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#buttonsinweirdplaces (Part 1 of 2)

By Simon Kewin

The buttons started to appear on the last day of April, 2022.

A six-year-old boy from Nairobi, Jomi Mbenzi, was perhaps the first to spot one. Dawdling along behind his mother, her swaying yellow-orange dress and the bag of melons and paw-paws she carried, his attention was caught by the shiny button set in the stone of one of the city’s office buildings. He squatted to study it. Strange that it was so low-down, right near the ground. In his experience, switches – and all other interesting aspects of the adult world – were kept high-up, out of reach, but here was this button set right where he could get at it. He was sure it hadn’t been there an hour ago when they walked down the same road toward the fruit market. Ground-level was his domain and he noticed everything there, while the confusing, noisy grown-up world went on around him and above him.

There was no writing on or near the button, nothing to suggest what its purpose might be. Buttons often had words on them to say what they did, words he rarely understood. Or else, they had warnings nearby telling you not, under any circumstances, to press – a fact which always struck him as odd. Why have a button you couldn’t press?

A bus roared past on the road, washing a blast of hot, smoky air over Jomi. He paid it no attention. Instead, he did what any child in that situation would do. He reached out with his soft finger and touched the button. The metal ring around it was hot from the rays of the sun, but the button itself – black, smooth and invitingly recessed – was surprisingly cool.

It clicked very faintly when he pressed it, and there was a brief musical note from somewhere, but nothing else happened. No alarms sounded, and no lights flashed. The button sprang back out when he released it, as if he hadn’t pressed it at all. He tried again, and then a third time. Each time, the same tone played.

“Jomi! What are you doing back there? I told you to stay near me.” His mother called from up the street, her bags on the floor and her hands on her hips as she studied him disapprovingly. “What have you found now? Whatever it is, leave it alone and come away at once.”

“It’s nothing,” he called. “A button.”

“A button?” His mother sounded worried, as if buttons and the pressing of them were always bad things. “Don’t you go touching it, now. Come away, it’s time we were home.”

Jomi stood. The button wasn’t so interesting after all. It didn’t do anything. He turned to run to catch up with his mother.

 

The first social media posting about the buttons came twelve minutes later from Cho Li Han, a postgrad student supplementing her income by cleaning the skyscrapers of Hong Kong. Dangling by ropes three hundred metres in the air, she came across one on the glass exterior of the headquarters of the Cathay Pearl Bank.

She paused to consider it, tilting her head as she tried to make sense of its existence. The exterior of the building was a flawless wall of glass, and their supervisor, the perpetually angry Mrs Fong, had given them clear instructions to remove any stain. An unblemished façade is very important to the bank’s public image. Someone must have put the button there for a reason, but it made little sense. None of the windows opened so high up, meaning only a person climbing on the outside could press the button. But it couldn’t do anything, unless wires had been run through the glass, and why would anyone do that?

The traffic crawling below her was a distant roar punctuated by the blare of horns, the occasional wail of emergency vehicles. Taking care not to press the button, she wobbled its housing to see if it was loose. It was stuck fast to the glass. She might be able to chisel it off with the tool she used to scrape off bird shit, but it went against her nature to deliberately damage something, even if it wasn’t supposed to be there. The gusting wind tugged at the fringe of the hair sticking out from her helmet, tickling her cheek, sending her cradle swinging. The breeze brought with it the smell of open water from the South China Sea, the promise of those distances. And what else did it bring? The news was full of warnings of high radiation counts. Chemical and microbiological agents, too. Corruption washing around the world on the winds.

She decided to leave the button where it was, unpressed. She’d lost vital minutes; if she didn’t catch up, she’d be in trouble with Mrs Fong. Again. The word was, she spied on you from adjacent towers when you were cleaning, and Cho was already on her final warning after the incident with the bucket of soapy, black water that she’d accidentally rained onto a knot of passing bankers far below. But, before she resumed her work, she couldn’t resist grabbing one photo. She took out her phone, tethered to her belt so she didn’t drop the device and bash in someone’s skull, snapped the shot and posted it to her social media accounts, thinking it might get an amused reaction from her friends. Hoping, also, Mrs Fong wouldn’t see it.

