The Best Album in the Universe
Harry Blackwood loaded the album onto Soundcloud. He was shaking, but he felt relieved to have finally done it. Here it was in all its 456MB WAV glory: a whole year of writing and recording condensed into 45 minutes and 9 seconds. There were an average of ten overdubbed audio tracks per song, each of which had needed numerous – some even hundreds – of recordings before he had been happy with them. He did not expect it to go far; he just wanted the chance to say that he’d finally finished something. Of course, though he would never admit it, he thought the album was actually quite good. He would tell his family to listen to it, but first he wanted to show it to his closest friend, John, who was also a musician.
“I’m gonna be honest with you, Harry.” He paused. “It’s not the best.”
Harry’s eyes looked sore. He felt as if he’d travelled the length of the universe and back again this past year, but John’s response seemed to suggest he’d not even managed to get out of the house.
“I don’t think it sounds finished.” John was a brilliant musician: classically trained, played piano in an experimental orchestra. He’d once shown Harry a piece of bone in a jewellery box he owned, which he claimed to be the left pinky knuckle of Rachmaninoff himself. Harry, on the other hand, had bought a cheap guitar online after hearing a nice melody on an advert. He had taught himself all he knew and did not think he could ever reach the same level as John.
John could see how upset Harry was. “Look, mate. You know I like it – it’s you! I think it sounds good. Just that it’s not finished. That’s all.”
“I know what you mean.” Harry squeezed his nose. “I actually felt pretty happy with it though.”
“That’s a start. It’s good to be happy with your own work.”
“But I’m seriously, finally happy with it. I was slogging away and tinkering around forever. I don’t want to change any part of it. It’s done now.”
John made the face he always made when he knew something the other person did not. “It’s your choice. I’m not sure I can help you if you don’t want to change anything.”
Harry was deflated for the rest of the day. When he got home, he removed the album from the site.
Mona Reggs was not a particularly well-regarded talent scout. She had studied entomology at university but had struggled to find work and so, with support from her connected uncle, she was given a job at a record label. They called her Mono Reggs because she could only hear from one ear. Nevertheless, a plaque on the wall outside her office read: ‘The Best in the Universe’.
She had just returned from a sunset lunch at Quarks’ when she scraped a random album from a backwater planet called Earth. She prepared to listen to it with customary bored anticipation. Headphones on, lips loose, her eyes focused on the growing patch of damp in the corner of the room, she played the first song. One minute in, she knew it was good and that she would download it for her colleagues to listen to. One minute into the fifth song she declared it a masterpiece. One minute after the twelfth, and final, song she immediately called in every single colleague available. By the third round of listening, she and her colleagues could barely move, the office was so packed. There were tears on the cheeks of industry veterans. Great, urgent cries of joy let out a command: Play It Again. Compelled by the pulverising sonic beauty, all of them sent songs skittering out across messaging platforms to their peers at other companies, or their parents or neighbours or ex-lovers or old roommates – anyone, who, startled by the simple delight of one song, or the catharsis of another, excitedly sent it on to play on their local radio station, or even as a last minute addition to the list of songs at their wedding. The album travelled briskly from town to town, from city to city, across seas and mountains, deserts and rainforests until, as if a whirlwind swept it up and up, the album left the very planet itself.
Alpha Centauri got it first, like it always does.
Then it made its way to Epsilon Eridani, where the Orakos dripped the soundwaves into their Halio-leaf baths.
Then to Betelgeuse where the Rarzis danced to it on their blue beaches with such ferocity that the wind dropped and the sea retreated.
And then it arrived at Andromeda, where on Murbsh the Li’-Ha sliced it into their Breggondos. It was quite the sight.
Within an Earth month, it was proclaimed the Sound of the Universe by the Universal Advisory Board for the Aural Sciences (UABAS). Within a year, the album was enacted into the Universe’s Record of Universal Achievement. By the time the third anniversary of Harry Blackwood’s album upload came round, it was said that 56 quintillion planets were listening to it at any given moment.
This was also the anniversary that saw the attempt by the Fanatic Fleet to make contact with the musical saint on his home planet. Numerous planets along the route were pillaged, Commonwealth caravanserais were raided, all which led to an overflow of sectarian tensions in Btershu that very nearly caused a third civil war. The Universal Commonwealth needed to clamp down on ‘Harry-Fever’. It co-opted the religious fervour for him and sanctioned ‘The Sacred Zone’. Earth was locked away from contact with the rest of the Universe forever.
Once the ecstatic scenes in her office had died down and her colleagues had left, Mona Reggs decided to look at what else the young man from Earth had released. She found nothing on any Earth channel. In fact, the original album upload had also disappeared. She stayed engaged over the next weeks and months, cross-referencing Earth channels with Universal Media sites. But right up until the Laws Protecting the Sanctity of Universal Genius prevented even the lightest scraping of Earth’s communication feeds, nothing more of Harry Blackwood ever turned up.
Mona’s career took off the moment she had discovered the album. Regardless of the quality of her subsequent artists, she held the yardstick for what new music could be about and consequently shaped successive waves of Universal Pop for many years. Yet, despite her success and staggering fortune, she bore a sadness for the rest of her career. She was torn between the pride of uncovering Harry Blackwood’s genius and the pangs of her conscience, that told her this success meant nothing if the artist himself didn’t know. One day not long before she was due to retire, her guilt reached its apogee. She stole an ultrafast one-person spaceship and flew it in the direction of Earth. Mona Reggs was shot down by the Universal Space Guard for Order, just as she touched the boundary of the solar system.
In Earth terms a century passed, then a millennium, quite some time thereafter a megaannum – and still Harry’s place as The Adored did not dwindle. Billions of years sped past, and when the Universe was as disparate and distant from itself as it ever would be, when it was lifeless and empty and even the black holes had withered away, one remnant of civilisation, of the very concept of ‘meaning’ lasted: a Commonwealth Hyperion-Music Box, forged from Gripshon diamond silk, indestructible. At the point at which its decay was about to become final, the music box played its last round of Harry Blackwood’s album. His music formed the very last ripple of the Universe.
It was two days after his first heart attack and seven minutes before his second and final one. The nurse had taken away a tray of hospital food, left untouched. Harry was exhausted. He was lying on the bed with his hands down at his side. Out of boredom, he started tapping his fingers. Suddenly, the memory of a beat came to him. He tapped with it and then, as if out of the ether, he snatched the earworm of an old melody he had written some fifty years before. It was the seventh song on the album and the first he had written. It was his favourite. A broad smile crept across his face. His memory jumped back through the years and took him to a place he had almost forgotten. The anxiety he had had at the time was now but an annotation, barely worth mentioning. In its place was something light and soft. One by one each song came to him, transporting him far beyond his hospital bed. He felt as if he were flown up to Mount Everest and then back down into the sea at the Bay of Bengal. He felt drifted into the hidden depths of the Mariana Trench, and then blasted straight up and out of the sea, out of the atmosphere, landing on the moon.
And from there he could see it all, sparkling and sublime – the great space of the universe. From deep within he felt his body begin to quake, and with one final movement, he leapt headwards into the unknown.
Martin Farrugia
Martin Farrugia is a British writer currently living with his family in Germany. After a joyful and chaotic paternity leave, he has finally sat himself down to write the stories that have always been bugging him. His fiction explores themes of conflict, isolation, memory and foreignness.
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