Universal Ear

🎥Chapter 33🎥
"Gratitude 2.0"
🎧VIRTUAL BANTER🎧

ℹ️ Link in bio ℹ️

Serializing UNIVERSAL EAR: The Curse of the Phantom Tympanum in episodes of several astonishing seconds at a time!

EXTRACT FROM THE SOURCE MEMOIRS:
“Before I left, Morelle managed to get her theme park switched back on, and she hurried me to the gift shop lest Santiago should whisk me away before I completed my contractual obligation to purchase a Bubble. True to her promise, my guide had arranged a snow globe representation of my experiences in Bourges: in it, dozens of tiny holographic Harley Byrne’s took a Möbiusean tour through the impossibly compressed alternative realities of the city. I did not study it too closely, not because I was afraid to see where my hallucinatory experiences had actually taken me, but because my work is not about me.
The gift shop merchant pressed me for payment, but I found that my remaining golden hearts had turned rotten in my pocket during my extended stay with Mrs. Coeur. Checking the pouches of my utility belt for an alternative currency, my fingers alighted on the bee faeces that I had collected early in my journey. The turds glittered still, and should have more than covered the bill for my souvenir, but the vendor turned his nose up.
‘I can’t accept that, he scoffed,’ as I passed him the sandwich bag. ‘It’s the property of the city – and besides, as an artefact from the city’s meta-history your… precious matter… would cause a paradox if introduced into the global economy of gift shops.’
‘Nonsense,’ I argued: ‘Museum shops are not historical ‘Duty-Free' zones through which time does not pass.’”

🎥Chapter 28🎥
"The Pulled Plug"
🎧VIRTUAL-ACOUSTIC AMBIENCES🎧

ℹ️ Link in bio ℹ️

Serializing UNIVERSAL EAR: The Curse of the Phantom Tympanum in episodes of several astonishing seconds at a time!

EXTRACT FROM THE SOURCE MEMOIRS:
“When I came to, Morelle was dabbing pointlessly at my brow with a holographic sponge. She smelled of ammonia, lavender, and a placeless scent I would later discover to have been ground unicorn horn. Although the odour was holographic, it had the effect of smelling salts, and I felt my senses recalibrate to their pre-Bourges condition. The unmediated taste of my unwashed mouth returned, and my sense of awe at humanity’s collective achievements dishevelled into a vague idea about how coincidence had been the primary curse and blessing of our wretched species and how we could have achieved a lot more if only breakfast, rather than evening tea, had been the dominant meal of history’s ‘doer’ cultures.
‘I received a medical alert,’ explained Morelle. ‘What happened here? You were babbling like a lunatic when I arrived.’
I tried to retrace my last memories.
‘My life’s work... up in smoke. And then I was the smoke. And I was sad.’
‘Oh come on,’ said Mrs. Coeur. ‘You couldn’t handle a little empathy?’
‘Ah, you’ve been through an empathy experience,’ said Morelle. ‘And you couldn’t handle it. This’ll be a case of ‘rubber empathy syndrome’ – when a user mistakes the emotions that he is empathizing for his own, he can become disassociated from his own emotions, which start to wither.’
‘I’m terribly sorry,’ came a small voice. ‘But would you mind keeping the noise down? I’m trying to create a mental field recording!’
‘We *are* the field, buster,’ Mrs. Coeur spat back at the stranger. ‘You can’t whitewash us from your archive.’”

🎥Chapter 27🎥
"You’re Smoke"
🎧BITCRUSHED WAILS🎧

ℹ️ Link in bio ℹ️

Serializing UNIVERSAL EAR: The Curse of the Phantom Tympanum in episodes of several astonishing seconds at a time!

EXTRACT FROM THE SOURCE MEMOIRS:
“I felt my smugness burn itself out; now I was looking down on the cathedral from above, and it was awful.
‘What’s going on?’ I choked. ‘How did I get here?’
‘Now we are the smoke that rises from the burning cathedral,’ came the reply. It was impossible to nail Mrs. Coeur to a specific wisp among the chaos. ‘How you feeling now, chuck?’
‘I’m sad because the flames will soon die.’
‘No, no, no,’ she coughed. ‘It’s the mutability of fire that lends her her beauty!’
‘This is terrible! I’m disintegrating into the atmosphere! Everything is temporary! Where are the back-ups?’
‘Oh yeah, I get it,’ she said. ‘It’s all fun and games when you’re fire. The thought that our heritage might live on as airborne particles is somehow offensive to you.’
I wanted to assure her otherwise but, unbeknownst to me, something unprecedented was happening: I was losing my mind.
Scraps of dialogue and unclassifiable vocal utterances were later found on the Universal Ear’s hard drive, indicating that I had repeatedly jammed the record-button on and off as my suffering hastened. Whilst I have not, at the time of writing, had the chance to listen back to those particular recordings – my brother immediately confiscated them and claims to be working on translating the ‘inhuman gusts’ back into standard English – Santiago assures me it’s hard-hitting stuff.”

🎥Chapter 25🎥
"Escape from a Frying Pan"
🎧SIZZLING SYNTHESIZERS🎧

ℹ️ Link in bio ℹ️

Serializing UNIVERSAL EAR: The Curse of the Phantom Tympanum in episodes of several astonishing seconds at a time!

EXTRACT FROM THE SOURCE MEMOIRS:
“Mrs. Coeur drew my attention to the existence of Easter Eggs she had scattered around her virtual curse. Almost always, these digital surprises came in the form of metastitial empathy experiences. I shall proceed, now, directly to the sequence of nested empathy experiences that so nearly proved my undoing.
…I instantaneously assumed the form of an organ pipe as it perished in perpetuity in a replica of the burning cathedral exhibition beyond the metastice.
The cathedral’s original stone walls had resisted Bourges’ greatest fire, the Madeleine of 1487, which inferno - some say - marked the beginning of Bourges’ decline (although this decline would level out some centuries later before resuming a steep downward tumble around the middle of the 22nd century, as we have observed). But in 1552, the church organ would melt in the fire of the Golden Helm, the smoke and hot air blasting notes of shrill panic from the liquefying pipes in an act of devastating calliopoid ingenuity, and in 1559 the catastrophe happened all over again.
When History® came along and gave a voice to those pathetic organs with its interlacing fire effect, whereby representations of the latter two 16th-century cathedral fires alternated at a speed that created a kind of tertiary flicker to that of the flaming visuals, it only formalized the subliminal dread that Berruyers had lived with for half a millennium. For first-time visitors, such as myself, but particularly those of weaker mettle, the sonic effect was more profound.
I would need to return and record these unholy organs at a later date.”