YOU MIGHT NOT BE AWARE OF THIS, BUT THE WORLD IS full of untraceable hums and drones afflicting thousands every day, driving people to madness and despair. I wasn’t. I had no idea. Not before I became one of the legions affected, and found the chat rooms and message boards filled with people pouring out their plight, long having lost hope in doctors or science or the media to help make sense of their suffering. Hundreds of neighbourhoods around the world seem to suffer from various local sources of noise pollution. Irresponsible industry, lack of government oversight, sloppy urban planning. Except, as much as I searched, I never found anyone living in my area who described my sound. I was sure a few sensitive souls in Auckland or Bristol weren’t being kept awake by the same hum that I was, and yet, I still found solace in reading their posts. Yes, I began to take comfort in the company of anonymous lunatics. But then why else was the Internet invented? Cat videos, and the comfort of anonymous lunatics. I found myself spending hours getting lost in different theories of possible sources. The electric grid, wind turbines, submarines, insect noise, meteors, wind passing through underground caverns, the vibrations of waves slamming into the continental shelf, the mating calls of midshipman fish, government mind-control technology, alien transmissions, distant volcanic eruptions—the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 left the Earth vibrating for days on end. The US military, of course, was a favourite culprit, and many posts talked at length about the very low frequency radio signals used to track vessels deep under the ocean; sonar from which nothing could hide, which turned the ocean inside out like a pocket. And of course there were those who bypassed geology and meteorology altogether and headed straight to God. In the end times the stars will sing, and the great horns of heaven will sound! We were the harbingers of revelation.