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#buttonsinweirdplaces (Part 2 of 2)

By Simon Kewin

(… Continued from Part 1)

The news the following morning was bad. An explosion in the middle of a market-square in Libya had been variously blamed upon a suicide-bomber and upon over-zealous security forces trying to control crowd trouble. The truth of it made little difference to the eighty who’d died, the hundreds left broken in the aftermath. Tensions had flared on the Mexican/American border after a young man fell to his death attempting to climb the wall to reach the USA. In Ireland, the names of old republican and nationalist groupings had been resurrected, wielded anew by figures wearing balaclavas and holding assault rifles.

Cho switched off the car radio. Sometimes it seemed the world was intent on tearing itself to pieces, and she needed to focus on the plan.

She’d travelled north to the Ma On Shan Country Park. Her predictions suggested there would be a button near the top of one of the remoter peaks. If it was there, it not only helped confirm her theory, it also meant she could experiment without any interruptions – something impossible part-way up a skyscraper.

It took her two hours to hike to the location. The GPS on her phone identified the spot rapidly enough, twenty metres down a steep, scrubby slope. The terrain had looked rough on the maps, and she’d brought ropes to rappel to it. After a couple of minutes of scraping through the brush and grass clinging to the side of the hill she found it, right where it was supposed to be.

Crucially, she also had phone signal. She’d worried there might be none so far from the city. She posted a message in the chat group she’d set up to say she was ready. Three of the academics that Dr Suresh had found from his contacts around the world were already there, standing by their buttons: one in Toronto, one near Lima, the third a few miles outside Edinburgh. It was the middle of the night in the Americas, but from their jokey messages, they all appeared to be in a good mood. Once Suresh had explained what they were attempting, they’d been happy to help. A lot of people are looking for answers, right now, he’d explained.

The fifth member of their team – Dr Mbenzi, a Linguistics Professor in Nairobi – came on line in an explosion of emojis and exclamation marks, and they were ready. Cho had thrown together a rough-and-ready app to tell them when to press and when to release their buttons, its simple display consisting of a light that flashed green for now. The app synched to an internet clock so there was no problem with communications lag, and it also captured the tones produced by the buttons. She’d specified a careful sequence of presses, repeated five times so she could spot patterns and filter out random effects from people clicking elsewhere in the world.

The buttons were still attracting a lot of attention. Social media occasionally trended with a #pressthebuttons hashtag, encouraging everyone to press as frequently as possible in the belief that numbers were somehow being tallied up. Countervailing tags trended in response – #donotpressthebuttons – from those who believed the whole thing was sinister, a conspiracy, some unspecified evil. Some saw pressing the buttons – or not pressing them – as a religious duty, an act of devotion. Others, for reasons she didn’t get, wanted to destroy them. The switches were tough, but acid or hot-enough flame, it turned out, ruined them well enough.

The countdown on the app reached zero, the light turned green, and Cho and her helpers began to press their buttons.

 

The following morning, she sat upon a bench outside the university, waiting for Dr Suresh to pass by. She breathed in the early-morning warmth of the summer’s day, enjoying the peace of it. The rising sun made the air glow, dissipating some of the weariness that filled her. The bitter coffee she’d bought was helping a little, too. She normally preferred tea but right then needed something stronger.

“Cho, what are you doing here?”

Dr Suresh, hurrying to his office, leather briefcase in his hand, looked bemused to come across her. He looked worn out, frayed around the edges, his usual clean-shaven dapperness gone.

“I came to see you,” she said.

“Has something happened? You look all done-in.”

“I spent all night analysing the data we captured.”

“You wish to discuss your Doctorate now?”

“I think there are more urgent things to talk about. I mean, perhaps afterward there will be time for that, but right now…”

Dr Suresh sat beside her, setting his briefcase down. She wished she’d brought him a coffee, too. He looked like he needed it. “You got some results from our little experiment?”

“I did.”

He studied the laptop screen through his glasses as she ran him through the data. “It’s as I thought,” she said. “There’s a clear cumulative effect to pressing the buttons at the same moment. The more that are on their three-second cycle at the same instant, the stronger the effect.”

“You had only five people; there’s a lot of background noise from random presses.”

She acceded the point with a nod of her head. “I still got results that are statistically significant, you can see from the sequence repeats. Each time we began our coordinated press, both the tone and the volume of the sounds increased by the same amount. The effect is clear and universal, recorded at each of the five locations.”

