The Silent History: A Novel (45 page)

Back then, school was a terrifying dark box of hazards. Kids who made fun of my accent, a teacher who accused me of smelling strange and wrote a note home suggesting I start using antiperspirant, my own thoughts. Empty, though, the school seemed harmless. Even pleasant. Down the main hallway was a mural of kids scaling a giant rainbow. I’d never noticed it before. Everything smelled of paper and pine cleaner. I walked around until I found the door of the art classroom unlocked, and sat there for the rest of the day eating my lunch, sculpting snowmen out of clay. When the afternoon bell rang, I went and met my mom out front. I never told her what happened.

Theo called up to his grandson to ask if he was okay. The boy was somewhere else. His face was alive and his shoulders swayed slightly forward and the sun had just set. The ugly overgrown fields were cleansed in bluish light. It could’ve been a vineyard, a field of blackberries, except for all the plastic bags snagged on the briars. Some had happy faces on them and the wind drove them wild. A dozen or so bats flew over the field, formless, frantic. In the distance, the factory continued to sigh its reefs of smoke.

I thought of David out here, wandering around with his knives, looking for something to kill and butcher. Providing. Feeling close to things.

I thought of my elementary school and how after that day it wasn’t so bad anymore. Empty, it had lost all of its menace.

The air was cold, and none of us had the right clothes. Up on his platform the boy seemed to wobble, so relaxed I thought he might forget where he was and topple down through the branches. The sky was dark and the branches were almost bare, and the boy’s face looked faintly lit from within. He half smiled and opened his eyes and began swaying smoothly back and forth, back and forth. A bat burst from the tree and swooped low over our heads and out past Theo’s friend, who had his back to the tree, still staring off at the silo, the empty field, the almost-collapsed barn. His pained rictus was gone and he was breathing deeply, and at first I thought something about that old barn must’ve soothed him. But he couldn’t be seeing the barn, I realized—his eyes were closed, and his head was slightly tilted, as if he was listening to some far-off music. Then he started to sway too.

JOHN PARKER CONWAY

MONTE RIO, CA

2040

Right when I pull up to the sooty ring of houses, I see a young boy swinging around a little chain saw. He has greasy hair, walleyed, a face twitching with pure malignant delight. He and his mom lived in the hills, up in blue fog with the other commune leftovers—it was implant central up there. Dr. Ng and I had personally seen to it that every silent was properly outfitted during our compulsory countywide drive last year. So when everything went haywire, I deputized myself so I could take distress calls—putting out fires, bandaging whatever granny got whacked in the head with a tree branch. Completing the circle. Mostly what I’d do is drive up, lower the passenger-side window, and shoot the kids with the trank. Which calmed things down for ten, twelve hours.

The boy swung the chain saw and carved through one of the beams supporting the roof over the carport, which listed against a redwood trunk. He looked around for something else to buzz. I couldn’t get a clear bead on him from the car, so I jumped out with the trank. He scurried behind the house. I followed.

I could see the boy’s mother in the windows, watching him maraud. She wasn’t a silent. I’d met her before, part of the last wave that moved to Face-to-Face as things went south—a talker detaching from society for the good of her son. A martyr. Sad, kind of noble, but mostly sad. She saw me and looked down at the trank and seemed to sigh. She had that air of punishing gravity you see in moms of dead and disabled children. I walked around to the back of the house and found the boy standing on the corrugated metal roof of a dog kennel, bringing the chain saw down between his legs, idly chopping at the chain link, maybe trying to get at one of the four greyhounds in there, but mostly just sparking and squealing. He saw me approach and paused for a moment, then continued poking at the fence.

I kneel down to line up my shot, a 650 cc humane-dart of Deprasil. But as I’m aiming, I notice that behind the kennel is a deep ravine, so if I shoot him and things went how they usually did, after 4.7 seconds give or take he’d fall backward off the kennel into the ravine. Something to consider—but not necessarily a deal-breaker. He’d survive the fall, though maybe with slightly diminished havoc-wreaking capabilities going forward. At this point my thinking was, it’s an issue of opening your eyes and admitting the inevitable. You can finger-patch a cracked dam here and there, but sooner or later something permanent’s got to be done.

