The Silent History: A Novel (26 page)

I got Slash into his car seat and slipped through the front door. It was one of those airless summer nights where you sweat just by thinking about it, just like the day Flora was born. That suffocating humidity, Mel slumped in the passenger seat, ghost white. Slash was clearly uncomfortable as well, yowling as I hauled him out to the car. I snapped his car seat into the dock and he instantly calmed down. He knew by that sound that we were about to go on an aimless sprawl through the night. I stood at the open door with my hand on Slash’s tiny chest, just like I’d stood on that night long ago when I’d buckled Mel into the car. It was still impossible for me to understand how I’d been so close to her, so oblivious to the fact that those hours were her last on earth.

We took MLK, which lets you get into the heart of the city for half the price of Telegraph. All you have to do is pass through the Trench, which is so burned-out at this point that it’s not even really dangerous. I actually like driving through there, because even though most of the houses are gone and the street names have all changed, I can still recognize certain places where I hung out when I was a kid. I liked to play tour guide for Slash, pointing to a mound of rubble and saying, “That used to be a store called Asata’s. That’s where your granddad stole his Cheetos.” Or we’d go past the rending pool where the park used to be and I’d tell him about how I got smacked in the head with a fence post by Jason Barber. You might say it was wishful thinking, but Slash seemed to really love my stories. As much as a nine-month-old can love anything, I guess. He sat calmly, peering out the passenger-side window, and it really seemed like he was listening. I told him things I’d never told anyone. Obviously he couldn’t understand me, but maybe someday he would. The chances were slim, but they were there. A talking kid coming from two silent parents. I wondered what his voice might sound like, what it would be like to hear him speak, to watch his mouth forming the phrases I’d fought so hard to wring from his mother’s lips. Would he sound like Flora would have if she’d been able to speak? I felt ashamed for even considering it. But it did cross my mind. So I let myself think it and then I put it away.

He was asleep by the time we made it downtown. I watched him on the dashboard monitor, completely slack in his car seat. Just holding his tiny foot in my hand made my eyes well up. I’d carry him around the apartment and watch his face as he followed every object. He’d look up at the ceiling lights with this spiritual reverence, his face just flooded with wonder. I was obsessed with every move he made, no matter how small or subtle. I’d forgotten all of it from my own bout with fatherhood, all of those details that come packed inside a new life, the tiny things that are gone in an instant. I had no memory of any of that with Flora. Maybe I’d forgotten, or maybe I had been so consumed with everything else that was going on that I simply wasn’t paying attention. But with Slash I had the chance to notice everything, a second chance.

I drove to a drive-through autobariste on Grand. The place made decent coffee when there was no other option, and I was pretty beat, knowing that I still had the trek back to the apartment. I pulled up to the register and put my palm on the scanner. There was a monitor above the dispenser and the news was running. I don’t usually pay much attention to those ad screens, but while the espresso dribbled into the cup I saw out of the corner of my eye this image of a man with what looked like a bunch of wires coming out of his head. I looked up and saw that the wires were attached to a sort of helmet, and that the man was moving his mouth in an exaggerated way. The caption on the screen was
Ending the Silence
, and that was the first time I heard about the implant.

AUGUST BURNHAM

RAHWAY, NJ

2034

I met Russell and Abigail Andersen in the waiting room on the morning they arrived to pick Calvin up. They usually only met with me in my office at an appointed time to go over Calvin’s charts. It must have been strange for them to see me in the wild, so to speak, but I had something to show them. I shook hands with Russell and gave Abigail a hug and ushered them down the corridor, past the tunnel scanner and the vapor deposition station to the evaluation room where I’d spent the better part of the past six months working with their son. Calvin was sitting at a table at one end of the room, wearing the prototype—a white skullcap with multicolored leads dangling from the contact points along the scalp, which can be shocking, seeing your son wearing this menacing-looking bit of cranial tech. I assured them that it was harmless and asked them to sit down across from Calvin. They looked nervous. I told them there was absolutely nothing to be concerned about. I said the surprise I had for them was a good surprise.