“And the tone itself?”

“It also changes in predictable ways, with extra harmonic spikes clear in the waveform. Here, and here.”

He let out a long breath. “It’s interesting, but I don’t see where it gets us.”

“I thought that too, at first, but then I studied the sound alterations some more. Both the pitch and harmonic changes suggest that a certain number of buttons need to be pressed simultaneously.”

“That’s a leap, Cho.”

“I know, but I’m worried we may not have the time for a long and considered analysis. I’ll show you why. I started by asking how many buttons would need to be pressed to raise the tone by a full octave. That seemed like an objective measure, and the increments I picked up in the test suggested it was in about the right range.”

“What number did you come up with?”

She’d thought about how best to tell him this, but now she just came out and said it. “One thousand. I mean, exactly one thousand.”

“There must be a margin of error.”

“Then I looked at the harmonics. A thousand extra spikes gives you exactly what you need for a regular pattern spanning the entire audible range of human hearing.”

“This is no proof; the range is variable.”

“It’s evidence suggesting a pattern. Next I looked at the volumes. The increases in the sound levels do not indicate a simple, linear change. The chart’s a little difficult to plot, but a thousand simultaneous presses gets us to one hundred decibels, pretty much exactly.”

“There’s nothing fundamentally objective about one hundred decibels, it’s an arbitrary scale invented by humans.”

“Which suggests whoever did this knows about us. The roundness of all the figures combined is hard to ignore.”

From his frown, he looked troubled by her words. “What do you mean whoever did this? You sound a little like one of these wild internet conspiracy theorists who claim that the buttons have been placed on Earth by a god or a benign alien to test us.”

“Do you have any better explanations?”

“I have no explanations,” he said. “No one does.

“Someone has set all this up,” she said, “and I can’t identify any obvious candidates.”

“But whoever did it – and however they did it – it has to be us, right?” he said. “People we simply haven’t identified yet.”

The ideas had been circling in her head all night and she was tired of thinking them. “Perhaps. I don’t know. We still have no idea how the buttons function, how they draw their power, let alone what they do. What matters is, I believe we have to press one thousand of them at precisely the same moment. That’s the point of the whole thing. And we have to do it now.”

His troubled expression returned as he considered her words. “What exactly do you think is going to happen? The buttons can’t really do anything, you see that?”

Did she? Perhaps. Without really understanding it, she knew they had to try. The best explanation she’d come up with was that it was what her mother would have done. Cho had sat in her room in the shadows of the early-morning, the glow of the screens in her eyes, and wondered who she was: her father’s daughter or her mother’s. Her father would have exercised caution, hung back, let others take the risks and shoulder the responsibilities. She could bury herself in her researches for years and hope the world sorted itself out. Or she could be like her mother, not stand for it, take a lead. Always trying to heal the world’s wounds, just like your mother. She didn’t want to do it, but it was what she needed to do. The realisation had surprised her.

Out loud, she said. “From a research point of view, we need to know what will happen. My theory needs to be tested.”

“Do you discount the wilder claims that pressing the buttons will trigger some unspecified Armageddon?” He spoke gently, like a counsellor gently teasing out some delicate truth.

“I do, of course.”

He nodded, as if she’d provided the correct answer. “You said there were two thousand, five hundred buttons on land. Why the sudden urgency?”

“Some are going to be impossible to reach, under the snow of high mountains or deep in jungles. My latest analysis suggests fifteen hundred should be reachable with a bit of effort. But the thing is, they’re not all reachable. Some states have declared them off-limits, refusing to let citizens near, claiming that they’re weapons or bugging devices planted by other powers. In several countries, we have no idea what’s going on because they habitually keep everything a secret. Then there’s the rate of destruction. It’s accelerating; you must have seen the videos. People are competing to destroy the buttons in creative ways. Relishing doing it. My best guess is, there won’t be a thousand reachable buttons left in about a week.”

“A week. It’s hard to see how we could coordinate such a world-wide effort in that time. I don’t have the contacts. You’ve seen the news; people are distracted right now.”

“Still, I think we have to try.”

“I suppose.” He was sceptical, she could tell. Not as excited as she’d thought he’d be. He stared at his brown leather shoes.

“Has something happened?” she prompted.

He waved his hand in a way that suggested it was nothing. “More trouble back home. A terrible thing happened; someone was set on fire.”

