Read The Silent History: A Novel Online
Authors: Eli Horowitz,Matthew Derby,Kevin Moffett
He went on about how we needed to do something—
something
was as specific as he ever got—always in the morning, always in that rasping whisper. Once I might have listened, but by now I had heard too much. All my life I had been listening, following, grasping. First running after Most Benevolent Thomas to his cathedral tents in northern Idaho. Then the bobcat sect in Montana. Back east to a series of yogurt cults. Then boyfriends I used to stare at while they slept. Then the silents. I won’t disavow any one of them. All of them had potential. All of them fell.
That’s what I wanted to tell David: it doesn’t matter what you do. Organize a parade. Fondle your aunt. Set a couch on fire. A force calls to you, you follow, but the tail you’re chasing is your own. And, yes, David, that’s exactly why you find yourself in this bloody diaper of a place. It’s what you wanted. It’s where you belong. Me too. I was here to see the end of our moment. This was the end—there was no doubt about that. But I just wanted to last long enough to see if all that straggly hope and aspiration and possibility made a sound when it winked out.
DAVID DIETRICH
AMERICAN HIGHWAY
2040
Have you seen pictures of trees and their root systems? Above are the branches and leaves and pinecones and birds and all that, but nothing grows if the roots aren’t putting in work. Down below in the cold soil’s where everything
happens
. Above it’s all stillness and slowness and piggish nattering. Above’s just a puked-up version of below.
Everyone had an area in the silo that was their own. My area was three or four flattened cardboards laid out end to end and a shredded shower curtain I pulled over my head for quick naps. Knives tucked into their hiding spots within easy reach, two phosphocreatine lollipops, a printout photo of Wallaby and me with shopped-in cowboy hats made like a
Wanted Dead or Alive
poster, a photo of me with Mom where her face is washed out from too much thumbing, just a ponytail and an eyebrow.
The old women had their cardboards too. Blankets. A water cup with some writing on it. Basics. Flora and Spencer had the boxes, the blankets, a nightstand made with broken shelving, and also a headboard for their cardboard bed, with columns and carved frog-looking animals on top of the columns. Plus a table for the boy to draw on, with a chair Spencer made from scrap wood. The boy had found some talc rocks and used them on the metal wall to doodle birds and bats and trees. They kept the area swept neat, and there was an understood perimeter around it—I always made sure they saw me and acknowledged me before I entered. They slept with the boy between them, each of them with a hand on him. They watched him even when he wasn’t in the room with them.
The silo was awful, it made me want to pull out my chest hairs one by one, which I often did before nodding off—but it was necessary. Sometimes you need to be below things.
In Decatur, when Mom was in her last throes with the albino magician, she started coming home more, cooking for me, asking questions about school. She had essentially rejected me to move in with this dude, and now here she was stirring up tuna noodle gratin, saying let’s go see a movie, let’s buy you some new jeans or a bearded dragon lizard for the terrarium she gave me for Christmas two years ago, which I kept my change and stolen chromies in. She offered me a ride to the pool. Her lipstick was smeared. She looked so old and used up. A hook with the bait chewed off. I asked her what the old albino was up to, why didn’t she buy some new panties and go over there and try to guess what card he was thinking of and make him a potpie or something.
She collected her keys and left, left for good. I saw the albino at the mall a few weeks later and he asked me how she was holding up, and I told him I had no idea, wasn’t she still shacked up with him? Not anymore, he said. Not since … there was a little misunderstanding and she accidentally broke her wrist on his countertop and sometimes love burns bright but doesn’t stay burning. Wink wink. Maybe she found a new love across town—he hoped she did. I just watched him walk off carrying his crappy fucking Foot Locker bag. I watched him without doing a damn thing.
What’d she distract herself with when she was lying in the hospital waiting for the doctor to reset her bones? I wondered. I wonder. Why didn’t I just let her take me to the pool even if I didn’t feel like swimming, let her be a mom for a little while without having to remind her of all the times she hadn’t been one?
