Phantom of the Boardwalk Strikes Again: Assailants Found ‘Sonic-Stunned’ at Oceanfront.
Read: “Axiom of the Self” a novel by Hakeem Ali–Bocas Alexander – Act I: Chapters 1 – 9
RESIDUAL FREQUENCY
His phone buzzed, shattering the silence. A news alert. He almost dismissed it, but the headline snagged his eye: “Phantom of the Boardwalk Strikes Again: Assailants Found ‘Sonic-Stunned’ at Oceanfront.”
A wisp of something—not interest, but a vague, professional irritation—stirred. The article was sensationalist trash, of course. It quoted baffled police and theorized about “ultrasonic weapons” and “vigilante justice.” Hakeem’s mind, trained to dissect anomalies, automatically parsed the data. Non-lethal incapacitation. Focused acoustic energy. Theoretical, but within the bounds of the Eternality Axiom’s implications for directed consciousness affecting local wave-functions…
He stopped the thought. That was the path to madness. Chasing ghosts in news reports was for conspiracy theorists, not PhDs. With a deliberate motion, he closed the browser tab. The silence rushed back in, heavier than before.
—Excerpt from Chapter 1
Hakeem Ali-Bocas Alexander
