Silence · fiction
What is silence?
A 2040 story. A girl who has never lived a minute without sound asks her grandfather what silence is, and he takes her to listen to the sky.
A vision — a short story.
The girl was born in 2031 and had never heard silence.
It's no exaggeration. In her house, the walls talked: they announced bath time, read stories, reminded her grandfather of his medicine. In her bedroom, a soft voice woke her. At school, every desk had an assistant that answered before she finished the question. In the street, cars hummed, ads sang, the adults' glasses murmured things in their ears. Even at night, when everyone slept, there was a low noise of machines working, like a sea with no beach.
So when the teacher spoke of the word silence, she didn't understand.
"Grandpa, what is silence?"
Her grandfather was seventy-eight and had a past as a radio astronomer. He had spent his life listening to the sky at an observatory high on a mountain, in Bolivia, where the air was so clean the stars seemed too close. He looked at his granddaughter for a while, as if looking for the answer in her face.
"Tomorrow I'll show you."
The next day, he asked the car to take them far away. Two hours of highway, then an hour of dirt road. When they arrived, the car announced there was no signal there. The girl was startled.
"What do you mean, no signal?"
"That's why we came."
He had everything turned off. The car, the glasses, the girl's watch. And the two sat on a rock, late in the afternoon, on a plain so wide the horizon looked like a line drawn in pencil.
For the first ten minutes, the girl was restless. She fidgeted with her feet, asked questions, hummed. Her grandfather didn't answer. After a while, she stopped asking. And, little by little, she began to hear.
The wind passing through the dry grass. A bird far away. Her own heart, which she had never heard. Her grandfather's breathing beside her, a little wheezy.
"Grandpa, is this silence?"
"It's the beginning of it."
When it grew dark, the sky opened like a jewelry box. Her grandfather pointed up.
"You know hydrogen? The simplest element there is. One proton and one electron. It's in everything, in the stars, in water, in you. And, when a hydrogen atom changes state, it releases a very faint signal, always on the same frequency: one thousand four hundred and twenty megahertz."
"And can you hear it?"
"Only with enormous antennas. And only because, many decades ago, the countries of the world agreed on something rare: no one emits anything on that band. It stays protected, quiet, so the universe can be heard. It's the most silent place people have ever agreed to keep."
The girl was quiet for a long time. She looked at the stars and thought about hydrogen's faint little signal, coming from everywhere at once, forever, without anyone asking.
Then she had a vision, the way only children do. She saw her own body made of little dots of light, and each dot softly singing the same note the stars were singing. She saw that she and the sky were saying the same thing, in a language you only hear when everything else goes quiet.
"Grandpa."
"Hm."
"Silence isn't when there's nothing. It's when you can hear what was always there."
Her grandfather didn't answer. He didn't need to. They went home late, and on the way she didn't ask the car for any music.
For Bairo, 1420 MHz is the frequency of silence: a symbol, not a device. No one transmits on that band, not even him. Read: The frequency of silence.
The way forward
Silence isn't absence; it's the space where you hear what the noise covers. Give children, and yourself, a few minutes a day without any screen or voice. The first minutes are uncomfortable; the ones after teach.