The Silent History: A Novel (21 page)

If I didn’t have the burden of running the viviplant facility in Rahway, I would’ve visited more often. And, of course, if I’d been able to keep the EPR clinic open, I might have had some influence over how these kids turned out. But the public wanted to believe that the silent community was capable of supporting itself without assistance. The silent people they saw on the news all seemed so content, so confident. They stopped viewing EPR as a serious issue. But those kids squatting in abandoned malls and underground tunnels and grain silos—they’re the true face of this condition.

I still believe that there’s a cure, and I’m determined to find it. Viviplant Central was a necessary rest stop, not a dead end. I just needed some income while I worked on my proposal for more research funding. And I needed to maintain close ties with the silent community in whatever way I could.

I remember the sound of that warehouse. Even standing outside, you could hear the bees—more of a low rumble, something you sensed more than heard. My partner Raph had been doing apitherapy to treat his MS for the past decade, so we always had bees in the house once he moved in. Raph kept them in a matchbox and he taught me how to administer the sting, so I wasn’t scared of them. But there was something powerful about all of those bees together in one place. Some genetic reflex, if you will, that made me a little skittish whenever I approached the entrance.

I had a little spiel that I did with the silents whenever I was trying to gain their trust, a sort of play-acting where I showed them what I was there for, how I just wanted to check up on their health and provide any care I was capable of. If all my years of study were worth nothing else, I could at least communicate with those kids. Most of the time they let me in without an issue. I’d just set up a card table in the corner of whatever space was available and wait for them to come to me. I could tell the more organized communities from the truly desolate squats because there would be a group of leaders who’d urge the other kids to get checked out. The Brooklyn warehouse was more organized than many, but that didn’t mean the kids there were any healthier. Everyone had head lice, everyone. That was the most common affliction. I always brought packets of dry shampoo for them, and I demonstrated how to apply it again and again, but either they weren’t keeping up with it or they weren’t using it at all, because every time I’d return they’d all be infested. Of course, the piles of mattresses and ratty furniture they had arranged as corridors and rooms were rife with bedbugs, so they had bites pretty much all over their bodies. Their teeth were also in rough shape—I don’t think they brushed with any regularity, if at all. I don’t know how or if they bathed. They each had their own incredibly acrid odor, but they didn’t seem fazed by this or interested in any of the hygiene products I left for them. Were any of them depressed? That’s almost impossible to tell, but it haunted me. I mean, the whole thing haunted me. The public had this idea about these kids living in their own separate little world, far from the rest of society. Out of sight, out of mind, you know? But the effects of this kind of isolation are unknowable. These kids were just not getting the kind of care and support that they needed, and no one was looking out for them. It was abominable.

One day I got a call from the man who owned the warehouse. He seemed nervous on the phone. He’d read an article on my traveling clinic in the local paper and wanted to see if I was looking after the people squatting in his building. I reassured him that I was going out there as often as I could. He seemed genuinely worried about the state of things in the space. I asked him why he let it go on and he said that he had an arrangement with the silents there. I wasn’t interested in his affairs, so I didn’t pursue the issue. I told him I’d swing by the following weekend, which was the first opportunity I’d have to get out there.

So the next weekend I showed up and found the girl with the stings. They had her lying on a rug in the center of the big circular communal room where they seemed to spend most of their time. I walked in and I saw immediately that her left arm was twice the size of her right arm. Her eyes were rolled back and her mouth was slack. She’d been stung, I think it was thirty-two times, the report said. She was barely breathing when I got there. I don’t even know how she was still alive. I administered some epinephrine, which didn’t seem to do much. She was on the edge—she needed a drip or she could be dead in hours.

