You know about white noise, of course. Do you know about the rest?

You know white noise, of course. Everyone does. You hear it every time you tune a tv, radio, whatever, to a dead channel. You hear it, in fact, even when you think you can’t hear anything. By the time you’re old enough to understand the things you’re meant to be listening for – voices, sounds, music – your brain has already learned to filter out the white noise. You still hear it, but you never think about what you’re hearing – and that’s bad.

It’s bad, you see, because white noise is a smokescreen. White noise is what keeps the Black Noise hidden from us. Put it this way – you know what you see when your tv loses its signal, right? A storm of little white dots hits your screen. The Black Noise is the darkness that slips through between those white dots. It’s always there, but we teach ourselves not to hear it.

It’s self-defence, as much as anything. The Black Noise gets into us when we’re newborn children. It tells us all about fear, and pain, and failure. It’s why babies cry so much when there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong. I think it’s why, in the end, we get sick and die – we’ve heard so much of the Black Noise that our minds and bodies can’t take the stress of it any more. We stop fighting it and just let ourselves fail and decay.

Well, not me. Not any of us, as a matter of fact. We’re going to stop it, and if we can’t do that, we’ll at least know the truth. The first step is to wake people up to the sounds around them. We need everyone to really listen to what they hear, not filter it all out. Ambient noise – muzak, traffic, radio and tv signals – is the enemy, and it’s all got to stop.

That’s not all. We’ve got a child who we’ve been raising in complete silence – and I mean really complete. Once the world is quiet enough, we’ll bring them out and tell them to listen. They’ll hear what the Black Noise is telling us all. They’ll hear all the lies, threats and hurtful things it says. Most importantly, they’ll hear its Plan.

Once we know what the Plan is, we’ll know – we’ll all know – what has to be done.