The Sonic War

“Leo, we need to talk.”

Dr. Tumik gently tilted the laptop screen down, cutting off the glow of a hundred neon audio tracks, and took a seat next to the young man's bed. Leo stared at him with complete disinterest, not even bothering to remove his bulky studio headphones.

“The nurses say you're still spending all of your time working on your music," Tumik said. "They say you hardly attend any of the ward activities with the other patients and that it's nearly impossible to get you to sleep without heavy sedation. You need rest.”

“Why? Is it important that I be well-rested when I die? Have I stopped being terminal?”

Dr. Tumik coughed and shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “We've been over this. There are breakthroughs literally every day.”

“That's what… almost one thousand fifty breakthroughs and none for me? Odds seem pretty slim.”

“Sounds like you're overdue some good luck, but if you work yourself to death before we find another treatment alternative, that'll be your last album. Are you really ready to make your last album?”

Leo answered by unfixing his eyes from the physician and reintroducing them to the screen, snapping the laptop lid back open. The rhythmic, low-frequency hum of a baseline resumed through his studio headphones, leaking a faint, tinny heartbeat into the quiet room.

#

The wall separating Rooms 410 and 412 was standard hospital grade, which meant it was entirely useless against the resonant pulsating from Leo’s bass unit on the floor.

Marcus didn't knock. He just slid the heavy door open, dragging his IV pole behind him like a skeletal companion. He looked hollowed out, the skin beneath his eyes dark enough to pass for bruises. He had been admitted forty-eight hours ago, right around the time the oncologists stopped talking about remission and started using words like comfort.

Leo was sitting cross-legged on his mattress, buried in a tangle of auxiliary cords. He was wearing his heavy, over-ear studio headphones, but his laptop was hooked into a small black audio interface on his overbed table. From that interface, a thick cable snaked down to a massive, square subwoofer resting directly on the linoleum floor. The sub wasn't loud enough to make an audible sound, but it was pushing out a deep, continuous, seismic vibration that made the glass water pitchers on the nightstand hum.

Leo didn’t look up from his screen, but he slid one side of his headphones off his ear. “If you’re here to complain about the vibration, I can slide a yoga mat under the sub. It deadens the concrete, but the wall still catches it.”

“I don’t care about that,” Marcus said, his voice flat, devoid of the energy required for anger. He slumped into the vinyl chair Dr. Tumik had vacated not an hour before, his bare feet absorbing the rhythmic, subterranean pulse through the floorboards. “I care about the fact that you’re actually doing something. That's more than anyone else around here.”

“They’re doing what they can.”

Leo was surprised at himself and had to laugh when he saw Marcus making the same face he always made when someone from the hospital gave him that line. He really must be dying.

“All they can do is make me ‘comfortable’. I’m a lot more interested in what the crazy guy in 410 is doing. Heard you got some wild theory that none of the labcoats think will work.”

“If they don’t then why would you?”

They’ve been a hundred percent wrong as far as I can tell,” Marcus said. “The cancer might be killing me, but their ideas about how to deal with it don’t seem to help much. They say I might have a month left. Something tells me this is the one thing they’ve gotten right so far and I’m ready for a wild idea or two. Are there any other inventive loons in the ward I should check in on? Or are you ready to explain your miracle to me?”

Miracle? Leo would’ve never conceived of it that way. It wasn’t deus ex machina from something outside their understanding. It was cold hard math. Real solid science type stuff, as far as he was concerned. Was that the name of the album? Miracle? Surely not.

“If math is miraculous, then sure,” Leo beckoned Marcus over to the bed and tilted his screen toward where he gestured for him to stand. “It’s really quite simple. I’m trying to devise the perfect sound signature to dissolve or at least greatly weaken malignant cellular tissues … while leaving everything else intact. That might be the trickier part, believe it or not.”

Marcus just nodded, deathly serious and contemplated what he’d been told. “How much longer do you think it’ll be?”

“It better be in the next week or two if I’m gonna be around to see if it works.”

“Same.”

The young men shared a moment of silence—or at least as much silence as they could have with the floor and walls slightly pulsating. Even while explaining the miracle, Leo was working on it. He knew his body was giving out. There wasn’t any time to stop, and even then it might be a very near thing.

Marcus stood in silence and watched the glowing screen intently for what seemed like an eternity. His body was screaming for him to take a seat but something in his soul told him there really was a miracle happening and he might be the only witness besides its worker. His eyes burned and he felt like his lips might bleed every time his mouth twitched, but still he resumed his vigil. Finally, something occurred to him.

“How do you plan to get it out to the other patients?” Leo kept clicking and dragging and rearranging his latest work of audible art. “I mean, you could put it on the net, for download, but what if their speakers aren’t good enough?”

