Parallax · Twin Tales No. 11 — Call for Help: Off · The Howl

A pair of short stories from Parallax · Twin Tales, which stage one real dilemma twice: Here, in the world as it is, with invented people in real places; There, in the world of Vision Come True, a future that split from ours in 2024 and never emerged. This pair belongs with the eighteenth essay of Brainstorming with the Enemy, The Gauge and the Mute, and adds what the essay leaves out: the people who love us, and want to do the muting for us. Both tales are pages from a notebook, written by hand by an old pharmacist after a night he needs to understand. Here, in Vélez-Málaga in November 2026, two weeks before Spain votes, Rafael Ortega, born under Franco and widowed in the spring, writes to his late wife. His daughter has set up two machines to protect him: a shared set of rules that mutes the town council's notice that the tap water is unfit to drink, and a ring that reports to her, with its call for help switched off. When he falls in the night, the ring tells only her, and her phone is on silent. He writes his way from anger to its cause, names the fear rather than the daughter, and gives her back a smaller, truer part. There, on the shore of the Seventh Lake in 2059, Faris Nasrallah, born in Haifa in 1985, lives with the inward hum of his body and the outward hum of his shore, his mutes his own and dated, his daughter's calls landing at a volume he sets. One night the honest instruments of the whole shore begin to howl, as bodies react to the very hum they feed; he mutes it for an hour, tests the reaction the way a pharmacist tests a drug, and has the echoes counted once, and in his notebook asks what is still left to tune. Written in part with Claude (Anthropic), an AI model. The ideas, editorial decisions and responsibility for the content are the author's.