So I’m looking through my sight at the boy’s knees and legs, scraped raw from thorns, at his torn T-shirt and scratched neck, and I realize he’s stopped banging on the kennel. The saw’s still going but he’s got it dangling at his side and he’s standing very still. I look at his face—even with the wild hair he’s still handsome, his features simple and lightly drawn, baby fat not even burned away yet. He’s just a kid.

Then I hear the chain saw fall. From his hand and off the kennel, bouncing into the ravine. The auto-shutoff silences it. Now the boy’s standing in the center of the roof, swaying from side to side. He stares in my direction but doesn’t seem to see me. He’s gone ponderous and deliberate, like all those loose ribbons had been tied up into a bundle. I blinked, thought for a moment, and lined up my shot.

Then I hear a fast rustling whip by me and suddenly the mother appears in my crosshairs. She’s hopped up on the kennel and is now cradling the boy, burying her head in the pit of his shoulder. The greyhounds were shrieking and pacing in their cage. I moved a few feet to the side to try to get a better angle on the shot, but it was no use—she had her son fully enveloped. The trank held four darts. I could easily just pluck off the mom, wait five seconds for her to fall, then pluck off the son.

Years ago I was the one who welcomed that first wave of silents into our community and smoothed the tracks for others. This woman embracing her son on top of that nasty kennel, all blurry with panicked dogs, she was probably here because of me. Staring at them, I felt a great upwell of pity and shame, so massive and contourless that I knew I couldn’t do a damn thing about it except grind my teeth together and wait for it to pass.

The mother held him from behind while he swayed, buoying him lightly. They had the same big eyes. They swayed side to side while the greyhounds lurched and barked. She brushed his hair aside and I noticed her crying, not boohooing but just soundlessly producing tears. Streams of them. She held on.

The boy stopped moving and closed his eyes. I’d lowered the trank by now, and I didn’t even bother to raise it. His mother let go, and the boy slowly turned around to look at her, still leaning close to him, still crying. I waited. The greyhounds, no longer barking, twitched their noses and looked upwards. The kid blinked awake, looked around, down at the dogs, over toward me, then at his mother, her face wet with tears. Watching her closely, he reached his hand out to her waist and touched her lightly. Like he wanted to make sure she was really there. Really her. She started boohoo crying then.

She nodded and smiled at the boy, and he extended his free hand toward her shoulder. He smiled back.

Halfway home, I realized I’d left the trank there in her yard, lying in the grass.

AUGUST BURNHAM

PORTLAND, ME

2040

I was sleeping in the back of a police trailer parked behind the Portland YMCA so that I could do around-the-clock triage on the affected children. The CDC had sort of taken over the place, converting the various fitness areas into safe holding pens, examination rooms, and lab facilities. It was the most advanced quarantine colony on the East Coast, but even with volunteers from all over New England we were still struggling to control the children’s behavior. I hate to use the term “holding pen” to describe where the kids lived, but that was essentially what they were—handball courts padded with wrestling mats, full of stalking children. We had to sedate them with tranquilizer darts in order to check their brain activity, and it usually took a pair of volunteers wearing riot armor to extract them for testing.

At the time of the mass event, I had just finished examining a young redheaded girl. She was coming out of sedation, which can sometimes be a nasty situation. The nurse held the restraint cords to keep the girl down in case she started to buck and kick. I was standing at the portable desk, traversing the scan of the girl’s brain, comparing its neural architecture against the brains of the other children we were studying. The girl opened her eyes wide and started breathing quickly, almost panting. She fisted her hands and dug her heels into the vinyl bed, straining against the cords. The nurse put a gloved hand to the girl’s forehead and tried in vain to comfort her. The girl shrank away and tried to bite the nurse, hissing deep in her throat. When the nurse withdrew her hand, though, the girl stopped. She went completely still. The nurse looked alarmed, and I thought for a moment that the girl had done something to her. I stood up and saw why she was so startled. The girl’s face was moving in slow motion, the mouth opening and closing and her eyes seeming to turn inward. We moved in to check her vitals with the wand—everything was normal. I took her gently by the chin and lifted her face toward mine, and as I did this I saw something—a flickering that passed across the surface of her face, an ineffable transformation of her features. It was as if I saw her go from animal back to human. I don’t believe there is a word in our language, or perhaps any language, for what I saw on the girl’s face. It was the primal spark of a mind recognizing itself.