I took out my phone to call an ambulance, but this young man reached over my shoulder and grabbed it right out of my hand. I turned around and it was the guy with the scars on his arm. He’d always encouraged people to see me for checkups, so I was shocked that he’d do something so drastic. I still wonder what his purpose was. Was he trying to protect his tribe? Did he think I was trying to call the police? How would he know? I made a series of desperate gestures to show that the girl was going to die, and he just stood there holding the phone away from me. I saw on the display screen, though, that I’d somehow successfully dialed 911 before he’d swiped the phone from me. So I shouted out, “Please, there’s a girl dying from anaphylactic shock at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, get an ambulance out here immediately.” He looked at the display on the phone for a second, and then he hurled it against the wall. I wasn’t frightened so much as concerned about the way things were turning out. I tried to ignore the episode with the phone. I knelt down and tried to remove the stingers from the girl’s arm, just praying that someone had heard me. Some of the stingers had actually been drawn into the skin by the inflammation. It was just an awful scene. The girl was going to die right there. And I became acutely aware of all the kids standing around me as I tried to pull out those stingers. Just watching me with their mouths hanging open. I never felt as much concern for the silents as I did at that moment, because it was just so clear that they were chronically unprepared to take on the challenges of the world. I mean, I had no idea about the bigger mess to come, but I knew that this was just the beginning of their suffering.

DRAKE POPE

BROOKLYN, NY

2030

We received a call from the district commander. Paramedics on the scene had reported a standard refusal-of-services, but the resisters were really digging in their heels, barricading themselves in. Backup was brought in from the local precincts, which meant that before long they had managed to butterhump the situation into a full-blown standoff. Which is when they called us.

I drove up to the warehouse in a Badger 110, which if you don’t know is an urban crowd-containment vehicle, like the kind they used in Pusan. It’s no fun to drive but it makes an impression. I had a small handpicked team with me. We pulled up in front of the place in broad daylight and took our positions at key points around the perimeter, making our presence known. The day was uncomfortably hot. Perspiration pooled in the sockets of our tracer goggles, making them all but useless, and we drank water by the bucketful without pissing once. We were miserable, and I can only imagine what it was like in that building. But I wasn’t naïve. Heat alone wasn’t going to flush the kids out of there. They were living in a condemned wreck of a stronghold, wallowing in their own turds. These people were not going to be lured out on the promise of a pizza and a rim job. They practiced a particular brand of asceticism that laymen always mistake for laziness but which I’ve come to know as a disciplined rehearsal for hardship. The heat would grind at them, but it wouldn’t break them.

You’d think I would be pleased to find that my suspicions about those people turned out to be accurate. But I’m too far along in my career to take joy in the fact that I know trouble when I see it. That would be a little like a baker expressing shock when his bread rises. It’s an ability that just springs forth naturally from the work. I knew from the moment I saw those young silent people gathering on the beach back in whenever that I’d eventually be doing the same with them. I said to Reville, “Only a matter of time.” And Reville says, “Only a matter of time until what?” And I say, “Until I’m talking them down from somewhere precarious.” And Reville, “Pope, they don’t talk.” And that’s what interested me. That particularity was a thing that drew me to the silents. How do you talk to someone who doesn’t talk? How do you change the mind of a person who doesn’t know what
mind
means? It made me want to study them, to know them down to the core. It made my job new again. Because I felt, the way an elephant knows where to die, that one day I’d be called upon to coerce them into doing something they didn’t want to do.

I’d been training for this type of scenario for several years. I’d read all the available literature on the condition, talked to professionals, made field observations. I knew how these kids operated. I had to do a bit of wheel reinvention in light of the fact that the standard tools would not yield the desired effect. To wit, I knew that a megaphone would be useless and a sound system’s effectiveness would be limited at best. We knew that our primary point of tactical leverage was their eyes, which made things difficult, since we couldn’t legally deploy any directed energy beams after the incident at Columbia. We could deploy tear gas but that was always a last resort. And, this is just a personal thing, but I feel like lachrymators are, in general, clumsy tools used by men who lack vision. I had something better. A nimble little drone fitted with a screen that displayed my face. I sat in a portable booth behind the Badger and practiced a set of well-rehearsed expressions that conveyed both the gravity of the situation and the reassurance that everyone inside would, upon exiting the building, be treated with the utmost respect. Golebiowski and Watts pulled back a plywood panel and sent the drone inside the warehouse, and Kosari helped guide it around remotely from the cockpit of the Badger.

