When Spirits Beckon

When Spirits Beckon, Part 2, Chapter 7

2 February, 8.18am

The gentle knock on his forehead, followed by a very loud racket right before his leaden eyelids, jolted Barry Stevens out of the micro-sleep he had slipped into.

His hands jerked forward to protect his face, but this reflexive act simply unleashed another round of clatter – as he knocked over several more items on his desk. Barry's eyes snapped open in dazed alarm as he fell over backward; it took several precarious moments before he regained his balance and realized that he was in no immediate danger. Once again, he had fallen asleep while staring overlong at the computer screen.

By then, it was clear what the source of the original disturbance had been. The ragged screen filter, already on its last legs in any case, despite the dubious benefit it supposedly offered his eyes, had come loose when his head slipped forward in his torpor. He saw that it was now balanced precariously with one end still hooked up to its fastenings on top of the monitor while the other was perched at a point on his desk. His penholder case had also spilled its hodge-podge contents; other trinkets. placed in a manner that he liked to describe as being decorative on his desk, also lay scattered.

Barry grunted wearily as he stood up and headed to the shelf cabinet a few paces away to get some sticky tape to reattach this screen filter for the umpteenth time. As he did so, he gave a hopeful glance across his cramped one-room rented bachelor's apartment. But his usual antidote for drowsiness was not yet ready in the pantry area; the coffee in his percolator had barely begun dripping – the dark liquid barely covered the bottom of the glass jug.

His sofa bed was still unmade from when he had woken up roughly fifteen minutes earlier. Amid the winter chill, Barry had resisted the temptation to curl back to sleep again because, by nature, he was a stickler for punctuality. He had never reported late in his 10-odd year career as a broadcast journalist at the WYC network and he wasn't about to make a start now, despite having gotten only two hours of sleep.

As he rubbed his bleary eyes, Barry wondered again if his all-nighter researching had been worth the effort. The station he worked at was based in the Wyoming state capital of Cheyenne. WYC's local news coverage was very much a slow activity in the 9th largest state in the US. Nothing very much happened in the state better known for its state parks, fossils and to a lesser extent, its rodeos.

The hot local news yesterday had been that of a microwave oven exploding in a fast food restaurant in downtown Cheyenne. No one had been hurt in the incident, which had provided much eye-catching video footage of the mess created. But, since an irate customer had threatened to sue the food outlet management, Barry's attention had been immediately triggered.

What had tickled his news sense was one of the injury claims that the customer had made in a televised interview, beyond describing how he had received minor cuts from flying glass shards and splattered with hot pasta sauce. Barry had listened intently as the customer also complained that he had been exposed to some high-powered electromagnetic radiation during the accident.

The latter claim stirred up an issue that was very topical in the state; concerns over radiation exposure always remained in the forefront of the local community – given the close proximity of nuclear missile silos buried in the deserted region of northern Wyoming. Further, it would give him another opportunity to come up with a news feature that might get picked up by the national news networks. There was still much disquiet about the high prevalence of modern devices like mobile phones, television screens, high-tension wires and even the microwave oven. No viewer could resist being reminded time and time again of the need for tolerance of these necessary evils that were so much part of living the modern lifestyle.

Barry had begun his search for fresh angles on the effects of electromagnetic radiation, immediately upon getting home late from dinner with colleagues. The sheer volume of material available on the Internet had been tremendous. He had learned that there was still an ongoing debate about what constituted safe levels of exposure, with the jury yet to be convinced any which way. And he wasn't surprised that one of the biggest concerns was in relation to radiation from touchscreens. Some of the statistics he had found showed most people, starting from children as young as two, spent at least six hours flicking, manipulating or simply staring at touchscreens. This was described as resulting in exposure much higher than that from watching flatscreen television sets and computer usage – because of the closer proximity.