Whitehall stretches out before you. Shock sets in quickly, but really you knew the moment you left Greek Street where he was taking you.
New Parliament.
You try to conceal the emotions rising in you. Just the look of it, even in pictures, makes you feel sick to your stomach. It reminds of you of your parents. It reminds you of the countless souls you’d never know, culled and silenced forever for the crime of speaking of a language that was not Neme.
When you were younger, you watched the images of Neme’s exponential spread from brain to brain, machine to machine, mouth to mouth. In some countries, non-speakers were killed in the streets, with neither dignity nor trial. The deaf were first–their nanotech rendered them unable to learn this new language. The handicapped came after. They were superfluous. They couldn’t understand, could not be understood, and therefore were the enemy.
In Newer England, there was less ceremony. People simply disappeared in the night. People like your parents.
Language, it seemed, was no longer an expression of the self. We were an expression of it. Of Neme.
You’re quickly aware your face might betray what you are feeling, and snap out of it; emotion implies Ralaine.
And now, looking up at that ghastly block of grey featureless concrete, you have so many questions. But you know you’ll never have them heard, much less answered. And you’re scared. You chance a second to check your reflection in the next window, careful to keep it brief. Vanity implies Ralaine.
Soon you’re in the shadow of it. Its façade stretches square and mightily into the grey sky, its northern flank standing monolithic over the concrete flats of Parliament Square. Taken in by its melancholic might, you realise you’ve lost your targets. Your eyes dart left and right, but everybody is wearing suits, like Wren and your apparent informant, and just as dread pitches your stomach and you think of how close you are to losing everything, you spot him, the man you don’t know. Relief implies Ralaine, but you can’t help but feel it—laced with dread, but relief all the same.
You see him see you. He seems to be checking you’re still there, and a hint of satisfaction appears on his face, ephemeral, discreet. You are, as a speaker of Ralaine, adept at reading faces as well as lips. Any emotion, no matter how slight, is easy to see when emotion itself is almost non-existent.
Wren is gone. You can’t see him anywhere. It is just you and your informant now, ten metres apart and uncomfortably aware of each other, like estranged lovers on a train. Your mind goes to the note again, and wonder what truth this man could possibly reveal to you, or whether he was lying in his written note. (But that is impossible. Speakers of Neme cannot lie, for that would be saying something contrary to what is meant.)
There is a single guard at the entrance to Parliament, armed. His belt bristles with crude weapons, but you and your target slip by unchecked. You’re still reluctant to think you could be being led into a trap. Perhaps the Government have operatives that still speak Ralaine, charged with hunting non-communicators, finding their strongholds. You think of home, Kilburn—although to these people it would be a series of coordinates, or just another quadrant of London’s grid.
The turbine hall of New Parliament bustles with people walking perversely single-file, autonomous. The people all around you are speaking in Neme. For a moment, you recall the pain of your deafening, and you’re thankful for it.
Your quarry has slipped into one of these lines. You quickly follow suit. You feel exposed and naked, wondering if anyone here can sense your lack of Neme—after all, if so many millions could be hunted down and killed in such a wide-reaching, global campaign of such deadly efficiency, surely one girl in a room full of the enemy was easy pickings.
The next minute is a tense and frightening slideshow of corridors, each as dull and identical as the last, and the people filter away as they find their places of work.
Then it really is just you and him. Your only exit is back the way you came. He turns to face you. You don’t know what to say, but he’s not going to start a conversation, so you do.
“Who are you?” you mouth to him. Your heart beats a tattoo in your chest.
“That’s not important,” he mouths back, and immediately you know he’s speaking Ralaine, and although you can’t hear it, can’t hear the timbre of his voice, you could fling your arms around him in relief. But there’s still something untoward going on here: he evidently knows you’re deaf, and you find that troubling somehow, because he couldn’t have.
“Do you know why you’re here?” he says.
You think for a moment.
“To have truth,” you say finally.
He takes something out of his pocket.
