Lost Transmissions

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Lost Transmissions

Entry: Lost Transmissions.

Somewhere on the far tail end of the eastern spiral arm of a faint and impossibly distant galaxy there is a planet that has never made interstellar contact. This planet, called simply "Yellow", is home to a thoughtful, psychic race of beings that is able to understand and communicate with everything around them. They spend their lives in the quiet contemplation of nature, playing fiendishly clever board games and going for long walks through the forests of prune and fig trees to enjoy the sunset.

To summarise, the Yellans were bored out of their skulls.

In fact it was so dull on their world that some of the more enterprising members of the population decided to shake things up a bit and see if there was anything else in the azure sky instead of astonishingly beautiful stars and flocks of incontinent birds.

Due to their strict and exhaustive laws on "making any kind of bloody racket", the Yellans decided to build an incredible array of hyper-sensitive microphones, point them at the sky and give the universe a damned good listening to.

The first transmission they intercepted, the opening words of which are now carved on the side of a mountain for no reason in particular, went like this:

"Look, I know you're out there, so stop mucking about and pay my expenses. I'm not writing this stuff for fun you know."

This, as you can imagine, raised a few Yellan eyebrows. What was being written? Who was the mystery voice? What the frud were "expenses" anyway?

However, the primary effect of this message was a sudden outbreak of religion.

One faction believed that this was the voice of an all-powerful being who was writing the universe into existence.

Others pointed out that there must be an even higher authority, enabling this being to do the creating through the power of these mysterious "expenses".

A splinter group further postulated that this was a pile of digested figs and that they had merely intercepted some random chatter from the galactic ether.

Despite these disagreements the Yellans decided to write it all down. They bent their psychic ears to the task and soon amassed a vast library of essays, complaints, observations, threats and pleas for help that transformed their world.

Having never even contemplated the word "spaceship", the Yellans let the universe come to them. They marvelled at the complexity of other worlds, shuddered at the news of the fractal spider plague, cheered as the hovergolf results came in, and so on. They were, frankly, very glad none of what they were hearing was happening to them.

This kind of detached observation, especially when combined with the peace and tranquillity that life on Yellow offers, tends to push the needle of the smug-o-graph deeply into the red. It was only a matter of time before someone noticed.

When a market-researcher from a galacti-vision documentary channel, homing in on the unfamiliar waves of satisfaction, arrived to record this undiscovered place with a long lens and a whispered voice over, he was, instead, taken gently by the hand and escorted to the archive.

This was a researchers dream. There was absolutely no work to be done, not even the indexing. The only thing on the to-do list was some hasty speech writing for the inevitable awards ceremonies.

The researcher, who for the purposes of this article will remain nameless unless there is a subpoena in the post, copied it all, set up a bug to record any future interceptions, retired to his ship and left Yellow behind in a flood of hyperspatial ions.

The articles were collated, edited and sent out every week to sympathetic online magazines with dubious editorial morals. And that is where, for now, the story ends. Read on.

Entry Ends.

The Lost Transmissions Archive

Tim Stevenson

17.10.11 Front Page

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