She typed the pinyin rapidly with her thumbs. Weird thing to find on the outside of a skyscraper, 300 metres in the air! Should I press it? #buttonsinweirdplaces

It was the first of many, many times the hashtag came to be used.

She didn’t check her phone until she was back on the ground two hours later. It had buzzed repeatedly, but she’d resisted the temptation to look. Unbuckling her harness, she stretched her back and legs, rubbing her shoulders where the straps bit into her. She took out her phone to scroll through her messages. The first few were from close contacts, her sister back in Wuhan, university friends, all responding light-heartedly to her post.

Then there was a reply from her father, characteristically formal and beautifully composed. The sight of it made her smile. He had never got the hang of writing brief messages. His reply gave her his latest thoughts about her troublesome older brother, Li Jing, who had dropped out of university to become a peace campaigner – much to her father’s distress. Li Jing was a bone of contention between Cho and her father, and they’d argued about him, something she hated to do. She’d defended Li Jing, saying he had to live his own life. Her father had countered with talk of duty and sacrifice, the importance of hard work. Once, he would have grown angry at her, but he was mellower now, his rough edges smoothed by his years and the loss of his beloved wife, and in the end he’d relented. There’d come a point in the argument when she’d heard him pause … and back down.

“Ah, Cho, always trying to heal the world’s wounds, just like your mother.”

Was she? It had never occurred to her before. Li Jing was the one for that; she simply didn’t like conflict. Back home in their village, whenever there was an argument between families or generations, it was her mother who would drag the warring sides to sit down together, force them to come to some grudging understanding. Her father would watch from the shadows, embarrassed at his wife’s extroversion. But also, Cho knew from the gaze in his eyes, quietly proud.

“We’re family,” she said. “We have to stick together, even when we don’t agree.”

“Yes, I know.”

There were also replies on her phone from people she didn’t know, contacts of contacts, widening ripples in the water, picking up on her hashtag. Some of the messages were in English and some in languages she didn’t recognize. Some were predictably childish, men saying how much they wanted to press her button. They were gone with a swipe. Someday, she’d go back to her AI filtering algorithm to cut out crap like that.

There were also posts containing pictures of other buttons: similar to hers but found in all manner of unlikely places. There was a shot of one upon the ground of the Great Wall, although, oddly, it wasn’t in the centre of the pathway but twenty, thirty centimetres off to one side. The fact puzzled Cho more than anything. In any case, there clearly couldn’t be any electrical connections there. The man who’d photographed that button had tried to remove it, bashing it with an ancient stone, but it hadn’t budged.

There were buttons set in the tarmac of busy South American city streets, run over by the tyres of thundering lorries. There were buttons discovered inside people’s homes, set into their tables and bedroom walls. They were upon the tops of cars, and one had been photographed embedded into the deck of a cruise-ship in the Caribbean. Another had been spotted high-up on the inside of the copper skin of the Statue of Liberty, while yet another was inside the Palace of Westminster in London, triggering a major security scare. An engineer erecting a wind-turbine on the North Island of New Zealand had found two, very close together.

While Cho scrolled through the growing list, puzzled by it all, Mrs Fong pulled up in her white pick-up to collect the team’s cleaning equipment. She looked as stern as ever through her gold-rimmed glasses as she jumped down onto the pavement, all suppressed fury. Cho slipped her phone back into her pocket to await the onslaught. She caught the glance of anxiety from Dani, the newest member of the team, and prepared to intercede on the younger girl’s behalf if Mrs Fong picked on her.

Instead, Mrs Fong addressed all of them. “You need to be quicker, quicker. This tower should have been finished yesterday; we have two more to do on the waterfront by the end of the week. I need you all here by 7am, yes? Plenty of others who will do the work, plenty of others. You should be glad you have a job in these troubled times, very troubled times.”

There were the usual mumbles of assent from the group as they dispersed.

Cho nodded to Mrs Fong, then watched the lines as they were reeled up the side of the building to the distant rooftop winches. Everything seemed so much simpler up there: just her and the building and the ropes keeping her alive. She loved the sense of distance and isolation the work gave her, the way she could literally look down on the troubled world. Some of her best ideas came while scraping the grimy patina of pollution off those high windows, idly wondering what was going on inside, invisible, a short distance away.

