As best as I could tell, we were in Mexico. Not wanting to disturb her during maintenance-in-motion, tricky even when all systems are functioning, I didn't dare ask Madra. I could see some lights off in the distance. It could've been a coyote camp and even some Solar Farm if the locals had the muscle to protect it. The road was surprising good on this stretch. The bots that held it all together were getting refreshed by some source. As a matter of fact, ever since we hit Mexico, the road had been quiet and well-kept. Occasionally, you'd even see some light on the road from a towering halogen lamp.
I sat there in the quiet car, with only the sound of the tires on the pavement and the whistling, destroyed, front gun mount. The rats did not even stir in the backseat. It was a placid little scene. My inflamed seminal ducts were even starting to cool down. I'd be ready for some sexbox soon if the device wasn't still broken. I couldn't find parts for it back in Panama, though I managed to clean out a surprising amount of rat hair from it, which became lodged in the intake hose so mysteriously.
As my mind drifted, I began to hear a little music, coming as if from somewhere in the center of my head. I thought it was a flashback, an aural hallucination. It sounded like my very favorite tunage which I thought was long gone from this earth, with the destruction of an ancient artifact of my one and only metal-coated plastic cassette tape. Or at least, any copies it would be far from where I'd ever be able to access. The sounds blorted like machinery fucking and farting. The musicians played guitars so broken that they only produced the restle of sucking wounds from zombie infantry who later devoured each other on the battlefield. I eavesdropped from behind craggy rocks on a dwarf with giant pig ears who sung to his blue donkey as they crossed methane swamps. It was the music of my very own damaged brain.
"Mad, what the fuck? Chrome. Helios Creed. Alien Soundtracks! Where did you get a copy of it? How did you get the sound into my head?"
"That woke you up, Sparky. Well, first, public networks are getting hard to come by, ones that aren't completely locked down by this or that military. The rest are administered by some duchy and prohibited by any but the local elite. One way traffic with insane encryption. I can't quack* it." Madra had started speaking solely in a very annoying British accent, as if she worked the science and technology desk at the BBC.
"Wow. I thought you could hack anything."
"No, Henry, quite the contrary. You see, I started picking up this really weak signal coming from the moon. It didn't seem to be bouncing off it. I think it's emanating from there. The node had no security whatsoever. According to some of the docs on the easily accessible root partition, the network was established by some members of the Moon Colony, which we thought was, essentially abandoned. I mean, no one has replenished them with supplies for a few years."
"So that means there's still people up there."
"It could. Anyone can run files there, but traffic was almost nil. And, from monitoring the transmissions, the other users on the system do not seem to be coming from the outside. Anyways, the point is they have amazing archives, including many terabytes of plain and structured text, as well as mp5 files, all publicly accessible."
"Oog. High quality musics. Droolworthy. Um, how are you getting this into my skull, Mad fucking Ra?"
"One of the text documents described how to produce a carrier wave of ten pulses per second by sending a signal of 200 Hertz to one ear and 210 Hertz to the other. 10 Hertz is the approximate frequency of Alpha waves. It could be used to deliver music that seems to come directly into the aural centers of the brain. These Alpha waves, by the way, predominate in your brain when you are learning and tend to diminish around age 16 to 18, the time you probably listened to much of this music. I guess the technique works. Hee-hee."
"Uh." I paused for dramatic effect in order to mine the deep reservoirs of my paranoia. "You could perform any kind of mind control on me."
"And you don't think I already have?" She replied darkly.
copyright 2002 Jeff Holland