“Killed?”

“Not immediately. They died after a few hours from their injuries.”

“Someone you know?”

“No, no. But it’s possible I knew one or two of the attackers. They were normal young men, like me, but they did that. It is … troubling. Is that what we’re all capable of?”

“You could never do such a thing. Most people couldn’t.”

“Are you sure of that?”

“Of course.”

He sighed. “I hope so, I do. Sometimes it is hard to see where things are leading.”

He seemed to rally, cast his anxieties aside. “So, these buttons. Let us try what you suggest. I can spread the word through academic circles, see if we can recruit a thousand people.”

“I’ve been thinking we need to go public.”

That puzzled him. “That runs the risk of alerting all the crazies intent on destroying the buttons.”

“I know, but it’s the only way to be sure of getting enough people in time.” She didn’t add that she thought the collective effort of it might be the whole point. It sounded ridiculous even to her.

He shook his head, smiled weakly, as if something in her words amused him. “Very well, let us see what we can do. Let’s set a time and begin recruiting.”

She placed a hand on his arm. Perhaps it would be good for him, take his mind of his troubles. “Thank you,” she said.

 

Five days later, she walked the streets of Hong Kong again. The anxiety etched on people’s faces was starker than ever. It wasn’t just the demonstrations and the riots, the clashes with the authorities, the barricades and the tear-gas volleys. That morning, the eastern sky barely shading from black to bruise-purple, the sirens had started up across the city, their mournful wailing a warning of imminent attack. In the end it had turned out to be a false alarm, but it had set everyone on edge. People whispered about the government practising for something they knew was coming.

She’d ignored the troubles, thrown everything into her plan with the buttons, but it wasn’t going well. The plain truth was that the numbers were against her. She’d thought people would be excited by the idea of the shared effort, but so many had turned against it, actively seeking out the more inaccessible buttons to destroy. She was going to fall far short of the one thousand mark.

Dr Suresh, it seemed, had been having similar thoughts. She’d intended to cross the harbour and climb The Peak, hoping the height and perspective would give her a fresh angle, but he phoned as she was crossing the choppy waters of Victoria Harbour, the deck of the Star Ferry lurching beneath her feet as she struggled to hold on to the rail and pick up at the same time.

He sounded weary, drained of all his colour and energy, like she was hearing a low bit-rate sampling of his true voice. “Cho, I’ve been looking over your projections.”

“I know they don’t look good.”

“I rang to say, I think you should forget about this concern with pressing a set number of buttons at the same time. It was an interesting idea, but not a practical one. Better to coordinate whatever amount of global co-operation you can and extrapolate from there. The long-term research possibilities are still enormous. That has to be your focus.”

“I think we have to do this now, or we may never be able to.”

“You can’t possibly know that.”

“Maybe I’m deluded, but I don’t want to take the risk.”

The weight of regret in his voice was clear. “Then, I don’t think there’s anything more I can do. I can review your research drafts when they’re ready, but this is beyond me. I’m sorry. I’ve spoken to everyone I can, spread the word. We simply don’t have the numbers. And I … I’m not convinced of the scientific or the social worth of what you’re proposing. Also, the thing is, I need to go back home, to India, for a while.”

“Because of the conflict?”

“I just think I need to be there at the moment, with my family.”

“When will you be back?”

It took him a long time to reply. “Honestly, I don’t know. Between you and me, there’s some talk of shutting down the university for a while, until the current political situation is calmer.”

His words troubled her, but they were also useful. She didn’t need to climb the Peak to think about what she should do. It was suddenly clear. She thanked him and, worrying she might never see him again, told him to be careful. After an awkward pause when he seemed to be struggling for the right words, he told her to do the same and rang off.

She had Li Jing on an encrypted chat app. If she sent a pre-agreed message, he would send her back a temporary phone number he could be contacted on. That was the arrangement. She’d thought the arrangement ridiculous when he’d explained it to her, but now it seemed completely reasonable.

It took his number an hour to come through after she sent the message. She called him straight away.

“Li, it’s your sister.” When he didn’t reply for a moment, she added, “It’s Cho.” They hadn’t spoken for nearly a year. She didn’t know where in the world he was.

Finally, he responded. “Cho. Is it father?”

“No, no. He’s well. Still doubting your life choices, but he’s coming around.”

There was another pause, although whether it was lag on the line or he was distracted, she couldn’t tell.

