Sound is Vibration

I wonder how many millions of us once asked ourselves what it would have been like to be Beethoven. Maybe it wasn’t quite so many, although I’m sure the majority of the population at least pondered deafness at some point. I know I did, frequently, but that’s probably a result of the things I love most in this life. It sure didn’t stop me from taking it all for granted, regardless of the fact I told myself I didn’t. Because I know that if you’d told me at any point during the last couple decades to enjoy my hearing while it lasted? I’d have had some comeback about how the nanotech would have that all sorted out soon. Life is funny with its little ironies.

Granted, there had been no reason to expect anything other than overwhelming success with the phase three public rollout. All the events of the last twenty plus years led us to believe that we’d finally entered a true golden age of humanity. Previously debilitating and life-threatening diseases rendered impotent. Many events which used to most often be fatal, reduced to inconvenience. A life expectancy that, although a far cry from immortality, made us feel like gods. There was no end to what science could fix, and we reveled in it.

Until, of course, we didn’t. Am I sad? Was I among the angry? Of course. Do I think it was part of some heinous master plan? No. I have no idea how it happened, but if we’ve come this far, there will be a way to fix it. It could have been much worse. Yet even as I sit here with my instruments, experiencing them in new ways I never could have before, I think about how the world went quiet. Too quiet.