Laser cutters have a hypnotic quality to them. A dot of light moves over acrylic glass, parting the material by its mere presence, while flames billow beneath it as the vaporized plastic burns. If it weren't for the deafening noise of the fan, it could almost be called meditative. I watch in silence for a few minutes as thousands of watts' worth of cohesive light sublimate carefully engineered long-chain molecules and think about how ludicrous it is that this kind of manufacturing has become commonplace enough that the dingy makerspace I frequent can afford it.
From the corner of my eye, I see a figure approaching. Carl is easy to recognize. Makerspaces attract oddballs, and even among those, he stands out: half banker, half occultist, both halves united by an overwhelming drive to optimize. He schedules his daily life, and everything idle — or in fact, even slightly suboptimal — gets cut. It's one of the reasons why I can't say I like him.
I nod in greeting, and he nods back, standing beside me as the machine runs its course. Another minute, and its done: a new casing for some electronics I've been tinkering with.
"It's yours," I say as I pack up my stuff. He uses the makerspace rarely, mostly to lasercut one of the many wooden amulets that hang around his wrists, hiding halfway under a suit jacket's sleeves.
"I'm not here to use the cutter," he says. "I'm here to make you an offer."
I tense up. That's the second reason I don't like him. He asks for favours, but never calls them that; they're always "offers". He's never approached me before, but I've seen it happen a few times. Somehow, he manages to convince everyone that they want to work for him.
"I'm... a bit busy at the moment," I say slowly, though nothing could be further from the truth. As a perpetual college student, I have as much free time as I need.
Carl just smiles. His teeth look like a toothpaste commercial, and he's probably put in the hours to make them look like it. "You'll want in on this, believe me. I'll buy you a coffee."
I inhale. I really, really didn't want to get roped into this, but it would be rude to say no, and I could really go for a coffee right now. "Alright, Carl. I'll listen, but I'm not promising anything."
The café is exactly what I would have expected from Carl. Everything is new, but the coffee is marketed as "artisanal", which is why the interior design pretends at being ancient. It's supremely hipster, and I feel out of place in a t-shirt and baggy cargo pants. On the other hand, the coffee is sublime. I realize that Carl probably knows I can appreciate that, and I sigh. He's waiting as I drink, letting me set the pace, so that it doesn't seem as if he's asking me for a favor. "Alright," I say. "Start your spiel."
"Well," he says. "There's two mindsets I'm known for, in the circles we both move in. First, I believe that money equals leverage, and am therefore trying to make money."
"In which case this is about an idea for a start-up."
Carl smiles. "This is about my other interest."
"Something esoteric." I bite back a more rude assessment.
"Yes. Well, you've noticed those," he says, gesturing to the lasercut precision talismans at his wrists. "You probably think I believe in healing crystals and homeopathy, but that's not what I'm about. I'm trawling the occult for something with real substance, and so far, nothing has thoroughly convinced me."
"What're the talismans for, then, if you don't believe in them?"
"It's an experiment. I'm measuring whether they have an effect, and so far, they haven't. Every few weeks, I swap them out for different designs. It's a long shot, but the cost is negligible," he says, shrugging.
I frown. This explanation is closer to my worldview than what I would have expected from Carl. He's probably just buttering me up.
"Anyway," he continues, "let's get to the point. I called you here for something which I know you have an interest in. Signal intelligence."
"Signal intelligence," I repeat, flatly. "You know it's not about contacting aliens?"
He smiles. "I've received a signal, but I have no clue what it means. It should be broadcasting even now, which means receiving it would be a full-time activity for me. I assume you could rig up some hardware to log it with a computer, and you should have the cryptographic chops to decode it."
I shake my head. "Back up a second here. I assume you mean you're receiving electromagnetic waves on some kind of antenna. Have you been getting into amateur radio?"
"Not at all. I've been meditating."
I try to think of a reply to get this conversation back on a sensible track, and fail utterly.
"I think it's an electromagnetic wave anyway," he continues. "Have you heard of the Earth's resonance frequency?"
"Schumann resonance," I correct him. "Only crackpots call it the Earth's resonance frequency. It's a natural phenomenon, completely explainable, and it doesn't interfere with human brains at all."
"As far as anyone knows," he says. "The brain is a complex electrical circuit. What if it was coincidentally attuned it to a resonance frequency of eight Hz? Like a transistor radio, it would pick the Schumann resonance waves right out of the air."
