Gator and the Big Buzz, one of my flash stories, dropped today on the great webzine Flash Fiction Online. In this article I have story notes and also an MP3 with my conception of what the “Big Buzz” sounds like, plus more information on what the L4 Lagrangian point means.
WARNING: There are spoilers in this article, so please take the few minutes required to read this one thousand word story: Click Here to read “Gator and the Big Buzz” on the FFO website.
Story Origins
There are two different things that inspired this story.
First, like millions of other people in the world, I have severe tinnitus. This is a constant ringing or buzzing sound that I hear 24 hours a day. In my case it affects both ears and is a super high pitch series of tones. Think of microphone feedback and go much higher in pitch. My tinnitus was caused by a genetic disease, otosclerosis, which caused the bones in my inner ear to calcify.
It’s important to note that this sound is not real. It originates in my auditory nerves. Nothing can stop it. If I deeply concentrate on something, such as writing, I do not notice it, sometimes for hours at a time. But it’s always there.
Backstory that got cut: “Gator” is the narrator’s nickname because he was inspired by Willis “Gator” Jackson, a real-life sax player.
The second inspiration for this story was the classic B movie “The Day of the Triffids.” A key plot point is that an astronomical event causes just about everyone on earth to go blind. I thought when I first watched this movie that the monsters that came in later were not really necessary! Just the idea of almost everyone going blind would have been enough for a great movie.
So I thought, wouldn’t it be nearly as bad if everyone went deaf?
The Science Behind “The Big Buzz”
I decided that the cause of the deafness would be an object that came into the solar system. This object has a previously unknown physical property that causes human brains to be overwhelmed with an auditory sensation of a loud buzzing sound, and it simultaneously cuts off all real sounds. This object is rotating at 37.19 RPM and so this induced buzzing has a warbling “beat frequency” of 37.19 BPM. (Gator uses this warbling beat to ‘keep perfect time.’)
GEEK NOTES: The MP3 is a sawtooth wave at 45 Hz and a square wave at 45.62 Hz mixed with both white and brownian noise.
What does The Big Buzz sound like? Here’s a simulation I made using audio software of my conception of the sound Gator (and everyone else on Earth) hears. It’s an MP3 file and you’ll need to download it to your computer or mobile phone to listen.
No wonder Gator hates the Big Buzz so much!
Could Anything Really Cause This?
Thankfully, there is no known effect that could cause The Big Buzz, at least as it is described in the story. But some things have come close. Experiments with microwave weapons have induced buzzing and tones in people’s heads, so it’s within the realm of possibility. The phenomenon in the story, however, is apparently not blocked by the Earth (everyone, everywhere on the Earth is affected all the time), so this would have to be some unknown physical effect that can penetrate right through the Earth. (Neutrinos do that, but mercifully, they don’t interact much with your brain.)
Effects of The Big Buzz on Society
If you play the MP3 you’ll probably agree it’s exceptionally annoying. Now imagine if everyone on Earth heard that, all the time, at a fairly loud volume, and the same phenomenon is also cutting off all other sound input from your auditory nerves. You’re completely deaf and hear only the Big Buzz 24/7.
What does that world look like? Well, the answer is obvious. Society would instantly collapse. Lots of people would not be able to stand it and would commit suicide. (William Shatner reported in an interview (HERE) that his own tinnitus nearly drove him to suicide). Communication would be so hampered that industries and governments would fall apart. Riots, anger, shortages of goods, violence. Not a pretty picture.
We’re coming into the story nine years later, when things are at least stable again. People have learned sign language; the people who survived have learned to cope.
What’s L4? Is that real?
Yes, L4 is real space science!
