Awaken: Light

Audio version

This version is produced by myself and narrated using (pretty damn realistic) TTS, primarily for use on my fictional "Awaken" podcast in SecondLife.

The audio version uses the following sounds and music:

The narrators were generated using ElevenLabs (with whom I have no affiliation).

Text version

I began my career at the military institute for applied physics, of which nation I am not at liberty to tell you. My role was as a junior research engineer at the lasers and optics department, primarily tasked with equipment maintenance, calibration, embedded programming of makeshift equipment, and procurement for a high-priority research project with long-term funding. In truth, it was an amazing workplace. I've always been fascinated by the physics of light, and working in a top of the line research institute with some of the most advanced technology available at the time was thrilling, to say the least.

At the time when these events took place, we were working on encoding data into a quartz matrix using high-powered lasers. The idea was that this method of storing data would be vastly more stable than anything currently available - perfect for data archiving. The hum of the machinery and the heat they gave off felt very comforting to me. You might think our technique was fairly crude, our room-sized equipment meant that we consumed electricity equivalent to the needs of a small town, just to write relatively basic binary data onto a crystal matrix. However, that's how things always begin, miniaturisation and efficiency improvements come later in the development process. During the testing phase you need to work with what is available to you.

Our lab was a fairly large open space with a wide variety of machinery, some tables intended for work that were perpetually covered in a wide assortment of spare parts, manuals, forgotten coffee mugs and paper that almost certainly should have been filed away somewhere. Additionally, I shared an office in the corner of the lab with my senior, for administrative work. There were 5 of us. I can't give you their real names, but for the sake of the story, lets call the other four: Sandy, John, Ishi, and Jennifer. Jennifer was our principal investigator, this was her project. Even so, we could count the number of times she had been in the lab since the start of the project on the fingers of one hand. Sandy was our senior research engineer, she essentially handled all of the day to day work, in our eyes she was the boss. John and Ishi did the ground work: setting up experiments, collecting results, and so on. We were not close enough to spend time outside of work, but we considered each other friends, and had fun together.

Sandy was a brilliant and highly motivated woman. Not only did she excel at her work, she also excelled at keeping everyone else feeling involved and happy. This only added to our sense of dread and confusion, when we returned to the lab after a long weekend, first met by the smell of burnt hair and ozone, then by the sight of Sandy on the floor in front of our equipment. John and I were the first to arrive to work that morning, and he was first to rush to see if she was alright. Of course, she was not. As soon as he turned her over on her back, he recoiled, then after some brief hesitation, turned away to usher me out of the room. I was close enough to see what had happened. Where her left eye should have been, I saw only a black hole, connected to a streak of badly burnt skin going from her eye, across her face, over her scalp - leaving a bald line where her hair had been burnt off. Our only reprieve that there was no blood in sight, everything having been instantly cauterised by the laser.

We settled outside of the lab, informing Ishi, who arrived later of what had apparently happened. I sat by John, trying to offer some semblance of comfort. Nothing much was said, most of us likely wanted to leave, the smell lingering even in the hallway outside after we'd opened the door. Police arrived, we were all asked to provide testimony, but there was very little to be gained from it. They soon found a suicide note on the desk in our shared office, and since no one reported ever seeing her in as much as a heated argument with anyone, the case was quickly written off as a suicide. We regular henchmen were of course never allowed to read the letter, but the department head informed us that Sandy had made it very clear that she had been the least depressed while deep in thought at work, and that her reasons for taking her own life had come from her personal life. Clearly, some people are very good at putting on a strong face around others, even when they feel terrible on the inside.

After that incident, we were given two weeks off while the scene was properly sanitised, and to let us all process what had happened. We attended Sandy's funeral. It was a simple affair, she did not have much family. However, the scout troop she had been leading gave her a pompous final salute, and the other leaders shared some lovely stories from events they had attended together.

Eventually, our two weeks came to an end, and when we returned, the lab still felt off. The sight of a corpse, that of a friend no less, in an otherwise sterile environment had left the place tainted in our minds. I thought I could still sense the smell lingering in the air. Ishi, and especially John both seemed hesitant to resume working with the equipment. I could understand, of course. Even though I loved the lab and the work that we did, returning to the room where someone I considered a friend had recently committed suicide was... harrowing. Even so, we were all dedicated to our jobs. As Sandy's junior, it fell on me to pick up her tasks - in addition to my previous ones.

It did not take long before Ishi approached me. During setup of the laser equipment, they had found a quartz crystal on the writing terminal. He seemed very uncomfortable while handling it, so he handed it off to me swiftly and hurried off to our storage room to fetch a new, untainted crystal. We couldn't know what it had been exposed to, so disposal was the appropriate recourse. However, I couldn't bring myself to. It felt strangely warm to the touch, and while a regular quartz crystal of this quality would be as transparent as the finest glassware you can find, it had a smoky tint to it. I decided to keep it around. If nothing else, it would be a pretty and unique desk ornament.

