by James Smythe
I had a team, and we had a press release being planned as soon as the television reports started asking what it was, and we realized that everybody heard it, it was a big deal – or it was going to be a big deal – and that we would have to deal with it. We didn’t have time to even think about what it actually was. We had to just get on with our jobs.
Dhruv Rawat, doctor, Bankipore
I forget now why they were filming in the region before the static, but they had video cameras, full crews. All the children had run over to see what they were doing, standing by the catering tables – tables of food! In that heat! – and peering through, desperate to be on the camera. That was always the way, when the cameras were in town: all the children wanted to be in on it. They knew that they would probably never even see what they were being filmed for, but that didn’t stop them. (Somebody, I forget who, said that the glare of the spotlight hits the people even on the streets of India, when they’re already blinded by the sun. It must have been somebody intelligent, but I cannot for the life of me remember who.) I remember when I was a child, and the first time the television cameras came and filmed us all for the British news, and we didn’t know what they were. That sounds like a lie, I know, but I was very young – only four or five, young enough to not know any better, and we did not have a television in my house, of course – and my friends and I did not believe that they could film us, put us on their screens as they did, show us what we looked like there. It was fascinating! People say, what moments made you decide to change your life? That was one for me, because they were so glamorous. There was one lady with them, wearing a long white skirt and a shirt that clung to her body like I had never seen, and a hat that was thick and white and nearly covered her entire face in shade. I went over to her, and she was the one who told us what they were doing there, and I thought, Some day I’ll persuade them to film me. After that, my plan, of course, was to leave Bankipore and go somewhere else – of course, dreaming of Mumbai – and to be on camera. I never went, because nobody ever does. Instead, I worked hard at school, and then went to Bangalore and I became a doctor, and then I moved back to Bankipore, because I thought that I could do some good here. That is what all my doctor friends said, if they weren’t going overseas; they were going home to do some good. Then, when the static happened and the cameras were there, I was the person standing closest to them, trying to see what they were there for. The woman talking to the camera, I recognized her from the international news television channel they showed in the hotel restaurant-bar – I lived out of hotels for a while. I was outside when the static happened, and the woman came over to me, saw that I was smartly dressed – I wore a shirt and tie to work every day, because it established a rule from the second I saw a patient, that I was a doctor, an authority – and she asked me if I heard the static as well; she wanted to check that it wasn’t coming from their equipment. I told her, Yes, of course I did.
Is it a noise that’s common here? she asked. A nearby factory or something? I said, No, I have never heard it before. I asked some of the children – who were over by my offices, by the wall, lined up as if they were waiting for their turn to be spoken to by the woman – and they said that they had not heard it before either. I am sorry, I told the woman. Will you say something about it on camera, just in case? she asked, and I said, Of course I will. She went back to her crew, who were all Indian as well, but they weren’t local, because nobody from Bankipore had that sort of equipment (that I knew of), and they all came over, set up in front of me. What do you think it was? she asked me, and I said, seeing myself reflected in the camera lens, that I thought it was probably nothing, because we couldn’t explain what it was. I am a man of science; there has to be an explanation for me to believe it, I said. Thank you, she said, and she moved on.
Elijah Said, prisoner on Death Row, Chicago
I was asleep when I first heard the static, in my cot. They called them cots, like we were babies. Lots of people in there didn’t sleep, defiantly staying awake, rattling anything they could against the bars, or howling their way through the nights. They would try to make sure that nobody could forget who they were, or where they were. I am a murderer, their actions called out, you would do well to remember who it is that I am, what I am capable of. It is within me to commit horrors upon you, and for that reason, I do not sleep when you tell me to; I sleep on my own timescale. On the corridor, we didn’t get exercise like the rest, didn’t get library time. Our meals were visited upon us, delivered on trays, always hot, always neatly plated, our cutlery thin shards of blunt plastic that was counted back when we were finished with our meals. If we tried anything – and I did not, but I watched as others did, unrepentant in their drive for freedom, or revenge – the cutlery was removed completely, and the prisoner ate with their hands, like a primate, free yet ignorant. The guards would laugh as they spooned potato into their mouths, with the gravy dripping through their fingers; that’s your punishment, they would say. No, I say: their punishment was both being there in the first place, behind those bars; and also would be delivered by Allah upon their death, a death that they entirely deserved for the crimes that they had committed toward their fellow man. They howled in the nights, dogs, desperate for their creator to put them out of their misery.
I could sleep through the catcalling, the constant abuse; but when a noise was unknown it would rouse me from even the deepest sleep. The static had us all on our feet, demanding to know what was happening. The guards ignored us, and left us alone. That was the first time I could remember the corridor being left unguarded; no matter how loud the shouts came for the next few minutes, the guards didn’t return, and we were briefly free from their watch to do as we pleased within those confines; for my part, I was on my musalla, praying.
