The Silent History: A Novel (32 page)

I got there at sundown and hopped out of the car with the box under my arm, and right away I could sense that something was wrong. All the lights were off in the main house. Nobody was on the front porch. There was no sign of anybody anywhere. I went up to the front door and it swung open before I even touched it. I stepped inside and saw that one of the windows in the front room was smashed. A shock ran through me, and I stood there with clenched fists, barely breathing, readying myself for whatever was coming next. But as my eyes adjusted I saw that there was dust on the glass shards. The window had been broken for some time, a few days at least. The air in the room was completely still, and I was alone.

I’d always been nervous about them living out in that remote location, completely vulnerable. I felt like something bad was certain to happen at some point. My mind raced with all the sick possibilities. I found myself praying there had been some sort of accident rather than the other outcomes I was imagining, like a hate crime committed by some antisilent yokel up in those woods. Or it could have been one of those implant cops that I’d read about—federal officers who roamed the countryside with a portable implant tool in search of undocumented, unimplanted kids. As much as I wanted Slash to talk, I didn’t want it to happen that way. I couldn’t bear to think of him being held down by some thick-armed thug in a police uniform as he fired the implant into the base of Slash’s neck. Especially not after the dream where I’d been the one holding him down. I wouldn’t wish that on anybody.

I started combing the house for clues, taking panoramic footage of every room I entered so I’d have a record of the exact placement of every object. Everything was more or less untouched, though. I went into the kitchen and opened the fridge to find that it was empty. Nothing, not a single stick of butter.

I heard a car approaching outside. I went toward the door assuming that it was the police. The engine went off, and in the silence I heard a man and a woman talking. The woman said, “If they’re gone, whose car is that?” and the man mumbled something. I opened the door and the woman was standing on the porch in a fuchsia microfiber dress and gold heels, holding a microphone. Behind her, setting up a floodlight, was a large man in a Steadicam vest—a local news team. They seemed perturbed that I was there, like I was the one trespassing on their property. “We got a tip that the last people had finally left this place,” the man said. “So who the hell are you?”

I told them I was a relation, and did they have any idea where the family had gone. The woman made a little sideways smirk and said, “Funny, we were just about to ask
you
.” The partner stepped forward and put his hand up to silence the woman. “For real, do you know where they might be? You’d know better than anyone, right?”

The impact of the news worked on me slowly, almost imperceptibly. I felt it like insects crawling all over my body. They crawled and my eyes blurred and the woman pointed the microphone toward me. “I’m going to take that as a no,” she said, “but do you have
anything
to say about the disappearance of your family?” Even though her face was tight and serious, everything she said sounded like a joke. The man moved in with the camera. I could barely make out their faces behind the bright light. I shouldn’t have said anything. I should’ve gotten in my car and driven off. But I didn’t. I stood there, consumed with rage and humiliation, paralyzed. Every neuron in my body was on fire. “Them leaving like that?” I said, choking a little on the words. “They think this solves anything? They think they’re not going to get caught? They think they can win?” I don’t remember all of it.

I drove home in the darkness, stunned. You know when people say they’re beside themselves? I actually felt that then. I felt almost like I was a ghost, hovering in the passenger seat next to my physical form. Did they really think I was going to force the implant on Slash? I just wanted to have a conversation about it. That was all. But now they were gone, and I was the thing they were running away from.

I got back to the apartment and found the news segment on one of the local streams. It was a thirty-second clip that contained almost no useful information—just a few seconds of Flora as a child from that
Frontline
episode, and then they cut to the footage they’d taken of me on the porch, shaking my head and weeping in the floodlight. I sat on the couch in the darkness with the Guess Who? game in my lap. I could barely make out where the box ended and where I began.

AUGUST BURNHAM

RAHWAY, NJ

2039

On the way to the press conference Calvin admitted he was worried about the silent protest that we’d heard was being staged outside the hotel. Police were predicting four to five hundred demonstrators, and they’d staffed up in anticipation. I assured Calvin that there was absolutely no danger, but he spent the rest of the trip just staring out through the rippled glass of the horse-drawn carriage we were using to get around town, scanning the sidewalks for placard-carrying activists with Molotov cocktails tucked in their jeans.

