“Major Benton keeps telling me to put the Bible down but I can’t. The more I read Revelations, the more I see our present world. I see the Children of Futuro in the mark of the Beast. Every one of them is marked by their false god. It’s like the mark of the Beast. I say “like” because I don’t want to believe this war is Revelations. I don’t want this to be the end. But they carry his mark and I pray it is not the mark of the Beast. The mark is a physical change. Their false god changes them into things. Shapes. Objects. Major Benton says they aren’t machines but they look like machines. Wheels and lights and metal all thrown together. They look like mistakes. But whatever they are, I can’t bring myself to feel anything when I kill one. The Jap demons, they’re monsters, but at least they’re animals. They have faces and bodies and they don’t want to die. They bleed when you shoot them and they cry out in pain. But these things, these objects, they don’t feel anything. They don’t stop. They don’t care if they step over their own to get to you. They can’t even be called imitations of life. They’re mockeries of life. They’re blasphemies against God’s own creation. And the worst of the blasphemies are the intonarumori. Music has always been sacred to God. The angels in heaven have choirs. David played the harp for the Lord. Boethius wrote of the musica universalis. As living noise, the intonarumori stand against God’s gift of music. If Hell has choirs, they are made of intonarumori.”

–Journal of Brad Hendricks, Black Terror soldier. 1945

The Children of Futuro came in many nightmarish forms, but perhaps none were more disturbing than the noise makers–the intonarumori.

In the cult of Futuro, the future was taught as something that existed contemporaneously with the present. It was not “what was to come,” but “what is.” What separated the present and the future was how life was experienced. In the future, life was dynamism and struggle. In the present, life was stagnation and death.

According to the cult, Futuro was the supreme god of existence. He created all of reality in a single, timeless instant and his reality was chaos and violence. Reality was constant change, an ever-future that destroyed itself to be reborn anew.

But Futuro desired something to subjugate for his glory. He created the present, and the present was designed to yield to the future. And his elect, born in the present, would share in the glory of conquest.

In Futuro, the future existed. It was his body, it was his blood. His elect would take bits of the future from out of his great mass and use them to tame the present.

At his touch, men were reborn as his Children. Their stagnant, earthly bodies filled with weakness and need were reshaped and remade.

They were remade into living weapons, for there could be no coexistence with the present.

The future was a conquering future. It existed to pillage and dominate the yielding present just as hawks existed to consume their prey. Violent subjugation of the present was as natural as water rolling down hill.

The children of the present were reactors. They reacted to stimulus. They heard, and saw, and thought. They were Adam. They were clay-men who were pressed and stretched into existence by external forces. They were toys. That was their destiny. And the Children of Futuro would play with these toy-creatures. For the Children of Futuro were stimulus itself. They acted without being acted upon.

The Children of Futuro would be heard, they would not hear. They would be seen, they would not see. And they would not think. Thought was for animals. The Children would simply be. Their will and their action would be one thing unhindered by introspection or abstraction. They would be as heartless and absolute as a thunderstorm. They would be speed and fury and noise–noise that would drown the universe in reverberations.

The Children of Futuro came in many breeds, but the ones closest to Futuro’s flaming pit of a heart were the intonarumori. The greatest musicians of Italy gave themselves to Futuro to be transformed into artists of the future. Those that refused were convinced of the error of their ways and then gave themselves to Futuro–willingly, more or less.

With his hands, Futuro turned their flesh into smooth, black tubes that opened into yawning mouths. Their hearts became black membranes of quasi-matter that vibrated to produce a noise that was the birth cry of a nascent future.

The noise makers found favor with their father because they of all their brother-kin represented the ideal chaos of the future.

Futuro despised the concept of music. It was a quaint conception of order invented by toy-creatures. It was disgusting how mankind venerated music through their myths. Apollo created the city of Thebes with a song and God surrounded himself with choirs of angels. Mankind went so far as to conceive of their universe as a kind of song–the music of the spheres, they called it. The mathematical harmony between celestial bodies in motion was music. The stars sang. All vibrated harmoniously as one.

What foolishness.

The stars were screaming, their cries muffled by void. Man would hear their nuclear shrieks if only there was a medium for the sound to travel through.

And if they heard the stars, would they not hear the truth of the cosmos blaring in their ears? Would they not know that the fundamental principle of the universe was strife and that their voices were too quiet to matter in the conflict?

And where would their precious “music of the spheres” be in their dawning wisdom?

The intonarumori would be his heralds and proclaim his truth to the world through their noise.

Sound, in the rational world of the present, was a waveform propagated across a medium. But the noise of the intonarumori was the sound of the future. It did not require a medium to propagate. Allied scientists explained intonarumori noise as agitations of quantized space-time. They increased entropy within the very fabric of the universe resulting in the propagation of destructive waveforms.

The cult of Futuro explained intonarumori noise as a sound truer and higher than that of natural sound. Their noise was not the music of the spheres. Their noise was not the gentle music of order. Their noise was chaos above order.

And their noise would fill the void until the entire universe would scream as one, as a single savage infant born by humanity to embrace the immutable destiny that was the future.

Intonarumori were powerful soldiers. Entropy itself was their weapon and all but the most powerful superhumans faced mortal danger against a single intonarumori. But they were notoriously difficult to field. All the Children of Futuro, including intonarumori themselves, were vulnerable to their noise. Intonarumori could and did destroy their own. The noise was also difficult to control once it began. It would spread across a battlefield and resound from Vril wall to Vril wall until stopped by a sufficiently powerful superhuman. This meant that a single intonarumori could wipe out an entire Allied army…and an entire Axis army. The battle of Turin was won when the Allies simply retreated and left the Axis to deal with their own propagating waves of entropy.

