Jane looked out at the vanishing point. Teetering over its edge was a buoy she anchored out there to mark the horizon. She needed a place for her eyes to stop so they wouldn’t strain to look further and further. At least that’s what she told the fellow technicians on the site. She had put it there for herself, to keep her mind from going out over the horizon and never coming back. It was too much to look out and hope, to put unreal expectations on the future. She didn’t have a problem with dreaming or hoping – it was an enjoyable hobby of her past, but here it only made reality that much more miserable when she had to come back to it. It was easier for the time being to participate in mindless motions and busy work without thinking too much. She played mental games with herself to program her mind into feeling like the time was going by faster. Any breaks from the monotony would only make her aware of the reality of how long she had to go. It felt hopeless; they had made so little progress in what seemed like eons. It probably was hopeless, but there was no world like the one she grew up in to go back to. They were either going to usher in a new era or die in the transition. Was she to wait for death and that was all? These were the thoughts that plagued her if she allowed her mind to wander over the horizon. Her eyes darted towards the buoy, and her mind jolted back to reality. She wondered if it might fall off the edge of the Earth one day. She wondered if she might swim out and fall with it. Her thoughts began to drift again.

The expanse of the ocean and horizon that extended from peripheral to peripheral made the waves look like small ripples on a pond. Her body looked tiny and frail in comparison as he walked up behind her. He watched as her hair danced over her shoulders. She was lost in thought again, he thought. It’s good that he was here to distract her.

“Anything?” Boomed Harold.

She jolted. She was ripped free from her thoughts and propelled back to reality. “Huh? Wha?”

“Is there anything new? Or just the norm? I know you can tell. Don’t make me go down to the decoders. I can’t stand to talk with them.”

She smirked and looked back out to the buoy as she spoke, “they’re not that bad.”

“I don’t like talking to them. They get so worked up about every detail. They’re crazy, and every time I go see them they make me feel like I’m the crazy one for not getting excited about something that’s been going on since before we inherited this planet.”

“You probably are the crazy one, but that’s fine. We all have our purpose here.” She gave a half smile as her eyes shifted towards his.

“I suppose.” He broke his gaze from the ocean and focused it upon Jane. She was painfully pleasant to absorb, and he did it with pleasure. The two then stood looking out at the buoy. Contemplating any number of things before Jane broke the silence. “I feel like I’m that buoy and the ocean around me is time. Whichever direction I choose, it seems like it will take forever to get to a shore. The past is so far forgotten that I’m having difficulty even constructing what a future could hold.”

Harold drank the last sip of his coffee, “Don’t – don’t think of the bigger picture here. Just stay in the moment. You know the pain of dreaming.”

“It’s not the dreaming. The dreams are like morphine. It’s the trip back, mostly the landing, that hurts.”

“Alright,” he dismissed this train of thought and changed topic. “What is it saying?”

Jane set her eyes back out over the ocean. The greenish-gray water mimicked the overcast sky above. Barely distinguishable from each other except for the thin line that darted out from the buoy. She looked down at the spacing between the ripples and interpreted the pattern.

“You know there’s not a person on this earth that can translate the waves. But I can tell you the pattern hasn’t changed, if that’s what you mean.”

“How long is it going to take?” He was frustrated.

“Longer than it’s been, I suppose,” she replied with her usual sarcasm,

“So insightful, Jane! We should be getting a different message by now. What’s the use of repeating it over and over. We have all the data saved, we need something new to compare our progress. Maybe we’ve gotten it all wrong. Maybe everything we’ve done has been a mistake.”

“Don’t talk like that.”

“One man’s frustration won’t make a difference. The whole world is trying to solve this riddle. How do we even know it’s real? They’re ocean waves! They’ve been around forever! Who gets to decide that it’s a message? The world was ticking away just fine in ignorance before this sham!”

“It’s real, Harold. I know it. I can see it. You know it, too. You were here for The Silence. You know what it was like before all this.”

“It was so long ago it doesn’t seem real. It just feels like a story at this point.”

“Yes, but we are to focus on our purpose.”

“Purpose.” At that he spit out the last of the coffee-flavored saliva from his mouth. “What’s the purpose of involuntary martyrdom?”

“Harold, please. You’re being quite unpleasant this morning. I must go calibrate the collectors for the decoders. I expect to find you in a better mood this evening. At least we can have that.”

