Type 88

The Blip

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At 2:15 a.m., Jimmy O'Brien finished another coffee at his cubicle. Jimmy had been investigating the voice's speech rhythms for the past six weeks, and he just found his breakthrough.

The first and last syllable of each sentence had a unique pattern. Jimmy was the first to recognize this, but his team dismissed his input as banal. Such was the life at the bottom of the totem pole.

Most people, when speaking in public on a matter of importance, tend to heighten the inflection of the last syllable of their sentences. This trick allows the speaker to pull the puppet strings, keeping the audience on the edge of their seats. Some public speakers also raise and emphasize the first syllable of a significant sentence, one they want to hammer home. They follow that with a pause in their cadence, for added emphasis. Dance, puppet, dance!

The voice also changed its inflection at the start and end of each sentence, but it slightly lowered its tone instead of raising it. The result sounded like something was attempting to replicate normal human speaking patterns but got lost in translation—a bug. This was some uncanny valley shit, stuff that gave Jimmy the creeps.

Tonight he noticed something else—the pauses between sentences. Each sentence was separated by exactly 0.750 seconds. To the thousandth of a second.

This wasn't cause for alarm by itself. It could suggest a computer program issued the broadcast. But Jimmy's team had ruled out simulated speech from the start. Common sounds in the broadcast were all slightly altered. Each use of the word you reached a different frequency, for instance.

Jimmy finished his report. He wasn't going to take this to the daily meeting and let Bill shoot it down because Jimmy was twenty-four years old and couldn't "actually contribute" (what the fuck was the point of an internship then?). No, he was going straight to Bill's boss with this—Melinda Shroud. Jimmy respected Melinda. She listened. He admired her tenacity and rapid career ascent. She took no bullshit but was honest and fair. He could tell. She appreciated hard data that could help her country. You couldn't fake hard data.

Jimmy got up and turned his desk lamp off. He put on his jacket. Walter, the janitor, passed him, bumping him with his shoulder.

Jimmy didn't exist in that fucking office.

"Hey, Walter!" Jimmy said.

Walter didn't turn around.

"As soon as I'm running this office, you're fucking fired!"

Walter walked out the front door, into the night.

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