A young woman becomes increasingly convinced that the radio receiver in her bargain headphones is picking up an alien transmission.
This story is from Year 8, The Year of Revisitation
I revisit one of the stories I’ve already written, and write a new standalone story connected to or inspired by the existing one through a character, a place, an object, a continuation of events (okay, sequel), and so on.
This week I am revisiting an idea and a story title: mysterious voices coming from headphones. I have a pair of over-the-ear headphones that has a radio receiver, which I pretty much never use. I didn’t even know they could do that. I wondered what would happen if I tuned in to a station that seemed to be transmitting an alien news broadcast. I would think it was fictional, of course. Because they’re speaking a human language, for one thing. But what if there was an explanation for that, and for all the other things that make me think this isn’t real?
This week’s idea was inspired by a story in which a girl is haunted by a mysterious voice that she can only hear in a pair of headphones that her friend has modified for the purposes of eavesdropping, “The Lady in My Headphones.”
[Video Description: Trailer. Duration, 37.5 seconds. No sound. Digital drawing. Overview of a wooden desktop. Clockwise from top right corner, most of a cup filled with a brown liquid. A cell phone displaying a checklist with a few items checked off. A hand with a bracelet visible, holding a pen perched over a folded-over notebook. A crumpled sticky note. A pair of over-ear headphones. A cylindrical container filled with colored pencils. A partial view of a pair of glasses folded up. A folded-over notebook with notes written on the top half lying over a document affixed with a binder clip holding a note where the sentences are partially visible under the headphones. The words “Short Story” and “Genre: Mystery” are displayed in front of the image. The title card fades and lines from the story appear in glowing text and text boxes, alternately: “’Now, most of our listeners know that Earth is not an intersystem civilization.’ At first, I thought I’d tuned into a radio play. ‘It would be fairly easy for even a one-ship pirate crew to conquer a significant portion of the planet’s current sentients.’ ‘Should we be telling our listener’s that?’ I had spun a scenario in which I was a stranger that some store employee was playing a prank on.” The title appears as the last line fades. A watermark of the site URL appears at bottom right throughout.]
Genre: Mystery, Science Fiction
Tags: BROADCAST, COMM-SHIELD, EARTH, GLOR, GLORMYNX, HEADPHONES, INVASION, INVESTIGATION, PRANK, RADIO, RECEIVER
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