Mitchell is standing by the airlock. The hum of the ship’s systems is like tinnitus, a common affliction of those who go to the discos of surface cities. Discos. Mitchell looks down as his brain puts the image of a disco on his long-term memory screen. People are waving, swinging their arms and bodies. They’re clearly looking for sex. It’s a mass hunt with the aim of fucking someone. Nothing else. Mitchell remembers the puppet-like expressions of the people dancing. And he also remembers a woman. Damn, what a stunning woman. And her golden skin glowing with desire.
Thump thump. Thump thump. Thump thump. Thump thump. Thump thump. Thump thump. Thump thump. Thump thump. Thump thump. Thump thump.
Suddenly he recalls approaching her and asking her to have a drink with him. Why not, blond boy? and they left together. The desire for sex claws at his brain. It is a physical pain. Something he cannot control. An undefined rage. Dense. Immeasurable. Something like the red noise of blood.
Thump thump. Thump thump. Thump thump. Thump thump. Thump thump. Thump thump. Thump thump. Thump thump. Thump thump. Thump thump.
A voice calls him to the present, “Mitch?”
He turns and sees Nora at his side. Out of nowhere, he realizes he loved her before he met her… Love. Uhm, no he doesen’t love her. It’s something he can’t control and doesn’t like it. He doesn’t even remember how feelings work, let alone when he first fell in love. As a matter of fact, this is all new for him. All new. Where’s the trace of his past? Faded.
“Are you OK?” she presses. Softly.
Nora is beautiful. A cruel kind of beauty. There’s no imperfection in her. Her irises are pure green… and perfect, as if filled with the liquid soul of a mountain lake. Her lips are full, soft pink and perfect. Perfectly round cheeks. Perfectly arched eyebrows. Perfect long hair colored like burning embers. Mitchell has always loved this color in a woman’s hair. Nora is the perfect creation of an artist. But Mitchell would give anything to find an imperfection in her. It is imperfection that activates love.
He looks at her as if he’s something to say, but in fact he’s nothing to say. This is exactly when Mitchell remembers what happened to the woman he picked up at the disco that night: she’s dead. Now he remembers seeing her lying on the ground. He remembers the blood and soft tissue on the road, a road he no longer knows of a city he no longer knows. But the detail that lights up his heart with a flash of fear is that the woman looked like Nora.
Mitchell opens his mouth slightly, a soft tremor making his lips quiver.
“Mitch? Are you here?”
Here?
“Yeah,” he answers.
Nora looks at him as if she had a pool of compassion in her eyes, like nurses in a psychiatric ward. “I’m with you, don’t worry,” she says.
“I’m the one here who should protect you,” he says, then smiles at her. “We’ll manage it.”
But he has no confidence that either of them will be able to survive a visit to the Planet.
Maybe, each of them has been affected by the strange forces surrounding the Nuclear Bulge, but Mitchell does not share this thought with the others. He’s not thrilled about the Captain’s decision to make this descent to the Planet, but he can’t challenge it. They put on their spacesuits, armed themselves and approached the hatch. Here, the buzzing has died down. Calhoun and the Captain are preparing the exploration equipment. Their movements are accurate, they don’t even tremble. Mitchell wonders if they’re normal, or if whatever drove the rest of the crew mad has already infected them. You’ve to be crazy to behave normally in a situation like this. It sounds so weird.
“All set,” says Calhoun.
“All right, let’s do it.”
The Captain’s order echoes in Mitchell’s head as if from afar. It sounds such definitive. And it makes him nervous.
Thump thump. Thump thump. Thump thump. Thump thump. Thump thump. Thump thump. Thump thump. Thump thump. Thump thump. Thump thump.
“This is insane,” Mitchell says.
The others turn to him, interrupting the hatch opening maneuvers. No one speaks but they all look at the Captain, and he steps forward, like someone with a great responsibility.
“What’s wrong, Mitchell?” he asks him. His voice is calm and clinical.
Thump thump. Thump thump. Thump thump. Thump thump. Thump thump. Thump thump. Thump thump. Thump thump. Thump thump. Thump thump.
“I’m just saying it’s crazy,” Mitchell insists. “All of this is just crazy.”
The Captain does not reply or get a particular expression on his face; he just observes, and this pisses Mitchell off even more. “I’m just–”
The Captain interrupts him, “Cool head and stay on task.”
“But it’s–”
”OK, stop it, now, Mitchell!” The Captain gives him a look that is at once metallic, apathetic and professional. “You know how it goes for those who lose their minds, don’t you, soldier?”
“Yes, sir, I do.”
The Captain turns back to the hatch. “Let’s move,” he orders.
Calhoun nods as if he knows better. Nora stays beside Mitchell and together they pass through the hatch and enter the shuttle that will take them to the dark Planet.
The shuttle moves at a slow pace forward, cutting through the strange miasma that hovers in space. The silence is totally unlike any kind of silence Mitchell has ever heard. It’s not just silence, it’s the opposite of the sound. Mitchell wonders if antimatter was spawned from that kind of silence. But he decides it’s nonsense.
