The Silent History: A Novel (41 page)

Dietrich’s remains are currently being scanned at a forensic imaging center in Kittery. The stolen vehicle he used to get to the facility was found in a parking lot in Acadia National Park. He’d carefully arranged a set of items on the passenger seat, apparently for authorities to find once he’d completed his task. They included the leg bone of an adult wallaby, a 1/144th-scale replica of the
Enola Gay
, and Huynh’s two-volume
Encyclopedia of Microexpressions
.

Of course, nobody was aware of any of this at the time. I was in Charlottesville visiting a friend from the consulate whose implanted granddaughter was stepping up to middle school. We were sitting at the dinner table after the ceremony, passing around a second bottle of wine, when the girl came into the dining room holding a plush manatee by the throat. Her eyes were wide open and her pupils were dilated as far as they could go. She opened her mouth to say something, but nothing came out. The girl’s mother got up to find out what was wrong, and when she did the girl crumpled into a fetal position on the floor and started flailing and grasping at her forehead as if it was full of hornets.

I rode with the girl’s father to the emergency room. I’ve seen plenty of seizures and paroxysms and psychotic fugues before, but there was something about the girl’s behavior that unsettled me. It was really like she was possessed by a spirit. She shook and flailed in the backseat, panting. Her father just kept trying to stroke her hair and whisper soothing reassurances, and all I remember of that trip was the streaking of the highway lights in the night and the father’s hushed mantra of “I’m here, I’m right here.” I heard a strain of desperation in his voice as he struggled to say something that mattered, something that might bring her back from the dark place she was in.

We rushed into the emergency room and saw that we were not alone. There were three other implanted children in the waiting area exhibiting the same symptoms. A young Asian boy squatted underneath the news monitor, covering his ears with his hands and quietly moaning. His eyes had the same wide, deadened look as my friend’s granddaughter. Another boy was crawling underneath the chairs, barking out nonsense sounds and scraping his forehead against the carpet. An older girl looked passed out in her parents’ laps, lolling her head back and forth and hissing. I told the father to sit with the girl and approached the receptionist.

“What’s going on here?” I asked, and she looked at me like I was an infant. “This is an emergency room, sir,” she said. “Please excuse us if it’s a little hectic.” I pointed to the kids in the waiting room and said, “Do you not see this? Does this not seem unusual to you?” She just asked me to sit down.

We sat there for a long time. The girl did not look good. She seemed to be in another world, nodding and twitching with her eyes half-closed. Whenever her father asked her how she felt, she just coughed and let out a low, gravelly sigh. He held her close to his chest and rocked her, and I told him I’d walk around and find a coffee machine.

In the hallway I called Bogdan and told him what was going on. He said, “Steve, what are you trying to do, get back in the game?” and I told him I didn’t know. I said I just had that feeling in my gut. Seeing that girl in the throes of something, it just gave me that sour tingling sensation that usually meant a story. Bogdan said, “You’re right about there being a story, bud, but you’re a little late.”

I went back into the waiting room and brought up a news site on the overhead monitor. There was a shot of a school gymnasium in Manhattan that was packed with wailing kids who were gnashing their teeth and sobbing and slapping their temples. The ticker read
City silents racked by unexplained behavior
. The camera cut to a man in riot gear talking to an offscreen interviewer, but it was impossible to hear what he was saying over the animal howlings of the children in the ER.

AUGUST BURNHAM

PORTLAND, ME

2040

I admit there was a dark wisdom to the terrorist’s plan. The worm bore a hole through the heart of the code base, and the destruction of the central server bank prevented us from dealing with the hemorrhage until it was far too late. PhonCom could easily have survived either one of those events in isolation, but the synchronized combination of the two did us in. Which is why I’m skeptical of claims that Dietrich was simply a loner with a death wish. He didn’t just toss a Molotov cocktail into the server room—he carefully planted and detonated the explosive device in such a way that it sent a surge of considerable strength through the entire infrastructure, frying everything. It was a well-planned and well-executed plot, and it may be some time before we understand exactly what he was trying to accomplish. On the night of the explosion we just stood around the burning wreckage in our pajamas, stunned, while the worm spread across the globe, grinding PhonCom to pixel dust. Rendering the implant completely useless. Crippling the linguistic faculties of every implanted silent worldwide.