Space-bending was a highly effective counter to intonarumori noise. Their entropy waves traveled through space. Thus by bending space, the waves could be redirected back to the intonarumori. The superhuman thaumaturgist Spectro won the battle of Genoa by doing just that.

Intonarumori noise could also fail spontaneously. In destabilizing space-time, they sometimes created pockets of non-quantized space-time called “pure void.” This would break the medium through which the noise propagated. The superhero Pyroman recalled in his memoirs seeing his life flash before his eyes as his supersenses detected intonarumori noise creeping towards him…and then suddenly stopping.

Though the intonarumori were conceived by Futuro to be seige weapons, they were quickly repurposed as defensive weapons as the tide of war turned against the Italians. They would be deployed one at a time to cover a retreat, then as the encroaching army pulled back, the Italians would marshal their forces and surge. But though this strategy significantly slowed down the Allies’ advance, it could not reverse it, and the intonarumori fell in the end like all the Children of Futuro.

The post-war years saw the cult of Futuro continue on in the shadows as their god was unmasked as Moloch and destroyed. The gods of the astral unconscious have more variations than humans have cells, and Futuro was no exception. His loyal cultists were able to reach deep into the mystic darkness of the astral unconscious and contact his other selves to receive power and instruction.

The cult of Futuro lasted the longest of all the Axis remnants and owed their longevity to the intonarumori. They were the ideal terrorists–small, singular units able to create immense destruction. An entire universe could be threatened by the noise of just one intonarumori. But science caught up to their abilities and space-time stabilizers were quickly invented to counter intonarumori noise. Space-time stabilizers took the quasi-energy generated by intonarumori and directed it to produce negentropy. Quantized space-time formed into latices that not only prevented entropic waves from propagating but sealed intonarumori in crystalized forcefields

When the superteam known as the Intercessors uncovered the cult’s last chapel in 1964, the cult’s attempt to destroy several universes by setting off their remaining intonarumori fizzled with the press of a button.

The intonarumori ended not in a bang, not in a whimper, but in silence.

It has been difficult to restore the humanity of the Children of Futuro, especially for intonarumori. Those turned back to humans cannot survive without constant noise. Their minds, their souls, remember the chaotic rumblings of their intonarumori hearts and long for its comforting familiarity. Silence causes them discomfort. Repeating, orderly sounds cause them pain. Music causes them agony. They must have a noisemaker placed on their auditory nerve programmed to constantly produce random sounds. Functionally, they are deaf and must deal with all the complications that brings to life. That many of the former intonarumori were once musicians adds another bitterness to their existence. But recently, many former intonarumori have found a calling as ambassadors and artistic aides to the Sapah race.

The Sapah evolved in a nebula so thick with gasses that its stars resounded. Their cloud-hidden homeworld was inundated with noise before life began. Their life-star which warmed their homeworld bombarded its surface with 125 decibels. Humans standing on the surface have reported that it sounds like a train horn one metre away blaring constantly.

There was no evolutionary benefit to hearing when all was swallowed in the scream of a star. The Sapah and lower lifeforms of their planet evolved deaf just as the creatures of our sunless oceans evolved blind.

From their earliest contact with mankind, the Sapah have longed to understand music.

The Sapah saw it depicted visually by human communicators, but the depictions were always lacking. They saw it depicted as a kind of radiance that touched those receptive to it. They knew it had something to do with light and enormity because the humans indicated that their sun was “loud” which meant that it had sound to an overbearing degree. The sun was “loud” the same way it was bright. Music was thus like seeing an invisible brightness. But humans indicated to them that music wasn’t exactly like that. They indicated that they could feel music. They held the Sapha’s feathered hands to their throats so they could feel the undulations. This they said was a form of music called singing.

So music was like the heat of their life-star as well as its light. It could be felt. But the humans indicated that it wasn’t exactly like that either. Music came in degrees. It could be “louder” and “quieter” like things could be hotter and colder or brighter or darker. Music was like art. The Sapah made art by harmoniously varying visual symbols by color and tone. Music was thus the harmonious variation of degrees in a medium they could not perceive. Music was the invisible art.

And that, the humans indicated, was indeed music.

The Sapah wanted very badly to master the “invisible art.” The concept fired their imaginations. Artwork without color, without canvas, without form or shape–humanity knew not the blessing they had. The Sapah wanted, as much as they were able, to create music.

Fortunately, former intonarumori were able to help them do just that.

The former intonarumori, many of whom were musicians, understood what it was like to be deaf like Sapah and remembered what it is like to hear like men. They helped Sapha artists conceptualize sound, and through their guidance the Sapha entered a golden age of artistic expression. They created what they envisioned to be music to the best of their ability– long, winding tapestries of repeating abstract elements. These tapestries have been prized throughout the universe for their beauty and sound–for their patterns can be converted into music notes. The conversion process is subjective and imprecise, but the result is always a hauntingly beautiful melody. Nothing in all the universe sounds like the music of a master artist born deaf. Order and symmetry, regardless of medium, are pleasing to sapients.

The dark story of the intonarumori thus has a happy ending. The humans liberated from the mad dreams of an evil god were able to put their traumatic experiences toward bridging the cultural divide between man and those he shares a universe with. The human spirit, even when broken and dissected, does not forget itself.