Day 140 - Babel - Chapter 36 (1385 words)

©Wayne Webb and constantwriting.blogspot.com, 2013. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Wayne Webb and constantwriting.blogspot.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

BABEL

By Wayne Webb

CHAPTER 36

Dr Nick wondered where it all went so wrong, he had a life alone in the middle of nowhere and he had got what he deserved, to live alone away from the humanity he had inadvertently destroyed. He had been paying the lonely price for a mistake that he had not made, but had been connected to. There was no way to fix the problem, it was irreversible in that the mess that ASHA 3F made of the language centre of the human brain was untranslatable. In order for anyone to learn language again once the Babel as it had come to be known, had taken effect you needed to train all the synapses to work in different ways and to recognise new sources of information. It was entirely possible for a single person to learn that with years of therapy, exercises and patience in abundance. This was a whole new problem, as over 99 percent of the population had fallen prey to Babel's rewiring of the brain.

He had not actually caused it, it had to have been one of the lab assistants or the interns that had perhaps infected themselves or taken improper precautions and the virus spread, well to put a modern internet age word to it, virally. He had recognised it when the sample of the flu stage of the virus was sent to his company for analysis and feedback as it had been done to many of the viral research houses that had the research and the equipment to deal with it. He was one hundred per cent sure that Babel, and the resulting fall of human society was due to ASHA 3F. He had done the right thing in dropping out of the human race into self imposed exile, living and eventually dying alone, his penance for his unwitting hand in the fall of a species.

Now though he had been found and brought in to fight the one thing that he knew could not be beaten, he knew it for a fact. There was nothing to beat for one thing, the ASHA 3F disease was gone, it was only ever going to last in the wild for a short term before the strain ran it course, it was not designed to be persistent. If they could make it past the uncommunicative generation that brought them up, then any one born after the first phase had completed, and before the second phase came in, they would have a language centre intact, and there would be some people left, approximately one in a thousand, that retained the skills and neurological pathways that could process languages.

There was hope, it was not impossible but it was slim hope. There would be wars, there would be melt downs, disasters and violence on individually unprecedented scales. Getting organised was mercifully hard, so religion and military group thinking would be near impossible, but it would still underline the acts of some without a doubt.

The people that came for him though, they were immune and had found each other to form a solid group of the most paranoid individuals he had ever met in his life. The way they operated, like a black ops unit from a spy movie, was frightening. He did not know what to make of the claims of Alien Ships, they looked real enough and the footage he was shown made a semi believer out of him.

The narrative they had did not fit the facts as he knew them though and the madness they were pursuing was based in this false narrative. He was taken to a base, a bunker a days flight from his mountain retreat, and taken a long way underground. They spun him a long story about how the Babel was an Alien tool of domination, how they had used it to soften up the earth for an invasion and established a beach head in New Zealand on the other side of the planet. They had access to satellites, trained on the ships that flew above the small nation of islands in the South Pacific. They had ICBM's that could travel over six thousand miles, but New Zealand was at the outer edge of that range.

They did not have the manpower to man a ship that would take them in range, they had a small number of ex soldiers, a general with access to nuclear missile codes and a few operational 'experts' who they could draw on. They wanted to pilot a submarine half way around the planet, put it in range of the ships and fire on them. They seemed lucid, reasonable and determined to carry out their plan to the letter. The Submarine had been deployed, it was going to be in range within days operating on a skeleton crew and would be rounding the north cape of New Zealand in days and steaming for the seas beneath the larger of the two ships.

Nick was appalled, and still he was unsure that any of this was real. He looked at the live satellites feeding the pictures of these super-massive saucer shaped ships that blotted out the landscape beneath them on the video. How could this be real? He could only stare and stare at them wondering just when it was that he lost his mind. They wanted him to work on the Vaccine for the Babel, they knew from the files they had cobbled together that he had identified and named the Babel ASHA 3F, and that he was working on the vaccine when the shit hit the fan and then he dropped off the map.

They did not know how that had come about, they did not find documents, which there were plenty of, that linked him to the disease he actually brought to life in his lab. He wanted to tell them that. That this Alien threat, which still he rubbed his mind's eye with a metaphoric knuckle over, was not related, it was a coincidence. Potentially it could have been the complete opposite as well, he had considered this internally that they had come because of the Babel, that there was no coincidence but a concerted effort to help or hinder our response to the virus we caused.

He started asking questions about the intent of the aliens, the message that they gave, the things that they did and he was met with hostility and suspicions galore. There was a plan in play, they did not need anyone poking holes in the plan, they needed a clean up of the Babel Effect. Humanity was infected, once the source of the infection was neutralised then the cure and the reversal could take place.

If he told them there was no cure, then there would be no need for him to be kept alive and they seemed insane enough to kill him for just not being useful. If he told them that it was not the Aliens that caused the Babel, but that ASHA 3F was in fact his creation, he would be as good as dead when he again advised of the lack of a cure.

But.

If he said nothing at all then the population of that City, which according to the records he had seen was over a million people before the Babel, and maybe a few hundred thousand at the very least by now, could die. And those that didn't die would suffer horribly in the radioactive fallout from the missiles, assuming that the ships themselves did not cause some kind of nuclear reaction in their own defence or any other outcome of a half dozen nuclear warheads being unleashed on each saucer from the sea of the Auckland Harbour, as per the plan.

Of course he could say nothing and work for years on a solution that would never work and claim that he was trying, he'd stay alive and well fed, but be a prisoner for the rest of his life, which could be cut short at any time on the whims of madmen.

He could tell them everything and they might even believe him and send the nukes regardless.

The world had gone mad and it was patently unfair that he was caught up in the middle of it all, with no way out.