“Alexandra,” he says, and you’re instantly terrified he knows your name. “Lex. Would you like me to show you the truth?”
“How do you … ” you begin, but you give up. There are more important questions. “How do you still know Ralaine?”
“Dear girl. Tell me. Do you speak Ralaine?”
“Yes,” you say immediately, petulantly, because you know. You teach Ralaine.
“How can you be so sure?”
And the question knocks you sideways. You remind yourself of your inner voice, which you know is Ralaine, the language of your birth. You are sure of it.
“When was the last time you heard Ralaine, Lex?”
And you can’t remember. They deafened you with pins so you weren’t infected with Neme. You were seven years old, and all you knew was hiding, how to stay hidden, how to not listen. You were saved by your deafening, but was it enough? Did the machines hear even if your ears didn’t? Was Neme that insidious?
Is your own brain that treacherous?
“Do you want to hear it again?” he says, and he holds out in his hand what he took from his pocket. You advance slowly, cautiously. “I can show it to you, your own language.” You look closer at his hand, and recoil at what he holds in it. “Can you be sure, Lex, that you don’t speak the invader tongue? Is it not possible you and your … comrades don’t speak it?”
Could it be possible? That for years you’ve fought a war already lost? Blinded by your deafness, unable to hear or comprehend or truly understand even your own language?
“Tell me, what good is language if you’re unable to hear it, Lex?” He says your name as if taunting you with it, that he’s fully aware you still don’t know his. “Your truth is through this door. But to find it, you must hear it.”
The thing in his hand is old-fashioned; coils of clear plastic attached to a beige module, with a switch on its side.
“What’s the matter?” he mouths, and you realise you’ve forgotten the whole conversation is taking place in dead silence, as if his voice is amplified purely by the magnitude of what he is saying. The familiar ringing in your ears becomes threatening and loud and insistent, stopping you communicating effectively. You don’t understand what is happening.
“Do you want to hear Ralaine again?”
You have no choice. Your friends were right when they called you stupid, no matter what language they thought they spoke. You look at the thing in his hand, and the profound risk that it represents falls away.
“Come and find your truth,” the man says. With shaking hands you take the little device and wrap it around the back of your useless ear.
You flick the switch on the back of the hearing aid. You experience a sensation you only vaguely remember, but that is instantly familiar. Your vision blurs with tears, and you go to rip the device from your ear and run. But then the man speaks aloud, and it is too late, because you realise the most frightening thing is not that he is speaking aloud, nor that you can hear him—it is that you understand.
Jack Schouten was born in Kristiansand, Norway, and was brought up in Surrey. He read Journalism and Creative Writing at Middlesex University London, specialising in science fiction, and his work has appeared in Jupiter Magazine, the North London Literary Gazette, and Clarkesworld (US). He lives and works in London, and can be reached on Twitter at @JackSchouten.
Possible Side Effects
Adam Connors
Art: Jackie Duckworth
My head is full of strange ideas today. Fragments. Daydreams. Memories. I buzz with them. I woke with words in my mouth that must be decades old. “Have you seen the newspaper?” “We need milk, I’m going out to buy milk.” “Soon, I promise.” I was dreaming about the woods again. Out where we used to live in the old days, before the business took off, before we moved to California, before … Well, just before.
Beech trees standing like guards over the dirt path. Black branches etched into white sky. Do you remember how beautiful it was? Somehow, in my dream, it’s always autumn. You’re with me, and we’re both young. Ben is five or six and he’s cycling ahead of us on that little orange bike he used to have.
He laughed when I told him this. He remembers that bike.
He was wobbly and you were terrified he was going to fall and hurt himself. I said something—in the dream I didn’t get to hear what it was—and you laughed and clutched my arm. In the dream I watch us and I wonder if we were ever really that happy. I was working so much back then, trying to get the business off the ground, it’s hard to imagine I had time for a walk in the woods. But it felt so real.
And then for some reason I was dreaming about Dr Merck again. Do you remember Dr Merck? “It’s not good news, I’m afraid, Mr King,” he was saying.