The guards returned after a few minutes, when I was still praying, and they put the lights on along the corridor, demanded that we turn out. They were on edge, frantic as mice. As always, I stood back, allowed them into my cell. As always, they invaded my privacy, their trust of my people so low that they felt no shame in their intrusions. They searched under my cot, in the metal basin they called a toilet, around my person. They searched my mat, which they were forbidden to do, and they provoked me, prodded me like I was cattle, all to get a reaction. You don’t say much, do you? they asked, and I did not reply: No, I do not.
When they were gone, and the corridor was quiet again – a comparative quiet, a quiet that is still loud with shouting, but constant, our own personal take on the tranquil – my neighbour, a murderer by the name of Finkler, spoke to me. Hey, brother, he said, because he called everybody of colour that name – as if he were saying, I am one of you, the oppressed, the downtrodden, we are in this together – you know what that was? No, I replied. He carried on, even though the lights were now out, and the guards demanded silence from us: What d’you reckon it was, then? Allah will deliver answers, I said. He went quiet. Even in here he knew I could still kill him, if he didn’t go at the hands of the state first.
WE’RE HAVING PROBLEMS
Phil Gossard, sales executive, London
As soon as the TV broadcasts came back online, we expected there to be answers. There weren’t any. They actually only seemed to know as much as we did. In some ways, that was a relief, actually. I think some people expected the noise to be a signal, a warning. Some people thought it meant that we were being attacked, and who could blame them for thinking that? Biological, that was the biggest threat, but anything else, really. Nuclear, Semtex, we didn’t care. We were all so on edge because it had been what, ten years since an attack? And there were constant whispers about terrorists holing themselves up, waiting for chances. I mean, there were rumours about everything, actually, especially about the new American president (that he was, despite his campaign promises, actually more anti-war than even Obama was, a couple of terms back) and about the threat from Iran. When it was done we left the windows and switched the telly on, and it had that We’re Having Problems s
creen on the BBC – Aren’t we just, I said out loud, but nobody laughed – and then a minute or so later it kicked back in. It wasn’t a regular newsreader – they were interrupting whatever had been on previously, so I suppose it was whoever they had to hand, dragged up from Newsround like it was work experience week – and then they reported what had happened, that we all heard something. They went to somebody outside BT Tower, asking for opinions. Everybody they spoke to was just confused. It was strange, actually; that corner is usually a flow of people moving between Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street, but nobody was moving. They were just milling around, looking terrified or elated or whatever. Bemused, that’s the word. Most of them looked bemused.
Bill hadn’t come back from downstairs, so everybody started to look to me for answers. (I wasn’t even second in command, but if in doubt ask marketing, right?) I didn’t have a clue, so I told everybody to take the rest of the day off. Go home; see you tomorrow. Traffic’ll be shitty, you should all get a head start. Nobody left though, not immediately. We went back to the windows and watched the streets, kept the news on in the background, and waited to see if anybody could work out what the noise was.
Peter Johns, biologist, Auckland
I remember thinking, Hang on, because the scientists’ll announce something any second, tell us that they fucked up and that they’ve got it all under control. We was in this bar in Auckland and we missed the last boat back to the island because of the noise – I mean, who in their right mind is gonna get on a boat after hearing something like that? We didn’t know what it was, so we waited. Trigger, my assistant, got behind the bar after the manager didn’t want to serve us any more and just started pouring them out. The manager didn’t even care; he was out in the street seeing if anybody knew what the heck was going on. We must have been in there drinking for a couple of hours before we even got so much as a whiff of an answer.
Andrew Brubaker, White House Chief of Staff, Washington, DC
Before the static had even stopped we had POTUS locked down in his office, and the service went over Air Force One top to bottom. They could do the whole plane (offices, press seats, cabin, hold, exterior) in two and half minutes. We cut off all comms to the aircraft – radio dark, they called it – and we sat still as they checked us a second time. I mean, totally still. Not even blinking. When they were sure that the noise didn’t come from the aircraft they let us get up from our seats, start using some of the tech again. POTUS was on the phone to China as soon as the handset was passed to him, and he had the Russian PM holding, with calls to return to the Brits, the Germans, the Japanese. I heard him speaking to the Chinese President. I assure you, he was saying, this was nothing to do with us, it was a natural phenomenon, it was not an attack. It’s a fine line, he said when he hung up, because those guys are ready to bite. They’ll lash out as soon as we do. We step off the ledge first, they’ll dive in after us.
When he was making the rest of his calls I told Kerry what was going on – she was the press secretary – and told her to keep the rumours under control. Does anybody know what the fuck is going on? I asked, and she said, Not a clue, so I told her to make something up. There’s going to be a hell of a lot of confused people out there, and the last thing we need is them reacting, so we’re going to have to tell them something. The leaders of the free world couldn’t just sit there and quietly wait for an explanation to fall into our laps; we had to make that explanation happen. You can’t fly tonight, the service told us, so we got back into the cars and went back to the White House before anything else could happen. We were there within five minutes, and I was watching them fielding questions in the press room within seven.
