Amber Alert and Necromancy

Have you ever heard an Amber Alert?

It’s California’s system to track recently-abducted children. I had seen the electronic billboards on the freeway but hadn’t heard the bulletins on the radio until recently. The billboards will flash descriptions of the victim and the suspected abductor’s car.

The radio system is much much scarier, and I don’t mean in terms of implications to civil rights. I mean it actually sounds frightening- The standard Emergency Alert System signal breaks into the programming, and a sort of staticky siren starts playing in the background. A tinny recording of an announcer, usually a female dispatcher, dispassionately intones the description of the abducted child and their abductor, and the abductor’s car. She sounds like her brain has been scooped out like a custard and replaced with Borg.

It sort of reminds me of the recording in 12 Monkeys– after Cole (Bruce Willis)’s disastrous and confusing trip into the past, the scientists piece together a voice mail by assembling bit by bit a recording made just prior to the end of human civilization-

“I can’t do any more. I have to go now. Have a merry Christmas!”

It is a strange, manic voice… a voice of someone long dead of the ghastly plague that killed almost everyone on earth.

Listening to dead people speak gives me chills. Maybe I’m not alone; isn’t one of the many things explictly forbidden by the bible speaking/listening to the dead?

It also reminds me of the joyful expression on the face of the previous captain of the Event Horizon– he has died in a very gruesome and perverse way, and in the recording he stares at the camera with glee, after having pulled out his own eyes. He shows the eyeballs to the viewer like a child holding out a bug he’s found on the sidewalk.