The biggest challenge I’d faced in creating the implant wasn’t activating the areas of the brain where speech is physically produced and parsed. It wasn’t the construction of the implant, most of which I had outsourced overseas. It was the words themselves, those building blocks of language that my patients lacked entirely—the words were the primary obstacle. This is a gross simplification, but I had to essentially seed their brains with a foundational catalog of words and word categories, the basic set of tools that any three-year-old possesses, but which my patients couldn’t access. I tried various methods of inserting this grammatical DNA into their heads, with little success until Paul Warner came out with his modular memory actuator, which allowed me to flood a patient’s language processing center—again, I’m speaking broadly here—with every word that the patient had stored in long-term memory. The fact was, all of those words and phrases, all of the necessary grammatical architecture, they were
already inside
the patients. They just had no way of interpreting the sounds they heard coming from other people’s mouths as a formalized language. What’s more, these sounds were already linked to a complex array of emotional and neurological states, everything my patients had experienced but had been unable to verbalize. The memory actuator made all of this raw data available, and through a persistent networked exchange with the central data center, the patient could spontaneously create a nearly infinite range of expressions using only the words they stored as pure sound in their memory, correlated with their naturally occurring neural-emotional patterns.

The Soul Amp was still in its infancy at that point. I was waiting for the self-assembling docking pins, which were stuck on a cargo ship in the South China Sea for weeks until the trade embargo with Vietnam got cleared up, so I had to use the skullcap and an external power device and work in a whole slew of hacks just to be able to run the demo. There was also a mountain of legal paperwork, naturally, but I felt confident about the core functionality. I hadn’t yet talked about the Soul Amp to anyone outside my immediate circle of advisers. Calvin Andersen’s parents would truly be the first people to see the thing in action.

Calvin was looking out the window at a crane that slowly lifted rebar from a flatbed truck in the lot next door. I went over to the master deck and initiated the demo, which stirred Calvin immediately into a state of heightened alertness. Abigail drew a breath. I could tell they were on edge, both of them. I asked them to remember the first time we’d met, back at McLean, when Calvin was just a toddler. I reminded them that they came to me that day because nothing was more important to them than giving Calvin the power of speech. I remember Russell saying that he’d trade his own ability to talk for his son’s silence because he’d already had “a lifetime of words to keep him company in the dark.” I assured him that he’d never have to make that kind of sacrifice. I turned to Calvin and said, “Isn’t that right, Calvin?” and Calvin said, as clearly as any healthy twenty-four-year-old man, “That is correct, Dr. Burnham.”

His parents, when they heard his voice, completely fell apart. They slid off their chairs and knelt on the floor as if God himself had entered the room. Abigail hobbled across the floor on her knees, stretching out her arms to embrace Calvin. She was babbling and gasping in the throes of disbelief. Russell seemed stunned, just paralyzed. He stared at Calvin, who was laughing along with me in delight, because we’d both worked so incredibly hard to make it happen. We’d put in months of grueling twelve-hour days fine-tuning the algorithms, hardening the logic, perfecting the physical enunciation modeler. Calvin had been speaking coherently for over two weeks. I’d already become so accustomed to hearing his voice that I no longer thought of him as a silent. But his parents’ reaction instantly reminded me of the magnitude of what we’d accomplished. We’d done it. We’d broken through the silence that had crippled Calvin. His parents suddenly faced the challenge of familiarizing themselves with a son they’d never fully known.

Russell started to ask Calvin a question and then stopped. I’ve showed the footage of this event a few times at conferences and panels, so I know the moment well. He paused, almost as though he was terrified that he might shatter the illusion if he asked the wrong question. You can hear me in the background saying, “Go on, ask him anything.” And Calvin giggled a little with pleasure and said, “Yes, Dad, you can ask a question and I will try to answer it.” And then we both laughed, and Abigail and Russell began to laugh too. Russell struggled to say something, but he was alternating between laughing and crying. Eventually he managed to say, “Calvin, we’re so glad to meet you,” and he gave Calvin a bear hug, overturning the rolling cart with the master deck in the process.