The monstrous object that generates The Big Buzz has gotten stuck at a point called Earth-Sun Legrangian 4. That’s a place in Earth’s orbit where the Earth’s gravitation, the sun’s gravitation, and centripetal forces will cause an object to get “stuck.” It will actually follow the Earth around in a fairly stable orbit. There are other Legrangian points as well (named L1 through L5). I chose L4 instead of the others mainly because there is a highway in Louisiana called LA-4 which came into the plot a bit. (Lagrange points are extremely important in space navigation, as they allow a nice way to change orbits, for example from an Earth orbit to a Sun orbit.)
Here’s diagram (from the Wikipedia article on Lagrangian points) showing how the five Lagrange points (green dots) are arranged. The Earth is the blue sphere and of course the sun is the yellow one. This is not to scale.
(The license for this image requires an attribution link, see HERE for the license and other information.)
One minor piece of poetic license in the story is that Gator describes the object at L4 as “following the Earth around like a rabid puppy” when in reality the L4 point leads Earth in orbit rather than follows it, as you can see from the animation above. Hey, Gator wasn’t a scientist!
What Does the Story Mean?
I’ll preface this section by saying: this is what the story means to me, but that’s not really important. What it means to you is all that matters. If you interpret it differently than I do, it doesn’t mean you’re wrong, even though I’m the author. There’s no wrong. In fact I have sometimes reinterpreted my own stories after hearing another person’s take–I actually liked their interpretation more.
To me, this is a story about how people react to a drastic change in their world. We have three significant characters: Gator, Alphamax, and Hammer Dude. Each of them reacts to the Big Buzz differently.
Alphamax has lost hope. He accepts the new reality of a world where nobody can hear and music is dead. He has moved on from his piano. There’s not much more to say about a person who reacts this way (at least not in a 1000 word story).
By contrast, Gator, the narrator, has hope. He continues to practice his sax for the day when the Big Buzz stops. He spends his time thinking about “the soundful days” and reliving past glories. He identifies himself as purely a musician, even in a world without music. But is Gator’s hope just “false hope” as Alphamax claims? At the start of the story the reader hasn’t yet received enough information to be sure.
Hammer Dude is actually the hero of the story! He reacts to the new reality by fighting it. He is also a musician, but unlike Gator, he’s willing to adapt. He invents a new kind of drum that people feel with their hands, it doesn’t require a person to be able to hear. He even builds it out of the sign for Lousiana Route 4, LA-4, which is a thinly veiled reference to LA(grange)-4, the place where the object causing the Big Buzz resides. By beating the sign for LA-4 with hammers, he’s symbolically beating The Big Buzz which sits at L4.
Although Gator is excited by the potential of Hammer Dude’s “boom boom” instrument, he can’t shake his past. He sees himself as a sax player, period. Illogically, he even tries to join in with Hammer Dude using his sax, which nobody can hear but himself (in his head). He could have asked the hammer dude to teach him to use the new instrument, faced reality and adapted to it. But, tragic figure that he is, Gator cannot see that as his future, and he chooses to continue to live in the past and spend his time simply wishing for the Big Buzz to go away.
At the end we find that his hope is perhaps not totally false, but it seems unlikely the Big Buzz will go away very soon, as scientists admit it could take a thousand years for some asteroid to randomly come by and dislodge it from L4. Any attempt to “nuke it” using a rocket also seems to be in the far future, as the infrastructure required for a space mission is gone.
Gator still hopes that the Big Buzz someday cease, and he can play his sax again to adoring crowds. But his world has changed in one respect: now he knows about Hammer Dude’s new kind of music that doesn’t require functioning ears.
That’s where the flash story ends. The one thousand word limit is brutal, but also forces the author to pick out just what matters and nothing else.
In my mind, I hope that Gator goes back and finds Hammer Dude the next day, and asks him how to use the hammers, or helps him build an even bigger boom boom. But I know that Gator would keep his sax, just in case, because you gotta have hope, or you got nothin’.
What does the story mean to you? Leave a comment and let me know.
See also: “Gator and the Big Buzz” Accepted by FFO
See also: Turning Everyday Life into Science Fiction Story Ideas
