The Flame Alphabet - Ben Marcus [102]
Such was the flawed reasoning I practiced.
As a test I would embed a message Claire would instantly know, something that could only come from me.
What kind of shoes does Rothschild wear?
Probably golden shoes.
Then what does he do when it rains?
My focus felt cold and clear. I did not ask for the serum that made this work possible; I wished it never existed. Yet since it did exist, since someone had discovered that a child might be siphoned in order for our speech to resume, I could not now deny its merits.
I pictured the children surrendering it through tubes in an underground room at Forsythe. Not just Forsythe, but elsewhere, at facilities in Wisconsin, Denver. I’d lost track of where the important work was being done.
I pictured myself in charge of this extraction. I lacked discipline when it came to the imagination, and here I was in my own mind leading a team, holding down children, some of whom grew distressed during the procedure, withdrawing the essence that protected them from the toxic speech. Withdrawing it so people who mattered—who had tangible communicative aims that they would soon enact, for the benefit of every living person—could ingest it and carry on in the world. This was simply about loaning a resource from a surplus site and shuttling it to an area of deficit.
Not everyone needed to speak. We’d have delegates, elected language users. Public servants.
Resource management involved compromise, but the gains could be so glorious.
For reasons totally other than moral, completely outside of the so-called human implication, a child-fueled communication system was problematic.
I knew that. And yet when my first dosage wore off I felt a skin peel away, and a skin, and another skin, and it was a great loss, a technical, objective sadness. Not my own, but a sadness belonging to the situation. Unprotected, the air was suddenly a salt on the body, and the overhead lights were a salt, and when I moved too quickly I felt a blast of granular salt at every turn.
An anecdotal observation, meant to illustrate how much protection this serum offered, regardless of its source. It was an exquisite thing, and without it we would be walled off from one another forever.
If the serum was high and burning in my blood right now, I would use its defenses to finally tackle my work with all of my faculties in play.
The first time they’d shot me with enough fluid to endure the session with LeBov, but this last time the antidote lasted longer, and I forgot myself.
I finished work and left my office, testing my power in personal whispers as I went, talking to myself out loud. Through the corridors and halls and then on the entertainment byway I walked with a weapon, one that could not hurt me, past my fellow scientists and the technicians and the women in white business attire, some of them dragging bright wagons that carried the same kind of old oak box they used on LeBov.
In the television room the facially distorted children ran as a group into the sea and did not come out.
Out in the hallway nothing was happening on the high monitors. The video feeds of the world offered the same dull exteriors. One feed revealed a man on a scooter whisking down the highway. On another feed a meadow spread out into the distance, disrupted by strange swells. These were shelters, but if people came and went, if people even existed, one saw no evidence of it.
At the child quarantine monitor a small clutch of scientists had gathered, studying the screen. They stood there pretending they were not hoping to catch sight of a child of theirs. They studied the screen as if their interest was merely professional, when in reality they were window-shopping against the glass that held the last possible hope that they might see their children.
I went to the coffee cart and found my sexual partner straightaway, and together we moved quietly back to my quarters, our hands