First I crawled across a huge steel beam that was covered in a blanket of dust. And then my shirt and pants were dirty, there was stuff in my hair, and I sneezed three times. And the work of art made by time, which was the undisturbed collection of particles from the air, which had settled year by year, decade by decade on the beam, were now smeared all over me. Sort of like paint that never really dried.
It's the first time that anyone had been up the ceiling in a very long time. Of everyone that could have gone, I was the stupid one that volunteered. I wanted to get the rest of the crew to feel eager, so I thought it fair to get my hands dirty. It was part of a research project that we were doing, and this ended up being the easiest way to connect some equipment that was on the roof, to the place where the rest of our equipment would live, which was a storage room in our lab. This building was one of the oldest university buildings in the country. Lots of wiring had been done here, but for some reason we found ourselves doing work in a part that hadn't been touched in a very long time.
As I was crouching up in the ceiling waiting for the other people on my team to figure out what was going on, I started to look around. I was in a place that nobody had been in for ages. As I shone my flashlight around I could see things that took me back in my mind, long before I was ever born. Knob and tube wiring, cardboard boxes that had somehow been put up here, and a bottle of something that was once hard liquor, mostly empty, with its lid on. Why would someone come up here to drink? I had a nervous excitement and a bit of fear as I moved my light around. As if the pool of light that it cast might happen upon something scary, or something that I would have rather not seen. But other than the few things that I've already mentioned, there really wasn't a lot to look at. Mostly just dust-covered parts of the building structure.
Minutes seemed like hours as I waited up in that ceiling, but finally I heard someone from my crew holler from the opening where I had entered. I heard a drilling sound and then a small hole of light appeared with a little piece of spinning metal retracting from it. Then there was a scritchy scratchy sound, followed by a little piece of cable sticking out of the hole. I grabbed it and fed some through the hole before planning how I was going to take the cable to where it was going, to the storage room. With careful steps and my light and the cable in hand, I made my way back the way I had come.
Later that day, once the dirty part of the job was over, a few people from our team were hanging around in the storage room which we were clearing out and cleaning up to make room for a few desks, some computers and other equipment. One wall in the room had some cupboards that were built in. They were mostly empty, except for a few books and random bits of paper. But inside one of the cupboards was a very strange looking wiring panel. It had all sorts of terminal screws, like telephone wiring, and there were dozens of connections, from many cables that came down the wall into the panel. It looks as though the cupboards had been built around this existing bit of complex wiring. All the cables looked old, but carefully and accurately installed. The way the cupboards had been built around the panel made it seem important. Like it demanded attention, or safe keeping or something. We all racked our brains trying to figure out what it might have been used for, and why it was in this particular place. Since our task for the day was complete, we drank coke and ate pizza and chatted about stuff, though our conversation seemed always to come back to that silly panel.
A few of the more energetic and adventurous people on our team decided that they would figure out what this most attention-seeking panel was all about, to put an end to the mystery. They followed wires, ruled out things that had long since been upgraded, such as telephone, fire systems, etc. and also decided that it wasn't power wiring. Was it just something that had been abandoned, something obsolete? Or were there still signals of some sort on these wires? Why were we so interested in this panel? It seemed to attract attention to itself. There was only one way to find out the real truth.
With a piece of pizza in one hand, I went in search of an oscilloscope. There was one in another one of our rooms, and so with it by its handle and my mouth full of pizza I hurried back to the storage room. We set it up on a desk that was near the panel, I plugged in the power cord. After a few seconds the familiar green line was flickering across the screen. I reset all the controls and we clipped the probe onto a pair of wires. Nothing interesting on the scope. Another pair, nothing. I turned up the sensitivity, still nothing. And then we tried a third pair of wires. The screen on the scope lit up with a signal. I turned down the sensitivity so it would all fit on the screen. A strong signal of a few volts danced on the scope. It looked like audio. Like speech. Had we found some sort of old telephone connections that happened to still be in use?
One of the other guys went and got a small amplified speaker and hooked up clips to it, so we could connect it to the terminals. He plugged in the speaker's power supply next to where the scope was plugged in. With an eerie sense that we were doing something that we shouldn't be doing, he hooked up the leads across the terminals where my scope was already connected. A soft but strong sound came from the speaker. We turned it up a little. It was the sound of a man talking, lecturing. It sounded as if this man was in a large room with students listening. You could hear the sound of papers shuffling, chalk being used on the black board and the reverberation of a large lecture hall.
Had we found some sort of intercom or paging system patch panel? It seemed as such. But the strange thing was that none of us recognized the voice of the lecturer. His voice sounded out of place, old fashioned, the way my grandparents used to talk. Maybe it was a visiting professor, or someone filling in that day. But the voice had a sound of something that you don't hear anymore. A few of us went to see which lecture halls were in use. Room 103 was empty, 104 was too. The lights were on in 120, but nobody was in there. And then one of us realized that it's Friday at eight in the evening. Nobody holds lectures here at that time. Weird.
With our hearts pounding, we rushed back up to the storage room. The man on the speaker was still talking, wrapping up his lecture. Maybe we were hearing a lecture from another building, maybe it was a recording that someone was listening to in their office, maybe...
We tried other sets of terminals. Most of them didn't do anything, but there were others that made sound. Some sounded like empty rooms, just a din of background noise. Others sounded like people talking, having conversations in meeting rooms or offices. And everyone that spoke sounded complete unlike people from the year 2003.
Our wires to nowhere were wires to a different time. We were scared, overwhelmed and giddy with excitement. Our project, and reason for being in this room was completely forgotten as we sat listening to the past, coming to us live on some abandoned intercom wires.
Pretty soon we had gathered some computers, a few more speakers and some wiring, so that we could record what we were hearing. With a few computer running, we started to archive the sound of the past, from the comfort of the future. We heard old lectures on computer science and engineering. We heard conversations between professors, students, and professors and students. There were arguments about controversial topics that have long since been resolved, talk of plans to build experiments that now seem trivial, and not surprisingly, banter about sports.
It was talk of sports that gave us information about exactly when we were hearing. It was Stanley cup season, and Toronto was playing Montreal in the finals. Based on this and some of the other technical talk that we heard, we figured that the year was 1967. Our suspicions would be confirmed several days later when Toronto would beat Montreal 4-2. We felt strangely god-like, having 20/20 hindsight while listening to people that were at least if not more intelligent than us struggling with concepts and ideas that we knew the answers to perfectly. They would struggle to discover the basis behind our current knowledge. But we had made the most incredible, confusing and accidental discovery of all. And there was no way to tell them, or was there?!...