The original records were lost or at least never found about how the university ended up with a small glass container holding the microscopic space aliens. All that anyone could say was that they were kept in a unmarked storage shelf in a science lab and the little things seemed perfectly at home in the mostly ignored container in their semi-corporeal state. They’d been there so long, really doing nothing. At some point an intern was assigned to keep a periodic record of any changes in their environment, any energy discharges, anything new on a paper form on a clipboard kept on a nail in the lab, like it was some “bathroom cleaning” record in a dive bar. This went on unnoticed for decades. Most scientists who knew anything about the project argued that the things weren’t even a real life form because of their lack of interaction or apparent interaction with anything inside or outside of their little glass container. 

Then one day some intern thought that it’d be cute to expose the things via his Sony Walkman cassette player to something called Punk Rock. At first, like everything else, they ignored it. Until he switched genres slightly and played a bootleg recording called “Zenyatta  Mondatta” from a group called the Police and without warning the lab was thrown into chaos. The little glass container shattered into a million shards thrown all over the storage shelf, The intern, only slightly injured by the flying glass, understandably fled the lab. That part of the college campus was immediately put on lock-down with no messaging sent to the public. 

The technology monitoring the room had been primitive, a single boxy video camera hung in a corner with a single feed running to a normally unmanned basement office. That changed right away. But the camera angle and the low light in the lab made it impossible to see what was going on in the lab. It was just obvious that the aliens were no longer contented with living in a low-energy state in their little now destroyed glass container. The Walkman was still on the storage shelf where the glass container had been with the music still blaring from the cheap plastic headphones. The Walkman had been one of those “advanced” models where the cassette would automatically switch sides when it came to the end of the tape, so this music was going to keep on playing in the lab until the batteries ran out. 

A meeting was called somewhere else on campus and the scientists who had been in charge of the project were rounded up to discussed what to do. The aliens had previously been exposed to all sorts of light and energy wave-lengths but no one thought of exposing them to sound. They assumed that sound, requiring an atmosphere or direct contact in the absence of an atmosphere, wouldn’t even register with these mostly non-corporeal things. Boy, did they get that one wrong. They had to figure out what to do, before the government steps in and addresses the problem in the only way they know how, with unnecessary brute force and then bury it. 

So far news of the incident had been contained and the aliens seemed to not want to venture outside of the lab or away from the Walkman still playing the recording. One scientist piped up, “What happens when the Walkman’s batteries dies?” 

Someone offered, “We can use the campus PA, limit it to that room and continue the sound experiment that way, but we should see what happens when the music dies.” 

Another scientist questioned, “Do they return to their inert state and find a substitute container or do they seek out more music?” 

Another voiced concern, “We don’t even know if they like the music or if it irritates them. We only know that they went from being apparently inert for years, to some kind of pulsing form that seems to mimic the music.”  

Sadly the Walkman in the lab had a fresh set of batteries, so the scientists had to wait almost four days before the music stopped and they got one of their questions answered. The aliens did not like it when the music stopped and they started tearing the lab apart looking for another source of music. The scientists also learned that the music had to be the Police-style ska/reggae and not pop, or straight punk or even classical. And the aliens would only tolerate a gap between tracks of less than five-seconds. After they figured this out, the scientists raided the on-campus radio station to find the appropriate music to keep the aliens from doing further damage to the lab. A team of student interns had to be set up to make sure that Police music was playing around the clock and uninterrupted in that room, with supervising scientists continuing to figure out the parameters that caused the aliens behavior to change and whether they could use this information to communicate with these little aggressive reggae fans.

What had been a largely ignored secret campus curiosity was now becoming a dangerous pain in the ass. Classes that had been scheduled to take place in that building or that lab had to be moved without disclosing the reason. Security had to set up to keep unauthorized personnel out of the area and funding had to be found to support ramping up the research, all without attracting outside interference or attention. Fortunately this was long before the existence of Social Media or really even “high speed” internet. So as long as they could keep the local print and radio/TV news media off the story the better, as far as the university was concerned. They, of course, seemed to forget that there was a now an energetic group of beings who have taken over a lab and were just beginning to exercise their own desires and the only thing we understood was that they wanted more of this stuff that we call Music. What we didn’t appreciate was that they weren’t going to allow themselves to get stuck in an airless, music-less container ever again. Ever. JBB

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