Echolocation

It's not a threatening sound, not really. I mean, well, it's become threatening—the MOST threatening sound … but in itself, objectively speaking, it's not at all. Just a gentle if irritatingly persistent chirrup, not unlike a bat's echolocation sound in the evenings near the mountain. The bats come down from their roosts in the shallow caves up where the sun never shines—in the fold of the mountain, a mountain that is only just a mountain but around here is so flat it certainly passes for one. The chirrup chirrup takes some hearing—it's just within our sonic range, and it always seems to come from much higher than it actually is.

But when you detect it the first time, you'd swear it was a bat taking insects in the pinched summer evening light, their weak eyes irrelevant to the deadly precision of attacks, their hunt. And though there is really nothing batlike about the entities, they are certainly weak-eyed. They can't bear the daylight, and all their tracking is done via their thirst for reflected sound; even when you yourself are totally silent, they measure you up, pinpoint you, and home in fast. It's said that even in pitch black their weak eyes can see you up close before their gnashing and tearing begins—tearing out your senses, leaving you bereft of any connection to the physical world, any connection at all. They leave you to your interior worlds, to your inner resources—some victims seem to think this is transcendent … they tell us this before they lose the capacity to speak, to write, to sign, to indicate anything of life at all.

As I load my dirty washing into the frontloader and set it for "eco wash," I contemplate how apt and ironic this setting is. After all, like many such things, the entity first appeared after the clearing and damage to the mountain became so catastrophic it had no choice but to react. After the first dozen cases of sensory failure, the government sent a team of military scientists to sort things out, but after they were all struck down, an evacuation and surgical airstrikes were considered. But none of us wanted to move and all of us had learnt that if you stay indoors in the evenings, and plant trees during the day in supplication, there's no bother. Some of us who are more keen even sit and listen to the gentle chirrup through the flywire of an open window.

Now, I would suggest NOT taking the risk with a flywire open, but some do. But what actually kept the government from compulsorily acquiring our dwellings and allotments was the fact that entities started popping up all over the place—anywhere there were natural roosting places under threat, an entity chimed in. In some instances, military and mercenary strikes on suspected locations were almost immediate, but that seemed to entrench the problem. The gentle chirrup would be heard above the deafening roar of rockets fired from the creeping, "silent" drones. Once the rockets were unleashed (oh, the ironies), the perpetrators would be suddenly cut off from the world. And this was the one exception—and it remains the case—to the indoors rule: drone operators and military strategists who committed the acts of "retaliation" would hear the chirrup, yell out in astonishment, and say they had a buzzing in their ears, screaming "It's found me, it's found me!" or sometimes "They've found me, they've found me!" and then they'd run around the room or building, trying to hide from something no one else could see but they could almost hear above the terrible screams of the "victims," until all was silent.

So, we've learnt to live with the entities around here—those of us still in contact with the exterior world. We sometimes chat it over and wonder if it wouldn't be better to join those who have been forced into interiority—that maybe this is an evolutionary process, a right-of-passage, a consequence of our rapacity, natural almost. But when...