BOOK ONE : LISTENERS AND READERS

::WINTER 2001

24 :: signals and antennas ::

[posted 1/26/01]

Snow quiets a city. Heaps of it muffle the sidewalks and streets — the flat planes that normally send sound waves bouncing. But the snow silences in ways beyond the acoustic. It cloaks. In the Star Trek sense of making invisible. A particular layer of data is absent. A strata of wrappers and trash is erased by a new snow, and won’t reappear until spring. Jakob moves through the quiet streets, towards the L stop (on his way in to campus to teach), noting (and enjoying) the decrease in visual noise. A new layer of litter has already begun to form on top of the snow — the cheap pachinko colors of a discarded scratch-off ticket, the origami cardinal of a Marlboro package. These pieces stand out conspicuously against their background; their individual signals amplified.

At the moment, Jakob isn’t thinking about his recent date (he’s come to give it that label through a sort of unconscious shorthand). He’s thinking about signals. This morning, he heard a piece on WBEZ about researchers who had figured out how to transmit more information on a single radio frequency. It involved transmitting different signals simultaneously on the same frequency but polarizing the signals differently by aiming them at different angles. The different signals are pulled out of the air by multiple antennas but then they’re overlapped to create a single signal. Researchers took a Joan Miro painting, broke it down into fields of red and green and blue, encoded each of those fields as a separate radio signal, and sent each of them down a hallway (on the same frequency but at a different polarization). Antennas pulled the painting out of the air and put it back together.

This radio segment was of interest to Jakob because it feeds into a project Jakob has been thinking about for some time. He is making notes for a science-fiction novel. His working title is Dense Air and it will be a novel about a future world awash in signals. Information pirates, suction-cupped to the sides of buildings, sticking antennas out into the radiophonic ether, tapping illicitly into closed channels, pulling programming out of the air, circulating their finds in a black market underground of tape. There are telepaths in this world, too, nascent, still weak, their signals prone to scattering, dropouts. They amplify their signals by growing biochemical antennas in their bodies. There are whole new industries, surging into power at the gesture of venture capitalists. But the pirates are out there with their surveillance dishes, bootlegging human thought, working secretly to create a new Fanning Market, a Napster of the mind...

He passes under Metra tracks, the pavement reappearing briefly, slick and green with fresh pigeonshit. He’s teaching today. He contemplates briefly what the experience of being a telepathic teacher would be like. Is teaching not the art of bringing the thoughts of a roomful of people into harmony with your own? (He’ll write that one down, later.) He comes out on the other side of the tracks, enters the edge of a bobbing field of pigeons. They notice him and, surprised, they burst into the air, as though they are a single thing.