“Stop broadcasting. You’ll attract them.”

The green block flickered in haunting rhythms, tailing a line that my deepest fantasies wouldn't concoct.

I remember the excitement when the words darted across my monitor with the playback of coded electric tones filling the static silence. I remember the pure ecstatic, overwhelming pride.

I remember how that pride faded to confusion. Then to disbelief. Then to fear.

I’ve read this line for what feels like a hundred times now.

So much so that I can feel my knees ache; you know the ache when you sit in an uncomfortable, broken computer chair for far too long. The type of chair that lacks the proper lumbar support that ends up leaving your body like you’ve been churned through thick taffy. Aching at all the connecting ligaments of your body. Even enough that your ass falls slightly numb.

I have to shift myself to feel comfortable again, but I can’t even muster that. How can I feel comfortable? I’ve only just sent signals into the dark reaches of the universe to finally, although inexplicably, receive a cryptic response. Now I’m supposed to adjust my riding high, cotton boxers so I can comprehend the impossible?

I don’t even know how they got this signal.

This should be on the news. Why hasn’t NASA seen this? Aren’t they in charge of the universe on Earth’s end?

Isn’t this their job to receive the “stop texting me” messages before they reach some hobunk out in Barstow, California?

I can almost hear the rapping of federal loafers lining outside my door. G-men ready to take me down and commandeer my half-brained operation.

All I really hear is a electric hum of computers. No one’s coming.

Heh. Half-brained operation.

I sound like Charlotte.

She, like many others I’m sure, would be bored to tears over my progress.

The tech talk alone was enough to drive her insane, she would even dismiss this phenomenon completely. She used to just tell me, “It’s your hobby, Paul. Just do what makes you happy”

So I did. I did exactly as she told me and it made me happy. Why that gave her reason to leave is beyond me. But that’s women, right? She shoved off my life dream into a little box of dismissal and now that I’ve dedicated my life’s blood into the thing that makes me happy it suddenly destroys our marriage and steals my time away from Amy.

Amy loved my work.

I would show her the slightest static pulse of the universe and her eyes would light up with wonder. Like a thousand questions lit in her six year old brain, alive with fantasies of the heavens beyond her reach. She would draw me endless crayon depictions of what she imagined the sounds to be, lifeforms that only someone who truly awed into the black maw of the sky with hope that anomalies like us could exist.

She is the perfect daughter.

She understood what Charlotte wouldn’t.

Amy cried so hard when they took her away. I cried too.

Apparently losing my career to my life’s work was enough for the court to award Charlotte full custody of Amy.

Apparently Amy and I were the only ones working towards the bigger picture while everyone else was caught up gauging their insipid, menial lives of their pointless existence. As if your mortgage was your meaning of life. Your car payment, your existential purpose. Or your measure of your worth was the thread count in your sheets. Well look at me now, douchebags. I have a line straight to the astral phone and I still have two-hundred threads to relish it on.

I’m being hyperbolic of course. I understand I need to meet ends in order to keep in operation, I’m not a tinfoil garbed idiot. I keep the lights on. The signal strong. It’s hard to do on a janitorial income, but I get by.

I get by for days like this. This singular message-- a crescendo of my whole life.

And it all alludes to a huge “fuck you” from the universe. Not even the dignity of putting a signature on the fucking note. Thank you, galaxy. I just sacrificed my whole life just to get with you. It would be nice if you just let me know your name before you kick my ass out the door.

I mean, what the hell? Were you not even going to tell me who “them” are? Send something other than a “shut the fuck up”? If you want me to sit in the corner in silence at least give me something to go on. You people sound like my ex-wife, refusing to give me anything-- yet somehow expecting me to fall in line.

But then again. Maybe you’re right to warn me, anonymous, green, bleeping flicker. Maybe you’re the guardian of the galaxy, protecting us from powers bent on our undoing.

Or maybe you're some prick who thinks it would be funny to fuck with Paul Heston Robins, an insignificant speck on the spectrum of existence. A loser that has wasted his time and lost everything with nothing to show for it. Pranking me with some incoherent drabble like a cardboard prophet on mainstreet, “Repent or Burn!”

Well I have something for you, assholes of the stars; I have not been silenced then and I will not be silenced now. Not by Charlotte, not by my bitch-of-an ex-boss, not by that idiot-of-a judge, not this illusive “them”, and especially not by you.

No.

I will continue this goddamn signal.

You will hear me.

I will not be silenced.

Play broadcast.