We were ushered onto the forecourt of the hotel by a dozen or so black-clad officers in full riot gear. At the end of the gauntlet of officers a hotel employee approached us and asked for ID. “Ready for action, eh?” I said, nodding my head in the direction of the officers as I pressed my palm to the ID pad. “I wouldn’t necessarily call it action,” the man said, and when he stepped away from the buggy, I saw across the street in the park a dozen or so individuals in street rags trying and failing to hoist aloft a massive puppet. We watched them for a good minute or so as they struggled with the unwieldy effigy—they seemed a person or two short, because the puppet’s head lolled and slumped and one arm dragged in the grass. A policeman stood about ten yards from the troupe of radicals, casually reading something on his wristwatch. “There’s your army of the night,” I said to Calvin. “But Dr. Burnham,” he said, “isn’t that puppet supposed to be you?” I took a closer look and saw that it did bear some resemblance—they’d used cotton batting to replicate the corona of white hair that still clings to my head, and my spectacles were spot-on, but the facial features seemed to belong to another man. Had there been an additional protester to support the head, the overall effect might have been more convincing. But instead it just looked sad. I couldn’t even laugh.

Have I heard the reports of silents refusing the Soul Amp for their children, or fleeing into the wilderness like the Greene girl? Of course—in my position, I’m exposed to all these rumors. But rumors is all they are. Don’t get me wrong—I think it’s barbaric for
any
parent to deny a child the proper medical treatment. But I don’t think the implant resistance movement—if you can even call it a movement—will have any lasting impact, no more so than that cult in Seattle that administered lobotomies to all its members. We’ve seen time and again that unaugmented silent people just can’t manage ordered, unsupervised community living. That’s an unassailable fact. If you could point to even a single example of a group of silent people that thrived on their own, with no intervention from talkers, for more than a few months, I’d be willing to listen to you. But I’ve witnessed so much misery over the years, all stemming from the absence of language. So to deny the gift of speech to a child, to make that kind of choice for them, force them into a life of silence—I can’t even imagine how you would justify it. I just can’t even begin. With the advent of prenatal testing for the viral markers of phasic resistance, parents are better prepared than ever to make informed choices about whether they can take on the responsibility of a silent child, and the implant all but assures them that they can. So who in their right mind would choose to cloak their child in a world of silence? I’m sure Calvin feels the same.

Fortunately, this so-called controversy seems to be on its last legs, as evidenced by the anemic protest. And the subsequent press conference itself went extremely well. We were unveiling the updated technology we’d been working on for the better part of a year, putting in ten- and twelve-hour days managing a team of seventy engineers and designers in three separate time zones. The name PhonCom started as a sort of inside joke—like something from a corny science-fiction film—but it was easy to say and even easier to remember, so we kept it. The centralized database that made up PhonCom allowed us to finally transfer the processing burden from the implant itself to our server farm, where we can more quickly process raw stimuli and produce infinitely more accurate and meaningful phrases. This service allowed us to significantly reduce the implant’s size, especially the circumference of the external port. The impact of this development was huge—from that point on, all future implantees would be nearly indistinguishable from their naturally speaking cohort.

But bringing PhonCom online took a tremendous toll on Calvin and me. We were physically exhausted and mentally drained, and perilously close to our own individual breakdowns. Recognizing this, and wanting to do something special for Calvin, who’d selflessly donated so much time and effort to the cause, I got us tickets to the International Sacajawea Fellowship’s annual conference outside Sioux Falls, which was accessible only via canoe or longboat. Calvin had never heard of Sacajawea, nor had he been in a canoe, so I thought, What better way to unwind than to follow Lewis and Clark’s historic path to the Pacific Northwest and meet up with like-minded devotees of the world’s most famous translators for some great conversation and debate? Calvin said he’d sleep on it, so the next morning I pulled up to his apartment complex in the carriage with an authentic resin model of a longboat strapped to the top. I tugged on Pinker’s bridle to make her bray a little, and Calvin came to the window. A few minutes later we were on our way.

Calvin seemed uneasy on the water. He’d never learned to swim, and he didn’t trust that the Instaflate lining of his period-accurate cloak would save him from drowning if the longboat capsized. He held fast to the rail and took shallow, rapid breaths.