“Why are you calling?” he asked.

“I need a reason to call my brother?”

“No, no. Of course not. It’s good to hear from you.”

“I wanted to be sure you were okay, but, actually, I do have a reason for calling.”

“Go on.” He sounded amused rather than angry.

“I need your help. Where are you?”

“Best I don’t say.”

“So, somewhere you’re not supposed to be.”

“That depends on your viewpoint; I’m where I need to be. I can’t stay on the call too long, though. Sorry to be abrupt, but what help do you need?”

As quickly as she could, she explained what she’d learned about the buttons, what she wanted to do. There were only twenty-four hours left before the big press, and, by her reckoning, they had only nine hundred of the buttons covered, give or take.

“We can get to those in hard-to-reach places, up mountains or in jungles, but it’s the human geography that’s defeating us. There are too many states that refuse to give people access, or that refuse to even admit they exist. It’s hard enough here in Hong Kong with all the trouble on the streets we’ve been seeing.”

“I can believe that.”

“You must have useful contacts. You must know who to speak to among the underground groups and the political activists.”

“Activists where?” The suspicion in his voice was clear.

“Everywhere. Anywhere that needs them; I can send maps. Look, I don’t want to know who or where your contacts are, but if word could be got to them, somehow, it could make all the difference. We need people in every corner of the world to take part in this.”

He couldn’t quite keep the note of disdain from his voice. “Why, Cho? This can’t do anything. Action on the streets is the only way to change anything. And something like this, even if it were possible, the risks would be too great. The locations of the buttons are well-known. You don’t know the half of what goes on, the extra-judicial killings and the atrocities.”

She resented his tone; she’d seen plenty on her TV screen over the past days. And on the streets around her, brutality she thought was in the past, safely confined to the history books. At the same time, she understood what he meant. In the face of what was going on in the world, her concern for the buttons seemed ridiculous even to her.

“I think we have to try,” she said. “I think the buttons have been put there for a reason. What we have to do is the simplest thing in the world. Press them, all together, all across the world.”

The chuckle in his voice was familiar from their childhood. He’d always indulged her in her mad schemes and games. Her big brother.

“I’ll put the word out,” he said, “try and reach people with restricted access to the net. But I can’t promise anything. I can’t know if the message will even reach them. Or if any of them will be able to respond. Or will want to. Or will be able to.”

“Thank you. Will we see you soon?”

“I don’t know, Cho. I don’t know. I hope so, truly.”

 

An hour before the agreed time for the mass press, she set off for the skyscraper where she’d found the first button. She’d seen no other mention of that particular location on social media; it would be her contribution to the effort.

She found her way blocked by a confrontation between angry protestors wearing face-masks and a line of armed police. The word was that many of the security forces had been brought in from the mainland to suppress the trouble. She skirted around the pitched battle, tasting the acidic smell of tear gas in the air, hearing the muffled roar of hundreds of voices united in their cries and shouts. The melee swept suddenly toward her, and she had to run, sprint past burned-out cars, the glass of smashed windows crunching underfoot.

The delay threatened to make her late for the agreed moment. It didn’t matter; she was under no illusions: they weren’t going to reach one thousand buttons. Over the last twenty-four hours, the number they had access to had reduced rather than risen, the rate of destruction higher than she’d projected. She’d tried to speak to Dr Suresh again, desperate for some ideas, some help, but he hadn’t picked up. She’d tried Li again, too, but the number he’d provided was now unobtainable. She’d even contacted her father, told him everything.

The fear in his voice about unfolding events had been naked. “Come home, Cho. Just come home. You’ll be safer away from the city. Perhaps when this is over, you can go back.”

She’d been very tempted to comply, too, hide away in the safety of her childhood home, let others shoulder the burdens. And yet, here she was, at the foot of the skyscraper that, just a few short days previously, she’d laboured to clean.

The building was deserted, the friendly Security Manager gone. No one had taken his place. Things were falling apart. She wondered what had happened to Mrs Fong. The word was, she’d fled the city leaving everything behind, as so many others had done.

Mercifully, Cho’s security card for the office tower still worked, the machines oblivious to the world’s troubles. She buckled herself into her harness and descended the glass side of the building alone, grateful for the solitude, the distance. Sooner or later, she’d have to go down to the ground again, but the longer she could put that off, the better. It was good to feel distant from the planet’s troubles. A part of her wished she could stay up there for the rest of her life. A part of her also toyed with the idea of releasing the safety locks, undoing the lines that held her so she could fall free. She could hear the roar of the riots, see the lines of people advancing and retreating down there, but they were distant, small. It was hard to be sure who were the protestors, who were the police trying to stop them.

