Wachet Auf

Wachet Auf is the Bach melody whose synchronized playing awakens the Thanatoids around Shade Creek and the Thanatoid Village. Distributed years earlier on sound chips, it turns an obscure commercial scheme involving Takeshi Fumimota into an unexpected summons to memory, recognition, and collective response.

A Tune Prepared in Advance

The music had been recorded on sound chips long before the morning on which it played. The chips had entered the market amid obscure commercial battles, which Takeshi Fumimota had helped foment as part of an arrangement with the equivocal import-export company Tokkata & Fuji. The sound was embedded in watches, clocks, and personal computers; when those devices sounded together, the tune began in unison. Its arrival had the quality of something prepared almost in anticipation of this moment.

The Thanatoids Awaken

The coordinated music was not ordinary electronic sound. Though adapted to the constraints of percussion, the opening of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Wachet Auf retained a quality the Thanatoids could remember: a soulfulness that reached their troubled souls. As they awoke, they blinked, rolled their eyes, and, perhaps for the first time, tried to meet one another’s gaze. The scene frames their awakening as more than sleep ending: the music briefly makes resurrection imaginable and brings into view the memories that define a Thanatoid.

From Music to Summons

The awakening was followed by a long, desolate howl transmitted through the air—not the familiar Thanatoid Call. Takeshi Fumimota and DL could not ignore it. They tuned in to Radio Thanatoide, broadcasting on the unusual band between 6200 and 7000 kilohertz, and played the transmission for Prairie. DL concluded that they had to answer the call and asked Prairie whether she would go with them. Wachet Auf thus marks the beginning of a collective change, but the sound that follows it turns that change into an appeal requiring a response.