I shake my head. "Accepting that supposition, the electrical fields in your brain would now be oscillating at eight Hz, with a tiny amplitude that is essentially noise and would, in all likelihood, get drowned out by all the other noise in there. I find it hard to accept that this would translate to anything you could consciously experience."
"I'm not done there. When you're doing meditation with a visual object — you're not looking at something, just imagining it — that object begins to vibrate in some stages. In the fourth Samatha Jhana, you can visualize extremely complex objects. When I use a certain geometry, the vibration causes parts of the geometry to overlap. Those overlaps are aperiodic, and I believe they encode the signal."
I nod slowly. He's obviously nuts, but I know where he's trying to go with this. "And the object vibrates at..."
"Eight Hz," he says, smiling widely. "7.5 Hz, to be more precise. That figure is an average over about an hour, by the way. I think I could get a few more significant digits out of my measurements, but it doesn't really matter."
He's grinning like a child, and I realize he fully believes what he's trying to sell me.
"So you haven't set up an antenna at all," I say.
"No. I did some quick calculations, and a circuit capable of receiving 8 Hz would need an absurd coil and a giant antenna."
"There are some tricks to get around that problem. It's all done electronically these days," I say.
His smile widens. "The guys at the makerspace told me you're an expert. So, how about it?"
"What's in it for me?" I ask.
"Well," he says, hesitating.
"Eighty dollars an hour," I say. "The equipment I'll be using is worth a few thousand dollars alone, not to speak of my skills. With the coffee you just bought me, I don't believe you don't have the money."
He sighs. "No, that's not... I thought you would be more interested."
"Do you want me to be honest?"
He nods.
"I think you're deluded. Lasercutting your amulets and empirically testing them is a cute shtick, but all it amounts to is that you're measuring out your doses of snake oil yourself. Admirable, but it's still stupid to keep drinking it. And given the money at your disposal, it's a bit pathetic that you're trying to guilt-trip me into helping you for free."
"Alright," he says. "I'll put my money where my mouth is. If, after doing the experiments I propose, you still think that there's nothing there, I'll pay you double of what you're asking. But at that point, you leave the project and never touch it again. If there is something, you get nothing, but I keep you on board, which means a share of the profits."
"You're pretty sure that there's money in it."
He looks me straight in the eyes. "If I were sure, I wouldn't need to ask you. But on the off chance that there is an unknown message floating on the aether that any human brain can pick up, there's bound to be a way to make absurd amounts of money off it.
"Also," he continues, "you're trying to play it cool, but you're itching with curiosity. And only I can provide the data to scratch that itch. You're apprehensive, because everyone always cooperates with me, and you think that's because I'm a skilled manipulator. The truth is more simple. I'm just good at finding people who would be interested anyway. And while you're not searching for magic — not like I'm searching, not seriously — the possibility is getting to you. You'd like nothing more than to disprove my claims."
I hit the button, and a dot starts tracing a waveform on the oscilloscope emulator.
"Wow," Carl says. "You're sure that's the Schumann frequency? I heard it isn't easy to measure."
"Completely," I say. "Why do you think you're paying me a hundred and sixty dollars per hour? It's because I'm good, and my equipment is even better. What about you? Do you need to light some special candles or something?"
Carl folds his legs on my couch and closes his eyes. The mess around him doesn't seem to bother him at all.
I shake my head. When I went to the makerspace this morning, I hadn't expected the day to end with Carl on my couch, but there we are, settling in for a one-hour-measuring session of the Schumann resonance, me with my EMF, him with his brain. It's surreal in more than one way.
The minutes tick by. I while away the time assembling the case I had cut in the morning; after all, my computer does the hard work of logging the signal for me. Carl doesn't have it quite as easy. Every few minutes, he opens his eyes, scribbles furiously on a notepad, and closes them again. Peeking at his notes, I have no idea what I'm seeing. It certainly isn't the Latin alphabet, and none other that I would recognize.
I shake my head, smiling slightly. Were he anyone else, I wouldn't even entertain the notion of a private alphabet. With Carl, anything is possible.
"What are those symbols?" I ask him an hour later.
"I found them in an old book," he said. "There's a library in Amsterdam which recently scanned a collection of several thousand occult manuscripts and put them on the Internet for free."