I spent the majority of the day after the disaster in conference with the NIH, the CDC, and representatives from about a dozen other state and federal organizations, all of us trying to figure out how to respond to the crisis. I had bad news for them. The genesis code for PhonCom had been corrupted—I couldn’t even begin to speculate on how long it would take to get the system back online. I recommended the establishment of triage centers worldwide where we could assess the patients and work our way toward an interim solution. My vague sense of the possible effects of a sudden absence of language was validated by some of the early news reports—a vertigo-like disorientation, a perceived distortion of space and time, and a hypersensitivity to certain sounds—but it was impossible to say how these reactions would change over time. They could fade or flare, and there was no way of telling which way the wind would fan the flames. Containment was key, I told the committee. Close observation and the administration of preemptive palliative care were vital to ensuring that affected patients would endure the blackout.

Late in the afternoon I was taken by helicopter to a YMCA in Portland to observe the triage operation that had been set up there. As we lifted off I craned my neck to see the tops of the massive red spruces of Acadia National Park. I willed myself to focus on the beauty of the terrain and not on the fact that my life’s work had been ravaged in less than a minute by a skinny brute with a death wish. There was an empty seat next to me that should’ve been occupied by Calvin. He’d surely been affected by the blackout, and had probably run off in fear, thinking that the whole thing was somehow his fault. I felt a crushing pressure on my heart when I thought of Calvin, but I put that aside, as well, so that I could focus on the blackout itself. Every decision I made would be critical to the survival of implantees everywhere. I had to be sharp. I had to project an aura of control and command.

We got to the gymnasium as the sun was setting, and the haze around the building seemed to contribute to the general sense of unease. Families stood in long, slow-moving lines through a maze of nylon cordons, carrying or restraining their children as they waited to be checked in. Parents who had already admitted their kids for testing lingered in the hallways, staring blankly at the trophy cases and team photos. The place reeked of foam and chlorine and it was hard to hear anything above the din of children hooting and grunting.

I was ushered into an examination area where a shirtless young boy with wild matted hair cowered in his mother’s arms. Both were implantees. The boy rammed his head into the woman’s chest again and again, and she bore the blows with exhausted resolve. I motioned for the mother to place the boy on the portable exam cot. She rose and tried to move the boy to the cot, but he started whaling on her with his arms and legs. Two volunteers stepped in, and the three of us were able to separate the boy and pin him down. All I wanted to do was check his vitals, but he struggled like I was about to murder him.

The boy was showing all of the classic symptoms of acute stress reaction. The volunteers gave him a sedative patch, which should’ve put him right down, but it had almost no effect. I tried to communicate with him using the flash-card method, but he just stared at me, gritting his teeth, while the volunteers held him down.

A young man in scrubs entered the exam area. He was a licensed pediatrician, but he looked like a teenager, with a landmass of acne spread across his left cheek. “I heard you’d arrived,” he said. “Now maybe we can get some answers.” “Answers to what?” I asked. The man gave me a look like I’d just eaten my own feces, and turned to the mother to console her. She stared at her boy with a stoic grimace, as if she could project her strength onto him, somehow will him out of his hysteria. It occurred to me only then that children seemed to be more deeply affected than their parents at the implant blackout. It made sense. Children who were implanted as babies had never known what life was like without it. In a single instant, just like that, the voice in their head was replaced with static, nothing but a vacuum where their thoughts had once taken shape. The feeling must have been akin to a hand reaching down from the heavens and yanking their brains right out of their skulls.