Phil Gossard, sales executive, London
People slowly started filtering off – there was a thing somebody read on the internet about public transport being at a standstill, and we were all British, so that meant we should all rush and try to get on a bus as soon as possible – when the BBC started looking at different options for what it could be. They had an astronomer on from Oxford Uni, and he was saying that there was nothing in the sky. Couldn’t it just be a sound from deep space? asked the presenter, like that was a thing we saw every day, and the astronomer said, No, it couldn’t be, because there’s nothing there. Nothing on any of the SETI equipment, we’re getting nothing. It didn’t come from space. Are you sure? the presenter asked, and he said, Ninety-nine point nine per cent. There’s always a slight margin of error. So what could it be? they asked him, Could it be aliens? I remember this: he laughed a bit and said, At this point, anything’s possible, right? He meant it as a joke, I think, but of course they took that as a yes and ran with it. Within minutes, every single news broadcast is saying that it could be aliens that caused the static. Could be.
Simon Dabnall, Member of Parliament, London
I found myself in a McDonald’s, if you can believe that, the one down by the Dali museum (and I remember thinking how appropriate that was). It was fit to burst with children and their somehow even more high-pitched parents; but it also had the huge television screens across the back wall that showed the news all day. I watched the reporters discussing the static, sticking their microphones in everybody’s faces, trying to get opinions. They cut between them – some of them at the busier parts of W1, some of them in suburb areas, a very cold-looking man in Newcastle – and then they cut to one outside Westminster, talking about the close of session. It’s clear, the girl said, that even the government isn’t sure what to make of this curious state of affairs. No, they do not, I said to myself. (After that, the woman next to me moved her children along the bench slightly, putting her coat between myself and her daughter. She tutted. Tutted!) Then they cut to another reporter right outside where we were, microphone in the faces of the tourists, who seemed entirely confused by the whole thing. I put down my godawful coffee and went out there and watched the interviews. She kept looking over at me, as if she recognized me, but she didn’t ask me anything. Sir, I heard her say to a burly Yank in sandals and a luridly floral shirt that gaped across his gut. Do you think that the static could be the first contact we have with another race? I’ll be damned if I know, he said, but no; I would guess that it would be some sort of experiment by the government, that would be my guess. His whole family squeezed themselves into the shot to voice their opinions after him, and then all the other tourists who saw the cameras followed. Savages.
Andrew Brubaker, White House Chief of Staff, Washington, DC
I was speaking to the National Security Agency when the alien stuff started coming through on the wire, and the journalists at the back began shouting questions about it. Half of me wanted to step in, tell them that of course there weren’t any fucking aliens, but the other half … I mean, look, there weren’t aliens, clearly, but the alternative was far less palatable. We’d spent twenty years worrying about terrorism, about attacks, and all of a sudden there was this, and it would have been so easy for the press to panic about it more than they should have. As I say, we didn’t have a fucking clue what it was, but it wasn’t aliens, and we were crossing our fingers it wasn’t anything worse. I told the press office to ignore all questions about that, just deny it, keep the cycle spinning for a while until we knew what it actually was. None of them believed it was aliens anyway; they just wanted something to fill column inches, same as we did.
I was heading down the corridor past the briefing room when a journalist from the Post stopped me, asked me how we would treat the static if it was a first-contact situation with an alien race. You really want me to answer that? I asked, and he did, so I said, We would treat it like we’d treat any other sort of first contact: with extreme fucking caution.
Ed Meany, research and development scientist, Virginia
We ran so many tests. I mean, we were into tests up to our asses, you have no idea. Picture this: there were seven individual departments of governmental science, and they each had sub-departments, three or four apiece. Each sub-department was running it
s own tests, so there were tests on background noise levels, radiation levels, NASA stuff, security stuff, tests to do with animals, asking people what they thought it could be. I mean, anything you can imagine, we were testing for it somewhere. There were only a couple of divisions not working on it, because they worked on the stuff nobody knew about – plausible deniability and all that jazz. We were sending out single-sentence press releases through the White House press office when we eliminated something from the running, just to try and get everything under control. Everything else was standing still. Two minutes after POTUS told us to start running the tests (even though we had already started, clearly, because we weren’t the sort of assholes who waited for a go-order from somebody who had no idea what we were actually doing) there were statements put out to the press to calm the nation, urge the emergency services to keep going, to go to work as normal. We couldn’t risk a shutdown of them, all of us knew that. So he asked everybody to keep going as normal, and I think most people did, that day. We did; the TV stations did, and I’m betting that every 7-Eleven was still selling Slushies.
Mark Kirkman, unemployed, Boston
I can’t remember how long I sat in that bar and watched the TV. Hours, probably. Max, the barman, kept putting drinks in my hand, and I kept drinking them. I didn’t say anything, that I didn’t hear it, and we all just watched the news as it rolled in. They went on about the aliens for an hour, maybe more, and then finally they started asking, well, what else could it be? One of the early theories was something to do with cell phones, like that beep you get when you leave it on top of a speaker? But it didn’t stick, and that became the news cycle. What is it, what is it, over and over. An hour later, every station was answering that question by sticking anybody with an even vaguely religious background on their shows.
