From American Internet Celebrity to God Among Men

Taylor’s new single ”Whispers of a Glimmer” was officially released across all platforms. There was no large-scale pre-heating bombardment; just Alex and Taylor simply sharing it on their respective social media accounts, accompanied by a link to the song and the sentence: ”For everyone who can still hear the faint glimmer within their hearts amidst the noise.”

The quality of the song itself and the combined influence of the two made it quickly land at the top of various streaming charts. Music critics called it ”a precise emotional massage,” while fans were intoxicated by the intimate and warm sense of dialogue within it. What was even more talked about was that in the arrangement details of the song, one could faintly hear the pure vibrational texture similar to the core sound of ”Ark of Consciousness,” forming a clever intertextuality. A music critic wrote: ”Alex Su is forming a unique ’sound signature’—an auditory aesthetic with meditative qualities that blends technological coldness with human warmth.”

When hearing this evaluation, Alex was trying out a new recipe with Taylor in the kitchen. He smiled and said to Taylor, ”It seems we accidentally created the prototype of a ’school of thought’.”

”That would be for the best,” Taylor said, carefully stirring the sauce in the pot, ”at least it proves that someone really understood the sounds we made.”

After dealing with these ”events in the sun,” Alex also took time to pay attention to the ”whispers in the shadows.”

The Architect reported back that the frequency of targeted anomaly scanning activities had further decreased, almost falling into silence, but had not completely disappeared, as if the other party had shifted into a deeper lurking observation. Alex instructed to continue monitoring and not to provoke them actively.

”Spirit of the Wasteland” fell into a long silence again after receiving the tape materials. Alex did not urge them, as the cooperation contract was already loose. He just occasionally thought about the strange signals from unknown sources recorded on those tapes, and the ”crystal collision” sounds captured in Sarah’s city soundscapes that were additionally recorded by the Nagra tape. These fragments seemed to point to the same obscure direction, but the clues and cognition he possessed were not enough to piece together the full picture.

He tried to apply and explore [Energy Perception] more systematically. In addition to using it intuitively in his creative work, he began to do some small experiments. For example, recording the same piece of music, using digital equipment and analog tapes respectively, and then comparing the differences in the energy fields when playing them under [Energy Perception]; or trying to ”listen” to the subtle sounds of energy flowing inside his own body under different materials and emotional states in an extremely quiet environment.

Most of these experiments did not produce immediate practical results; they were more like a cognitive pioneering. But Alex enjoyed it. He could feel that his perception of ”energy” was becoming more delicate and stable, just like muscles becoming stronger and more controllable through exercise. He even tried to combine this perception with the section on the ”gray area between the physical properties of sound and psychological perception” in the MPSE seminar manuscript he was preparing, forming some more insightful (and of course, rigorously scientifically packaged) viewpoints.

On Friday night, it started to drizzle in Los Angeles. Alex and Taylor canceled their original outing plans and decided to stay at home. They dug out an old documentary about the golden age of jazz, turned off the lights, and huddled on the thick carpet in the living room to watch it with a projector.

The sound of rain tapping on the roof and windows became the natural white noise of the documentary. In the film, those legendary musicians improvised in smoky clubs, with sweat and inspiration flying. At moving moments, Taylor would softly hum along to a complex saxophone melody, while Alex silently tapped the corresponding rhythm on his knee with his fingers.

Halfway through, Alex got up and went to the kitchen to make two cups of hot cocoa, adding marshmallows and a little cinnamon powder. When he returned, the documentary was at the part where an elderly drummer talked about ”rhythm is the breathing of time.”