Escape Velocity: The Anthology (11 page)

       ‘
... Clinton has one. Are you with me, Mr Skelton?’

       ‘
Course. In each ear?’

       ‘
Who, you or the former president? Doesn’t matter. Yes to either. Your auditory tests need to be more rigorous than before. Come through to the lab next door. There’s forms to sign too.’

       ‘
Aren’t there always?’

       ‘
You’ll need your hair off.’

      
Instinctively, he stroked his spiky hair. ‘I bet Bill didn’t.’

       ‘
Bill? Oh, his was simpler and cosmetically expensive. Why worry? That cut is a number two isn’t it?’

       ‘
Four.’

       ‘
It will be four again soon, but with the advantage of your ears not needing those outdated contraptions and with enhanced facilities. You just wait.’

      
Two hours later he’d lost all his ability to make decisions. Soundproofed cubicle it might have been, but his tinnitus kicked in louder than ever. They must have heard it too was his private joke but the internal whistling soured when they made him press the button when he heard a note. Focussing on a sound-to-be was Chinese torture. After half an hour he wasn’t sure whether he was pressing the button because he’d heard a ping, or his tinnitus called, or he was just hurrying them on. He should’ve told them he’d had listening fatigue but he pressed on, or not.

       ‘
Come on,’ she said, with no awareness of his weariness. ‘Luckily, the computer does the rest.’

      
After inserting temporary beads into his ears, electrodes led from them to itchy pads on his shiny pate and to her box of tricks. ‘You’ll hear strange beeps and bops but ignore them. The program will sense the sound patterns and make equalization adjustments. Just relax.’

       ‘
So my ears and head link to this Moog Synthesizer thing?’

      
She threw him a pitying smile.

      
Finally she said, ‘We’re done.’

Finally wasn’t the end.

       ‘
I can’t go home?’ He stood, his left hand in his pocket rearranging his undercarriage after so long on a lab stool.

       ‘
We have a slot tomorrow morning. You’ll have a private room,’ said Doctor McBain. She hadn’t looked up from tapping on her electronic tablet, synchronised with satisfied smiles as the graphs animated with dancing numbers.

       ‘
But I haven’t brought—’

       ‘
Everything is provided,’ said a male nurse whose black beard must have infringed health regulations.

       ‘
I’m expected—’

       ‘
You’re single, living alone here in Florida while your parents are a thousand miles away,’ said the doctor still playing with her virtual copy of his ears.

      
The nurse, maybe he was an orderly, pushed gently but firmly at Abner’s back, heading him towards the lab door.

      
At last the doctor looked up at him. ‘You are the perfect patient for this procedure, Mr Skeleton.’

       ‘
Skelton.’

      
Abner put his hand on the doorjamb wondering if he was allowed to refuse this operation.

He dreamt of being back in his apartment that night, and the next six nights. ‘Settling in’ problems they said. At least they avoided referring to the cacophony in his head as being teething problems.

      
Doctor McBain glared down at him with her green eyes. Her with all that verticality and he could still make out those bottle-green orbs sending hostile emanations into him. She tap scratched on her pad and showed him her recrimination:
You should have mentioned your tinnitus
.

      
So it was
his
fault.

      
Maybe she was right. At first his head imploded with so much noise he thought his new aids had amplified his tinnitus and he had yet to hear external sounds. He had tried to filter out some of the frequencies. His former girlfriend had often accused him of selective hearing, and it was true. But now he suffered booming echoing inside his skull. Before the operation his tinnitus threw him a random selection of twittering birds, single tones and a drunk playing a harmonica. None particularly distracting or hateful. Until now.

      
Then he saw a nurse five metres away drop a pen. The detonation burst in his head accompanied with a kaleidoscope of coloured stars. He told the doctor. She mouthed back: Stop shouting. Maybe she’d said it too, but his head was so full he couldn’t distinguish the lower frequency noises any more. The audio equivalent of a colourful painting turned brown by over-fussing.

      
Don’t worry. We’ll sort it.

      
It took a whole day with those electrodes buzzing instructions to the implants before the sounds settled to deafening. It was driving him crazy, not just the sounds reverberating behind his eyes and up and down his spine, but the time it was taking. Abner loved the outdoors. Born in a hurry in a hospital parking lot, he yearned for fresh air, earthy smells, insects and other unencumbered creatures. School was a nightmare, this worse because he wasn’t allowed home. 

      
If his acoustic problem wasn’t enough, another concern was the increasing number of senior military personnel ogling him and nodding to the doctor. They didn’t speak to him, or if they did their words were lost in the sound fog – turned down now by a joint effort of computer and earplugs. He couldn’t resist a smile at the irony of having cochlear implants that were so good he had to wear earplugs. So he ended up with external devices after all.

      
This was a military hospital, and they paid his expenses for the experimental implants so he couldn’t object to being peered at like a caged orang-utan. Even so, his stomach knotted when he noticed white-helmeted guards at his door with fingers on the trigger guard of their M-16s. Were they afraid he’d run off with their precious implants? But that was going to happen anyway. He felt sick when he realized they were keeping people away from him. He’d no family near enough to visit, no friends – only acquaintances at Spiro’s Bar. Was that a factor in choosing him for this implant? He’d enquire when McBain returned.

      
You’ve cost the Services a helluva lot of dollars
. She scrubbed it and wrote more.

      
We need to test your ability to hear voices from a distance.

       ‘
Is that what this is all about? Using me as some kind of listening device? I thought there were CIA bugs for that?’ Abner thought he’d spoken calmly but he could see her pained expression. Hell, her spectacles blurred as if they were about to crack. She staggered back and leant against the wall while she wrote again.

      
Use your pad for the time being. We go to the test lab in 30 minutes.

