I was in the wings, waiting to go on after Akira, listening closely so my parody would mimic his brilliance to perfection.
He held the audience as he always did, or better this time of all times, as the origami of his music folded and refolded around us, bright and sharp as a Samurai blade, and he sang the words that told us new things we'd always known. It was hard to separate the meaning, sliding fractally between the emotion of the sound and the magic of the lyrics, right up until he reached that line.
I won't quote it here, though it makes little difference now, but it was the key that opened the lock. He stopped instantly, his face lit up with such utter surprise I've never seen before, and he was fitting before he hit the ground. For a moment no-one moved, as if the frothing and bleeding could be part of the performance, but then everyone surged to the stage and the cameras cut away.
I was the first to reach him, close enough to see the eyes and hear the words. I've been around the business long enough to have seen a lot of bad trips, on things too expensive to get on the street, but he was beyond delirium. Much of what he said meant nothing to me, but there was enough to see he was already in a terrible place, and not coming back.
There was nothing I could do, and I was soon swept away by the professionals, who could do nothing either but at least took him away. So I went home, tried not to think about the images he'd put in my mind, thought that was the end of it, until the visit.
There was a policeman and a woman who looked completely unlike someone in the intelligence services, which I soon found was typical of them. She asked for all the details I could remember, as if it were something I could forget, but that wasn't mainly what she wanted. She wanted me to help, me uniquely because of my two unusual talents.
She said they'd become involved because of the things he said, mostly too strange to understand, but enough that he should not know, could not know, that the security forces became interested. They'd tried to get more, but - and she was disturbingly evasive on the details - he died before they could find out what was happening.
So why would they need me, a professional mimic who happens to have perfect pitch?
The one fact they were convinced of was that the episode that changed him was caused by his singing that line, and they'd tried hard to reproduce the effect. Simply playing the recorded sound had no effect, just as it hadn't done anything to the studio or television audience. So they'd tried getting their people to produce the same sounds, again with no results, but there was the doubt that perhaps the sound needed to be more precise than they could achieve.
Hence the need for me to try. Of course I pointed out my concern that he went mad and died, so it was not something I'd ever want to do.
She argued, talked of their extraordinarily sophisticated drug and monitoring controls that would allow them to keep me sane and safe under any conditions. And she said the safety of not just the country but the world was involved, and appeared to mean it.
It took a long time, but at last I gave in, and came to this place with the impressive pharmaceutical magic, and sang the song.
I don't remember the two days it took to find the mixture of controls that would allow me to regain awareness without reacting to what had happened to me, which is how I survived. And I understand that I'm well under the influence of the drugs now, which allow me to think about it without going insane. I'm even OK knowing that if the drugs ever wear off I'll die, but of course that doesn't matter anyway now.
So, what do you want to ask me first? How it happened, it's like radio: the message was broadcast on a "frequency" keyed to that line of words and music. Anyone producing exactly that sound would recieve the information, like tuning a radio receiver to match the transmitter.
Less like radio is that the broadcast comes from the future, near the end of the Sun's lifetime, from a race called the Shana, visitors to the long dead Earth. They read our standing wave, the permanent record of the most intense feelings of all human beings, and sent a reply back to us.
Unfortunately, the Shana aren't like us. They are a billion years from their own animal origins, when they had predators and enemies among their own kind, and have no understanding of the early times of suffering. Their standing wave consists of love, but ours doesn't.
Do you want to know the first word uttered on Earth? I heard it in the Shana's reply, a near human hissed, hoping her child would hear and find the meaning, avoiding the snake that she did not. Everything from the standing wave came back in the reply, and it's all in my head.
How many humans have died screaming? I can't count them, but I can hear them and know their meanings. They tried to send the same message, of Hitler and Vesuvius and the blackened bodies piled high in Constantinople, of dangerous animals and more dangerous men, of all the millions of dreadful things that happened but could have been avoided.
The human standing wave is of warnings that came too late.
The Shana tried to help, artificially collapsing the Sun into a black hole to produce enough of a curve in space-time to send back one message, broadcasting our warnings back throughout human time to save us. But they couldn't tell us the key to tune in, and had to gamble on whether we'd get the message in time.
It's just bad luck that we should only hear it now, with the asteroid impact due this evening.