The Silent History: A Novel (34 page)

I was filled to bursting with nothing. I walked.

NANCY JERNIK

ROCK ISLAND, IL

2040

We left Monte Rio as soon as we could. As soon as everyone was assembled. We knew the mayor would be back, or someone worse than the mayor. Someone without even the shred of compassion the mayor still had. We didn’t have a clear idea where we were headed—just east. Just away from the coast. We started out in an old school bus someone had left behind, but the timing belt snapped outside Denver, so we left it by the side of the road and continued on foot, with Francine and I taking turns hauling our possessions in a wagon while Spencer and Flora carried backpacks filled with canned vegetables and cooking gear. I’d urged Francine to go her own way. I made it clear to her that we had no plan, that we were going to wander until we stopped, but she just shrugged and kept walking.

For the first few days the boy seemed excited by the notion of the trip. He would bound ahead of the group and then dart back, zigzagging in our midst, pretending to be a starship hurtling through an asteroid belt. Or he’d hop in the wagon against his father’s protests and assume a primitive surfing stance, swaying dramatically to keep his balance. By the end of that first week of traveling, though, he mostly just slumped backwards in the wagon, staring out at the hills toward the world we’d left behind. The rest of us, too, even though we kept moving forward, heading directly into the morning sun—we had only the past on our minds. It didn’t make sense to me that Theo would have sent Ng and the mayor right to us, and I didn’t want to believe it, for Spencer’s sake. But I couldn’t put the possibility of it out of my mind. We’d narrowly escaped, but I wasn’t sure we’d be so lucky a second time. Not that I knew where we were headed instead. A lifetime of hiding? I didn’t know what the others were thinking, and I didn’t say anything myself. We were all on edge, ravenous and scared, walking single file along the shoulder of the weed-flanked county roads that led us through Colorado into Kansas, a vacant, white-hot Möbius strip.

We were convinced we were being followed. We held our breath every time a weather drone went by overhead, fearing it would be followed by a squad of men in black padded suits who would surround us and bind our hands with zip ties. But no one appeared, except for when a gang of local boys tore past in a gold truck and hurled tumblers of Slush at us. I didn’t blame them. It was just what they did in that part of the world. And the taste of it reminded me of driving Spencer out west to Monte Rio—how we were always so madly craving Slush, and everything was new and ahead of us still, nothing broken or burned. Nothing to run from.

Somewhere into Iowa we ran out of food. We started edging closer to larger towns and cities so that Spencer and I could forage in Dumpsters like we did back in our warehouse days, but the trash of these Midwestern people was more organized, more closely monitored. We’d vault the wall of a cavernous bin and find industrial garbage bags full of fresh bread, only to discover the bin rigged with motion sensors. One night we were climbing into a pair of big brown units, eight yards each, when I heard a pinging sound right next to me. A steak knife had just struck the wall of the Dumpster right near my calf. Spencer groaned and I turned to see a second knife stuck in his back near the shoulder. There was a man in a baseball hat standing in the cone of light cast by the parking lamp, rearing back to whip a third knife at us. I tugged at Spencer’s sleeve and we ran into the woods, stumbling through the darkness until we were sure the man wasn’t following us. I pulled the knife out of Spencer’s back and tried to clean the wound with water from a creek. In our panic we’d drifted far from the camp we’d made, and it took us until dawn to find Flora, the boy, and Francine, who were out of their minds with worry.

When morning came I saw that the wound was beginning to become infected, red and firm in a widening splotch. We had to find a place with running water, a place where I could properly care for my son. Flora and I went into the town to look for help. It was called Rock Island, even though there was no rock or island that we could see—just a loose collection of fading storefronts and strip malls, indistinguishable from the dozens of other towns we’d passed through. I’m sure we drew attention to ourselves in our black rags and mud-caked boots, but I was beyond caring at that point.