While Mrs Fong fumed and fussed over her equipment, Cho slung her backpack over her shoulder and set off for home, walking through the thronged streets that she’d gazed down upon so recently. She really needed to spend some development time on the system she was designing for her Doctorate, modelling the 3D topography of social-network interactions, tracking ideas washing about the globe in real-time. But, if she was honest with herself, she’d lost her burning interest in her thesis. The technology had moved on so rapidly in two years that what had once been cutting-edge was now almost commonplace, and she’d thought about dropping the project more than once, finding some new area of research.

She needed to think more about the crazy buttons, too. Try as she might to plan her researches, it was the buttons her brain dwelled on. The messages had continued to stream in, from more and more unlikely places, corners of the globe she’d barely heard of. One or two news sites had picked up on the story, her own photograph even appearing on the BBC World Service, attached to a jokey story about the buttons as some sort of elaborate prank. Maybe that was it.

Or maybe, as some thought, it was a clever marketing campaign from a tech start-up, a way of grabbing the world’s attention ahead of some product reveal. She didn’t think that was it, though. Too many of the buttons were in obscure places. There were several in Paris, but none in the obvious places, the Eiffel tower, say, or the Arc de Triomphe. Instead, they were attached to street grids in residential parts of town, or upon the exteriors of drab buildings of no particular cultural interest. In any case, the buttons inside people’s houses couldn’t be part of a guerrilla marketing effort. Perhaps people were pretending to have found buttons. It was the sort of thing they’d do.

One button had been photographed upon a rock in the Patagonian Desert – she’d had to look that up to find out where it even was – and from the geotag attached to the post, it was clear the button’s finder was a long way from civilisation, only able to get a connection via one of the new constellations of low-orbit internet satellites. Which suggested there might be unknown buttons in all manner of obscure corners of the globe, in places no one was currently visiting.

Back home in her flat, Cho made herself a pot of green tea, the little ritual of it something she did to get her mind slotted into the right shape for thought. At some point on her walk home, weaving through the pedestrians, thinking about the patterns of their movements and arrangements, she’d had an idea, and she wanted to consider it in the quiet calm of her room. Step around the thought slowly, as she might some precious work of art in a museum. It thrilled her, intrigued her; she was wary, also, of going too near it in case, up close, it dissipated, turned out to be a disappointment.

She started with a world map and threw together a simple script to plot all the geo-tagged button sightings she could pull from the various social media platforms. Many of the posts had no GPS metadata, and these she siphoned into a separate list for manual consideration later. There might still be some way of getting a rough fix on them, from some detail of their accompanying images or text. She was only after a broad view at the moment.

When it was done, she sat back and sipped at a second cup of tea from the pot. On her screen, dots were appearing every few seconds, each a tagged sighting of one of the impossible buttons. So far as she could tell, they were scattered randomly across the landmasses. Inevitably, there were more in areas of higher population density – clear enough if she applied an urban area overlay – but every now and then, another appeared in an empty stretch of wilderness, confirming her suspicions.

She watched the picture building up for an hour before phoning her PhD Supervisor, Dr Suresh.

“Cho, hi.” Dr Suresh disliked what he termed the stuffiness of social convention, insisting they use first names. Sometimes she thought she would have liked a little more formality between them, but right then it was fine. She needed to him to be cool about what she was about to propose.

“Arjun,” she said, “thanks for picking up.”

“No problems. Hit another wall with the project?”

“Actually, it’s a little more serious than that.”

There was a smile in his voice as he replied, as if he’d been expecting just such a conversation. “Sure, tell me the problem.”

She took the plunge, saying the words before she had chance to reflect upon them. “I’d like to start again, pursue a different thesis.”

“Quite a step, Cho. You have a new idea?”

“I think I do. I might be able to use some of what I’ve been working on, so it won’t be completely lost, but it’s a very different direction.”

“Sounds intriguing. We should get together to discuss it before we make any definite decisions, yes? I’m at the university tomorrow, are you around first thing?”

That was all she needed. “I’ll be there.”

 

There were still a few hours of light left: she had time to go back to the skyscraper if she hurried. Something she needed to check. Strictly speaking, she had no right to be up there on her own, but she still had her building pass, and the Security Manager was a kindly, grandfatherly figure whom she had chatted to several times while preparing for a descent.

