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  Missionary

  Copyright 2014 Bull Garlington

  “I’m not a big scifi geek.”

  You can’t imagine how exasperating it is to explain that. Here I am literally surrounded by the most impressive telescopic equipment on earth, filtering data through a complex array of spectrums and this noob wants to talk to me about Ender’s Game.

  “You’re kidding me—“ she slow twirls and takes in the massive evil-genius lab. “You, like, live in scifi world.”

  “No, I, like, don’t. I live in Science world. Real science, not space alien-meets-Matrix crap.”

  “The Matrix was so cool.”

  Jesus Christ.

  I can’t do this shit by myself. I need an assistant. I need twelve assistants. I need a monastery of math-freak Jesuits who will shut up and cross multiply. But I work for a university, there’s a shortage, and I get a marketing major. I get Cindy.

  Our telescope is on a mountaintop in New Mexico, in the dry part of New Mexico, where nothing ever happens—no rain, no clouds, no nothing. I have 24/7 unobstructed access to the universe and I use it. 1100 Miles east in a university basement in Springfield, surrounded by teraflop processing banks and bad lighting, I hold court at a metal desk circa 1950s crewcut design school and crunch numbers. Reams and reams of numbers. I am an astronomer.

  “I am an astronomer.”

  “OMG—do mine!”

  I will murder her. I will stuff her teensy body into a crevice between the boiler and the furnace. No one will ever find her.

  “I don’t do horoscopes, I—“

  “Ohemgee--I’m just fucking with you.”

  She morphs from the spunky cheerleader who walked into the room with an assignment letter in hand into a calm, cool . . . uh . . .

  “I minor in marketing. I’m from the math department. Gee a el, noob.”

  I look at the letter and see that she is indeed a mathematics major with a marketing minor and I’m a dick.

  “Aren’t preconceptions killer?” She sips her mocha-choke-ya-latte and mock glares at me over the rim.

  Two weeks later, we’re tight. She’s smarter than me by something like an order of magnitude. All I have on her is experience and age. And I’m her boss--sort of. Her mind is like some kind of slick ice tunnel. Anything that gets near it just slips in and disappears. She’s a bottomless pit of data absorption. And she can crunch. We’re so far ahead I’m doctoring the reports so the committee that keeps me in the basement won’t think I’m actually doctoring the reports and fire me.

  However, Cindy is 15. She’s part of an outreach program from Chicago that finds hyper-intelligent local science whizzes and puts them into a professional environment in the hopes that we can somehow stem the national hemorrhage of brainiacs in the near future if we only harness the raw elemental power of 15 year old hyper genius cheerleaders.

  So I have Cindy and Cindy has an iPhone with hello kitty in pink jewels on the back. Cindy listens to Japanese hyper-punk-pop. Cindy crunches data, IMs 7,000 people, and bounces. Simultaneously.

  So two weeks later and we’re tight and I’m going over the numbers from a week previous. We’re analyzing pure noise listening for analog information signifier events. I say listening but we actually read raw data; and I say analog blah blah blah but what I mean is blips. We take the ambient background chatter of the universe, turn it into numbers, and look for sequences and repeats. Well we don’t. The massive banks of processors in the room next to us do. If one of them catches a sequence, it sends it into a verification chain and puts itself into standby. If we actually get a hit, the whole room freezes for ten minutes then busts out into an entirely new mode and ransacks the celestial ‘hood where the signal came from. This has happened exactly once—1977--and though a handful of scientists got really crunk to celebrate, no money obtained and the program tanked.

  We’re down there listening to Cindy’s insane punk-house-thud music when she looks over my shoulder and says “Dude.”

  Three of the processors in the other room have stopped. As we’re staring through the clear plexi window into the air-conditioned data banks. An entire row shuts down domino style—then the room freezes.

  Cindy says, “Bingo,” real quiet.

  Fourteen pages in we find it: 5 6 4 3 5 4 3 U 7 5 7 repeated 21 times. I can’t believe it. Has to be a mistake. We’re talking about how to run verification and we’re both very exited, talking fast, when the processors wake up and start going door to door in the ring nebula. Printouts pile up on the cheap gray carpet.

  Sometime around noon we get our first translation from pure data. The sequence of numbers becomes blips, clicks, hot metal sounds. Then we run it again with a filter.

  Cindy’s eyes nearly pop out of her head.

  “OMG! Dude, that’s a song!”

  “Um, I don’t think so. I’d be willing to call it a string of tonally related pulse tones--”

  “Here on earth we call that a song, astro boy!”

  Just for fun, when I was a kid, I’d spell out the major tones of hit songs and jingles. I had a headful of them. But I’m tone deaf and as much as I can tell you that the Plop Plop Fizz Fizz Alka Seltzer commercial is a string of perfect fifths, I couldn’t sing it to you in a million years: I have amusia: the freakish inability to hear music. To me, Beethoven’s 5th sounds like an avalanche of garbage cans. With cats.

  The closest I get to music is the whir of cooling fans, the tiny whine of a hard disk, and the crunchy white noise of deep space.

  But the Tone. It’s not just a song. It’s a jingle. A ditty. It’s a cross between the Jeopardy theme and a lost Barry Manilow tune.

  “It’s kind of like the theme song from Scrubs,” she says.

  “Reminds me of dial-up.”

  “You’re retarded.”