I called the implant the Soul Amp after a poem I heard once at an EPR conference in St. Paul. The poet’s son was silent, and she wrote the poem while sitting by an open window, listening to some kids playing in a park across the street. She wrote something to the effect of, “The whiplash songs of children flare and fade / this house a silent witness to the sound of the soul amplified.” That phrase just jumped out at me, and I wrote it down on the back of my nametag—
the amplified soul
. A whole being, an inner landscape as rich and varied as any of our own, just too quiet to hear. I hadn’t even conceived of the basic implant at that point. But when I saw Calvin Andersen speak for the first time—on his own, using his own words to express his own desires—it suddenly made perfect sense. My mission wasn’t just to give the silents language—I had to give them back their souls. And Calvin Andersen was the living embodiment of that quest.

STEVEN GRENIER

NEW YORK, NY

2035

I remember we surged out of the press conference like the fucking bulls at Pamplona. We were all on our devices, trying to get through to our bureau chief or our agent, or already composing our pieces on the fly as we streamed out of the auditorium where we’d just seen a silent talk for the first time. This was a moment I never thought I’d get to see in my lifetime. A cured silent, Calvin Andersen, standing there behind the podium talking to us as calmly and casually as I’m talking to you right now. He told us what it was like to grow up without language, which he described as being stuck on a rubber raft that was being towed by a cruise ship—he could see the lights on the deck and hear the music playing on the dance floor, but he couldn’t ever come aboard. He was among Dr. Burnham’s first patients, and he told a funny little story about how, when he was a kid, he thought Burnham was a magician in training, and that he was the test audience. He said, “I always wondered why his tricks were so bad. I didn’t know that he was just showing me flash cards.” We all laughed—he actually had us
laughing
. Not only was this man able to speak, but he delivered it with personality.

The day after the announcement there were people lining up outside hospitals to register for the trial cycle, as if they were waiting for the opening of a new theme park or something. They didn’t seem to care that this wasn’t how you got on the wait list—they just spontaneously started gathering in the courtyards and on the front steps. I’d never seen anything like it. A few weeks into the trial there were dozens of implanted silents who were treated like superstars, doing rounds on the news-feed circuit and appearing on late-night clips, where they were probed about their past and asked what it felt like to be suddenly capable of all the freedoms afforded their talking counterparts. They weren’t always able to put their thoughts into words, and nobody could blame them. It must have been overwhelming and exhausting. But their faces were everywhere—on billboard screens and sky ads and bus wrappers. And the hype they received only drove the crowds waiting for implants into more of a frenzy. There were families on the waiting list whose kids hadn’t even been born yet—they were just saving a spot for themselves in case the baby turned out to be silent. Others were signing up just to sell their spots to the highest bidder. It was a real circus.

A couple months in, there were almost three thousand successful implantees walking around, and that was when reality set in. Talking silents were no longer a science-fiction novelty. They were a real segment of the population, a growing minority with a unique set of pressing needs. Most of them were kids—kids who’d been in silent schools with nonlinguistic curriculum, heavy in math and physics and arts. These were smart, high-achieving silent kids, who were suddenly reclassified as illiterate talking kids. That’s when the federal commission was set up to develop a specialized curriculum for implantees. Adults who got the implant were in an even stranger position. They’d been toiling away for many years at mostly menial jobs, repetitive tasks not requiring speech or much interaction, and suddenly a whole new world of possibilities was available to them. They found themselves competing with their natural-talking counterparts for jobs, and there were subsidies for businesses who hired implantees, so the whole market shifted.

This amazing medical story was quickly becoming a societal story, and within the first few weeks everything had been done to death. There was the spotlight interview with Burnham that extolled his lifelong search for a cure, and there were dozens of columns that followed the family of some silent kid into the hospital waiting room where every anxious wringing of the hands and daubing of the eyes with a crumpled tissue were drawn out in excruciating detail. Gail Rhee-Sanders at
Bullrush Magazine
actually found a little Venezuelan girl who was saving up all of her centimos so that her brother could get a Soul Amp. Just the typical obvious crap. Not my style. So instead of waiting for a story to appear, I decided to make one of my own.