The shuttle just turns a little, leaning to one side. It’s not like there are motorways in space, and it’s not as colorful as you might imagine. Black, grey and various other shades – that’s all there is. The stars look like old tungsten bulbs, in the distance. If there’s no funding for the special effects, it’s like all the magic disappears. Then, all of a sudden, the light from the Nuclear Bulge casts shifting fractals down onto Mitchell’s feet, and he looks out of the thick cockpit glass.
“Oh, damn...” he says, but without even realising it.
The surface of the Nuclear Bulge is pure energy, with a restless flow around the core. There’re shades of purple and red, with bands of condensed electricity bending and twisting under the immense gravitational forces, creating these intricate shimmering ribbons. It’s kind of artistic... The stars seem to stretch and blur all around, as if the fabric of space itself is constantly winding and rewinding.
Mitchell focuses his gaze on the centre of the anomaly, where the Nuclear Bulge appears to pulsate like a heartbeat. He senses a connection to that chaotic vortex.
“It shouldn’t be there, you know,” Calhoun says quietly and points to the Nuclear Bulge, as he sits down next to Mitchell. “The dark Planet, I mean, shouldn’t even be there. It’s hard to imagine matter condensing in such close proximity to a monstrosity like that.”
Calhoun has the tone of someone who’s trying to convince you of something, like those who sell cars. Nora and the Captain are silent, sitting as if they were on a tour bus in any city on the earth’s surface.
“You call it a monster, but the Nuclear Bulge is a thing of absolute beauty,” says Mitchell.
“Deadly beautiful.”
“Afraid to die, Calhoun?” Mitchell asks directly.
“Of course,” Calhoun replies, with a hint of unease in his voice. “What about you? Afraid of death, Mitch?”
Mitchell retorts, “What do you expect me to say?”
Calhoun laughs, then backs away, putting his distance between them.
“I don’t expect anything, man,” he says. “Nothing at all.”
The Captain turns in their direction, and it seems to Mitchell that his eyes are alight with a strange intensity.
The closer they get, the more the Planet reveals itself. At first it appears to be just a speck in the distance, a patch of darkness, an absolute void. Then, as if by magic, contours begin to emerge from the obscurity: sharp ridges, jagged mountains and a boundless heath of black rock. Perhaps cold. Perhaps lifeless. Perhaps.
“The Planet is not reflecting any light,” Calhoun points out.
“Yes, it seems to be absorbing it,” Nora confirms.
The shuttle shakes slightly as they pass through the thin atmosphere, whose gravitational pull seems to be much stronger than the instruments predicted. Calhoun remarks, “Cap, we’re droppin’ too fast.”
“Keep your shirt on,” the Captain says.
The shuttle lands and they jerk, more than landing, they have plunged to the black surface. The landing bay lowers slowly and a thin mist curls inwards, entering the shuttle’s cockpit like smoke. From the hatch, the Planet’s surface looks dead, stagnant and cold. Deep black.
The Captain steps down and walks out. His boots rest on the perfectly smooth, glass-like surface. He pauses, looks around and signals for the others to join him. Mitchell walks behind Nora. He scans her back, her thighs, her feet. He looks at the exact spot where her feet leave the footprint, and there he notices that the surface is cracking. Thin tears run like veins, glowing faintly with a pulsing light, like the beating of a heart.
“The ground might crack,” he warns, his voice echoing through the helmet intercom, along with his breathing. “Under your feet! It looks like a huge lake of black ice.”
The Captain’s looking out at the horizon. “Let’s move on,” he says, as if he didn’t hear or care about that warning.
”It’s insane,” Mitchell wispers.
Nora says softly, “You can handle this.”
Thump thump. Thump thump. Thump thump. Thump thump. Thump thump. Thump thump. Thump thump. Thump thump. Thump thump. Thump thump.
Mitchell feels totally unease. He’s got a sharp pain in his head. He feels like there’s a ghost in his brain clawing his thought. An exasperated and unfulfillable ghost.
“Let’s keep moving,” the Captain says. “C’mon.”
Mitchell realizes that his hands are clenched into fists. Nora looks at him as if to say something sweet, but all he hears is a buzzing sound, no words or sentences that make sense. He’s overcome by an uncontrollable urge.
“Let’s get out of here,” he says. The others look at him and he continues, “Or the Planet will kill us.”
The Captain stares at him. “The Planet doesn’t have a will of its own.”
Others remain motionless. Tension keeps them still, waiting.
“Why not?” says Mitchell. His voice sounds deeper.
“Nevertheless, we’ll proceed as planned,” the Captain urges again.
“Why?” Mitchell presses. “What’s the real reason we’re here?”
“What ya mean?” the Captain asks.
“I don’t feel right about this. I need to get something off… me.”
“Off you?”
