亲爱的Bioware
Hi! It’s me, Austin. I’m writing to you today because I’ve been thinking. A lot.
What have I been thinking about? The Reapers. You remember the Reapers. They’re the colossal
robot squid monsters that serve as the primary antagonists of the Mass Effect franchise.
Specifically, I was thinking about what makes them scary. Because, if I can be real for
a second? The Reapers scare the everlovingshit out of me. Lovecraftian, imperceivable, seemingly
omnipotent progenitor robots who are capable of wiping out an entire species without fail
for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years? That’s the shit of nightmares.They’re
like giant meteors that could be hurling undetected at our planet as we speak, ready to blink
us out of existence, along with everything we know and love, erasing every song ever
written and every love story ever told.
But that’s not just the only thing that makes them utterly terrifying to me, BioWare--in
fact, that’s almost the secondary characteristic. “Being able to destroy all you’ve ever
known and loved” is pretty much the standard operating procedure for video game antagonists.
Sauron, Doomsday, blah blah, the list goes on. No, the truly horrifying aspect of the
Reapers is their indoctrination technology.
You remember Indoctrination. It’s the ability the Reapers have to brainwash organic lifeforms
like you and me by mere proximity, turning them, er, us into unwilling slaves bent toward
doing their will. It can be used to devastating effect to sow chaos by directing sabotage,
creating sleeper agents, spies, and outright armies to oppose those who try to resist the
Reapers in their ultimate goal of harvesting all living beings.
It’s never explained exactly how this is done in the games--it’s presumed that there’s
some sort of sound or signal that surrounds the Reapers that reprograms humans’ and
their friends’ brains to behave differently, and see friends as foe, and foe as friend.
Unwilling enslavement and brainwashing, robbing you of you without your consent, turning you
into an impassioned warrior and zealot who actively works against your own species and
wellbeing--that’s the shit of nightmares. Thankfully, this technology is completely
and totally absurd. I. Think. It is, right?
That’s what I thought, too. Or at least that’s what I told myself at night to help
myself sleep. But the truth? Well, the truth is a far, far more terrifying than that.
The most iconic thing about the Reapers, aside from their size and colossal bad breath, is
their sound. It weighs down on you like an oppressive boulder between your shoulders
whenever they arrive, letting you know that daddy’s home, and it’s time to hide under
the bed. Could this sound be the way that Reapers indoctrinate people?
I know. It’s stupid. Sound waves changing the way you think and feel. But what if it’s
not stupid?
In the 1960s French scientist Vladimir Gavreau discovered something called “infrasounds,”
which are soundwaves of 20hz or below, at the very threshold of human perception and
lower.He became interested in them when he and his lab assistants started spontaneously
bleeding from the ears from sounds they were creating by shaking lab equipment. And that’s
just the beginning.
British lecturer Vic Tandy discovered that infrasounds in a supposedly haunted Warwick
Castle were actually at the right frequency to resonate with one’s eyeball, causing
hallucinations and ghost sightings. The cause? A ventilation fan. Dozens of ghost sightings,
explained in the instant to be caused by the feebleness of our own body to tell the difference
between sound waves jostling our eyeballs and actual ghosts. He then published a book
on the phenomenon titled The Ghost In the Machine.
But those are just weird physical experiences. It’s a pretty far leap from “some low-frequency
sound is making me hear and see blobs” to “I WILL ACTIVELY DESTROY EVERYTHING I USED
TO HOLD DEAR FOR OUR ROBOT OVERLORDS.” Well, that’s because I’m not even close to being
done yet.
In 2003, Dr. Richard Lord and other researchers in the United Kingdom held a “infrasound
concert” for 700 people, and discovered that low frequency infrasounds at 17hz with
a high enough volume made people feel uneasy, fearful, paranoid, and even the sensation
of someone pressing down on their chest. Just...sounds. That you can’t even fucking hear. Sowing
chaos and fear in our very, very real world.
In fact, humans have a long, long history of being emotionally effective and manipulated
by sound and music. From war drums in ancient times spurring men to victory and their enemies
to fear, to Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, which was so challenging to audiences at the
time that it’s said that at its first showing the crowd found it so unsettling that they
burst into a riot and the ballet had to be cancelled, and study after study has found
that music we hear affects our perception of the world around us.
What remains unclear at the end of the day is why. Why do sounds affect our emotions?
Why does happy music make us happy? How do we know what happy music even is? Why do discordant
sounds make us feel a sense of unease to the point where we’re willing to fight about
it? Why can sounds we don’t even hear push us to the edges of sanity and make it possible
to fucking see ghosts? Nobody has any idea. But the truth is that soundwaves affect us
on a deeper level than any of us can possibly understand.
Is that trumpeting of the super-advanced Reapers just them communicating with one another when
they land on planets, to better coordinate? Is it just intimidation? Or are these sounds
very specifically designed to shake us to the core of who we are, reprogramming the
way we think on a fundamental level? Is it really that much of a leap from “infrasounds
making you see things” to “infrasounds are zipping straight to your hippocampus,
overloading your limbic system, and switching your human version of IFF so that your mom
is now secretly plotting against you and the Reapers are your only hope?”
Our brains function a lot like wet, analogue computers, and they’re incredibly open to
suggestion and perception-adjustment. Just look at recreational drugs and mental illnesses
like paranoid schizophrenia.
The terrifying truth that we tell ourselves is that things like Reaper indoctrination
technology is a science fiction fabrication, when in reality there’s far more science
suggesting that a technically-advanced, lovecraftian horror from the beyond would be more than
capable of subtly manipulating our nervous systems into their little organic computer
drones is a much more realistic technological feat than faster-than-light travel. It’s
something we’ve observed in our real world, can’t be stopped by tin foil hats, and how
it works is completely beyond our understanding.
All it would take is this.
Sincerely, Austin
P.S.
You’ve just learned that it may be possible that infrasound can create feelings of dread,
horror, and anxiety by their mere presence. So it’s time I let you know that for this
entire video I’ve had a 17 hertz infrasound tone on loop for the entire video. Let me
know how you feel down in the comments. Muahahahahahahahahaha