Leo stopped what he was doing and thought very hard. He wished he had an answer for Marcus, but the truth was he just hadn’t thought about it. He’d been working on curing himself, not the galaxy. But that wasn’t right, was it? He’d never really thought about the ramifications of curing cancer. He wasn’t even sure this would work, much less if it would be effective against forms of cancer different from his own. He’d been so focused on the goal he hadn’t had time for any of those thoughts. Beyond that, was he willing to make anyone else a labrat in his mad experiment? Marcus was fine because he wanted to and didn’t have any other option anyway, but what about the others? He was thankful when Marcus filled the void for him.

“You should throw a rave. Here in the cancer ward. A rager to die for.”

“A rager to live for, you mean.” Leo smiled his broad unreserved smile for the first time in years. They immediately set about making plans, and hit several sizable snags just as quickly. As Leo saw things, there were five essentials for any good rave. Music. Venue. Time. Speakers. Security.

Music was being worked on even as they spoke. It would be done in time for their big night or he would. All he could do was keep going as constantly as his severely weakened body would allow.

The venue was something of a different challenge. He’d never had a closer gig. He’d also never had one where the staff was committed to keeping him in bed and generally sedated either. After some back and forth Marcus decided they could just drug all the ward staff. Turn their favorite weapon against them, as it were. Leo liked that idea a lot, but it seemed next to impossible, until Marcus revealed perhaps their most powerful weapon. His family was absurdly rich, and at this point in his illness he basically had a blank check to ‘do whatever he thought might make him happy’. There was no hospital orderly in the known universe that couldn’t be bribed and Marcus was sure there was at least one who could figure out how to get into the drug locker.

The best time to start any rave was obviously 2AM and this would be no different. He’d need Marcus and their orderly to wheel the other thirteen patients in the ward out into the corridors but that should be pretty easy. While they were getting that done another pair of orderlies would be helping him set up their audio equipment—more gifts from Marcus’s family estate.

Security was a more complicated matter that Marcus and Leo discussed for several days. The cameras they could loop. The locks on the doors leading to the wing had easily accessible manual lockdown switches in case of emergency. The real issue was that the second they locked down all access to the ward, hospital security was going to head their way. They might even call in local security forces. They only needed about thirty minutes, but no matter how they figured it, they didn’t see getting more than fifteen, maybe twenty if they got lucky.

Then, Marcus had an idea. “What if we don’t lock the ward down? What if we just leave everything open? Business as usual.”

“It won’t help,” Leo countered. “They’ll still hear the music if it’s loud enough to do its job.”

“Right, I hear you, but think about it this way…” Marcus took a few seconds to order his thoughts before continuing. It was nearly all he could do to keep his eyes open at this point. “We lock the ward down, security shows up in a few minutes with laz-cutters. It takes them another ten to get through the door.”

“Yeah, there's fifteen minutes. Twenty if they spend a while talking about what to do. It’s not en—”

“Hold on, I wasn’t finished. Let’s say we leave the doors unlocked and loop the cameras. They won’t hear the music instantly. Even if they do, they won’t come running with laz-cutters like they will when they see the ward in full lockdown. They’ll send one or two guys to check things out.”

“And then they’ll walk right in, turn off the lights and music, and wake up our jailers. How is this at all a good plan?” Leo tried not to let his frustration show, but their very lives depended on things going well and Marcus sounded half-senile.

“I’ll lock the doors when they try to come in.”

“They’ll bring laz-cutters then and we’re right back to square one.”

“They might. Or they might yell really loudly for me to open it up for a while, first,” Marcus shrugged. “You know how those security types are. They love yelling at people any opportunity they get. Even if they only yell for thirty seconds, we’ve bought ourselves another minute or two, which isn’t back to square one.”

Leo was silent for several minutes as he attended to the tracks in front of him. Maybe Marcus was right. It could work. If they yelled and argued and negotiated… if they weren’t particularly excited about the prospect of cutting their way into a cancer ward to turn down some music… there might be a chance that it could buy them just enough time to get through the entire sonic sequence he’d designed to decimate their cancer. It was a big gamble, but he didn’t have any better plans and time was running short.

#

The atmosphere in the oncology ward was electric with anticipation. At the master console, a night-shift nurse was slumped forward, her cybernetic optic-lens flickering in an endlessly repeating diagnostic loop. The automated nutrition-dispenser nearby sat quiet, the delivery vehicle for a localized neuro-sedative Marcus’s credits had smuggled into the staff’s caffeine rations.

Down the wide, straight corridors, the transformation was underway.

