Prologue:

Transmission

Throwing another heavy log on the fire, inhaling the stinging bark smoke willingly, I feel fully present, alive you might say. As I sit to stare at the sparks that rise up to the night sky from the fire on the cracked and overgrown basketball court, the embers seem to join the stars. Exhaling a heavy sigh, like some emergency release valve for my barely disguised and contained inner tensions, I feel I finally know who I am, even though I do not.

The subtle hum of the reactor adds a strange atmosphere to the natural chorus about me. Frog, bird and insect mating calls punctuate a steady tone, not at all unpleasant, one that I have gradually become accustomed to. The daily change in modulation, as the power output increases, acts like a gentile wave guiding me in some way to my fate.

It was only perhaps a month of hard work to learn enough about this abandoned and crumbling property to know that I could revive it, to generate enough power to get the transmitter operational again. By the timepiece of changing moon only, and with a vagrant’s privacy, it seems perhaps another two months were labored to repair what was needed to start the systems. Another two perhaps to wrangle the inner torrent of what I was to broadcast.

When I am finished with these words, I will add them to the stack of forgotten corporate procedural manuals, their sealed colored binders preventing the decay of the precious paper within. Margins, forms, blank back pages, even widely spaced sentences and the empty areas of charts, all the unused surface space they easily took for granted, this is now my palate for thought. My journey, my only recollections, now fill the spaces never remotely considered by anyone.

As I sit here before the firelight, finally scribbling this most procrastinated portion of my message, I am a tempest of feeling as the time of transmission draws near, the scavenged pencils I use often breaking from sheer momentum.

My imagined resolve in this act of communication (or is it communion?) is as unwavering as that of my brain cells themselves that mysteriously bore it. What they have exhibited, irrespective of ‘me’, belies a premeditated act of microcellular creation, of which I can only report. Like the information contained in the universe itself, thoughts of import impel their construct to always find the little cracks of consciousness to ooze from.

But this is not important right now.

The weight of meaning and the realities of the aftermath of my efforts, push whatever emotions I possess into apparently virgin territory. They pump away, a part of me as much as they are wholly separate. I must remember to remain merely a reporter, centering myself on the remembered facts and keeping the feelings and implications at bay. Though a crab tossed by a tsunami, I remain a vigilant watchman of my own subjective maelstrom.

My purpose became clear, gifted to me as it was, as I stared one day at the plants gradually making their way to the top of the impressive kilometer tall white globe, which was the old transmitter at Alderville’s former Media Broadcast Centre. Like all the decrepit real estate now inherited by me, each has its own baffling personality and I suppose this had an effect on me as I lingered here, long before knowing what I needed to do.

At first, it was easy to become lost and revel in the unique glory of this beautiful place. Unlike most other lonesome artifacts of humanity left about everywhere, these buildings are ripe with a kind of melancholy symbolism. The materials here, the surfaces, the tiny interconnected parts, seem to resonate with one voice. A force that stands beside what is seen. Though what is seen is likewise the focus of the relentless recovery efforts of micro-nature, the world’s seldom considered and rarely seen overachieving inhabitants. Searching myself for the root of this perceived potency, I endeavored to achieve some sort of intimacy.

Feelings grew rather quickly and guided me. Comfortable like no where else, I walked back and forth over the sweeping pedestrian walkways, carpeted with leaves and guarded by nesting birds in every lamplight. Unlike other places I have recently seen, the architecture throughout is a true conglomeration of every major style from the last century or two.

More than merely loved as it was aided through one era after the next, my explorations revealed more redundancy designed into the Centre, on all levels, then I imagine exist at military installations of the highest order. Perhaps I can observe and be influenced by, but do not truly understand, a culture (my culture?) that seemingly places the loss of telecommunications and media in the same category as food and atmosphere. Basic trait of species? Somehow surviving without its host?

Something like desire still exists here.

Phantom traces of human lives lurk about here like smoke hanging on the air, fanned away yet still smoldering, more so than most other so-called empty places I now haunt. My hands and steps unavoidably trace their old movements in a kind of mindless chronological massage. I find myself hopelessly lost in the deleted past wherever I went, wandering likewise on those atmospheric currents, as if cursed to a gradually fading echo like some ghostly ancestor.

Every sopping, mossy metal chair and rusty doorknob become a meditation on the life of some secret unknown from long ago, or some parallel neighborhood for that matter, where hands kept them to their purpose, gave them their existence. The thought came once of expending the effort of maintaining one of the properties I was particularly attracted to, for whatever reason, as a ‘home’ I suppose you could label it, since there are so many buildings in this strange complex.