      
He knew he’d shouted not only from her reactions but from his increasingly sore throat. She’d left some botanical magazines; evidence she’d read his notes under interests. Must be worried he was slipping into insanity, or maybe the distraction would help his brain learn to adjust to the implant.

Three days of testing, zapping the electrodes, and increasing hatred of all things military passed before Abner got away. Their mistake, letting him wear his everyday clothes. He faked a collapse when a single guard accompanied him from the lab. As the idiot ran for help, Abner helped himself to the staircase and out.

      
He smiled at the simplicity of his escape route, but frowned again at his current dilemma. Hating crime, to the extent of handing back litter to louters, he now heard more than was good for him. How could he ignore obvious law breaking now he could hear it happening? Ignorance really was bliss. Pity they hadn’t programmed his hearing to hear only plants growing, or dragonflies, but those sounds wouldn’t benefit the damned military.

      
He recalled that McBain had marched up to him accompanied by a visitor even taller than her. Also in white but in a knife-sharp army uniform encrusted with three stars. The visitor’s voice boomed into Abner like a shockwave. His hearing shut down immediately, a neat trick built into the implant by the Silverstein wizards. Nevertheless, the pain streamed like a hot knife into his brain – the mother of all head bangers.

      
A nurse rushed over with an iced flannel and placed it on Abner’s forehead while another brought a glass of whiskey-looking medicine that tasted of paraffin.

      
Ten minutes and he was ready; as normal as any other mutant. This time the general wrote:
We are taking you to G Bay. A mission for you.

      
He thought about where G could’ve been. Somewhere operational, where secrets might be overheard now that electronic bug detectors matched the cunning of the bugs. Somewhere too long to spell out quickly on a pad. His return note said:
I don’t wanna go Guantanimo Bay.

      
The soldier didn’t blink.
You’ve no choice. U cost us 2 much.

      
How much?

      
U don’t want 2 know.

      
Then why did he ask? Abner shut up in more ways than one.

When Abner sprung the tab on the can of beer there would have been fizzing. He pulled out the foldaway table – an act he knew should squeak, and he relaxed on a hard bench in his parents’ trailer holiday home. The cupboards bulged with food, most within their eat-by-date. His dad must be on a hoarding binge again, worried that terrorists will invade, or maybe it was a forecast asteroid hit. He hoped they wouldn’t return for a few weeks.

      
Abner snarled at the beer. Cheap, tasting of metal.

      
He turned on the TV. Few channels reached out there so the picture looked like an Aztec carpet. He couldn’t hear it anyway. He wondered if McBain was on the ball and his hearing would settle down once his brain adjusted. He’d best do it in small stages. Already he’d found that it was human voices his aids now focussed on. Low frequency sounds like engines and road noise hardly bothered him.

      
He wondered if he should ease out one of the earplugs – not easy because they were like gum; he would roll it in a ball and squeeze it into his ears. Perfect silence, except he usually heard his heart beating, Worrying when it skipped a beat. Between thumb and forefinger he eased his right plug out. Darn that clock! He shoved the plug back in and stood, knocking into the flimsy table. He knew the wretched clock went right through him earlier that morning but had forgotten to pull its batteries. He yanked open the rear compartment and ejected them. He sat back down and pointed a victorious finger at the dead chronometer. He’d not realized how many clock tocks were the same frequency range as human voices. He pulled out the earplug. All this experimenting, they should pay him. Good the arguing had stopped in the next valley. Thanks ma and pa for possessing the urge to be so isolated.

      
Occasionally he heard a jackal, maybe an owl, crickets, but they didn’t hurt, filtered by the implant program. He clenched his fist – not daring to hammer the table. The fact that in the absence of human speech he could hear other sounds without deafening himself proved to him that they were clever enough to do a proper job on his ears but chose to amplify human voices so he could be a listening post for them. Maybe they wanted him to listen the Cubans to death.

      
He stopped his silent rage for a moment and cocked his head towards the wall.

      
Cables lay inside a plastic conduit leading to the kitchenette. A fridge was on, making its gurgling music, no other gadgets. He stood and placed his ear to the conduit. He could hear a sloughing sound like millions of tiny feet running through the wire. A smile grew as he reckoned he could hear electricity. He bet he’d be the first. He rushed over to unplug the fridge, and listened at the wall again. The tiny feet pattered but less so, confused at the lack of output, no flow possible. They slowed, seemingly reluctantly and stopped. Not liking his toxic beer to be warm too, he switched the cooler back on.

      
He released a small laugh at the results of his experiment, especially as it meant he knew something that McBain didn’t. Not that he could think how it could help him, or the planet, to be able to hear electricity, unless terrorist electricity was different to good ole American juice. He reinserted his earplugs to keep out the external night noises so he could catch some sleep.

Bright dawn rays turned dirty yellow by the old lace curtains brought unwelcome consciousness. He recalled hearing electricity, and unplugged his ears prior to plugging in the kettle. Just as the realization that voltages
were
different in other countries, he heard a woman’s soft voice.

       ‘
Abner, can you hear me?’

      
Shocked, he turned around the sparsely furnished trailer, looking to see if someone had sneaked in and spoken quietly. Of course no one had. Anyhow, his watch showed only 5:10 am. It was spoken as his mother would, especially when she’d been calling him for dinner and finally entered his room where he’d been stuck in a Game Boy shootout. The voice was feminine but mellow compared to the screeching from the next valley. Nevertheless, he slowly opened the door and staying on the top step looked out over the plains. The wind rippled through the wheat in the adjoining ranch land, a line of windbreak poplars a mile away threw long shadows towards him; the rising sun blinking through the branches if he turned his head this way and that. Maybe it was the soughing of the bowing wheat or the rippling poplar leaves whispering.