Gene Andrews was Sonny's grandfather. When he was young he developed a fondness for birds. He liked to watch them come and go along with listening to the songs they would sing to each other. As he got older he began to think that maybe the birds were speaking to each other; sharing information. Birds would come to a new place, and relay reports on where they had been. Most people did not understand how the noises these birds made could be interpeted as language. But he knew they were saying something, he heard the patterns.
Camille Spencer was a woman who didn't communicate much with the world. She spent most of her time tinkering with things; getting machines to work and organizing things. Many people thought she was wasting her time since they didn't understand the use of her creations. And she would never tell them. She just loved her creations. She had no time to try to explain, her creations needed her. About the time Sonny's father was born, Camille Spencer discovered the radio reciever. She fiddled around with this thing finally getting it to make noises. She somehow got it to pick up the transmission coming from Skylar Rippon's transmitter. But nobody knew what it meant......
When Gene Andrews first heard the reciever he was floored. He knew it was somebody sending messages, just like the birds. Again, he couldn't understand the language so nobody believed him. He was possesed to crack this code and unleash the power that the knowledge of these messages would bring. He spent night after night listening to the sounds. He began to hear patterns, and he would record the patterns. He would tally the number of times various sounds would appear, building a set of "common sounds". One group of sounds that he became very familiar with was "Sac For Wo jex Sey co rit". This was one thing that everybody could recognize, although they didn't know what it meant (This is the phrase that made it's way down to Sonny).
He also studied the dynamics of the rhythm and and tone of the sounds, trying to connect it to some kind of emotion. Over the years others began to catch on to his pursuit. An institute devoted to understanding these sounds arose. It consisted of listening centers where people would listen to the transmissions, analyze them and share their results. Although the cause had much momemtum, most people outside of it were skeptical. They didn't believe that the sounds were coming from some other city. They thought it was just noise coming from some crazy lady's machine. But they hadn't spent much time listening to the machine. Regardless of these nay sayers ,the listeners continued to listen anyway. In time, Gene Andrews realized that the institute's mode of study had plateued. Now, they needed to see the words in action. It was necessary to physically witness the nouns, verbs, and adjectives that the sounds were representing. Currently they were familiar with some words, but they could only speculate what they meant. They needed to see them used in real life before they would really know. They had to go out and find the senders of the messages and experience the language with their own eyes. Only then they would understand.
Some of the members in the institute were against this. They were afraid of the outer lands. Gene was afraid too, but his thirst for knowledge outweighed his fear. These opponents to his mission proposed development of a transmitter instead. They thought that somehow the outside city would be able to recieve and understand transmissions sent from the institute, and they could send back messages answering the institute's question. This made no sense. 'How was the outside city going to understand our language?' Gene would say. 'They won't know what we are saying just as we don't know what they are saying. We need contact.' They were just avoiding the fear, using the transmitter as a talisman to hide behind. Still, Gene was not too outspoken against the idea of developing a transmitter. He knew it would be a neccesary tool for communicating with the outsiders once they already understood the outside language. Knowing that, it was clear it couldn't be a replacement to finding the outsiders.
Gene intensely pushed members towards joining the mission, and moral was great. Eventually the idea became a reality. Many of the members followed Gene as they packed supplies onto slow moving vehicles pulled by livestock. Since the people of this city had previously been too afraid to leave the city, they had not developed much in the way of vehicles. What they had were mostly used for farming purposes. There were some vehicles powered by internal combustion engines, but they could not risk running out of fuel. Since they did not know har far they were to go, they could not plan for that.
Although they made their way across the outerlands slowly, they were full of hope. The outerlands were vast though, and much time passed without site of the new city. The journey was hard and Gene became ill and died. With the death of Gene came the death of the mission. The hope was gone, being replaced by a need for water. Gene's son was now a man and he knew that the group needed to find a permanent source of water, or else they were doomed. Everyone split up and searched for water. They eventually found a large aquifer accessible by an underground cave. They settled here growing crops with seeds they had brought. They domesticated wild birds and became content in this new land.
The immediacy of survival had led them to forget the ways of the institute. They forgot about the specific thing that Gene had hope for and instead remembered the intensity he had given to that hope. Their relationship with the reciever had become much less specific and much more broad. It no longer represented a challenge, but a symbol for the beauty of the unknown. They began to believe that this new settlement was the city they had been searching for all along.
Some thought that Gene had died from thinking too hard. This led to the demise of that type of thought among the inhabitants of the new settlement. That didn't mean that they didn't have the utmost respect for Gene though. They knew that if Gene had not thought this way they would have never found their new home. They thought that the reason that Gene was the way that he was, was so that they didn't have to be. So they thanked Gene for his sacrifice, forever remembering him with the phrase "Sac For Wo jex Sey co rit" (or "The stars must shine before the sun can rise").
