The Flame Alphabet - Ben Marcus [87]
Indeed it was a bag of fluid, but it dangled from the little neck of the child, puckering from his skin into the tube.
From this it flowed directly into the man.
Allowing him to speak, one presumed.
A fluid drawn directly from the child.
Like most important solutions throughout history, this one seemed inevitable. Our own dear children, immune to the malady that is killing us all, must have within them a resistance that, with a long enough needle, our best scientists should be able to extract. Finding such a solution was just a matter of time.
Everyone will soon come over to this approach, LeBov had said to me that freezing night back in the neighborhood.
It needn’t cause any trouble. In the spirit of science.
After the assembly, the glass sheet lifted and the man shuffled from the stage. Were we meant to applaud or weep for him? We did neither.
The child had to be carried off, but first they threw a sheet over him. The tube that joined them was severed by one of the technicians. It was too far away for me to determine if this liquid was clear or dark. But it hung in a clump from the severed tube, suggesting viscosity. Working quickly, they squeezed the remaining stuff into a vial. Whatever it was they’d withdrawn from this child, they didn’t want to waste it.
Assemblies after that featured similar spectacles, and this fluid factored as the golden constant. Whenever it appeared, frequently under guard, always sourced by some oddly well-dressed child who seemed styled for his first music recital, we were supposed to leap from our chairs and rush the stage in order to drink the slimy dregs of it from the tube. The child was never the same one, though sometimes the man was. He was a tired specimen and his face, as I’ve said, hung badly off his head. But as we moved into summer and the uncirculated air of Forsythe began to stink of blackened medicines, this man, who early on seemed to have been thieved from the morgue and filled with a last-ditch animating dose of adrenaline, began to look functionally dead, dead in all the measurable ways. When the serum was pumped into him he bled freely from his ear. They began to plan for this in advance, packing gauze on the bad side of his head. But even that darkened quickly and slid sometimes down his face during the presentations.
I suppose it wasn’t so terrible to become a guinea pig during your last days.
It wasn’t hard to piece together what they were showing us. The assemblies never featured text, we were never addressed. If there was sound, it was the kind of dissonant code music that was precisely designed to evoke nothing.
In most of the presentations the subjects were plugged into something, a child, a bag, or a machine offstage, perhaps, suggested by the medical tubes snaking under the curtain.
They clobbered us with the obvious. Okay, I get it, I wanted to say. You’ve struck gold in those kids. But until they released this fluid into our own labs, until they even gave us a fucking operational lab with actual equipment, what were we supposed to do about it, and how impressed was I supposed to be that you needed to be fed by a live connection to a living human child in order to cough out a few unimportant words?
Unplug one of these motherfuckers, I thought. Unplug him from the child and let him run around barking his silly words. Then maybe I’ll be impressed.
37
It happened pretty soon after that.
I had finished work early and was on my way to the entertainment suite. Perhaps I’d stare blankly at some faceless television until the coffee cart opened, at which point I’d drop a tap on my partner. On days like this, Marta offered the most reliable respite from a sense of futility, and with Marta I’d never experience the shame of having confessed frustration or despair, or having confessed a single thing, because we did not speak.
Nothing had come of my projects today, as usual. More slogging, more obviously failed scripts,