It was a surreal, ghostly parade. Marcus—his skin translucent under the sterile lighting, etched with the graying bioluminescence of a terminal cellular decay—moved silently from bay to bay. He was aided by an orderly carrying a master-key chip. Together, they bypassed the magnetic locking mechanisms on the stasis-pods, gently waking the other thirteen patients and guiding their gurneys out into the four open hallways around the central hub of the ward’s control desk.

They looked like a flock of displaced phantoms. Some were tethered to rhythmic hum-clicks of mechanical lung-regenerators; others were bathed in the pale green light of localized radiation-shields. Marcus leaned over a young girl whose hair had been taken by the aggressive gene-therapy, his hand firmly gripping her bed for support.

"Keep your optical implants unshielded," he whispered. "Something is coming."

The control desk had been hastily disassembled and moved along with its sleeping inhabitant and the other knocked out nurses and doctor on call. In its place, they’d just as quickly installed Leo into a greatly expanded version of his in-room studio setup. His "stage" was set.

It looked less like a musical apparatus than it did some terrible experimental weapon, and maybe that was exactly right.. Three massive, high-resonance acoustic sub-drives—smuggled piece by piece from Marcus’s family estate on the core worlds—sat bolted directly onto the metal floor plates to bypass the hospital's sound-dampening fields. Heavy, fiber-optic data tendrils snaked across the floor like synthetic vines, pulsing with raw energy.

Leo sat in a specialized life-support rig, a web of monitoring wires tunneled directly into the neural port at the base of his neck. He looked skeletal, his lungs rattling with every shallow breath, but his eyes were fixed on his glowing terminal. The interface didn't display traditional musical notes; it displayed a massive, swirling, three-dimensional kinetic waveform; a jagged vortex of neon blue and ultraviolet strings representing millions of delicately balanced frequencies.

He looked up as Marcus floated the final bed into the corridor. The silence of the ward was absolute, save for the hum of the life-support scrubbers and other various medical equipment that their compatriots were hooked up to. For just a moment Leo paused, a thought hitting him that hadn’t before. If he flipped the switch, the music might fry all of their life-supporting implements. If it cured them, as he truly believed it would, this wouldn’t be an issue. What if he was wrong, though?

“The external feeds are on a half-hour loop," Marcus rasped, leaning heavily against Leo’s rig, pulling him out of his moral dilemma for the moment. "The primary security bulkheads are unlocked. When they realize something’s up they’ll be down in a minute. I’ll be waiting to engage the locks when they try to get in. Ready?"

Leo nodded, his mind made up. It would work. It had to work. He could feel the fluid building in his lungs. His time was measured in hours now, not days. He looked down the line of beds inhabited by his fellow living ghosts.

"If this implodes our bodies, or phases us out of existence, or somehow makes things worse ..." Leo said, his voice a gravelly whisper. Marcus nodded and gripped him firmly on the upper arm. He didn’t need to say anything else.

Leo reached up and pulled his heavy headphones over his ears, drowning out the hum of the ward and submerging himself in the raw, mathematical architecture of sound. His hand hovered over the master ignition key. On the terminal screen, the ultraviolet vortex began to pulse, syncing itself perfectly to the erratic, failing rhythm of his own heart. He exhaled, closed his eyes, and initiated the sonic war.

The silence of the ward didn't just break—the very essence of the space seemed to shift into something entirely different.

The first ten minutes of Terminal Velocity didn’t register as sound but rather as a wave of seismic force tearing its way through the ward. The three massive sub-drives groaned, sending a hyper-low, thirty-hertz frequency rippling through the floor plates. Down the eastern corridor, the young girl’s mechanical lung-regenerator sparked, its digital readout glitching into a cascade of error codes as the sound signatures overwhelmed its circuitry. For a terrifying three seconds, she suffocated. Then, a sudden, violent cough tore from her chest—not of fluid, but of pure, unburdened air.

At minute fifteen, the outer proximity sensors chimed. Through the reinforced glass of the wing’s main entrance, Marcus saw the silhouettes of two hospital security officers. They hadn’t brought heavy ordnance. They walked right into the unlocked outer bulkhead, hands hovering over their sidearms, expressions deep in confusion as the bass rattled their ballistic vests.

The moment they stepped into the sterilization chamber, Marcus slammed his palm onto the manual override panel. The heavy, titanium doors dropped with a thud, sealing them out. Through the viewshield, the lead guard stepped up to the glass and began furiously yelling into his vox-com, his face turning crimson. Marcus didn't activate the wall-mounted headset to listen. He just leaned against the bulkhead and let the sheer, deafening weight of Leo's bass massage the aches out of his spine.

Outside, the world was screaming to turn it down. Inside, they still had fifteen minutes left to live.