"Is that what tax money gets used for in the Netherlands?"
"The library got the means through a private donation by Dan Brown."
I break out in laughter, and Carl joins in. "Dan Brown? Seriously?"
"Of all people," Carl confirms. "Anyway, most of those books are bullshit, but there was a real diamond among the rough."
"How do you judge the, ah, veracity of an occult manuscript?"
"Well, if it's wishy-washy bullshit, it's out. I'm not looking for vague woo, I'm looking for clear, step-by-step instructions. Something I can try to replicate."
I nod. Carl has a sensible approach to occultism, and that's a sentence I never thought I would think. "So what instruction are those symbols for? Summoning a demon?"
Carl chuckles. "Those are part of the geometry I was talking about, the one that allows me to receive the signal. The signal is easiest to write down in this form. The whole geometry is... I can't even begin to describe it, and the author of the book was also at a bit of a loss. Somehow, while I'm meditating, it's possible to keep it straight."
"So you're saying you got the instructions to receive this signal out of an honest-to-goodness occult manuscript and mastered them in a few weeks."
"Far from it. From what I understand, it's a life's work to actually come far enough to understand the signal. The author had been working at it for several decades, and his notes weren't complete."
"Decades of meditation?"
"Well, you see, the bit rate of an 8 Hz signal is low, which means that the signal transmits a symbol every few minutes. The complete string of symbols apparently takes a few years before it repeats. Given that no one can meditate around the clock, and you have to take breaks to write down your notes, it's expected to take a few decades before all the holes in the transcript can be filled."
"Which is why you thought about doing it with a computer, automating the process."
"Exactly. Given that I had neither the equipment nor the expertise, I went to you."
I shake my head. "I don't see it. What signal would be worth wasting your whole life meditating for?"
Carl shrugs. "There's no verified source on the signal's contents. The leading opinion, however, is that it contains knowledge of the past, the future, and the key to divinity."
"Divinity," I say flatly.
"Well, it would explain Buddha, and maybe even Jesus."
"You think Siddhartha Gautama contemplated the signal, which was somehow already floating through the aether two thousand six hundred years ago, and became divine."
Carl shrugs again. "I wouldn't say I believe it. I think the possibility is vanishingly small. Yet the possible expected value nears infinite, and therefore, it's worth pursuing."
"Pascal's wager. That ancient argument is so full of holes."
Carl smiles. "Unlike Pascal, I don't need to postulate heaven. The evidence for the signal is there, the instructions clear. I already knew how to meditate, you already knew how to analyze signals. We're looking at mere days of work, at least to prove that there's something there."
For the first time, his enthusiasm is infectious. The idea is as ridiculous as it ever was, but if it was true...
The absurd hypothetical would become very real. I would have to ask myself who was sending the signal, and I could already imagine what Carl's literature had to say on the matter. Secret government experiments, Atlantis, the Illuminati, aliens, even demons. And at that point, Carl's literature would be the the only source available to us.
A shiver runs down my spine. I continue working.
In my dreams, I see the symbols. First, they appear only sporadically, but the more I work on Carl's notes and the manuscript in my attempts to separate signal from noise, the more clear the symbols become. Finally, I realize that I am continuing to work on the problem while asleep, and some aspects of it make more sense in my dreams.
A week later, we're sitting in the same café again. The coffee is as good as ever, but I can't relax and enjoy it. Ever since I got the first glimpses of the signal a few days ago, I've worked around the clock, taking only short naps. The lack of sleep is taking its toll on me.
"It's there," I say. "Took me three days to make sure, but the signal is there without a doubt."
Carl nods.
"That's it?" I ask. "There's a signal in the Schumann resonance. I've verified it with your meditation notes, and it checks out, which means humans can receive ELF signals by meditating. It's groundbreaking, and you just nod?"
Carl smiles. "I'm just not that surprised. I knew my research would pay off some day."
"So what's next? Are you going to seek venture capital? Apply for a few patents?"
Carl laughs. "No need to rush. First, we need to find out more about the signal, until we know that it's safe to go public with this."
"What do you mean, safe?"
"You've probably asked yourself where the signal comes from. A similarly interesting question is who receives it. Both of those groups, whoever they are, would probably not take kindly to someone publishing their best-held secret. I think you'll agree that it's best to keep the signal on the down-low until we know more."