The fury subsided; a flash-thought of her body stretched against the length of his own brought warmth. “Yes, well…”

“Yes, well, nothing. You just came to me and told me not to get too caught up and lost thinking about the bigger picture and here you are in a fury over the hopelessness of it all. You were right. Now let’s get our work days over with and relish in what little enjoyment we can get out of this life. I will see you in the evening. Do not be late.”

“Okay, okay, I take it all back. Be sure to give the crazies my warmest regards.”

“Don’t mock them, or I’ll arrange for you to be stuck with them on the night shift instead of spending your nights with me.” Her smiling eyes looked through his.

He held his palms in the air. “No mocking. No mocking here. Go play with your gizmos. Clutter your mind with them. We’ll just have to work extra hard to unchain ourselves from our mental burdens this evening.”

“We just might.” She said smiling back at him as she walked away. Harold watched Jane’s figure sway from side to side in her over-sized coveralls. When she was out of sight he looked down at his coffee mug, turned the grounds out on to the pebble beach and looked out at the horizon with a deep breath. So gray, so boring, he thought. It looked like today was going to be the same and nothing extraordinary was to come.

Jane was out a few feet from a jetty inspecting and calibrating a signal-collecting device called a wave-tap. It was a simple device consisting of a pendulum submerged in the ocean that was then pushed and pulled by the movement of the waves. The other end of the pendulum was attached to a gear system set to an algorithm which would translate the patterns of the waves and then tap them out on the contacts like a telegraph.

Before the wave-taps, people like Jane, the Visionaries, knew for a fact that the waves were saying something. They couldn’t translate the message verbatim, but they could interpret the general mood of distress coming to the shores. They felt a connection to the source; they could feel the signal, and they knew it was coming from something bigger – something that lived freely throughout the mesh of the universe that fleshed itself out as the Earth. No one took these visionaries too seriously, they just seemed like another group of spiritual people trying to push a belief.

But as it turned out, the visionaries were proved to be right. The people of the Earth woke one day and looked out to the shores to see something that didn’t quite seem natural. The waves began to look fake, like a sort of computer simulation. It seemed mechanical and with a purpose. The pattern was subtle at first; some people would look at it and ignore it, yet more and more would feel disturbed with a deep-down feeling of distress. After too long it couldn’t be ignored. The ripples took on a definite pattern and meaning.

As time went on the waves became increasingly intense. It was then that the pattern became obvious to most everyone and could no longer be ignored. The waves could be counted on to repeat like clockwork. The phenomena became the center of a media frenzy, a headliner and debate topic, a campaign platform for politics, and a growing source of fear among the masses. As a result, a portion of world-wide government budgeting went towards research of the phenomena, but it was too late. The waves became bigger, faster, and more exact. You could hear, and even feel, the pattern crashing on the shores in sync. It became the heartbeat of harbor towns and shorelines across the world. It became louder and faster for weeks until it seemed like it couldn’t possibly grow any more intense. Then, just as it seemed like the whole planet was going to explode, when it felt like their must be a revelation coming at the end of all this activity, when the mysteries of the universe were sure to come to light; When someone, somewhere, somehow, was going to put it all to meaning – Silence. Silence like a shock of adrenaline. A silence so loud it crushed the soul.

Everything pounding on the shores came to a sudden stop; one last final crash that stunned the earth before it all went still. The water released its last breath and receded as if in low-tide. From the shore a smooth glass, a perfect mirror, was finished out to the horizon and beyond. The silence was unbearable. It was a silence that tugged at the soul and beckoned it towards nonexistence. The silence felt like a scolding; people walked around depressed as if they had done something wrong. They felt like children that had disappointed their parents. Each of their faces sullen as they went through the motions of their daily routines. The entire Earth was engulfed in doldrums.

It was in the silence, reviewing recorded data, that they finally made a break through. Mathematicians, cryptologist and the visionaries all worked together to crack the cipher of the waves. They could translate it into a computer language, but it still had complex layers of data. Some was visual, resembling ancient hieroglyphics, some was like a strange music, a small fraction could be translated as actual words, but a large portion was still a mystery.

It was this history of the whole phenomena that occupied Jane’s thoughts as she put the cover back on one of the wave-taps. She put a check against it’s number and location, looked at the next one on her list, and made out to its spot down the shore. She was exhausted from starting her day out with too much thought and wouldn’t engage in it anymore. She hummed a song that went along with mechanical crashing of the waves as they washed over her bare feet.

Next installment: Static