Nowadays, Jamie likes to bounce off the ionoshpere.
 

    Nowadays, Jamie liked to bounce off the ionosphere.  Thank the sunspots he existed below the 3130 megahertz range.  What with the sporadic E propagation wedged between the D and F layers and all, maintaining proper Earthly purchase might have been a struggle.  But he was up to the task now.  He had evolved.  Or so he believed.

    Debi, recently coming of age, had embraced the notion that she was a full-spectrum girl, living across the low infrared realm all the way to the high gamma region.  She showed no partiality to the visible spectrum, however, could hang with the ultraviolet as though it were an ordinary violet in the garden of wavelength’s creation.  And while X-rays might have been in her heart, her soul belonged to the photon in its quantum state.  For all this she was grateful because it gave her freedom other young ingenues didn’t enjoy.

    As Jamie careened off this lower level of the magnetosphere he called home, he sensed Debi one day.  How much richer in vibrancy she was than he. How liberated she was, being able to come and go as she pleased.  And beautiful as well.  On many wavelengths all this troubled him because he knew she was unattainable.  Why must I be such a low-spectrum boy? he asked himself, self-pity resonating through him.  Limited to the AM, FM, PM, and the crude Morse code of my continuous wave.  Now Jamie was nothing but continuous and thoughtful, despite being trapped in his global slaloming.  Though his task was an incessant one that left him nearly incognizant of his surroundings, he quickly became smitten with this girl of the upper spectrum.  On some small quantum level his carrier wave was, perhaps, falling in love.  So how did he get her attention?  Because he lived beneath her radar, she didn’t even know he was alive.
    
      Well, having only to work with what he’d been given, he began with commonplace AM.  But screaming with amplitude at the top of his low-frequency lungs turned out to be futile.  The LF band was so laden with static crashes and hum, his impassioned declarations were nothing but a garble.  Getting this fickle young creature’s attention required a more subtle approach, he decided.  So he switched to FM, modulating his frequency with tenderness and passion.  Singing out with a fidelity only this clear-channel mode could provide.  But alas, nothing.  Time to pull out the big guns.  

        Now phase modulation was such a recondite thing, he knew.  He wasn’t even sure if he fully understood the advantage of PM himself.  And if he didn’t understand it, then how could she?  But then it struck him.  Maybe the simplest approach might work the best.  Which left good old CW.  Continuous wave had worked for Guglielmo Marconi, had it not?  Mightn’t an unadorned carrier wave convey his proclamations of love?

    While acknowledging the inadequacies of the medium, what brief message should he send this light-borne princess so she might deign to look down upon him?  An SOS would probably get her attention, but then he’d look merely pitiful and desperate, and he certainly didn’t want that.  Might the standard CQ calling any and all stations be the subtle approach here?  Subtle yes, effective no.  Patrician that she was, she’d probably ignore his lowbrow invitation.  Best he be honest and proclaim his true feelings for her.  Certainly she’d appreciate that. Yes, the old radio telegrapher’s abbreviation for “love and kisses” was the message to be sent.  Eighty-eight was the numerical equivalent.  Dah-dah-dah-dit-dit.  Dah-dah-dah-dit-dit.  Three longs and two shorts repeated twice.  Which he then repeated again and again and again.  Repeated until his carrier wave wept from exhaustion.  Damn, why wouldn’t she listen?

    Then one fine day, as Debi came flickering across the aurora borealis she’d had a hand in fashioning, she finally sensed this young elemental of low-frequency extraction.  If it hadn’t been for the exquisite northern lights she’d just help create--turning to marvel at their splendor--she might never have noticed him beneath her.  Yes, though he was unmistakably an earthbound swain, his vibrancy rather base and shabby, there was something about him that caught her eye.   Strange though that this boy should be limited to such a meager existence, forever stuck in the basement of waveform electromagnetics.
  
        But should she approach him?  Wouldn’t that be considered…slumming?   Her father had always warned her to stay away from such uncouth young men as these.  Bad boys had always held a fascination for her, however.  But what would such a liaison bring her? she had to ask herself.  Riches?  Prestige?  Glory?  Hardly.   Truth be told, in the end he could only hold her back.  Due to her gentrified configuration the entire galaxy was her oyster, while this poor boy would be forever stuck below the ionosphere of this grubby little world of his.  To forever bang his head against the ceiling of his own limitations.  Still, there was something intriguing in his ardent plea.  Something that...

    Debi looked down with a superior eye.

    Jamie called up with invitation. Dah-dah-dah-dit-dit.  Dah-dah-dah-dit-dit.

    Somewhere betwixt them lay the microwave realm of introduction.  And perhaps a fleeting infatuation of wavelengths crossed, like those stars of lovers that so often are.