We found out later that the same phenomenon was occurring throughout the facility. The children were all exhibiting the same odd behavior—a sort of rapturous torpor. We assumed it was a fluke, whatever that would mean, but of course minutes later our sister facilities in Portsmouth and Central Falls and Hartford were all calling up, reporting the same occurrence. Nobody could figure out what was happening, but when I ran a diagnostic on the redhead’s implant I saw the signature of the Reiss calibration helmet time-stamped at 18:41:03. I checked the other children in our facility, and each one had the same time stamp. I’d assumed the device had been obliterated in the explosion with the rest of our gear. I couldn’t imagine how it was possibly still active. But we traced the signal and located it in rural Iowa, and, as we now know, it was Calvin who had transported it there and handed it off to the unimplanted boy.

The device was designed to access specific neural pathways in silent patients’ brains. The conductor of the signal—Calvin, back when he was my design director—would pass a predefined emotional impulse into the mind of a targeted subject and then record the vocalization of the impulse. We’d then assess the verity of the response based on the signal. We could pass out these impulses to a single subject or a hundred of them. But by all indications the boy had simultaneously accessed all possible endpoints—in effect, all implantees worldwide.

We’re still trying to piece together exactly what happened. Because it took place in such a remote location with very few witnesses, certain aspects may never be clear, but we believe that the boy was able to act as a sort of neural beacon, broadcasting a signal of such strength and purity that it broke through the chaos of the implanted children’s brains and established the kind of order and focus that afforded conscious thought. You see, the children who had been affected most acutely by the destruction of PhonCom were all implanted within the first year of life, and of course none of them had ever developed an internal consciousness that wasn’t brokered by the implant. They hadn’t
learned
to be silent. So when the plug was pulled, they had nothing—no organized way to process and categorize sensory information. Their erratic and sometimes violent behavior was the product of their minds desperately trying to make sense of the world, with no guideposts or map.

We can only guess at the exact nature of the boy’s transmission, but scans show tremendous spikes along Bellamy’s curve—the constellation of paths that process emotional content—in the brain activity of the children at our facility immediately following the time stamp of the device. It was just a moment, and just a simple signal—from a neurological perspective, anyway—but their brains must have seized upon it like a beggar to a crust of bread.

I wanted to study that boy. I had to. I needed to record his brain activity, map his neural architecture. It wasn’t going to be easy—it would take weeks of continuous observation and analysis in a clinical environment to generate a truly high-resolution profile. And, of course, distilling all that data into some sort of answer was a whole other challenge. But this boy held the key to the silent world I’d been trying to access since the day I first observed Calvin back at McLean, and I wanted in.

STEVEN GRENIER

NEW LIBERTY, IA

2040

News of the zero beacon spread across the country in an elongated sprawl. Isolated status messages from parents that metastasized into local news reports in the major cities about kids going into a trance. Within the first hour it was clear that something huge had happened. “A synchronized reawakening on a scale that nobody was prepared for”—not to quote myself, but that’s how I phrased it in the live-stream. By that time the kids had already come out of the fugue state, calm and alert. I had been in a holding facility interviewing a group of volunteers for a segment of
Night Watch
when it happened, so I saw firsthand. It was terrifying, and then amazing. We just knelt there on the floor next to them as they slowly awakened.

Bogdan called less than an hour later, so I excused myself and went outside to talk. The air was sharp and gritty, like a thunderstorm had just rolled through—everything was taut with a weird anxious energy. There were people clustered in doorways and gathered on stoops, everyone staring into their Catenas as the news rolled out. Bogdan was calling to tell me about the helmet—about how they’d been able to track down its location. He wanted to know if I was interested in riding out there with the recon team. I was like, “Where and when,” obviously. I hung up and made my way to the rental car. There was a man standing at the threshold of his brownstone apartment, calling inside, “It’s okay, darling. It’s okay to come out.” I could see the girl’s silhouette in the hall, taking tentative steps toward the door. Driving down the street to the airport I passed a woman leading a pair of implanted twins, who were bounding down the sidewalk, staring up in wonder at the ailanthus trees that lined the streets, as if they were vaulted cathedral ceilings. There was a lone boy in the park, standing at the bow of a wooden pirate ship, balancing on one foot as he whistled into the clouds, while his father wept on a park bench. Many kids were still locked away in basements and vacant strip mall storefronts, and there were random packs of runaways living in peripheral space, hiding in construction sites and junkyards—kids who had no way of telling anyone who or where their parents were. It was a real mess for a while, but things were finally on their way back to normal.