A Familiar Language

5 a.m.

Craig regarded his reflection in the mirror coldly. Another morning and he found that he was once again greeted by the same face. It was the face of a tired, bitter, and balding old man. He turned on his electric razor. There was still hair trapped between the blades from his last shave. Just like every other time he noticed it, he considered cleaning it. And just like every other time he noticed it, he decided it could wait. He looked at the buzzing razor in his hand and found that he couldn’t remember what it sounded like. He turned the razor back off. He had intended to use it, but keeping up appearances seemed rather pointless now. He should beg for his job back. He wasn’t sure how he was going to keep paying rent on his apartment. But what would he tell his boss? That he would do better? That was a lie. His boss had every right to lay him off. He hadn’t been able to concentrate as of late. His reports, when he actually did them, were full of errors. The ringing picked up again. They were only two sounds, a short ring and a long ring, but they were shrill and too mercilessly inconsistent to fade into white noise. At first he had tried to drown it out. His landlord had threatened to kick him out if he kept receiving noise complaints, so Craig had invested in a good pair of headphones and created a heavy metal playlist on his phone. It wasn’t the music he typically listened to, but it worked for a while. Eventually however, the ringing became so prominent that he couldn’t hear anything else. He spoke to a doctor when it first started. Tinnitus, she had said. He had meant to go back to the doctor when he realized the ringing was all he could hear, but he hadn’t really slept in days and leaving the house seemed impossibly difficult. Everything seemed impossibly difficult. He was even moving about his apartment less. Trips to the bathroom and his fridge were about as much as he could manage. He kept telling himself that every morning was a new day, a new chance to go out and get his ears taken care of, but he had failed this morning as well. He fell back into the too soft cushions of his couch. He covered his ears even though he knew it wouldn’t help. He had just become so accustomed to the motion that it comforted him even if it didn’t actually muffle the ringing.

12:00 p.m.

Craig jolted up out of his crevice in the couch. Had he fallen asleep? That was probably good. He wished he could have stayed asleep. The ringing was getting more insistent. He punched the couch cushion in frustration. He was so tired. He smelled something burning. Was that… smoke? Craig followed the smoke to its source in the kitchen. Flames were coming from the top of the stove. Luckily the flames weren’t big yet and he was able to smother them with a nearby pot lid. He turned off the stove top and lifted the lid to reveal a badly singed cloth rag. On the stove was a pan with what looked to be the charged remains of eggs. When had he tried to cook? He couldn’t remember ever even coming into the kitchen this morning. And where was his fire alarm? Shouldn’t it be going off? He looked at the small round device on the kitchen ceiling. The light was blinking frantically. The reminder that he couldn’t hear the world around him made him instantly aware that his ears were still ringing. Craig went over to his computer. If he hadn’t woken up when he did, he could have died. He couldn’t put it off anymore. He had to figure out what was wrong with him. He googled “constant ringing in ears.” He expected tinnitus to be the first result, but it wasn’t. There were internet users all over the world complaining about symptoms similar to his. It was some kind of epidemic. People were asking what was happening to them. It seemed the doctors had no answers to give. He read medical blogs and watched news reports. Eventually he found his way to the conspiracy pages. People were claiming they had seen spaceships and strange lights. They seemed to think the ringing was the work of aliens. Craig was having a hard time keeping his eyes open. He was so tired. He re-read lines over and over until his head finally slumped forward and came to a rest on the desk in front of him.

5:00 p.m.

When Craig woke up he hardly noticed the pain in his neck over the ringing. It was so loud. He gingerly touched his ears half expecting them to be bleeding. Pain seared through his head. He thought it might split in two. It was just a noise. But what if those two simple interchanging rings were going to be the death of him? Other people were panicking. It made him want to panic too. Was the ringing really the work of aliens? Or just some strange illness? Why would aliens make his ears ring? Maybe they had decided to drive some of the population insane. Maybe they were trying to communicate. Maybe it was a language of some kind. But what kind of language only has two symbols? He looked at his computer again. It hadn’t helped him much before but this time it instantly gave him the answer he was looking for. Binary. Craig slipped back out of consciousness.

8:00 p.m.

Everything was black. No. There was a faint glow. He followed it until it got closer, but it was still blurry. He blinked a few times trying to will his eyes to focus. It was his computer screen. He had been thinking about his computer before hadn’t he? It was something important. The ringing kept going in his ear. This time he paid close attention to it. He opened a blank document and typed what he heard. Soon he had a long string of ones and zeros. But even if they meant something, he hardly knew anything about computers or binary, how would he know what it said? That’s when he remembered the conspiracy theory forums. He sent them the file with a question. “What does this say?” He waited for a response while his ears continued to ring. His vision was covered in black dots. He was struggling to keep his eyes open again. Suddenly a reply flashed on his screen. “It’s some kind of programming. Give me a sec and I can give you more info on what exactly it’s meant to do.” Those words were the last thing Craig saw before the world went black again.

12:00 a.m.

Craig sat up. He walked out of his apartment and into the hallway. He didn’t notice that the ground was cold on his bare feet. Slowly he was joined by others. They began to form orderly lines. They didn’t seem to notice that people were trying to stop them. No matter what, they just kept walking. Craig didn’t notice when his bare feet started to bleed. He didn’t notice when people began to point at the sky and panic. He just kept walking in his single file line. He walked into a spaceship, and then he walked back out. There were no aliens on board. The fleet wasn’t for transporting living beings, it was an automated armory. Craig had never seen the weapon he held in his hands before, but he knew exactly how to use it. As loud as the screaming and explosions were, Craig didn’t even notice that he could hear again. The ringing had stopped. Now all that remained was the program.

This was for a writing contest that you can find here:
https://steemit.com/twentyfourhourshortstory/@mctiller/writers-win-5-steem-the-june-26-twenty-four-hour-short-story-contest-a-man-driven-mad-by-a-ringing-in-his-ears-discovers-it-s-an

The image is from Andre Furtado on Pexels. It is free for personal and commercial use and can be found here:
https://www.pexels.com/photo/abstract-architecture-background-buildings-370717/