Carrier Wave

A signal arrives from deep space. It is not a message and it does not need to be understood: hearing it is enough. Anyone exposed is taken, immediately and completely, and they carry on looking and sounding like themselves while they work on spreading it further.

The book follows the people trying to stay unexposed in a world where sound and image are everywhere and where the infected are indistinguishable from friends, and it does not pretend that a happy resolution is available.

Robert Brockway writing straight horror rather than the comic register of the Vicious Circuit books: bleak, fast, and built on a premise that gets worse the longer you think about how much of your day is spent listening to things.