We approached a motel called the Deluxe Inn Waterfront. Outside, a man was smoking a cigarette, and as we passed he waved and called out to Flora. I froze, taking Flora by the elbow. He came up close and squinted, said he knew her face, and was she famous or something? He seemed puzzled that we were shrinking away from him. I pulled at Flora’s arm to steer her away, but she held her ground, facing the man, trying to express something to him. Then I saw the black port behind the man’s left ear. He’d been implanted. He stared back at her and snapped his fingers. “Oh, you’re that girl from back then, the smartest one!” He knew Flora’s face from the various documentaries and articles she’d been in when they were both children. He was a sort of fan of Flora, I guess, and I could see his frustration deepen as he attempted to speak with her. His face moved from bemusement to shock to disgust as he realized that Flora was still implant-free. I stepped in and explained our situation. The man listened carefully. In the end he grimaced and stroked his chin. I could tell that he was not interested in helping us, but I pleaded with him until he took us to a room on the far side of the motel and let us in. There’d been a shooting there a month previous and the management hadn’t been able to afford a proper cleanup crew. He told us we could stay the night there as long as we kept out of sight. Aside from a single geyser of dried blood flecks plastered to the far wall, it was no different from any other motel room in America, which is to say that for us it was equal parts prison, mausoleum, and safe haven.

VOLUME FIVE

AUGUST BURNHAM

ACADIA NATIONAL PARK, ME

2040

We moved the PhonCom data center out to the Acadia National Park bird sanctuary in Maine. Our team had outgrown the facility in Rahway, and the work we were doing required more sustained focus, but mostly, what a perfect environment to hone a language machine—up in the canopy in a glass building on stilts, surrounded by primordial birdsong, the elemental precursor to human speech. It’s like waking up in paradise every morning. We are at peace here, fully engaged with the deep, complicated process of polishing that elusive final expansion of the Soul Amp’s design, the features and enhancements that will forever end the debate about whether the device is a true cure for silence or simply a language emulator.

Don’t ask me which one I think it is. Just look around. Just think back to the world before the Soul Amp. Think about what it was like back then, when you had this whole population of marginalized people who couldn’t talk, couldn’t work, couldn’t learn. Human in form but incapable of taking part in human society—forgotten hordes who we locked away in transitional facilities or who languished in abandoned warehouses and strip malls. Now look around you. Look at these able-minded, vocal citizens who are able to articulate their dreams and ambitions and who have the tools to make those dreams come true. When your dearest wish is nothing more than to lead the kind of productive, fulfilling life that should be the birthright of any human, and then you’re given a simple tool that allows you to take part in society instead of simply taking shelter on its periphery, isn’t that evidence enough?

Well, not for some people, apparently. This small but loud minority throws around reckless, inflammatory, and misleading charges—that we’re just piping canned phrases into the heads of silent people. Sitting up in an ivory tower somewhere, cutting out sentences from old forgotten texts and broadcasting them across the network. Making people say what I want them to say. If this were true, how could it be that we have so many successful implanted actors, writers, and artists? Was it PhonCom that wrote the novels of Epistola Caridad, the Surinamese implantee who won the National Book Award for
The Empty Palace
? I wish I could take credit, but no—those verifiable works of art sprang from a creative mind
set free
by the Soul Amp. Is Harper Treadwell nothing more than my puppet? If so, how could she give so moving a performance in
Robocide 3
that she won four Critics Circle Awards and a Golden Globe? When you actually sit back and observe the evidence, the behavior, free of abstraction and psychobabble, you see that the critics have no legs to stand on. And, fortunately, the world at large seems to agree—the remaining doubters are becoming more marginalized every day.

Which is not to say that there aren’t a handful of vital improvements still ahead. I can’t show you the list for all the obvious IP-related issues, but I can tell you that, while the ultimate goal of facilitating the use of a truly infinite set of phrases is still a long way off, we’re making real progress. The system is only as strong as its source, and we’re still relying on the pool of phrases that we’ve already collected in our database for language generation. The pool is colossal—last time I checked we had over thirty-four billion unique phrases available. Even though the mathematical probability that any implanted silent would ever be at a loss for an exact phrase is infinitesimally small, it’s still there. We’ve seen it already, in fact. Just a few instances in our data stream of someone searching for a specific description and coming up short, or trying to force another phrase into place, or just giving up and not vocalizing any phrase at all. It’s much better than in the early days, but it’s still not perfect.

