The Radio Tower by Valentin Wasserman
The man in front of me was the most typical secretary I had ever seen. His receding hairline showing off his milky white skin punctuated by the bags under his eyes which were nearly poking out from beneath his glasses. You could almost taste the boring conversations you could only have with such an individual.
The room, however, was more imposing. Blank concrete walls highlighted by blue light. It almost felt like I was inside of a prison. In a way, I was. Â
“Mr. Sinclaire will see you now,” the tired and scratchy voice of the secretary rang out.
I had almost forgotten what he sounded like within the 30 minutes that I had been waiting. My numb limbs lifted themselves off the bleak chair, and I entered a doorway that had opened itself for me. Â
I walked through and entered an office. It was marvelous compared to what I had seen of the facility so far. A big glass table with paperwork strewn about all over its surface was standing in the middle of the room. It was outlined by a golden carpet on the floor that showed intricate depictions of the sun and moon. The wall behind the table was made of glass and allowed a full view of the empty black void behind it. The remaining walls, made from the same marble, were intermittently covered by paintings depicting landscapes or pictures of what I assumed Mr. Sinclaire shaking the hand of government officials. What really surprised me was the lack of a computer on the table. I had heard that Mr. Sinclaire was eccentric to a degree, but I had assumed to oversee this outpost he would need an overview of all the incoming and outgoing data at all times. I made a mental note.Â
Sitting on an unremarkable chair was Mr. Sinclaire himself. He was as imposing as the entire outpost with his neat, burgundy suit with a black tie. His gray hair was combed back in such a way that you could still see parts of it fringing on the back of his head. His jet-black eyes were as reflective as the void behind him. When I saw that, I understood why he had no computer: He had taken on the extremely risky blackout procedure. It allowed an individual to connect to a network and visualize all data in a way that helped the mind comprehend it faster. He was probably working even right now. Sadly, this procedure has a high chance of blinding the individual and it seemed like Mr. Sinclaire was a victim of that side effect. I tried not to let any sympathy or pity shine through my demeanor as I stepped towards the table. Â
Mr. Sinclaire seemed to be watching me with a predatory smile that still reflected respect. He knew who I was, after all. “The inquisitor, I assume?”Â
He had a surprisingly soft voice that didn’t fit with the rest of his person.Â
“Yes, but I’d rather you call me Tremont.”Â
“Ah, all right, Mr. Tremont. I am very pleased to welcome you on outpost 17. Is there anything I can get for you?” He stood up and shook my hand while I answered. Â
“It’s all right. Thank you for being cooperative with Kronos.”Â
“No problem at all. It’s not like I can reject an inquisition when they paid for all of this.”Â
He opened his arms and gestured at the room while chuckling. “Very true, Mr. Sinclaire. So… shall we?”
“Oh yes, we shall. However, there is a problem. As you may have noticed, I have been on a very tight schedule recently, and that is partly because of the colonization of Lenard B. So I had to move a few meetings around, and sadly, you ended up in a slot with someone else.”Â
This came as a surprise to me. The outposts usually didn’t cooperate much with Kronos, but they respected inquisitors. “Well, who might that someone be?” I asked with a hint of anger in my voice. Â
“Well, it’s not really a problem since they will be seeing the same parts of the facility as you are,” Mr. Sinclaire interjected quickly. “It’s a group of middle schoolers from Highland A. They traveled all the way out here to learn about the use of the outposts and their necessity.”Â
I was surprised again, but he was right. This wasn’t going to interfere with my inquiry. It’s important to teach the younger generations about technology, after all. Â
“May I ask why you choose to lead the school group personally?” I asked.Â
“Well, I thought I needed a little break from all this nonsense work here.”Â
He pointed at all of the papers on his table. Â
“Besides, I’m the one that knows this facility best, after all.”
That’s when something came to me. Â
“Forgive me if this is intrusive, Mr. Sinclaire, but how are you able to read the paperwork in front of you?”Â
He laughed out loud with a surprising force, and the sound bounced off the perfect marble walls. Â
“It’s funny. After living with blackout for so long, you sometimes forget how you appear to other people. Forgive me for not telling you.” Â
He gestured to a little device on the table that looked like a lamp at first. I realized that it was a camera. “The cameras all around the facility provide their data to me and help me navigate around. It’s perfect for me since I never leave the outpost anyway.”Â
“I see.”Â
He tilted his head for a second before looking at me and smiling again.
