A young man studying in Russia sends a voice message to his family in Babil Governorate, Iraq. Her voice, captured by a microphone, is transformed into a stream of electrical impulses. These are sampled thousands of times per second, each sample quantized into one of 65,536 possible levels, then compressed, encrypted, and encoded with redundancy to protect against errors. The resulting bitstream is mapped onto constellations of QAM symbols, modulated onto hundreds of orthogonal subcarriers, and upconverted to a microwave frequency. The signal travels through the air to a base station, then through fiber-optic cables under the ocean pulses of light traversing thousands of kilometers in fractions of a second. At the destination, the entire process is reversed, and her brother sees her face and hears her voice as if she were in the same room.