He was dubious when she explained she needed to go back down the building, but she had her story all worked out. “I know, but Mrs Fong was checking up on me, watching through binoculars, and apparently I missed a spot. She said there’ve been complaints from inside, too. You know what she’s like.”

He did; they’d shared jokes about her, but he wasn’t convinced. “It’s not safe to descend on your own. If something went wrong with the ropes…”

“If I don’t go, I’ll lose my job, and I need it. Please, I’ll only be twenty minutes. I can bring the line up myself once I’m done.”

He had grandchildren her age that he loved to indulge, loved to talk about. Maybe that was why he relented. His face broke into a nest of wrinkles as he smiled. “This one time, then, but be careful. I’ll watch the line myself.”

She thought the button might have vanished as she neared the spot, but there it was, tiny in the expanse of smoked glass. This time, she was going to press it. She needed to record exactly what happened: there were reports of faint musical notes coming from the buttons when they were pressed, a fact that had to be significant. She held her phone ready, close to the button, recording everything. The wind was gusting more strongly now as the sky faded and the lights of the city began to shine out around her. The glass of the building was a starfield of their reflections. She shivered, feeling very exposed, the gulfs of air beneath her gaping. She put them out of her mind, steadied herself with her feet against the building and pressed the button.

It clicked in, clicked out, and a quiet musical tone sounded. Nothing else happened so far as she could tell. She listened back to the recording. Not a tone, a more complex sound with harmonics to it, lasting three seconds. She repeated the process, capturing a second press, and a third. The last time, something interesting happened to the sound: it changed its harmonic properties part-way through, rising in tone very slightly but also becoming richer. She pressed a fourth time and the sound returned to its original form.

Satisfied, she let herself down the glass cliff-face to the ground. Once she was free of the harness, the kindly Security Manager hauled the line up for her, no doubt relieved she was safe. She waved her thanks, although he wouldn’t be able to see her in the darkness and distance.

 

By the following morning, the miraculous rash of buttons was already slipping from the headlines, not because they continued to defy logic or explanation, but because of the deteriorating political situation across the globe. Most trouble-spots were longstanding conflicts, but so many were coming to a head at the same time that some commentators were seeing a pattern, warning of a wildfire of global conflagration. Festering tensions in the Middle East had flared up again. North Korea was testing long-range nuclear-capable warheads, while the USA retaliated with dire threats. The Balkans, Kashmir: old resentments left smouldering were suddenly boiling up.

Was it possible there were connections there? Her researches had suggested something along those lines. Us-and-them ideas reinforced by social networking algorithms that spiralled their popularity, cheap anger easier to foster than slow understanding, a way of grabbing user engagement. The news had been bad for months now, each day a fresh worry. Mrs Fong had been quite correct with her very troubled times. Perhaps that explained Cho’s disillusionment with her researches. Given the way the world was going, did mapping out social media posts really matter? Cataloguing the conflagration did nothing to put the fires out.

The thought about Mrs Fong sent a pang of guilt through Cho. She wasn’t going to make the 7am skyscraper-cleaning rendezvous, and that meant she’d have permanently burned her bridges. It couldn’t be helped. Scouring office blocks suddenly didn’t seem very important.

It occurred to her that she sounded a little like her brother, a reflection that brought a smile to her face as she ran through some Tai chi stretches in front of her window, preparing herself. She’d worked most of the night, pulling in more data, hypothesising, and she knew now what she needed to do.

 

Dr Suresh poured her more tea from the antique, brass urn he’d brought with him from Northern India. My own little taste of home. He’d been in Shanghai for three years and talked about going back from time to time, but never very seriously so far as she could tell. Recently there’d been trouble in his community, too, violence flaring between Hindu and Muslim, young men who’d grown up together attacking each other. She hadn’t asked him the details.

“You look like you need this,” he said, passing her the cup. “You were partying into the night?” He asked with a grin; he knew it almost certainly wasn’t the case.

“Working.”

He sat in his chair, peering at her over the papers piled across his desk like some model of the Himalaya he was building. “So, tell me your new area of interest.”

“It’s the buttons.”

He nodded. “I thought it might be.”

