Radio Waves

"Why are you so peculiar?" she wanted to ask the old man seated next to her. This was merely a bus ride, and listening to a radio during the journey wasn't out of the ordinary. It was too old, she thought. The radio looked antique with several knobs and dials indicating its impracticality and likely obsolescence; it couldn't possibly be functional. So, why was he staring at it as though it was the most prized thing he ever possessed?

"I wish you would just tell me what makes you seem so odd," she repeated the sentiment again in her head. He glanced over at her. "Oh, please don't look at me!" she yelled in her mind, suddenly consumed by awkward embarrassment. He returned his gaze to the radio.

BING!

The loudspeaker announced a stop approaching. Hers was the next one on the route. To her annoyance, the old man began shuffling his feet and turning his body towards the aisle, indicating his intention to exit. She debated a moment whether to hold off on leaving at her stop, but then quickly scoffed away the plan. Her aversion to and curiosity about the man's strangeness battled out a course of action.

She resolved not only to exit at the correct bus stop, but also to clandestinely follow the man for clues about his destination. She forewent her usual left turn at the street corner drop off in favor of the man's right turn. "What am I doing?" she whispered to herself. An old man with an old radio would hardly give reason for a second glance to most anyone, but here she was, unable to resist discovering answers to questions about him that she hadn't realized her mind was asking.

The sidewalk forming their path headed towards a side of town she generally avoided, but a sense of mission had taken over by the time she'd realized it. Then, when the man entered a seedy adult shop with blacked out windows and very low lighting inside, she followed without objection from her conscience. A door in the back of the building soon emerged, and they both let themselves into the room it concealed behind it.

The mystery of the man and his radio suddenly deepened. Several chairs were set up along the walls of the room, each occupied by a different elderly person, and all holding slight variations of the same type of radio in their laps. None of them looked up to notice their intrusion, nor did they acknowledge the old man as he found a seat to occupy himself.

A few moments passed after which she asked them what they were doing in the room, shocked by her sudden urgency. "We are waiting," they replied, somewhat in unison. When she pressed for further details, they calmly reiterated their initial answer until finally, she found a series of questions that garnered the existence of a second door in the room containing the occupant they were seeking to meet. "Did anyone knock?" she challenged, greeted with shaking heads in response.

So, she knocked.

The man that responded in kind wasn't the kind of man she'd ever seen before. He was tall and quite distinguished; however, he had such an otherworldly aura about him that she couldn't interpret his features using the usual categories one would describe another person with other than to understand that he was male. He just...was what he was.

"Did you bring the right one?" he demanded. She simply stared blankly, unable to comprehend his question.

"The one from before, when I was here – when we all were here. It had the correct frequency to communicate with our ships. Where is it?"

"I...I...," she began, then stopped when a sudden realization came over her. She hadn't heard him say the words her mind was considering. She'd been filled with them, as though they'd simply arisen from her own stream of thought. And she wasn't providing her response with her mouth, either.

"You're not human," she managed to convey to him as her immediate response to his questions set in.

"Do you have it?" he continued, ignoring her declaration. "I've sent for it and you are here. Please, answer me."

"I don't understand what you mean."

"I've sent a message to those from before. Their genetic sequences only receive very precise frequencies, and the messages only deliver to those I've called."

"From before?"

"Yes. However, I miscalculated the life span of your people, and those I've called no longer have physical forms. The next closest genetic sequences were found, relations of the sequences sought, and they have come as I asked. You are related to the last sequence and therefore, you must have the right one."

The man's countenance was desperate and determined. She felt compelled to help him, but her lack of comprehension was creating more obstacle than she could overcome. All she could gather was that he'd summoned relatives of people he'd known from an earlier time using a radio-type technology that operated like a search engine. It seemed to use a frequency to find and retrieve people whose DNA was the most relevant search result.

"Can you explain what...what is it you need from these people who've come? A radio?"

"A transmitter. They have brought the correct type of device, but they are not enabled to serve my purpose." He looked down at her hands, then back to her face. "If the right one no longer exists, one of the wrong ones can be made right. You must have the knowledge. Your hands come empty."

"Um, no. I just followed that man over there," she rebuked, pointing to the old man from the bus. He shook his head in response.

"That is not how an emergency protocol operates. You may only come here if you've been invited. The frequency surrounding my current position dissuades all in its vicinity to go elsewhere."

"Well, I can promise you that my working knowledge of electronics is nonexistent. So, there's that."

"Do you possess a book?"

"Many. But none that are here."

"A small book, perhaps? One that would fit into your parcel there," he persisted, gesturing towards her purse. She shook her head. "Do you not carry any sort of written thing at all?"

She scoffed at his insistence, but then remembered something she always kept with her: A note from her father.

"Oh, I suppose I do have a handwritten something," she admitted. "But it's short and doesn't make much sense in this context. It couldn't possibly be useful to you."

He held his hand out to receive it despite her objection. She pulled it out, explaining to him how he couldn't keep it because she was adopted and it was all she had from her parents. "See?" she mocked. "Just some scribble that won't make sense to you."

He did not answer her. Instead, he punched the scrawled words from the note into a small electronic device he had on a desk behind him. Then, he went to one of the elderly women and retrieved her radio. He dialed the knobs precisely based on the output from his device and she gathered that he next sent some sort of signal to it from that same device.

For several minutes, the man stared at the radio as if anticipating something. She tried to ask another question, but he held his hand up, indicating his desire for her silence. Finally, a series of intense bleeps came through the radio's speakers, the sound of which appeared to relieve him.

"My fleet will be here momentarily," he announced to her. "The others will be released once I have been summoned."

"But, wait!" she protested. "Am I to think you knew my father?" He gazed at her intently with a pained expression. "The treaty between our people requires that I do not answer that question."

Then she awoke suddenly, seated on her usual bus home. "Oh, my God," she whispered to no one. "What a dream!"

"Excuse me, miss? Do you have a tissue by chance?" a little girl seated behind her inquired. She nodded in affirmation and reached into her purse. Her hand met with two objects. The first was the pack of tissues she sought and subsequently handed to the girl. The second was the piece of paper she'd retrieved in her apparent dream state. Compelled to open it by its sudden relevance to her, she read its newly added contents in astonishment:

"Thank you."