Live Wires
by Philip Martin Cohen
One day Tom Silbert removed his computer charger from its carrier. As he plugged it in he noticed a knot in the wire. How could that have happened, he wondered. I didn’t do it. Why would I want to tie a knot in a wire? It certainly wasn’t there when I disconnected it yesterday. How did the bloody knot get there?
Then he recalled the other day removing some wires he needed for his computer’s speakers that had lay in a bag for some time. He found them hopelessly entangled in one another. It took ten minutes to pull them apart. Certainly he did not store them in that condition. How did it happen?
He wondered.
Then he realized.
This sort of thing occurs all the time. Wires get knotted or become wrapped in other wires for no obvious reason. Why?
He decided upon an experiment.
Tom placed a bunch of wires in a cardboard box. He aimed a video camera capable of recording for six hours at the box. He let the camera run its course and he walked away. When he returned, the wires lay in exactly the same order as he had placed them in the box. A speeded up scan of the video revealed nothing, except for a fly that, at high speed, swirled furiously around the box for a while.
I must be imagining things, thought Tom, and put the video camera away.
The next day Tom happened to look into the box. He saw the wires had become a tangled mess. Impossible. Last night they were straight and untangled. Now they’re in a hopeless jumble.
Tom resolved to experiment once again.
He placed a bunch of untangled wires in a box. This time he placed a sensitive microphone out of the direct line of sight of the box. Any sound produced during the next several hours wirelessly would be picked up and recorded. When he returned the next day, sure enough, all the wires were wrapped into each other as in a lover’s embrace. When he listened to the recording, he could hear indistinct but nevertheless real noises emanating from the box.
Tom now resolved once again to try to acquire visual evidence.
He purchased a one-way mirror and placed a box of wires on the mirrored side. On the other side he put his video camera and once again recorded the goings-on in the box for six hours. A quick glance at the box six hours later revealed a wired mess. When he took the camera and fast forwarded through, was astounded. All of the wires in the box moved about, some furiously, others sluggishly. They made a devil of a noise in the process. Fast or slow, they all moved. And in their moving around they collided and became entangled with each other.
Tom wrote a report about what he had observed on his computer.
Next day he discovered his notes were gone, the file non-existent. How could that have happened? He wrote his report again but this time made multiple copies three of which he placed on three different flash drives. By midday the original and all the copies had disappeared. Then Tom wrote his report by hand and made fifteen photocopies which he hid in sixteen different locations. By the next day all but one of the copies had disappeared. But he did have that one copy that somehow defied whoever or whatever was destroying his reports.
With that copy Tom determined to expose the true nature of wires. He would contact CNN, Fox, CNBC, NPR, The New York Times, The Washington Post, the CBC, the BBC and every other news outlet conceivable. He would expose wires for what they were: creatures living a surreptitious animate existence among humans. They served us diligently during the day, but possess a sneaky side that must be carefully watched.
He would expose a worldwide wiry conspiracy.
He would have, that is. Except that very day Tom Silbert was found strangled to by the wire leading from his computer to the outlet.
And the murderer was never found.