“Let’s play idioms,” I said. Calvin was, at that point, the only silent in the world capable of parsing idioms with above-proficient accuracy, and we were both pretty proud of that. He nodded, still sitting rigid in the boat with his knuckles white against the rail.

“I’ll start. If you can’t see, you might be blind as a what?”

“Bat,” he said. He cracked a tentative smile. It seemed to relax him.

“Okay, good. Now it’s your turn,” I said. He thought for a long time.

“Is this accurate, if I ask you to stop doing something fast, I might suggest you go cold…”

“Turkey. Good! Good job. Now, let’s say I’m really good at playing cards. What am I?”

“An excellent card player?” he said. I reminded him that we were playing idioms. He paused, and I could practically see the activity meters flaring up at PhonCom. “Oh,” he said. “You’re a card shark?”

“Correct!” He was good. The best in the world at that moment. I had the world’s greatest scientific advance as my passenger, and we were slowly drifting down the Missouri River in the crisp late-summer morning, and the cloud patterns were incredible.

As we approached Sioux Falls, though, things turned ugly. Unbeknownst to us amid our river idyll, a group of Lakota militiamen had set off a bomb outside the entrance to the Sacajawea Memorial Museum and Gift Shop in an attempt to shut the conference down. As we came around the bend in the river we saw the black plume of smoke rising through the trees, accompanied by shouts and gunshots. Militiamen were herding attendees out to the river’s edge, and when they saw us coming they pointed and called out. Calvin held on to my shoulder with an icy hand and said, “What is the idiom for the kind of creek you are up when you don’t have a paddle?” which was interesting to me, because I don’t believe we had spent much time at all working on sarcasm or mockery.

DAVID DIETRICH

RICHFIELD SPRINGS, NY

2039

After Coney Island, I knew my destiny. I knew I couldn’t just go back to Decatur and continue with a life of irrelevance. I found a group of silents living under a tarp on the edge of an algae farm in Jersey City. They were subsisting on sugar packets and vitamin patches and algae runoff. Under the tarp it stank like medieval abortions. I brought them four cases of amino-acid powder I’d stolen from a superstore loading dock. That’s how I incorporated myself. First the powder, then I showed them my van, a twelve-seater, which I’d recently bought and reupholstered. I made it known that I’d take them wherever they wanted to go.

They almost never acknowledged me, but they let me drive them around, and for a while that was enough. Mostly food runs, places that trashed bread and pastries after hours—they led me there by pointing and punching me on the arm when I should turn. I drove them to random buildings and shelled-out stores, and they came back disappointed or visibly angry. After I dropped them back at the algae farm, I’d drive around some more.

Then I was pulled over for a busted taillight, and I’d never bothered to get a driver’s license, plus I had some stolen camping equipment in the van. They sentenced me to six months of house arrest, which in my case was the van. Ambient motion sensors, Breathalyzer chip, the whole thing. I read, mostly. Biology, neuroscience, virology. Animal husbandry. I watched irrelevant people through the windshield. I figured some things out.

Once the six months were done, I went back to the algae farm, but they were gone. I sold the van, liquidated my savings, and two months later I owned a plot of land and thirty feral wallabies—a package deal. First day the herd jumped me, kicking and snorting and herding me into submission. Happened again the second and third day. The fourth day I got in a few punches of my own, and a few more on the fifth, and by the end of the month I was the toughest thing in the pen.

Most of them grudgingly accepted me as their leader. The ones that didn’t, I killed and hung in the slaughterhouse. Butchered the meat, boiled the bones, and brought the brains back to an old shed I was using as my lab. I poked and prodded the wallaby brains. Zapped them with jolts to see what changed. Found a database of silent brain scans, stared at them till the cauliflower turned to scrambled eggs and then the eggs turned into worms. The virus was hiding in there, somewhere. Plenty of people had tried to kill it, searching for some misguided cure, but I was trying to
catch
it. I was done trying to be near the silents—I was ready to
be
silent. Theoretically, the right zap, targeted with precision at the language centers where the virus had to be living, could cause a mutation, activate the life cycle, set it contagious and free. But the logistics seemed difficult. Wallabies were simpler.