One symbol every few minutes. All in all, about a hundred thousand symbols per year. If Carl's source is correct and the message loops once every few years, that means the message consists of several hundred thousand characters, which equals a medium-sized book, assuming that the symbols have an information density comparable to letters in the English language.
I toss the calculation around in my head as I lie in bed. Carl's source mentioned that the message would only be understandable once it's known in full. I can see it; while standard cryptographical methods might yield results on far shorter texts, nothing indicates that we're dealing with a normal encrypted text. If our luck is bad, it might be like the Voynich Manuscript: impossible to translate because there is no frame of reference for the language and concepts used.
On the screen, another symbol ticks by. Having a glowing display right at my bedside is probably messing with my sleep schedule, but I want to keep an eye on it. Though the resolution of the glyphs leaves a lot to be desired, they seem almost alive. The interlocking lines seem to move when I stare at them for long enough, and in the stream of symbols, I catch glimpses of something else. Right at the edge of sleep, when my breathing is slow and even, I feel like I can almost imagine the complete geometry.
I'm far from the fourth Samatha Jhana, whatever that is. I've never even tried to meditate, and I don't particularly want to. I want to stay out of the occult side of this and focus on what can actually be measured, keeping Carl grounded. Yet it all seems so close sometimes.
I'm dreaming. I haven't even noticed the transition, but I am no longer in my bed. Rather, I am floating in a void with the colour and texture of old parchment. The glyphs are falling through the air, but my first thought isn't of the Matrix. My first thought is of the display of my computer, on which the glyphs are scrolling by even now.
Then, I see it. It's sudden, an epiphany, an understanding that is atomic in nature. Try as I might, I couldn't divide it into smaller parts, and I know that I will not grasp it once I wake up. Yet it makes undeniable sense; its presence is absolute.
The full geometry, coiling through itself, expands infinitely before me, though it is contained within an infinitesimal point. I've always scoffed at the way Lovecraft used the term "non-euclidean" as a descriptor for the unnatural; after all, hyperbolic and elliptic geometries do appear in nature. Seeing this, however, no other word than non-euclidean could suffice to describe how strange it is. The construct doesn't seem as though it belongs within a human brain, yet there it is.
The atmosphere shifts, and all of a sudden, everything is wrong. I feel it in the ink seeping through the parchment skin of the universe and in the Schumann waves thrumming through my brain. The construct dilates and a presence expands within it. My imagination, stretched to its limits already, refuses to give the thing forming within the construct a visual representation. Rather, I can feel its arrival as a bare concept, its presence expanding within the dream. Though it has nothing I would classify as an appendage, I can feel it reach for me, and I know that I cannot keep it from touching me.
Fear. It's absolute, all-encompassing, seeping through the parchment in blacks so dark as to be violet, finding its way into my veins —
and I wake up, a hand shaking my shoulder, a flashlight blinding my blinking eyes.
I realize I'm screaming, and shut my mouth.
"Are you alright, miss?"
"Yes," I answer. "Just a nightmare."
"Must have been a hell of a nightmare," the man says, and I realize I don't recognize his voice.
"Who are you, and what are you doing in my apartment?"
"Police. Your neighbours called us because you've been screaming for ten minutes straight in the middle of the night. You didn't answer the door, so we assumed you were in distress. Bad trip, huh?"
"I don't take drugs. Never have."
"What's that, then?" The police officer holds a small bag in front of my eyes. I squint at what seems to be two small, light pink pills.
"What's that?"
"You tell me. If you don't, the lab will, though it will take a few days."
"I've never seen those pills in my life." I shake my head. Everything is happening way too fast. "Am I under arrest?"
"Depends on the lab results. In all likelihood, the dose in those two pills falls under 'personal use', which means you're off the hook." The officer shrugs. "We would still be interested in knowing about your dealer, of course, but you're a small fish."
I shake my head. "I don't have a dealer, and those pills aren't mine."
"Figures. Well, you seem sober enough. Will you get through the night okay?"
I nod, though I'm still shaky.
"You'll hear from us. Good night."
"What the utter fuck does that mean?"
Carl takes a deep breath. "It's a warning."
"Someone slipped me drugs while I was sleeping. They broke into my apartment to do that, and did it well enough to leave no traces except for a small bag of drugs to frame me. Also, they shut off my computer. What the fuck kind of warning is that, Carl?"
