Sonny told the people at the listening centers that the transmitter was broken. It was sending out corrupted messages, sending out noise. With this revelation the crowd at the talking centers were less receptive to him than they had been before. It seemed a possibility that the noise coming from the radios was a result of a broken transmitter, but they didn't know this. How did Sonny know this, he had never even seen the transmitter. How did this guy on the street know more about the transmitters than the Administration of Information (The organization in charge of running the transmitters). The people were skeptical. But really, they hadn't even given Sonny's point of view a chance because they didn't want this to be true. If all these years they had been sending out a bunch of noise, of course nobody was going to reply. That would make all of these years of waiting one big waste of time. So the listeners stopped knodding their head.
Amidst the frustration Sonny was approached by a man who didn't shake his head, or knod. He met him on the street one night as he came back from the talking centers. Sonny felt a boost seeing that someone was going out of their way to talk to him, the new black sheep.
"You speak dangerous words", he said.
"Who are you?" Sonny replied.
"I know of these transmitters. I was very involved with them years ago. The people of this city do not want to see what you search for. And the administration doesn't want them to see it. Come......"
"Wait, you don't think i'm crazy like everyone else does?" Sonny said.
"I know about the outside. When i hear you talk I know you are from the outside, people from the inside couldn't make that up. Let's go"
They walked back to a small room not far away.
"Let me tell you a story. About the time you were born I was working for the administration of information. I was in charge of monitoring the recievers, the radios. It was a boring job considering nothing but static was all we could pick up. Some of my colleagues had thought maybe the radios were just broken. This was refuted the day we started picking up transmissions from the outside"
Sonny was excited. "So I am right, you have heard the transmissions from my homeleand"
"Yes, But the administration could not understand the words your homeland spoke. The sounds coming from the transmissions sounded so much different than our speech that they could not imagine the sounds to be coming from humans, they must be coming from monsters. They were very afraid of these "monsters". They knew the public would be even more afraid. They couldn't let the word out. They suppressed all knowldege of the transmissions. They put up a network of reflectors around the city that kept transmissions from coming in. Even though the recievers were a rare technology among this city, they made an effort to get rid of them. Even so, they couldn't be sure they had found every single one; the reflectors were a sure method of keeping the public from hearing the transmissions. This explains why you could never find these transmissions on your reciever."
He continued "Along with this, the heads of the administration came up with an idea of confusing the monsters. They feared that with all the information we had given them in the past, the monsters might be able to find us, and take us over. They couldn't just stop sending messages, the monsters might get suspicious. Instead they thought they would fool the monsters. They would send them transmissions that sounded similar to talking, but was really just a jumble of words that didn't mean anything. They hoped to achieve two things: First, the monsters wouldn't be able to learn anything new and secondly, the altered transmissions would confuse the monsters. If they had acquired any understanding of our language, this might cause them to doubt it. The misinformation would corrupt their knowledge. Soon they would become disenchanted with their failure to comprehend the new nonsense and give up listening. Basically the theory was, keep throwing a bunch of nonsense into their information pool, and soon the pool would be mostly nonsense. To do this we had a simple solution. We would just delay our ori ginal transmission and mix it with itself, then delay that delayed signal and mix it and so on. This would end up sounding like a bunch of conversations going on at once. This totally whacked out what everything sounded like. It sounded nothing like our language, but it did sound like some message was being conveyed. It sounded like something was trying to be said. This is what you heard coming over the air waves. " "Some of us at the administration didn't fear these "monsters". Maybe they were saying the same things as us, just in a different way. But we were the ones who had been listening to the transmissions day in and day out. The more we listened we began to hear some emotion, hear patterns and rhythm. Unfortunately the HIgher ups hadn't been listening, they didn't hear what we did. By the time the higher ups decided that "something needed to be done", we weren't very worried about these "monsters". Instead, we had become petrified of the higher ups. And the more they feared the monsters, the more we feared our superiors."
"After the smoke cleared some of my fellows stayed. Some of them left in shame. I have been hiding and watching....."
Sonny had some questions "Why didn't they just listen? They would have heard what you did".
"Because, when they listened they heard monsters. And monsters don't talk, they growl and snarl. They didn't want to waste their important time listening to growling and snarling. But we had to, it was our job. "
Sonny was perplexed. "Well, why did they think that monsters could understand them then?"
"Ah good question. But i think you are being a little bit sensible about the non-sensical. I guess this is the closest i've come to answering that: Say you have a pet dog. You talk to it over and over. After a while it begins to understand some of your words. It begins to learn your language, but you'll be damned if you can understand anything that dog is yapping about. That dog will never speak. But you don't realize that the dog learns because it has to, if you got thrown into live with a pack of wolves you would probably quickly understand every growl and snarl they made also. But you don't see that, you just see something different than you that you are trying to put beneath you."
Sonny was frustrated with the illogical nature of what the administration was doing. "This is crazy. None of these people's actions make any sense...."
"Yes, yes. But you must remeber, you are on the outside looking in and they are on the inside looking out. You have been on the outside, so when you come inside and try to look out you don't see the same thing they do. You may know what the outside looks like, but you don't know what it looks like from the inside."
Sonny just stared at the man blankly. Seeing this, the man paused. He thought for a moment and then summed it all up with this:
"They were just paranoid. Very, very paranoid......."