After two weeks of downtime, we were massively behind schedule. Jennifer made an unusual appearance in the lab, seemingly only with the intention of breathing down our necks, as if we didn't already have enough on our minds. Additionally, I had inherited Sandy's mountain of paperwork, as well as her undocumented source code for controlling the laser. To make matters worse, nothing seemed to work properly anymore. Calibration of the lasers power output was off, and no matter what I tried it seemed impossible to restore. Silently I cursed the cleaning crew, surely they must have touched some of the dials.

One evening, as we were wrapping up and heading out, Ishi points at my office and asks if I had forgotten to turn the lights off. Through the window in the door, it was brightly illuminated. I gave out a sigh, told him I would go turn the light off before leaving for the night, and said good bye. However, the lights in the ceiling were still off, but the crystal that Ishi had found on the writing terminal after the incident with Sandy was glowing. I picked it up. It felt warm to the touch and a tingling sensation spread in my fingers and up my arm, then it began blinking rapidly. I had no idea how this was happening, or why, but I got the distinct feeling that there was a pattern to the blinking light.

Suffice it to say, I never left the lab that evening, entranced by the pattern of light emitted from the crystal. Instead using equipment we had laying around to construct a simple contraption with a photoresistor to record the length and count of the pulses of light. After collecting a good amount of data, which I initially thought was binary, I ran it through some pattern recognition software I found on the internet. The results came back right away: Morse code.

"... there? I cant see you, I thought someone was there, but I cant see or hear anything. If anyone is getting this, please respond! I am so lonely, I don't know where I am" were the first words I managed to decode from the blinking lights. My first thought was - of course - that someone must be playing a tasteless joke on me... but who would do that, and why? More importantly, how? Surely, a person couldn't be in the crystal calling out, could they? "Sandy?" I asked, hesitantly, but of course I got no reply, the crystal had just stated that it could neither hear nor see anything. Similar messages kept streaming out of the crystal, pleading for contact.

I thought that perhaps the electrical weirdness we had experienced was due to the crystal interacting with the magnetic fields from our wires somehow. It was, at least, worth exploring. I supplemented my cobbled together light pulse detector by salvaging some copper wire from an old transformer, wrapping it around the crystal. My plan was to induce a magnetic field and modulate it with intentional fluctuations, to hopefully establish two-way communication. As I did so, the lights in my office visibly dimmed, and my office computer unceremoniously abruptly turned off. This certainly seemed to support my hypothesis that the crystal was the culprit for the phenomena we had observed during the week. I was going to have to shield it somehow.

I remembered seeing an old CRT monitor in one of the storage closets, it should have some mu-metal for shielding around the tube. It took some doing, but I managed to disassemble it and recover a thin piece of shielding metal, enough to wrap around the crystal, with some to spare. Dismantling lab equipment gave me an uneasy feeling, it was certainly old but someone had kept it around for a reason. I just hoped Jennifer wouldn't come looking for it anytime soon. Handling the crystal seemed to spark heightened activity each time.

I grabbed a waveform modulator from one of our work benches, and rigged it to pulse current through the copper wire in long and short pulses to send simple messages via the magnetic field - morse code. It was not something I was used to, so I started with a simple message: "SANDY?"

At first, there was no reaction, so I sent the message a second time. What happened next can only be described as a flurry of activity, a steady stream of confirmatory messages followed by questions: "Where are you?" and "Who are you?". It took me a while to communicate this way - to Sandy it must have been like trying to coax valuable information out of a barely literate toddler, over a 12 kilobit connection. I told her who I was, and asked her if she knew where she was and how she had ended up there. She didn't know, or didn't want to tell me, and was reluctant to talk about the last thing she could remember, I could understand why.

At first, I hesitated to tell her that I'd been there when we found her dead body on the floor of the lab - or that she was, apparently, currently inhabiting a quartz crystal the size of a human thumb. However, I didn't see how I could skirt around the subject. It took me over an hour to get the message out, but I told her everything starting with how we had found her body on the floor, and ending with how I was currently communicating with her via a precarious contraption that looked like something taken right out of Back to the Future. The crystal remained inactive for several seconds after I had finished sending the message, enough time for me to wonder if I had somehow managed to break the equipment. Then, Sandy replied: "So I hadn't dreamt that," surprising me by not questioning the part about currently inhabiting a crystal.

We spent the few remaining hours that night chatting, I was never going to get as quick at morse code as Sandy clearly was, but my speed improved. I told her about the memorial service, that everyone were both surprised and sad. That her scout troop had attended. She was certainly missed as both a friend and a colleague. Still, she was understandably reluctant to talk too much about her feelings at the time, but she told me about how her current existence felt like slowly waking up from anaesthesia, mute, blind, deaf, and alone. Sandy could feel things around her, probably the magnetic fields from our instruments and wiring.

Morning approached fast. Even though I felt guilty leaving Sandy in isolation, I hid the equipment behind a stack of books on one of my shelves and returned the waveform generator to the work bench. At least she understood her situation now. I would keep it between me and Sandy for now, how would I even begin telling John, Ishi and Jennifer about this? Furthermore, I was in desperate need of a cup of coffee to wake me up before the start of the rapidly approaching work day.