Almost all realizations come too late. Except, one afternoon down in the silo I was cleaning a schnauzer, which I had tracked for almost three hours, through briars and a tire dump and fields of headless wheat. I was coughing with frustration. I was angry at the others for being content to burrow like blind rodents. At myself for chasing what I thought I wanted, refusing to let up long after I didn’t want it anymore. At the dead schnauzer for being so fast and skinny and making me jog eight miles for its stringy nothingness. So I was hacking and pulling and cursing and hacking, and I paused to wipe some blood off my cheek. In the room where I was butchering there was a plate-glass window that Flora had wiped clean. I couldn’t see myself clearly in it, but I saw enough: beard, matted hair, butcher’s knife, coveralls. What was I pretending to be now? Commando, mercenary, slave? In a world of frauds and impostors I was the fraud king. The best and the worst. Any other day I’d swing out and smash that glass and then I’d feel better and terrible. But that would be more pretending. I was tired of pretending. Tired of all the words and stories we hide behind.
I wonder if every kid starts out thinking he’ll do something remarkable. I never thought that. Far back as I remember I never felt permanent about anything I did. I wanted to, I tried to, but there was always doubt followed by shame followed by fury, refusal, shame again. But that’s past. That’s aboveground. Down in the silo, down below, I can see more clearly. I can be different. I can bring people together, make them stop what they’re doing and pay attention and feel. It won’t take much. I’m not scratching some dull itch anymore, not trying to fill a hole or scrambling to prove something. I’m so tired of the sound of my own voice. You’ve heard enough of these recordings. I feel warm. I feel like everything’s been sucked out and I’m bald and ready to take flight.
I left the silo in the morning like I usually did, and I just kept walking. The farther away I got, the closer I felt to everyone there. All of them. And everyone up above, too. All those people living invisibly in their houses. A plan took shape in my head while I walked, and by the time I’d stolen a Venezuelan one-seater and was headed east, the plan was a certainty.
I will not dream about how anything I do will be perceived. I will not worry about how people talk about me after I’m done. I shouldn’t even say it out loud. Saying it makes it less true. Saying anything. I love you. That’s not true. I’m sorry. I’m not. All my life I have talked and talked, and it’s been just a thin skate on the crusted-over surface of nothing. A babble blown dead by the wind. You, too. Aren’t you tired of it? Now it’s time to follow the end that’s been there all along, waiting for me all the time I spent running, following, hiding. All that separates us is a tiny line. It’s time to step over.
CALVIN ANDERSEN
ACADIA NATIONAL PARK, ME
2040
I was in the control room late at night when I heard the noise. It came from above and started hollow and shrill, like a marble slowly circling the basin of a copper pot. I was hypersensitive to any unusual sounds after hours, because team members weren’t supposed to be in the control room past 8:00 p.m. Especially not if they were in the control room with the calibration helmet strapped on, randomly dialing in to people’s implants and beaming neural patterns of self-doubt and whiskey-sick, which was my particular cocktail that night. Also, I wasn’t wearing any pants, which was another thing that went against Burnham’s
Principles of the Designer’s Biome
. But the coordinated flat-front wool trousers we were assigned were painfully itchy, and so I’d taken them off to let my thighs get some air while I scrolled through the implantee network directory to find hapless victims to grief. Which was a third thing team members weren’t supposed to do in the control room. So when I heard that noise I went rigid in my chair. Time slowed to a halt, and I felt thirsty and cold.
The sound came from far off, almost as though it was occurring in another building, although of course that was impossible, because it was just the eight of us in that sprawling treehouse in the middle of goddamn nowhere. No matter how hard I focused on the sound, I couldn’t figure out what it was. A mourning rodent? An old woman wheezing into a paper bag? And then, just as suddenly as it started, it stopped, leaving just the normal rush of the temperature regulation system and the sixty-hertz drone of the projectors that displayed the millions of phrases that streamed through the PhonCom data center every minute of every day—every word spoken by every implantee—a shifting white fractal cloud of characters set out against a blue background. This industrial hush was all I could hear for almost a minute, and then there was a percussive thud, loud and flat. It sounded like a server rack crashing to the floor. I checked the load balance and everything seemed normal, but I still felt a warping sensation in my gut. I stood and walked slowly toward the door, taking an old drafting compass from one of Burnham’s Inspiration Vitrines as I went. I held the pointy end of the compass out like a switchblade and padded to the threshold, where I stood for a small eternity, waiting for another sound.
