The Tide of Static

Anya listened to Faelan’s symphony of feeling, not with her senses, but with her intellect. It was beautiful, a raw and powerful expression of pure emotion. And it was, as he had intended, completely immune to her semantic virus. A song without words cannot be infected by a disease of language.

But a song, she reasoned, is still a signal. It is a wave, a vibration, a pattern of information traveling through a medium. And any signal can be jammed.

She did not try to corrupt his music. She did not try to introduce a sour note. Instead, she began to broadcast a signal of her own. It was not a song. It was not a feeling. It was pure, undifferentiated noise. A chaotic, random, meaningless hiss that filled every corner of their shared reality.

At first, it was just a quiet background static. But it grew, relentlessly, in volume and complexity. It was the sound of a billion voices talking at once about nothing. The roar of a waterfall of pure, unstructured data. It was not an attack on his symphony; it was an attack on the silence that made his symphony audible.

The cartographer’s map began to degrade. The pure, vibrant colors of Faelan’s emotions were still there, but they were becoming harder to distinguish through the blizzard of meaningless information. His clear, beautiful notes were being drowned out by the rising tide of Anya’s static.

She was not trying to infect his song. She was trying to make it impossible to hear. She had moved from a semiotic attack to an information-theoretic one. She was no longer a saboteur of meaning, but a terrorist of the signal.

Her challenge was a wave of pure, chaotic noise, a question that needed no words. “What is a song, if no one can hear it?”