Getting through another full day of work was torturous. Not only was I completely exhausted, my mind was unable to focus on anything other than Sandy and the otherworldly experience I'd had the night before. However, at least the weirdness we'd experienced with our instruments was gone now that I'd insulated the magnetic interference generated by the crystal. John and Ishi thought the reason I'd stayed behind all night was to fix that issue. I was happy to let them think so. At the end of the day, even though I yearned to stay in the office and continue our conversation, I just had to go home and get some sleep. I'd told Sandy as much, but leaving her alone for such a long time still felt wrong.

The following evening, I told everyone I needed to finish up some paperwork as they headed home. I waited a few minutes after they'd left for good measure, then got my equipment set up again. "Sandy?" I enquired. It took a moment before I got a reply: "I'm going to need your help."

Sandy had spent the last 36 hours in complete isolation, alone with her thoughts and without any external stimuli. She wanted me to help her end her life for good.

Now, you must understand that I'm by no means a killer. Under any other circumstances I wouldn't even consider heeding her request. But Sandy's situation was unique to say the least. She was clearly deeply depressed, had no way to perceive the outside world other than second hand via - for her - painfully slow morse code. What kind of future could she expect? In the best case scenario, she would become a subject of scientific study, granted some limited interaction. In the worst case scenario, she would spend eternity alone in darkness with nothing other than her thoughts to keep her company. Neither option sounded very appealing to either of us, only like different levels of hell.

So, we discussed various means of how we could approach the issue. Shattering the crystal would perhaps do the job, but quartz is extremely hard, a 7 on the Mohs scale, and I really wasn't sure I would be able to. In the end, we agreed that her consciousness was data, somehow written in the crystals molecular structure, and we should be able to destroy it by overwriting it with new data. Erasing her. I asked if she wanted me to write anything in particular, a favourite song, book, film maybe. But she was not interested. So we decided on just writing an on-bit - binary one - at each position, a brutal overwrite without nuance.

I promised Sandy I would leave the crystal at her grave, but got no response, she'd resigned herself and retreated into isolation.

Setting up the equipment was simple enough. Removing the magnetic shielding would likely cause some variance in the lasers output, but considering that the goal was to scramble the data in the crystal lattice, I doubted it would make much difference. I steeled myself before pushing the button.

As soon as the laser fired, the crystal began glowing. Only slightly at first, but rapidly becoming so bright it was blinding and I had to look away. The lasers power output was increasing, almost as though the crystal was sucking the energy out of it, thirsty for as much as possible. I tried turning it off, but even pulling the plug from the wall had no effect. Around me, every device in the lab came to life, every monitor shining brightly, every light on. Somehow, the magnetic field generated by Sandy's crystal was inducing current in the wires, sustaining everything electrical around it, endlessly perpetuating a cycle of increasing power output.

The fluorescent lights above my head exploded, the loud electrical humming was deafening, and the smell of overheating electronics flooded my nostrils. I ducked under a table, taking cover from the shattered glass raining down. For a moment, the irrational part of my brain suggested that a disassembled CRT monitor was the least of my worries, Jennifer would have my hide. Then, finally, every light turned off, the cacophony of sound around me silenced. For a moment, my world was darkness.

A bright, warm light enveloped me. Feelings of happiness permeated my soul. I looked up and saw Sandy's face, beaming with the widest smile I've ever seen. At least, it looked like Sandy. A being a pure light, bright ripples cascading around her. She didn't speak, but I could feel genuine gratitude emanating from her godlike visage. She stretched out an arm, reaching for me. Her hand touched my forehead. In my mind, a stream of information flooded in, Sandy was imparting all of her know-how on me, all of her experience, everything she knew about physics. No, more than that. She was giving me the secrets of life itself, of death, of everything in-between, of the universe we've only barely scratched the surface on. It was too much, it hurt, my head felt like it was about to explode. I screamed.

I remember nothing more from that night. The next thing I knew, I woke up in a hospital bed two days later. Lucky for me, Ishi had arrived early for work that morning. He'd seen bright lights streaming out through the cracks in the door and smelt burning electronics and feared the lab was on fire. When he'd opened the door, it had been dark. He found me on the floor, violently convulsing in a grand-mal seizure.

As you can probably imagine, I was not considered employee of the month, and I had no way of explaining myself without sounding absolutely insane. I lost my job. The damages left me drowning in debt. I lost my home.

I was never let near the lab again, but I did manage to convince John to smuggle Sandy's crystal out for me. The smoky tint was gone, but it was definitely the same crystal with the same slight imperfections on the ends. Holding it felt significant, the warm feeling, the tingling sensation, gone. I briefly considered keeping it, but in the end decided to uphold my promise to Sandy, even though I knew she was not dead. Far from it.

These days, I travel the world, offering my considerable knowledge - what she gave me - to organisations around the world who do honourable, significant work. Chances are I've contributed to something in your life as well. One day I will be joining Sandy.

Last modified: 2025-05-07 16:47:46