The button was unharmed, just where she’d left it. Most likely, no one had been to it since her last visit. It was as small and black as simple as ever, almost unimportant-looking. Still no one had been able to adequately explain how it and all the others had appeared. How they functioned, what they were.

Her app, distributed to the whole world for anyone to download, showed her the remaining time. There were suddenly only a few moments left, the seconds of the countdown flicking over to single digits, to 3, 2, 1.

To 0.

She pressed the button, heard the familiar tone. Rapidly, it rose in volume and pitch while deepening in complexity, becoming richer as more and more buttons were pressed. There was something choral to it, massed voices booming louder and louder, the timbres familiar but also unearthly, making her flesh crawl.

The app, sampling and analysing the sound, gave her a readout of how many buttons had been pressed. The number shot up to four hundred, five hundred, six hundred, and her heart leapt. Maybe they had enough people after all. Then the numbers began to level out.

She pressed again, and again, hoping people across the globe were doing the same. The digits ticked up more slowly, creeping to seven hundred, touching eight hundred – then dropping back again. The clarion sound from the buttons ringing out around her, beautiful and alarming, dipped noticeably in volume.

It wasn’t going to be enough. They’d got close, but they weren’t going to make it. They’d tried. She’d tried. She’d done all she could.

Another sound came to her ears, above the roar of the city, above the chorus of the buttons. A falling and rising wail. The sirens were sounding once more, warning of some imminent danger, some malign cruelty screaming through the air toward them. This time, she knew, it wouldn’t be a false alarm. There was a taste of finality in the air. Of an end being reached.

Desperately, eyes watering from the wind, she pressed the button again and again, jabbing at it. Others, people she had never met and would never know, were doing the same. She wondered what fights, what bloodshed was taking place in the world as people fought to press. She wondered where Li was, right then, whether he was involved.

The numbers on the app continued to react. Nine hundred. Nine hundred and fifty. Eight hundred and eighty. Seven hundred and ninety.

Then came the moment when the numbers spiked. For the briefest moment, they shot up sharply. The coincidence of human actions all across the globe. The sound from the buttons swelled to a crescendo that sent shivers up her spine, the volume of it deafening, seeming to fill the world. In that instant, she couldn’t tell if it was inside her head or real.

One thousand and one.

A huge, heavy silence washed over Cho, washed over Hong Kong. The chorus of sound from the buttons ceased. So, too, the wail of the sirens, their mournful howl cut off. The numbers fell back, but for a brief moment they’d done it, reached the mark.

The roar of the crowds had also stopped. She looked down at distant faces. They were all upturned, staring at something above her. Straightening her legs against the glass, she peered up the sheer side of the building. A bright light was there, like an impossible day-time star. Not just a light: there was a solidity to it, too. Some new object hung within the atmosphere. She could see others in the distance, stationary in the air above sea and land. Filling the skies of Earth, impossible constellations of atmospheric lights were appearing. She understood their locations, the arrangement now very familiar to her. One shone out above each button, beneath each star.

Social media posts began to flood in, reporting the same thing over every country and continent. People stopped what they were doing and gazed to the sky, their faces lit by impossible red and orange and blue lights appearing from nowhere, the glow on billions of upturned faces brightening and brightening.

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Host Commentary

By Valerie Valdes

Once again, that was part two of #buttonsinweirdplaces, by Simon Kewin.

In fiction, collective action often takes a back seat to the daring feats of heroic paragons, in no small part because the work of the many tends to be tedious, incremental and thankless rather than dramatic. In the face of massive political, environmental and social problems, the actions of individuals are like so much random button pushing until they are coordinated, guided toward a common goal. Stories like this remind us not only that we can accomplish more together than we can separately, but also that none of us are alone in the world, that we’re all spinning on the same rock in the void of space, looking up at the stars and hoping for a better world. And maybe, somewhere out there, a greater galactic community is looking back down at us, waiting for us to join them.

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 Albert Einstein, who said, “From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: that we are here for the sake of each other – above all for those upon whose smile and well-being our own happiness depends, and also for the countless unknown souls with whose fate we are connected by a bond of sympathy.”