I heard nothing, but my stomach still churned. I shut my eyes and listened closely. Through the whooshing of the ventilation system I could detect a rhythmic clicking pattern coming from the server room. Click-click-click stop. Click-click-click stop. Again and again. It sounded like a person trying to open a combination safe or adjusting the settings on a power tool. I crept out into the hallway, naked but for my boxer briefs, an
Ask Me About North American Conifer Bark
shirt that Burnham had given me for my birthday, and the calibration helmet. I carefully made my way to the server room, everything inside me taut and alert. The compass was slick in my sweaty hand.
The door to the server room was closed but unlocked. To guard against hackers, the network was protected by a class-five self-randomizing firewall, but we were in such a remote location that it never occurred to us that the servers themselves could be attacked. The clicking sound continued as I pulled the door open and slipped inside. The space was illuminated only by the flickering red and yellow network traffic bars that surged and receded as waves of data passed through the system. There was a crude hole cut in the ceiling tile above the console, and a dark shape crouched in the center aisle. It was a small man with stringy muscles and a wispy beard, wearing forest-camo combat coveralls, a crude bone necklace, and what looked like a sheathed knife. I watched him unspool a length of multicolored cable from a black backpack and plug it into one of the RAID units. He unzipped the bag and started punching numbers into a keypad welded into the face of a green canister that looked like a scuba tank. I stood there silently, just watching him perform his tasks. He moved carefully and efficiently, as though he’d spent years in rehearsal for the event.
He punched in a sequence of numbers and the server rack on the far wall lit up as the units began to overload. The error tone played on the loudspeakers and the man looked up, surprised. He saw me standing by the doorway and froze in a half crouch, rising slowly with his hands up as though I was going to apprehend him. I saw that he had a bone-handled machete, but I wasn’t alarmed. I was as calm as a midnight desert. I watched his face in the red light. Whatever he’d come to do, he wasn’t going to be stopped—I could tell by the way he regarded me, his mouth turned slightly downward, his eyes focused at an apologetic distance. I returned his gaze to let him know I had no plans to interfere. There was nothing in that room that I cared to protect. I turned around and walked out of the server room, closing the door behind me, and turned down the hallway. I kept walking, past the control room, past the test chambers, through the lobby, and out the twin glass sliding doors to the observation deck. The canopy blocked the moonlight, so I had to make my way to the steel railing by intuition. I leaned out over the edge and listened to the screech and whoop of the birds, trying and failing to tell one species from another in their incomprehensible symphony.
Then the blast came—a low, concentrated thunderclap that took me down in an instant, knocking the wind out of me. A searing pain shot through my skull, so fast and hard that I remember thinking I must have been hit by a bullet, but as I lay with my hands clamped over the smooth surface of the helmet I realized that the pulsing came from the inside. My ears rang and I felt like my head had split open and all the words I’d ever learned were streaming out onto the ground. It was the pure, grinding sensation of losing my mind.
STEVEN GRENIER
CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA
2040
We know from the surveillance records that Dietrich entered the PhonCom facility at approximately 9:41 p.m., and that he used a Madrid Blacktooth demo saw, which he’d shoplifted two days earlier from a hardware superstore, to cut a port in the roof. He then crawled through the vent system, cutting a second hole to drop into the server room. He breached the firewall and installed a worm of unknown origin, most likely a pirate job from one of those sub-Saharan hacker cults. The worm bore through the PhonCom data set, completely tearing it to shreds within about a minute and a half. It quickly compromised all of the mirror server sites worldwide, so that by the time Dietrich blew himself up, taking the core servers with him, the PhonCom application was completely obliterated.
No one from Dr. Burnham’s design team was injured in the blast, although Burnham himself hasn’t yet come forward with a statement. The design director, Calvin Andersen, was missing when authorities arrived on the scene. Security camera footage shows him entering the server room after Dietrich had begun his operation. We’re still waiting to hear whether there is any connection between Dietrich and Andersen.