”Yes! Me, my head, my brain! Me! Fuck it!”
Thump thump. Thump thump. Thump thump. Thump thump. Thump thump. Thump thump. Thump thump. Thump thump. Thump thump. Thump thump.
The others look at each other. Mitchell notices the concern in their eyes, reflected in the visors of their helmets. Their fragile intentions breaking under the strain of the lie, and he gets a sudden, thrilling truth: They’re afraid of him.
“Mitchell, be cool. We can work this out,” Calhoun tries to get in.
Mitchell tilts his head slightly to the right and then to the left. His bright eyes fixed on the Captain.
“Where are we?” he asks.
Calhoun says, “We’re on a mission... The black Planet, the Nuclear Bulge–”
Mitchell yells at the Captain, “You’ve reset me, haven’t you? You’re controlling me with a made-up social scheme. The crew members who went crazy… You didn’t really kill them, since they were androids, right? This is all a set-up.” He looks at Nora. “That’s why she looks like someone I loved. That’s why she had sex with me. Didn’t she?” Nora lowers her eyes. “I’m under control.”
“All right, let’s talk about it, but take it easy,” the Captain says.
“Easy?” Mitchell points the gun at him. “Who are ya all?” He looks at Nora. “And who the hell am I!”
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Scientific details
The extraordinary potential of anti-sound
Do we only hear sounds? Or can we also hear silence?
Sound has frequency, intensity, phases, etc. But an indispensable part of sound is its unseen side: silence. Silence has a fundamental value in our daily lives. In nature, in artificial emissions, in the rhythm of voices when we speak, in the perfect mix of our favorite playlist. And writers use silence, too: the pauses, the allusions, the punctuation, the unspoken words given to the reader as perceptions.
Silence might not be deafening but it’s something that literally can be heard, concludes a team of philosophers and psychologists who used auditory illusions to reveal how moments of silence distort people’s perception of time.
Silence is an element of time and flows through acoustic space in close connection with its antithesis, noise. It is their interplay that gives balance to our acoustic perception, because silence prepares the ear-brain system for the succession of sounds. Silence is a dimension of sound; it is not just emptiness. But it is almost impossible for us humans to experience absolute silence (the total absence of sound) because we are constantly immersed in sound (or noise). A human being, by the very fact of being alive, interacts with the environment by exchanging sounds with it, even if they are so faint as to be imperceptible. And consider that the total absence of sound can be a rather unpleasant experience. In fact, Mitchell (the main character in Nuclear Bulge levels) is first challenged by the perfect silence he is experiencing (a cosmic silence), in which every sound that manages to reach him becomes an emotional hook with a past that, for some reason you will discover in the next episode, has been reset.
Auditory perception is traditionally conceived as the perception of sounds—a friend’s voice, a clap of thunder, a minor chord. However, daily life also seems to present us with experiences characterized by the absence of sound—a moment of silence, a gap between thunderclaps, the hush after a musical performance.
The discomfort of experiencing absolute silence lies in the fact that the ear-brain system constantly and automatically exchanges a lot of information about the sound propagation in the surrounding space and uses this data to draw a mental map that allows it to interact effectively with the world around. The correct perception and interpretation of this data greatly affects some basic functions such as orientation, balance, and movement coordination. Some say that even unconscious thinking is affected.
There are studies that suggest that the longest people can tolerate being in a completely silent environment is 45 minutes. The silence can be so uncomfortable that we try to fill it up with random music, sounds, and noises. Maybe this happens because, in order to keep up with an increasingly fast-paced, confusing, and noisy world, we gradually become unaccustomed to listening to ourselves and our inner life, and we tend to fill the silence with sound, no matter where we are or what we are doing. Let's try the opposite, listen to, isolate, and learn to find the silence between sounds. Perhaps we will learn about the extraordinary potential of anti-sound.
What about you? Have you ever experienced the extraordinary power of silence?
More insights
The perception of silence (Edited by Steven Luck, University of California, Davis, CA; received February 8, 2023; accepted May 10, 2023 by Editorial Board Member Michael S. Gazzaniga).
The sound of silence? Researchers prove people hear it, 10-Jul-2023, Johns Hopkins University.
The power of silence, Taken from the April 2014 issue of Physics World, 03 Apr 2014.
Should physicists work to the sound of silence?, PhysOrg, 2014.
Goodbye big bang, hello big silence, by Michael Brooks, 11 June 2014.
Reducing noise below the sound of silence, by Nick Carne, 2020.
Reducing noise of quantum light below the sound of silence, Australian National University, 2020.
What Is Sound?, by Jonathan Hanna, 2024.
Il silenzio: il lato oscuro del suono (e l’importanza di farselo amico), by Marco Silvestri.
Wow! Very gripping Michael. I am totally invested in finding out what happens and what’s going on. You’ve written a very engaging narrative here. And it’s impressive how you’ve weaved in the anti-matter, anti-sound science stuff in a way that flows naturally. :)
What's gonna happen?