“What do you make of them?”

He breathed in, breathed out. “In truth, I’m baffled by them. Someone has gone to a great deal of trouble to scatter them around the world willy-nilly. Their motivations escape me, frankly.”

“The thing is,” she said, “I don’t think they are random. I think there’s a very definite pattern to them. Somehow, also, they’re connected. I mean, physically connected. They interact with each other.”

“Interesting.” He studied her with his soft, brown eyes, then nodded to the laptop she carried. “Show me.”

She’d worked out a fix for maybe half of the non-geotagged posts she’d pulled in, and all were now plotted on her world-map. “It was these three that showed me what was going on.” She indicated the three that formed a diagonal line across Kenya and Tanzania. “You recognize the arrangement?”

“I don’t believe I do.”

“Let me show you.” She activated the other overlay she’d been using, the one she’d spent half an hour building from charts she’d pulled off the University’s servers. “You see it now?”

Understanding lit up his face. Understanding and wonder. “You’re saying the buttons have been placed to match the arrangements of the stars?”

“I think they have, yes, the stars as they were at the precise moment the buttons started appearing. These three correlate to the Three Stars mansion in the quadrant of the White Tiger. Orion’s belt, in the Western tradition. Using them, I was able to fix the orientation and scale of the rest of the arrangement. It took some work to wrap the star chart data onto the globe, but you can see how closely everything correlates.”

“Some are slightly out. Here and here.”

“The blue dots are buttons I couldn’t fix precisely. The red have reliable GPS data, and almost all them align closely with the star map, down to the centimetre. One or two are out because, I believe, people have invented sightings for some reason of their own.”

“Is it possible any random scatter of dots could be made to fit?”

“Not with so many data points. The correlation has to be significant.”

“There are millions of stars: look far enough out and you can find one at just about any point in the sky.”

He was testing out her ideas, challenging her thinking. Exactly as she’d hoped. “I’ve used only stars visible to the naked eye, around six thousand of them.”

“I see. You obviously only have fixes on the land masses, but most of the Earth’s surface is ocean.”

“Which made the matching difficult, but the pattern is clearly there.”

“You’re suggesting there are thousands of these mysterious buttons upon the sea floor?”

“I don’t know about that, there’s no data. I have a few matches on permanent coastal structures, oil-rigs and wind-turbines, and one on a ship that happened to be in the right place at the right time. It seems unlikely there are buttons on the sea-bed, but who knows? The whole thing defies logic.”

“You have, what, two thousand five hundred possible land button locations?”

“About that.”

“And how many actual buttons reported?”

“Nearly twelve hundred now.”

“Isn’t it odd there are gaps?”

“Few are near centres of population. They’re on mountain tops, in deserts, lakes, that sort of thing. My working theory is that there are buttons in the missing places, but no one has found them yet.”

“You haven’t postulated a reason for the buttons’ existence?”

“No.”

“But you have ideas?”

She did, little more than vague ideas, but she needed much more evidence before she would spell them out. “Not at this point. What do you think of it?”

“Well, Cho, I think it’s clearly worth pursuing. It’s fascinating, intriguing. It could be the basis of a very important and significant piece of work. What do you need to take it further?”

“There are some experiments I want to carry out. And then I’ll need as big a network of contacts as we can muster between us.”

 

Continued in Part 2…

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Host Commentary

By Valerie Valdes

Once again, that was part one of #buttonsinweirdplaces, by Simon Kewin. The story will conclude next week.

Stories about inexplicably strange phenomena can sometimes feel more like fantasy than science fiction, even considering the old adage about advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic. In a story like this one, the considerations of how a seemingly impossible thing is accomplished are secondary to our human reactions to it–and therein lies the scientific underpinning. We speculate, we investigate, we form hypotheses, we experiment, and we reach conclusions based on the limited information available to us. Those conclusions, however, can raise their own questions, and so the cycle continues.

Escape Pod is part of the Escape Artists Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and this episode is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license. Don’t change it. Don’t sell it. Please do share it.

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Our opening and closing music is by daikaiju at daikaiju.org.

And our closing quotation this week is from Leo Baeck, who said, “Every answer given arouses new questions. The progress of science is matched by an increase in the hidden and mysterious.”