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亲爱的Bioware

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Hi! It’s me, Austin. I’m writing to you today because I’ve been thinking. A lot.

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What have I been thinking about? The Reapers. You remember the Reapers. They’re the colossal

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robot squid monsters that serve as the primary antagonists of the Mass Effect franchise.

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Specifically, I was thinking about what makes them scary. Because, if I can be real for

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a second? The Reapers scare the everlovingshit out of me. Lovecraftian, imperceivable, seemingly

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omnipotent progenitor robots who are capable of wiping out an entire species without fail

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for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years? That’s the shit of nightmares.They’re

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like giant meteors that could be hurling undetected at our planet as we speak, ready to blink

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us out of existence, along with everything we know and love, erasing every song ever

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written and every love story ever told.

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But that’s not just the only thing that makes them utterly terrifying to me, BioWare--in

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fact, that’s almost the secondary characteristic. “Being able to destroy all you’ve ever

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known and loved” is pretty much the standard operating procedure for video game antagonists.

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Sauron, Doomsday, blah blah, the list goes on. No, the truly horrifying aspect of the

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Reapers is their indoctrination technology.

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You remember Indoctrination. It’s the ability the Reapers have to brainwash organic lifeforms

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like you and me by mere proximity, turning them, er, us into unwilling slaves bent toward

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doing their will. It can be used to devastating effect to sow chaos by directing sabotage,

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creating sleeper agents, spies, and outright armies to oppose those who try to resist the

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Reapers in their ultimate goal of harvesting all living beings.

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It’s never explained exactly how this is done in the games--it’s presumed that there’s

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some sort of sound or signal that surrounds the Reapers that reprograms humans’ and

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their friends’ brains to behave differently, and see friends as foe, and foe as friend.

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Unwilling enslavement and brainwashing, robbing you of you without your consent, turning you

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into an impassioned warrior and zealot who actively works against your own species and

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wellbeing--that’s the shit of nightmares. Thankfully, this technology is completely

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and totally absurd. I. Think. It is, right?

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That’s what I thought, too. Or at least that’s what I told myself at night to help

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myself sleep. But the truth? Well, the truth is a far, far more terrifying than that.

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The most iconic thing about the Reapers, aside from their size and colossal bad breath, is

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their sound. It weighs down on you like an oppressive boulder between your shoulders

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whenever they arrive, letting you know that daddy’s home, and it’s time to hide under

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the bed. Could this sound be the way that Reapers indoctrinate people?

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I know. It’s stupid. Sound waves changing the way you think and feel. But what if it’s

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not stupid?

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In the 1960s French scientist Vladimir Gavreau discovered something called “infrasounds,”

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which are soundwaves of 20hz or below, at the very threshold of human perception and

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lower.He became interested in them when he and his lab assistants started spontaneously

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bleeding from the ears from sounds they were creating by shaking lab equipment. And that’s

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just the beginning.

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British lecturer Vic Tandy discovered that infrasounds in a supposedly haunted Warwick

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Castle were actually at the right frequency to resonate with one’s eyeball, causing

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hallucinations and ghost sightings. The cause? A ventilation fan. Dozens of ghost sightings,

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explained in the instant to be caused by the feebleness of our own body to tell the difference

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between sound waves jostling our eyeballs and actual ghosts. He then published a book

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on the phenomenon titled The Ghost In the Machine.

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But those are just weird physical experiences. It’s a pretty far leap from “some low-frequency

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sound is making me hear and see blobs” to “I WILL ACTIVELY DESTROY EVERYTHING I USED

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TO HOLD DEAR FOR OUR ROBOT OVERLORDS.” Well, that’s because I’m not even close to being

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done yet.

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In 2003, Dr. Richard Lord and other researchers in the United Kingdom held a “infrasound

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concert” for 700 people, and discovered that low frequency infrasounds at 17hz with

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a high enough volume made people feel uneasy, fearful, paranoid, and even the sensation

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of someone pressing down on their chest. Just...sounds. That you can’t even fucking hear. Sowing

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chaos and fear in our very, very real world.

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In fact, humans have a long, long history of being emotionally effective and manipulated

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by sound and music. From war drums in ancient times spurring men to victory and their enemies

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to fear, to Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, which was so challenging to audiences at the

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time that it’s said that at its first showing the crowd found it so unsettling that they

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burst into a riot and the ballet had to be cancelled, and study after study has found

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that music we hear affects our perception of the world around us.

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What remains unclear at the end of the day is why. Why do sounds affect our emotions?

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Why does happy music make us happy? How do we know what happy music even is? Why do discordant

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sounds make us feel a sense of unease to the point where we’re willing to fight about

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it? Why can sounds we don’t even hear push us to the edges of sanity and make it possible

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to fucking see ghosts? Nobody has any idea. But the truth is that soundwaves affect us

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on a deeper level than any of us can possibly understand.

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Is that trumpeting of the super-advanced Reapers just them communicating with one another when

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they land on planets, to better coordinate? Is it just intimidation? Or are these sounds

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very specifically designed to shake us to the core of who we are, reprogramming the

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way we think on a fundamental level? Is it really that much of a leap from “infrasounds

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making you see things” to “infrasounds are zipping straight to your hippocampus,

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overloading your limbic system, and switching your human version of IFF so that your mom

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is now secretly plotting against you and the Reapers are your only hope?”

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Our brains function a lot like wet, analogue computers, and they’re incredibly open to

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suggestion and perception-adjustment. Just look at recreational drugs and mental illnesses

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like paranoid schizophrenia.

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The terrifying truth that we tell ourselves is that things like Reaper indoctrination

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technology is a science fiction fabrication, when in reality there’s far more science

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suggesting that a technically-advanced, lovecraftian horror from the beyond would be more than

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capable of subtly manipulating our nervous systems into their little organic computer

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drones is a much more realistic technological feat than faster-than-light travel. It’s

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something we’ve observed in our real world, can’t be stopped by tin foil hats, and how

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it works is completely beyond our understanding.

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All it would take is this.

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Sincerely, Austin

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P.S.

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You’ve just learned that it may be possible that infrasound can create feelings of dread,

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horror, and anxiety by their mere presence. So it’s time I let you know that for this

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entire video I’ve had a 17 hertz infrasound tone on loop for the entire video. Let me

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know how you feel down in the comments. Muahahahahahahahahaha