The Human Stethoscope

Monitoring the Earth's Pulse

Gibberish: Flash Fiction Friday - Victorious

March 28, 2025

Scoot’s Assignment: Write a short story about triumph, including divine thunder, a character with a scar, and the sentence, “Pick something else.”

Highlighted in FFF (April 4, 2025) 🤗

Photo by Look Up Look Down Photography on Unsplash

The Human Stethoscope

I'd had tinnitus for many decades, for so long that I couldn't remember a time without the constant high pitched private radio station singing away 24 hours a day, every day. The frequency of the internal feedback was at about 3,500 Hz, about the same as what cicadas and crickets produce during the summer. A funny thing about tinnitus - if one listens to something that produces the same frequency as the tinnitus, the internal squealing can be canceled out. So while the chirping bugs of summer drove everybody else nuts, I basked in the temporary inner silence and blessed the critters for the few hours of relief.

No storms were predicted on the day that I decided to hike up Mount Washington, but a thunderstorm brewed up unexpectedly, as these things do. I sheltered under a granite ledge to wait it out. The lightening was violent, pitching down from the clouds almost constantly, crashing into the ground all around me. Suddenly, a bolt blasted the granite ledge above my head, sending shards tumbling all around. One of them struck me in the head... I heard divine thunder rolling through my skull, then all was silent.

I don't know how long I was out for, but when I woke up, I was in a hospital bed. The doc said I seemed okay physically, with just a few scars left by the granite shards, but I'd been unconscious for three days, so they just wanted to make sure that everything was working up to par. I noticed two major differences: Whenever I closed my eyes, I could see images moving around, like on a TV screen or something. The doctor said this was called "Closed Eye Hallucinations," and was probably nothing to worry about. The other thing was that the pitch of my tinnitus had drastically changed - instead of a high pitched squeal, I was now hearing a much lower humming sound. According to the doctor, the resonance of this new tone was at about 7.83 Hertz.

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By the time I'd been allowed to go home, I'd become somewhat of a celebrity because of surviving an almost direct lightening strike without any apparent harm. The press dubbed me "The Electric Woman," and a lot of curious people tried to get in touch. One group, the Mother Earth Rescue Squad, was especially persistent, pestering me until I finally agreed to meet with one of their representatives, a Mr. Darwin. He explained that 7.83 Hertz frequency is known as the "Schumann Resonance," otherwise known as the Earth's pulse, and that it suffuses and protects anything that's alive. He further explained his belief that I was able to hear the Earth's heart beating and that the things I saw when I closed my eyes were visions of the immediate future.

I found these ideas to be more appealing than the diagnosis of insanity, which was the theory held by the hospital, so I joined MERS. My job was simple: To monitor Earth's health by listening to her heartbeats, sort of like a human stethoscope; and to pay attention to my hallucinations, reporting anything that seemed important.

My predictions always came true, but my warning always went unnoticed and ignored. The human race was pretty hard on Mother Earth, and conditions degraded rapidly. Mr. Darwin eventually moved us to a bunker, saying that it was for our own safety. As the months wore on, the resonance sounding in my head suddenly pitched higher and higher, until it sounded like a scream. My head was fit to burst as the frequency rose beyond normal human hearing and the decibel level crashed louder and louder. And now, when I closed my eyes, horrible visions flashed through my breaking mind:

The Earth's life force was dying: The ground was littered with the bodies of dead and dying insects; dying birds crawled about, too weak to fly; the unpollinated plants withered without setting seed; wasted, starving herbivores wandered through empty deserts; carnivores and scavengers fought fiercely over the last sources of protein.

I watched as the human race soon realized they were but animals, too, and so were doomed to suffer as well: Oil stopped flowing and the machines soon failed; people desperately sought out canned or packaged foods, stealing when they became scarce. I saw people turning cannibal before finally succumbing to the inevitable end… at this point, I opened my eyes, afraid to see more. Mr. Darwin seemed keen to know what I'd seen, but I couldn't speak of the horrors. I begged him to pick something else, anything else, for me to speak of, rather than dragging me back to witness the death throes of the Earth.

But exhaustion overtook me and my eyes slowly closed. In the moments before sleep, my visions resumed, and I saw Mr. Darwin, alone in the bunker with piles of useless gold coins, opening the last can of baked beans on Earth, the last can of ANYTHING on Earth. And then I knew... the greedy, wankerous bastard. The reason my warnings had gone unheeded was because he'd never passed them on. He’d used the information to enrich himself. He'd sold us out. He'd sold us all out.

And then I heard nothing more within my head, as the Earth's pulse slowed and died. I closed my eyes, but there was nothing there either, no future, just darkness. When I opened my eyes, Mr. Darwin again asked me what I’d seen, and I told him a half-truth: "Nothing. I saw nothing. I heard nothing." But he could see the doom written on my face.

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Mr. Darwin drank himself into a stupor that night. I decided dying alone would be better than living a bit longer in his company, so I snuck out, back into the ruined world. But once I had escaped the muffling effects of the bunker walls, I could hear the Earth's heartbeat again, faint, but present. I closed my eyes, and the visions had returned as well, faded and faint, but alive: I saw kelp forests and fish, and humans swimming among them. I abruptly opened my eyes and began to walk west, towards the sea, towards the increasing decibels. The world was still alive! Maybe life would triumph after all.

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