Call it instinct.

Quickly, however, I found this blind stab at a kind of normalcy, one only vaguely remembered in the first place, quite impossible. I simply ran from the cafeteria I had moved into after the absurdity of ‘sweeping’ one day literally knocked me over.

That was when I found myself staring at the huge transmitter, the globe. I thought of leaving this place to return walking. Unfortunately, hiding in some form of comforting ignorance is just not an option for me either. My mission, then only vaguely understood, became as the days wore on, my gradually increasing obsession. It seemed to me to be a rather human one, to be heard, by anything – even a dog who happened to cock his head just right.

The urge to cry out, to be understood by the pack, even if it is just a theoretical possibility, is something hardwired into any member of a tribal species, I suppose. To bond somehow and let whoever may be listening know something of my life is an urge I have found difficult to suppress, regardless if the message will end up bouncing through earth and space forever undeciphered. Even the most dedicated hermitic human will find that some connections are required. The lonely, I remember, talked to their pets as if lovers and the discarded homeless to anything that would listen, even their imaginations. Though I have drifted without care for a long time in my lonely journeys, connection was always lurking in the back of my mind, forcing itself into my attention like the stare of a stranger.

Is this stranger my own animal instincts asserting themselves or just my remainder bin of memories? Perhaps it is those persistent little evolving artifacts, who may soon no longer need ‘me’. Is it a delusion, or can all the cells that make up a body somehow get along without that annoying phenomena called consciousness or sentience.

What of my memories?

These broken pieces are the survivors, the life rafts of my own diseased, but somehow transcendent life. Perhaps they are merely the collective dream of a soul, a fair witness, damaged by an act of god. Perhaps I was merely selected by simple, wholly natural, forces of physical law on an infinitesimally small scale as to escape notice and imagination. I hope to have answers soon, for even forced exertion of the details that I have, in fact, even written - yields little. Answers may be unreasonable to expect, completion of my journey may not.

As I write this introduction to my transmission alongside the somehow purging bonfire, it is easy to suppose that my life is much simpler. The belief that I am merely plagued with the meditative reflection that often afflicts people when they are around a fire is comforting. The hypnotic fire itself, though empty of information, forces pressurized liquid thought to rush in and fill the space as one remains transfixed to it.

For my situation in particular, it is also comforting in some strange way to believe that I am simply gripped by madness.

Regardless, I could have driven the chill of the night away in any one of the buildings, for their encrusted vents no longer exhale just debris, but heated air. Even some of the lights work. However, I cannot bring myself to be inside for too long for whatever reason, now that the work on the equipment is done. From here, outside with the wild nocturnals in the former recreation area, I can see the inert red light previously dangled out of the control room window. When it illuminates I will march up there, transcribe into the machines, and broadcast.

Thinking to that moment, my instincts tell me to flee once the machines are set to repeat, while power still sustains them. Although my progress has been largely uninterrupted since I arrived, aside from the occasional brush with the wildlife that now resides here, I sense the very act of cohesion I am attempting will ultimately draw sinister attention.

Paranoia?

Perhaps, but resuscitating this disused cathedral to the media animal will likely issue a tone when the eyes finally open again. A tone that, at the very least, my relatives will hear. Knowing those two, they will certainly be listening, even if no one on the planet has the ears for this particular tune.

Perhaps it is they who would ultimately give me the answers I require.

Perhaps they will kill me on principal alone.

Perhaps they will chop up my abominous body, my tumors being the repository of souls, to lay me on some distant medical freak show trophy shelf – forever. Unable as they may be to let go with what is now part of me.

Fear.

I cannot dwell on the possibility they represent. I must not loose focus. I must not loose voice. I must focus on you. You, my savior in more then one sense.

Forgive these seemingly psychotic machinations of thought. Forgive the enigmatic allusions. Do not let them scare you away. Hear me as I commune, even though it may be sometimes be in tongues.

Hope allows me the belief that ‘you’, with the intimacy that we will share through these words, will find greater understanding lurking in these visions, these memories, then I. Perhaps, one day you can be the benefactor of my ignorant enlightenment, for I am the crate dislodged at sea. What is inside, is for you. What is outside, is beyond my power.

As near as I can recon with any amount of certitude, everything began for what I consider as ‘me’ in one moment, my first true moment.

Unlike the newly birthed, I recall with complete clarity that sensation of sudden being that greeted me. I would understand, much later, why nature found it advantageous to loose those feelings to time. To an already structured mind, birth is overwhelming in a unique way that I suspect separates itself from the infant.

Like a detonation, my birth was the sudden genesis of self that greets the amnesiac.