Member-only story
Strange Tales: Volume 4
Pitch perfect
They gathered in the great new atrium built for its intimidating spatial monumentalism as befits a space-conquering civilization. But it had also been built for its acoustics. There was nowhere inside the atrium where you could not hear perfectly what the speaker had to say.
It had been built for 500,000 to assemble together as one. The idea was that the speaker would be speaking to all but the psychic connection would be made with every single one of any of the half a million in attendance. They had mastered the science of acoustic singularity where the wavelength bounced off the prism above the atrium and then channeled onto the position of each attendee and connected them as one. It was perfection.
Attendance was obligatory.
Any refusal meant immediate demotion to take immediate effect and the ion mines on Centauri 7 were your next stop. And nobody ever returned. Even the radiation there was too much for their metabolism to process effectively. It was certain death within 12 orbits.
They had come to hear something that had once been thought impossible and as unlikely as the creature they had discovered during their latest conquest. Most of their scientists believed it could not exist and those that did were soon isolated from their studies and sent to work on other manual endeavors…
