Radio Free Earth

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

The aliens dug our tunes.

It was sweet. They came to down to us in these big blue ships, all curves and awe-inspiring slowness through the clouds like settling continents. Freaked us right out. We, the human race, didn’t even try to attack. We’d seen this movie before. We knew that there would be no point. We just waited for them to either kill us or speak up. There wasn’t even much panic, just a global sort of cowering whimper.

Wide eyes in the shadows of floating leviathans, we waited, holding each other tightly.

“Hey there. Uh. Hey. Right. This one right? Okay. Hello!” said the sky. It was a human voice, the kind of voice you’d hear at any old bus stop on a cel phone. Our guy, North America’s guy, was named Robert Gogas. A greek fry cook from Venice, California. The aliens had kidnapped him and told him to speak to us in our native tongue to calm us down.

“They like our music but they say we have shitty transceivers. Uh, like, I mean, uh, our broadcast quality. It’s lame. They say. But they really like us. Man, this is AWESOME!” said Robert Gogas. “They’re all blue. They’re musicians, man!”

All over Europe, similar addresses were taking place as the atmosphere was turned into a giant acoustical dome. Each ship had taken a local artist and had him or her talk to the planet, to his country of origin, in the local language.

There was a flurry of translation after Pete stopped talking. He rambled on for about fifteen minutes. The upshot was this.

The aliens, named the Kursk, wanted to install giant antennae at equidistant points around earth and they wanted us to hook our datacables into them. They wanted us to funnel our libraries, television shows, podcasts, webpages, movies, songs, animations, books on tape, and spoken word into the antennae for the enjoyment of the whole universe.

They wanted to turn Earth into a radio station.

We were far from the first.

That was ten years ago. After the first year, they started to ship down billions of tiny things that looked sort of like a cross between an iPod and a throwing star.

They were universe radios. The music of a billion billion civilizations was suddenly available to us.

It’s been a fantastic decade.