It took us a long time to even find one of them. The drone’s AI wasn’t sophisticated enough to recognize that the mattresses and other refuse the silents had piled up were functioning as walls. Kosari had to actually write several lines of code on the fly to help the drone locate a small pocket of silents crowded into a fissure about three feet wide. I saw them on the small screen in front of me as I performed the expressions I’d prepared. I showed them calm. I showed them order. I gave them my most vigorous rendition of justice. I watched them in the glowing green of the night-vision camera as they took in my message. The man closest to the drone, who wore a long unkempt beard and had a gray sort of homemade tunic, got down on his knees and put his face close to the screen so that I could see nothing but his forehead. I felt the hairs go up along the back of my neck, just like they say. I felt like I’d broken through some barrier, as if I’d somehow deciphered their methods of communication. I’d brought one of them down to his knees just by looking at him remotely. I felt a moment of pride at having accomplished this feat, but the sensation was short-lived. The man was only trying to find a way to shut the drone off, and when he failed to deactivate it that way, he tossed it through a broken porthole under the peaked roof. Thirty grand worth of custom R&D smashed on the blacktop.

I called Reville. “They took out the drone,” I said. Reville told me to hold tight, which was not the response I wanted. I asked him when the bulldozers I’d ordered would arrive. He says, “I stopped the order on the bulldozers.” I didn’t say anything. Reville filled the ensuing silence by saying, “You’re not using force. Not before force has been used on you.” I explained to him the violence of all the wires and chips busted all over the ground like some infant’s broken bones, but it did not move him. “This is not going to be a repeat of Columbia,” he said. Fair enough. I respected Reville. In my estimation, they’d crossed a line, and as I saw it the only thing to do was to shift the line back across the sand until they had nowhere to go. But I followed Reville’s lead.

That was the first day. Next we rotated through a battery of some of the more predictable PSYOPS techniques—blasting the sound of dying rabbits, placing high-powered floods outside all of the windows, blowing hot air in through the basement, helicopter flybys. The kids weren’t showing us a thing. By the fifth day of the standoff everyone was weary. Everyone was nearing the breaking point. The sense that you’re drawing ever closer to an asymmetric chaos event is palpable. I’ve felt it many times. At Columbia, sure. In Montreal, in Bogotá. It’s just something I know, the way you know when it’s lunchtime. I felt the first shock waves of premonition fully a day before the end of the standoff. So, when those young people dropped the beehive on Kosari’s Interceptor, nearly killing him in the process, I knew exactly what to do.

PRASHANT NUREGESAN

ATLANTA, GA

2030

I was at an IPI Deep Mind Persuasion training session when my sister called. You’re not supposed to communicate with the outside world during IPI training, because of how it tends to break the illusion that you’re a Bronze Age Wanderer, so I knew it was serious when the High Priest led me through the back door of the longhouse where the catering crew was making ceviche and handed me the phone. My sister was pretty hysterical. It was hard to figure out what was going on. At first it sounded like Isabelle was dead. I was already braced for it—the whole family knew that Isabelle was living in that warehouse in Brooklyn with a bunch of her silent friends, and we were all pretty nervous about something bad happening to her. It turned out she wasn’t dead, but she was somehow trapped in the warehouse, surrounded by a SWAT team that was shooting at her through the windows and whatnot. It sounded surreal, but my sister just kept saying, “Do something, Nu, you’ve got to do something,” on and on. And, of course, I was going to do something. Of course I would figure something out. Even though it meant I had to petition the tribe to be exiled, which involved a stoning ceremony, which was just rubber stones but still, when a guy whips a rubber stone at you full force, you’re going to get a welt.

I met my sister at the hotel where she’d holed up during the standoff. I sat in the recliner eating a meal bar while she told me what was happening. I asked her, “Why won’t she just leave?” She said that Isabelle had finally found the community of people she’d always longed for. My sister had never seen the girl so happy as she’d been in the past few years. And this was a girl who’d been through a lot. Many bad years where she was treated for depression, on all kinds of meds, and at one point tried to kill herself by swigging a bottle of cleaning solution. I said, “You really want her living in all that filth?” And she said again, kind of resigned or defeated, “I just want her to be happy.”