“Well, they seem to have arrived at port 4, so let’s pick them up and begin the tour.”Â
I agreed, and Mr. Sinclaire led me through a maze of corridors to the ports where I had arrived half an hour earlier. He walked with the assurance I was accustomed to from seeing individuals. Apparently, he had adapted perfectly to his disability. I also noticed the high number of security cameras now. Every time we entered a corridor, they would follow us step by step until we left again. Â
Once we reached the ports, the children spilled out of the ship like water from a dam. A bubbling mass of loud voices and laughter. They seemed to be between the ages of 11-13. When they saw Mr. Sinclaire and me, they all quieted down. Mr. Sinclaire gave them a brief introductory speech and explained his condition so they wouldn’t be scared. Then, the tour already began.
While we walked through the facility together, Mr. Sinclaire explained the purpose of the outpost in his unnervingly soft voice.Â
“The outposts are the pillars of our society today. Without the incredible communication the outposts provide, we would’ve never spread to the stars. And all of this was achieved by one simple tool. AI.”Â
We walked into a corridor with a glass wall that overlooked the communication center. I could see a crowd of staff working behind computers, analyzing data and cryptic maps. The front of the room was dominated by a massive screen showing different numbers, statistics, and graphs that mostly didn’t mean anything to me. I could see that the facility was fully staffed and that the transmission speed seemed to be efficient. I made another mental note. Â
“Welcome to the communication center. In this room, we receive thousands of direct messages from 7 different solar systems and we transmit them further along until they arrive at the next outpost or their final destination. Without this outpost, we would never be able to communicate with our families on different planets or with government officials in different systems.”Â
The children stood in awe of the efficiency of the people working below them. We stood there and watched Mr. Sinclair’s people work for a while until a brave kid chose to speak up.Â
“Do my messages ever go through here? I have a friend on Lenard B, and I always text her.”Â
Mr. Sinclaire fixed his eyes on the kid and smiled. “If your friend lives on Lenard B, your messages have definitely gone through here. We have no way of checking all of the messages, but we are currently the only outpost able to connect with the new colonies on Lenard B, so yes, your message was definitely transmitted through here.”
The kid smiled brightly and Mr. Sinclaire continued with the tour. We proceeded through a few corridors until we came to a room with a smaller screen.Â
“All right kids, sit down. It is time for a historical lecture,” Mr. Sinclaire said.
I could hear a few of the kids groan, but they all sat down obediently. I felt like groaning myself, but professionalism was holding me back. The screen flicked on and showed a few images from the 21st century.Â
“When AI was first invented, humanity thought it would be able to solve all of our problems. We thought that it could be our god, that it would be able to control everything. But we ran into a problem. We couldn’t create it.” Mr. Sinclaire began. Â
The screen flicked to a few images of scientists who were standing around rudimentary quantum computers. Â
“We had hit a wall,” Mr. Sinclaire explained, “and that wall was technology. We just weren’t able to physically build a machine capable of processing that much data. The best machine we could ever build was Kronos and even he wasn’t able to create something better than himself.”Â
The screen flickered to a picture of the founder of the Kronos cooperation shaking hands with a robotic hand attached to nothing. The humor in this picture had never appealed to me. Â
“Still, Kronos was incredibly useful,” He continued.
“He helped us save our planet, use the sun’s energy, and travel to the stars. But we still had a problem: We couldn’t make anything better than him. There were a lot of tasks and numbers that Kronos couldn’t crunch. One of those was interstellar communication. If we sent shortwave radio waves through space, it would still take decades for a message to arrive at another solar system. So we gave up on ever colonizing planets out of our own solar system.”Â
The image on the screen flicked to a picture of a huge metal construction, which I recognized to be the first-ever outpost.Â
“But then Kronos came to us with a revelation: Together with our scientists, he had composed a plan to solve interstellar communication. Their plan was so simple that even our forefathers could’ve thought of it, but it just hadn’t come to us. What if we used the computing capacity of the human brain?”Â
The screen now displayed a picture of a patient with an open skull. The exposed gray matter was shining with a red tint. I noted, that a few of the children shifted uncomfortably when seeing that image.Â
“You see, the human brain has the capacity to store more information than even Kronos himself can. If we could harness the power of the brain, we could use it to send information to different solar systems at a speed that is faster than light. And Kronos succeeded. He managed to fuse a part of himself with a human, and together they devised a theory of how we could send messages through FTL communication.”