I’m very sensitive about this issue—the one shortcoming that prevents the Soul Amp from reaching its full potential. There is an exceedingly small but influential resistance to my design on precisely these grounds. Fringe groups who have refused the implant and gone underground, and the talking sympathizers who have rushed to their cause. Even though their collective power is negligible, it haunts my dreams. I want to be memorialized not as a puppet master but as an innovator, a codebreaker who breached the steel walls guarding the delicate machinery in the human brain that creates pure language.

To demonstrate this commitment to silent empowerment—to silents determining their own fate—I’ve placed Calvin Andersen in the position of design director. Some people have found this coy, or political. I recently overheard some board members gossiping that I’d made Calvin my own personal peg boy, which I thought was in poor taste. My decision to promote him so aggressively
was
symbolic—I’ll admit that. The silent community needs an icon of representation within the implant infrastructure. But I wouldn’t have done so if I didn’t think Calvin was up to the task. I’ve worked with the man for years—I know him better than his own parents do, quite frankly—so I think I can say with complete confidence that he’s the right man for the job. The fact that we occasionally take kayaking trips and visit natural hot springs sites and enjoy collecting rare barks—what business is that of anybody’s? And what on earth does it have to do with the impossibly difficult work of mapping the language code?

CALVIN ANDERSEN

ACADIA NATIONAL PARK, ME

2040

Do you know what is the worst sound in the world? The sound of a thousand tiny birds chirping directly into the inside of your ears while you are trying to just eat a sandwich. Actually, what is even worse than that, now that I think of it, is the sound of Burnham’s voice shouting over the birds, trying to pretend like we are actually having a conversation, that it’s not so loud up in this floating treehouse that I cannot even hear my own dreams above the din of birdsong. The sound of Burnham’s voice drilling me with question after question, not because he is curious about my life but because he’s testing his implant. That is the worst sound in the world, and every day feels like a slow death.

I finally got to the place where his constant testing of me was too much to take, so I decided to test him instead. I started calling him “Burned Ham” instead of “Burnham.” “Good morning, Doctor Burned Ham,” I said as I sat down next to him in the lab. He turned and gave a questioning half smile, but didn’t try to correct me. I put the calibration helmet on, pretending everything was normal. When I locked the jaw plate into place, I said, “Would you mind passing me the spectron calipers, Doctor Burned Ham?” and he gave me the same look. He passed me the calipers and said, “A very funny joke, Calvin.” I looked at him blankly, as if I didn’t have the slightest idea what he was talking about. “You said my name wrong,” he said, still maintaining that bastard half grin. “That’s impossible,” I said. “But you’ve just now said it wrong twice.” I could hear just a thread of annoyance running through his voice. “That can’t be true,” I said. “All I’ve said to you was ‘Good morning, Doctor Burned Ham’ and ‘Please pass the calipers, Doctor Burned Ham,’ and certainly I said all that correctly—I mean, you just heard me.” He dropped the smile and stared at me. He closely examined my every facial twitch and tic. I wasn’t worried—I knew he had no idea how to read my expressions, so I was able to fool him without really trying. He sat back in his seat and said, “Say my name again.” I said, “What? You want me to say your name again?” And he said, “Yes, again, please.” I went, “This is ridiculous. You know how hard it is for me to talk with this helmet on. Are you trying to test me? Is this some kind of test?” And he just looked at me. “What’s my name, Calvin?” he said. I stared right back at him, making my face as wide and innocent as a child’s, and said, “I honestly don’t know what this is about, Doctor Burned Ham.” He shot up from his chair and began pacing behind me.

I just powered up the helmet, pretending nothing was wrong. “Who are we diagnosing today?” I asked. He went over to his tablet and scrolled hastily through the network map. “64.2775.243. Eloise Gibson.” I entered the address and established a connection with Eloise Gibson’s implant. “Okay,” Burnham said. “Looks like the issue here is an inability to verbally express sexual desire. So please do whatever you can to provoke that in her.” I loathed this practice—I had to use the helmet to massage a stranger’s neural pathways in the hope of eliciting some kind of verbal response. This was how we tested the latest iteration of Burnham’s translation code—the helmet ran on a local dev branch that had its own language bank so that it could operate independently from PhonCom. It was sick. I felt like a criminal, wandering around in these peoples’ heads, vandalizing their thoughts. I sat wearing the awful pinching calibration helmet, with Burnham observing my every move, and tried my best to get hard for Eloise Gibson.