The Flame Alphabet - Ben Marcus [76]
I sat down and fiddled with the apparatus, trying it out on whatever text I could find. Such redactions would keep my own work from poisoning me. If I desired, with the self-disguising paper, I could write with the perfect impassive remove that would keep me detached from the very thing I was writing. I’d have full deniability.
Elsewhere in the desk were some retired alphabetical designs, produced perhaps by my predecessor.
I pictured a man with blackened limbs, sitting on the high stool with his stylus. Of course he died of his own work. One day he lets down his guard, forgets his language shield, starts looking through his alphabets, and they poison him.
The work he left behind came stuffed in a binder. Had any of it mattered to anyone at Forsythe, had it somehow transcended the limitations of our current repulsive alphabet, I figure I would have known—it would not be here, we would not be here—so this was failed work. But since it was failed work, I wanted at least not to repeat it, which meant I needed to study it, to understand what went wrong. And that struck me as problematic. Such work would take me days with the self-disguising paper, as if I needed to go thread by thread through a pair of trousers in order to determine that they were wearable.
To examine my predecessor’s work I customized the pinhole device, scissoring a thumbprint-size divot from a page of cardboard, then running that cardboard over the materials inside the binder. And with that I toured through his written work, studying dissected parts, the spatter of letters, drops of what must have been his own blood mottled into the page.
Much of my time in those early days at the script design desk was spent creating inhibitors that would keep me from seeing what I was doing.
After some hours of scrutiny I concluded there was nothing here of any use, just examples from our own alphabet, fattened here and there, rendered so erratic that they looked like the lines of an EKG.
My predecessor was poor at his job. He seemed to have looked at our existing alphabet, decided that nothing was wrong with it, and, in fact, if only its parts were emphasized, bolded, the As fattened, blackened, perhaps, and so on, then all of the sick fakers might finally fall at his feet and praise him.
Or perhaps my predecessor enjoyed sending obviously fatal scripts to the testing grounds. He could watch from his glassed-in perch as the English language quietly picked off test subjects one by one, eating away at everything crucial inside their heads until there was nothing left but mush.
That first day, after studying the examples left to me, I realized what I was meant to do here in my office with no trace of medical equipment: I was meant to test letters, alphabets, possibly engineer a script. I was meant to string together symbols that might be used as code, a new language to outwit the toxicity.
The solution is in scripts, don’t you think?
Visual codes? Except not the ones we know?
Of course LeBov, then Murphy, had said this to me for a reason. And maybe this was it.
Outside, hordes of people sought entrance into Forsythe. A mob of bodies swelled before the gate as if suspended in emulsion. Some had covered their heads. The ones with kerchiefs looked like mummies floating at sea. Others were fitted with masks, dark scarves, some kind of putty that filled their eye sockets.
At the very back of the crowd, keeping their distance from the others, stood a group who had fashioned homemade tackle to defeat language sounds from penetrating their defenses. Headphones reinforced by wood, by metal disk, spread with a cream.
Elsewhere stood those who had dressed for the weather, as if waiting for the train to take them to work. Perhaps for them such defenses were futile, too much bother, an assault on their pride. They were born to language, to speak and to listen and to share what they felt and thought. If such activities would kill them, then so be it. They’d