The boy broke free from the volunteers and hoisted himself up to the top of the foldaway bleachers. The mother pushed past me and tried to go up after him, but he was too fast. He leaped from the bleachers onto the backboard of the basketball hoop, barking and hissing at the volunteers below as they tried to coax him down with foam batons. A thundering chorus rose in the gym as other children caught sight of the boy. With his long, unkempt hair and his shirtless back he looked like a young Tarzan. A group of children gathered under the net and howled as the boy climbed the suspension shaft to the ceiling and popped out one of the perforated acoustic tiles. He disappeared through the hole and his peers went wild, screeching and clawing as the volunteers tried to restrain them. The pediatrician stood dumbly underneath the hoop, staring up at the ceiling. I went into the men’s room and ran cold water through the tap. When the basin was full, I dunked myself and held my breath until I could no longer feel my face.

GORTON VAHER

PHILADELPHIA, PA

2040

I was a sculptor back in Lithuania, nationally known, but after the purge the best job I found was chief of edible ice art aboard a fake cruise. The SS
Muir
, sixteen nights of entertaining children and child-brained adults with dessert-size replicas of famous ecosystems and oil spills, colored with flavored syrups. Does it sound fun? It was not fun. The other workers treated me like a piano-bar whore. Everyone called me Iceman—“Iceman, table sixteen wants lemon-lime condor nests”; “Iceman, some woman says her Nile basin tastes like cough suppressant.” Everyone but Persephone. She called me Gorton. And once, Gor. It made my stomach leap.
Gor
. I loved it. Then on day three of the cruise, the implants fizzled out and Persephone stopped calling me anything at all.

I searched for her as soon as I heard the news, but she was nowhere. And then she appeared at dinner, calm and conscious but floating from station to station, smiling as if from a great distance. I saw her staring into a bowl of origami albatrosses, and I patted her shoulder like I sometimes did and asked if she needed help. She tilted her head and smiled with her eyes, and whether she needed help or not, I helped her.

The kids, the implanted ones, were immediately a handful. They couldn’t tolerate the predinner movie minutes, which were only forty seconds long. A few had nasty stings from trying to battle each other with baby stingrays from the petting pool. Some parents demanded that the captain unlock the main doors, but he refused. The
Muir
emphasized authenticity above all else—not just ocean sounds and randomized storm patterns and ninety-eight simulated portholes, but also the door policy. Once the doors were closed and time-locked, you were setting sail on the open ocean for the duration. We’d had heart attacks, panic attacks, women going into early labor. There was a medical staff on board, but they weren’t prepared for anything like this. No one was. “We’re in the middle of the Pacific,” the captain said. “The nearest port’s eight hundred miles away.”

“We’re not in the middle of the Pacific,” said one of the fathers. “We’re in southeast Philadelphia. I can smell hot garbage and urine from my cabin.”

Our info from outside was fuzzy, and I think everyone assumed the implants would come back online in a day or two. So we carried on like good sailors, ice art and all. I spent most of my shift avoiding the kids, stalling at a table of senior women who wanted me to carve the Patagonia bone fields out of their seventeen-inch slab. Meanwhile, moms and dads had to grip their children by the arm to make sure they didn’t run off. I saw one mom holding an infant in her lap nursing a different kid, I guess the brother, who was way too old to be nursing. The mom said to him, “You full yet, sweetie?” and he just stared at her, eyes full of fuming hunger.

It got worse each day, brawling siblings, angry kids splashing around in the toilets, gleeful toddlers in the kitchen walk-in eating someone’s four-tiered anniversary cake, eating and eating until they vomited all over the grated floor.

And mealtimes, the worst—shattering plates, flying food, shouting parents. Most people just stocked up on smoked crab buns and hid out in their rooms, waiting for the cruise to be over. But the staff had to soldier on. Upstairs in the Oasis Room, I readied my mobile ice station, refilled the sixteen syrups, made sure my liquid nitrogen was full and that the etching drill was sharp. I noticed Persephone at a table with five rabid beasts, doing her best to clear the dinner course while the kids tried to wrench away the porcelain butter frog. She held the frog high in the air, where they couldn’t reach it. I was afraid they were going to go after her, so I wheeled my cart over to the table. Once I pulled up and started doing my here-comes-the-edible-ice-art whistle, the kids only had eyes for me and my nozzles and tubes.