  “Maybe it’s a cosmic ringtone.”

  “No shit!“ Cindy has her iPhone out in a second and records the sound. “I’m putting it on Facebook!”

  “Cindy! No way; we have to verify it. Seriously.”

  “For what? It’s not like its gonna hurt anybody. Besides—it’s a perfect pop song. We’ll be famous!”

  “No--we’re not allowed to release any data, Cindy.”

  “Dude! Somebody out there is singing to us!”

  “We don’t know that.”

  She sticks her iPhone in my face.

  “Listen!” and she hums along with the Tone, harmonizes with it like a 14-year old pop star. I can tell the tones mesh harmoniously. Still sounds like a fax machine.

  “Didn’t you see Close Encounters?”

  She puts it on Facebook anyway and I give her the hairy eyeball but my heart’s not in it.

  I have to tell the board. I play them the song and the Big Guy nods along, looks up, bemused, and says “Catchy.”

  “Hey, wait a minute,” Lisa Harper pulls out her phone. “My daughter bluetoothed me a ringtone—“ she holds up her phone. It plays the Tone. As we listen the big guy’s eye grows hair.

  “Contain it.”

  They let Cindy go, tell her to scrub the ring-tone off her iPhone, but the damage is done. The Tone goes internet-dancing-baby. I hear it on everything from cell phones to dog food commercials. A friend calls: “Listen to this!” and plays a crazy-frog rendition off his iPod. I get into the elevator at work and it floats down out of the pinholes in the ceiling. I recognize the values. I could even notate the thing. I can’t hum it for the life of me.

  I get to the basement and the Air Force is packing my data. Box after box of magnetic tape and disks. The Big Guy catches me before I explode and he explains that the government is very concerned about the signal and they’ve erased all recordings of 5643543U757 from the lab. I quit on the spot; take my vacation time.

  Puerto
Rico is nice and sunny. Beats the hell out of Springfield in January and I’m loving my little retreat until I go to get groceries. The highway’s empty. I get to the town and the streets are choked with people. Must be carnivale. They’re all dancing. Speakers on top of cars are blaring a latino house thing I recognize right away.

  People are grooving to it, men, women, and children.

  Men. Women. Children.

  I slow down and take it in. It’s not just 24-hour party people and slackers. It’s grandmas and toddlers. They’re all crammed together in the street rocking out, screaming with joy, grinning ear to ear.

  I creep the jeep around the corner to the market and fill up my small basket. I leave a 10 spot under a ceramic avocado since no one is there to take my money.

  Two days later I’m out of tequila and cigars so I hop in the jeep, flip on the tunes. The Tone is on every station.

  In the town, the people are still dancing. Some of the toddlers are sleeping, huddled in a doorway, or sprawled on the tarmac. The crowd is dancing in slow motion though the house version is still blaring like a syncopated jet engine.

  As I stare, a thin elderly woman sinks to the ground, slipping between the sweat stained revelers. Through the thicket of their dirty, skinny legs, I see her hand reach for someone’s ankle, then it’s snatched away.

  I drive into the main part of town and it’s the same everywhere. As I get close to the Mall, I can smell them, a massive, moist fog of ammonia. There must be 10,000 people. I drive up to them like I’m on safari—weary and exhilarated--but I can’t get close.

  I park up on a hill near the big Statue of Jesus with a pair of binoculars and bag of potato chips and a warm beer. Everybody’s jumping up and down in their own shit, hypnotized by a hit song from the ring nebula. Hell of a way for the world to end.

  The sun sprays a fan of mango and cantaloupe across the sky and I turn on the radio for the hell of it, even though I know exactly what they’re playing. I think about the song. I think about Cindy—I can almost hear her. OMG, dude! Mind like an ice tunnel, I swear.

  I’m unconsciously measuring the intervals and tapping along with the Tone, my pencil bouncing on the steering wheel, staring down into the dancers at the mall. Maybe I could find a way to play the exact opposite notes, cancel it out, turn it all into white noise and maybe save some people. It seems like such a brilliant idea, so perfect and I really listen to the notes, the intervals. Though I’m unable to hear the color of it, the music, I measure, and I listen, and I tap tap tap along . . . tap tap tap . . . tap tap tap . . .

  ###

  About the Author

  Bull Garlington is an author and syndicated humor columnist whose work appears in various literary magazines, including Slab, Bathhouse, and the Dead Mule School of Southern Literature. He was the humor columnist for Chicago Parenting, New York Parenting, Michiana Parent, Tulsa Parent, Birmingham Parent, and Carolina Parent. He is co-author of the popular foodie compendium, The Beat Cop’s Guide to Chicago Eats. Garlington’s features have appeared in newspapers and magazines across the nation since 1989; he won the Parenting Media Association’s Silver Award for best humor article in 2012. His book, Death by Children, was a 2013 book of the year finalist for the Midwest Publishers Association, and was named 2013 Humor Book of the Year by the prestigious Industry standard, ForeWard Reviews.

  Other books by this author

  Please visit your favorite ebook retailer to discover other short stories by Bull Garlington:

  Bullfighter

  Largemouth Bass

  Many Boats on the Night Ocean

  Reliquary

  Gone

  Jenny’s Parents Are Cool

  Out

  Birdhouse

  Lucky Jim

  Chaste

  Connect with Bull Garlington

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