"The bag was small enough that you're not facing criminal charges. There are two ways to interpret that: The first is that they don't want a court case because they do not want to draw attention to what they did. The second is that they are completely aware of how badly they could have ruined your life, and made it as close as possible to make sure you understand, too. They shut off your computer to make sure you know why they were there."
"Well, who the fuck are your ominous 'they', then?"
"Cultists, obviously."
"Like in a bad horror movie? Sacrificing goats on the full moon and everything?"
"It's a catch-all term for those who belong to secretive occult organizations. I have no clue whether these particular ones sacrifice goats or anything else. However, I'd be willing to bet that they have a penchant for meditating."
I take a deep breath. My anger at getting framed is dying down, and I don't like the fear beneath. "Who are they? How do they know about me? What do we do next?"
"I can't be sure who they are, but I believe they are the group I've been researching for a few days. In my search for the origins of the signal, I've found vague hints regarding a cult which is devoted to studying the signal. They meditate all day in an attempt to decode it, and their upper members claim that they understand the signal in its entirety. I doubt that, by the way. As to how they know about you... maybe I wasn't as discreet in my research as I thought. Once they knew about me, finding out about you would have been a simple matter of asking around. Their way of telling us that they're onto us is a message in and of itself. It appears that they have no problem with my part of the project, they just want to stop yours."
"Which means?"
"Stop recording the signal. I'll pay you generously for your time. Knowing that the signal is real is more than worth the money, even if I cannot use a computer to record it."
"And that's it?"
Carl shrugs. "I'll just do it the old-fashioned way. They won't have a problem with that. Maybe I'll even join them, if I think it's worth it."
"Join a cult?" I shake my head. "And you had almost convinced me that you were a reasonable guy. They'll brainwash you, until you think it's a good idea to hasten the coming of Azathoth."
Carl grins. "You know me. I'll pass the cult's initiation with flying colours, go mad as quickly as possible, and if there are any elder gods to summon, I'll summon them on a strict schedule and with the most efficient possible use of sacrificial goats."
I can't smile. "You... I've told you of the dream I had. What if the signal really is—"
"Don't say it. You got slipped some experimental drugs. You should probably move, and you'll certainly need to delete that program from your computer, but then you'll be fine."
"So you're saying I should just go and be a muggle again?"
"Exactly." Carl isn't smiling anymore. "I'm as ready as I can be to face this, but you aren't. You probably won't see me again, but if everything goes as planned, I might make the headlines in a few decades. Until then, I hope you'll be content with a normal life."
"I guess I'll have to."
I won't.
He gave me the quest; the cultists broke in and drugged me; he decided that I wasn't ready to continue. I don't like being the passive one. I certainly don't like when others presume what I'm capable of. What I like least of all is leaving my burning curiosity unsatisfied. There's a signal floating through the aether, and it's intriguing enough that an entire cult was founded on its presence. I agree with Carl's assumption that the leaders of the cult probably don't understand the signal. Claiming to do so gives them leverage over the members of their cult, which explains why they want to keep its true contents under wraps.
Threatening me to keep that information under wraps is a stupid idea. If they lose track of me and I start researching the signal again, they have no way of knowing. I have all the information I need to do so.
I smile to myself. There's an even bigger hole in their plan: what will they do if I let that information go public? At that point, there's no incentive to kill me anymore. They will already have failed to keep the status quo, and killing me is unlikely to help them in facing the new situation. What were they thinking when they drugged me? Perhaps they thought a bad trip would convince me of their strange religion.
A shiver runs over my spine at the thought. I remember only fragments of the dream. Even so, it was easily the strangest I ever had, and I cannot shake the lingering fear that, perhaps, the signal does have its origins in the supernatural.
There's only one way to find out. I check the instructions I have prepared one last time. They're simple enough; anyone with the necessary hardware should be able to receive the signal using the code I've provided. I know more than a few will try it. A few hundred, at least.
I hit the upload button.
Author's Note: For more information on the vibrations (allegedly) experienced during certain types of meditation, read Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha by Daniel Ingram. The Schumann Resonance and the digitization of the Ritman Library's occult collection are real, as are laser cutters. Everything else mentioned in the story is purely fictional. Thank you for reading.