Transmitting over such great distances, often knowing that there is no one listening? Two brothers are born somewhere out in America and you call out but can't be sure if you're heard, if anyone understands you. The theoretical maximum distance of a radio wave comes into play but you can't do the math. You've lived a hundred years but you're still barely more than an infant, your life experience limited by what you hear and see from within your jar, the signals you capture in your left ear. Still, you have learned a lot, lessons in anatomy and physics and other sciences that have helped you become what you have become. It was scientists who cared for you first and who will care for your last. You have seen friendship and loyalty, betrayal and murder. You have been owned and sold, bartered for and stole. You have seen the look of fascination in a man's peering eyes and the look of disgust in a woman's. You have seen, over and over again, the machinations of sex and love written across the faces of the men who have owned you. * For a power source, first try need. Try want. Try hunger and pain and loneliness. If that fails, then remember that electricity can be generated by any kind of turbine. Even the slowest turning object generates power. Try spinning in your jar for months, for years, making slows turns in the formaldehyde and eventually building up a charge. Be static energy, or, better yet, be potential. Finally, if all else fails, try blood, try your brother's blood still circulating in your veins. When electricity begins to flow, transmit messages about the inevitability of reincarnation and the importance of sacrifice. Continue to transmit a plan of action, a way upwards and outwards, up and out of this glass prison. The lack of love put you in this jar and only its presence will finally free you. |
1996 © 2008 |
One hundred years pass in the jar and now you're less boy and more radio. Send your first tone across a decade of peace, evolve your signal into the short long short of Morse code during a decade of war. For your signaler, try tapping your finger against the walls of your glass prison.