Once again, the image on the screen changed, this time to a human sitting in a chair with a myriad of wires poking out of the back of his head. Her eyes were closed. Â
“Kronos found out that the gift of intelligence that nature gave us could be used for FTL communication. Sadly, I cannot tell you exactly how it works since Kronos is the only one who knows, and he decided that it isn’t for our ears. In any case, Kronos and his human counterpart then set out to build the outposts. We placed them on asteroids surrounding solar systems to create the perfect communication network. Kronos also constructed the ship brains that help us travel between the planets.”Â
At this point, Mr. Sinclaire flicked through a few pictures that showed the construction of outposts and human-machine testing. Â
“So kids, that’s enough of history,” Mr. Sinclaire concluded. “Let’s go see the radio tower, shall we?” I scrunched my nose at the word “radio tower”. In my educated opinion, calling this device a “radio tower” was similar to calling a slaughterhouse a “burger maker”. The kids excitedly hurried out of the room, and I followed behind. I made a mental note of the details of his lecture. It was good for an outpost administrator to be able to teach.Â
We entered a room with a massive glass wall that could have shown the “radio tower”. However, Sinclaire had closed the curtains for dramatic effect. Gruesome, I thought to myself, but the kids had to learn how important interstellar communication was one way or another.Â
“Are you kids ready to see it?”Â
A cry of excitement went through the crowd of children.Â
“All right then. Behold, our very own radio tower!”
As Mr. Sinclaire said this, the curtain slowly lifted itself from the window and started to reveal what it had been concealing: First, you could only see gray rock and craters. Then, slowly, the other parts of the facility surrounding the radio tower came into view. I could see people with lab coats hurrying along behind windows and people behind computers recording data. Then, the tower came into view.Â
It was a massive metal construction: Its steel components had been bolted together and fixed on the ground in a way that reminded me of the Eiffel Tower back on Earth. Cables were leaking from beneath the tower and feeding into the different buildings of the outpost. Towards the top, the tower was thinning out until it ended in a sharp spike. The tower was covered in blinking lights, switches, cables, and plates that I couldn’t even begin to describe. But in the middle of it all, a figure was standing on the tower. All the black cables led up and connected to its spine and head. It was as black as the void behind it. Its arms were stretched out to the side and the hands seemed to be fused to the tower. The legs were fixed in a similar way. The head, however, remained free and was flailing around, hanging on the cross like Jesus, its mouth agape in a silent scream that we couldn’t hear inside the facility was subject 17, our endlessly tormented “radio tower”. It was screaming and wailing into the endless night of space, yet nobody would ever hear its voice. Â
When the kids boarded the ship, they were in various moods. Some were crying. Some seemed to be in shock. Some weren’t affected by the ordeal at all and chatted with each other just the way they had done when coming into the facility. I made a mental note to recommend an increase in desensitization on Highland A. Â
After the children had left, it was time for my statement to Sinclaire. Â
“So, Mr. Sinclaire,” I began. Â
“Everything here at outpost 17 seems to be in order. You’re fully staffed, and I can see that the subject is settling in nicely. We also haven’t had any complaints from any of the solar systems you’re responsible for. It seems like I’m going to have to go back to Kronos empty-handed.”Â
He chuckled.
“Yes, indeed. The subject seems to have adjusted pretty nicely already. Our outpost computer says that the match is perfect and it seems like we’re going to have clear communication for at least nine months. If we’re lucky, we may be able to stretch it out to a year.”Â
“That is very good to hear. I will report back to Kronos about the state of the station and about your wonderful teaching abilities.”Â
Mr. Sinclair’s smile became even wider, and – as we shook hands and I left his office – I could still feel its intensity burning on the back of my head while the doors closed behind me.Â