Day 141 - Babel - Chapter 37 (1855 words)

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BABEL

By Wayne Webb

CHAPTER 37

Anne came back to her senses in the middle of downtown Auckland in a crowd of nine hundred thousand people. She had been at home in the village, sad but living a peaceful existence of making pictures to communicate with people like herself who had lost the ability. Times in the village had been frustrating but ultimately safe for her and George, and she knew that he could talk and she could not. All she ever heard was gibberish, though in her head everything she saw made sense, it was like there was a filter over everything to make it indistinct and abstract rather than precise and defined. She drew pictures of how to do things, and she was getting very good at that, she knew that when she saw the dawning in people's eyes, the click that it made lifted her tired spirits every time she saw it again.

That softened the harsh reality of her world, the insular existence where she was utterly dependant on the man in her life, a thing she would have railed against in her life before the Babel came. She did not know it was called the Babel until she woke again after the possession, the migration to become Looped in. These were concepts in her mind, not words or labels, but they made sense to her the way language used to do. The little pictograms that she had designed, the use of figures and motions, placement and amounts to convey information, she had a lexicon that she now shared with almost a million people, and if all went to plan maybe up to a billion or more, depending on how many people had survived the Babel.

She understood the death and destruction she saw in everyone's past, in the memories she now had unfettered access to. There were plenty of people like her, she was far from unique in the broadest aspects of her personality and skills, but she did stand out in one very helpful way. She had hated the sound of her own voice after the Babel struck, it reminded her of a bird squawking before it was killed, the gawkish and piercing shrieks of fear and uselessness they felt as the world was bent to the will of the person taking their far too short a life. That is how she heard herself when she spouted the gibberish that was trying to be words, trying to be feelings and trying to be heard when she opened her mouth and made sound. It was just sound, and she heard the sound, knew that it was as unintelligible to others as it was to her own ears.

When George spoke his voice was deeper and recognisably his voice to her, she could pick him out of the crowd if every one babbled at the same time, she knew him by the timbre, tone and tempo of that noise. She had not realised at first that he was still able to talk, she saw and heard him and she assumed it was out of habit, a lifetime of saying things and being heard, even now there were people who still maybe the sounds expecting them to work on some level, but it was less and less required when in the Loop. People would respond before you finished a thought sometimes as everything was more or less concurrent in the Loop, you did not have to wait for someone to hear or understand, as you thought it they got it and the response was as long as it took to think, which was nano seconds in some cases, and minutes in others. Some people did like to cogitate but the process was much faster with a million minds running over the options at the same time as you. This was cloud computing, distributed processing power and group think. There was many opinions and analogies in the Loop and they democratised themselves into the most popular and agreed to answers becoming accepted.

Anne was used to not talking, and she liked being so intimate with so many other souls, she thought of them as souls though the prevailing label was minds, but you did not have to agree to everything, there was room for dissent and point of view, but it could not be taken to extreme because it was all open to see, there was no trickery, persistence or persuasion to change peoples minds, only the chance to share a belief. Belief was something you could not argue, but it was pocketed somehow, like you knew it was there but you could not access it. It was saved, ready to be referenced to but not allowed near your ability to act.

There were definitely some extreme views in the Loop, some paranoid, some unacceptably deviant. They could not act on these thoughts without alerting the Loop and opening themselves up to counteraction and argument. It would have been impossible to steal, lie, cheat or abuse without everyone witnessing, without people stopping them. There was not a physical prevention, but in the case of a person who was boiling with rage and ready to kill the person in front of them, the thought was processed by them all in the instant. The victim, the intended got out of the way, could see the blow coming. Every move they made was telegraphed, every intention was known, but conversely all the countermeasures were seen and it created a stalemate. No move was without a counter and no desire or rage could be sated without everyone in the Loop approving, letting it happen and there was no excuse to let it go anymore. There was no ignorance.

Anne felt more connected to the people of the Villages now, the bulk of them were nearby physically, no one had perished in the bridge explosion, she had made it over the alternate route after the bridge had blown. She had not been 'awake' for it technically, but she had access to the memories of the journey, the confrontation with George, which she did not experience, but she remembered. She remembered also him groping and could see why he did it, but the ill jealous feeling and the shame that the girl had felt, not at the time but later. It was cold and calculating and done for a purpose, there was absolutely no accusation against George, he was doing something specific, experimenting, trying to connect, but the act was a violation and they all felt it. They all felt it exactly the same way, gender was beginning to blur in the Loop, and sense of individuality was blurring.

When someone in the Loop saw George, Anne saw him too. She felt things for him she had not felt for a few years because the raw processing power of the Loop, she felt fear, anger and shame of the girl he had ripped the short off of, and she felt love, loss and lust for the man that she had been with for so long. They all felt it, in a rush of feelings and desires they all needed to learn to suppress and process amongst themselves but now it was one sided. This was directed at someone where there was zero feedback and no open line to communicate.

She needed to see him and it was not enough to be near him via the Loop, though she was aware that he was there, and she wanted to find him. He was hiding on the wharf, and it was hard to see him, there was a blind spot over the water. They felt it, the Loop was weak closer to the surface of any significant body of water. The wharves were jumping off points for the Loop, unlike a shore line where there was a draw that moved gradually deeper, the wharf lay over a depth f instant proportions.

George was there, she knew it and felt it and walked towards him, wherever the sense of him was, the shadow of his presence as it registered on the Loop.

Then the bomb went off, she saw Victor's face as he reached the bomb he had prepared she knew who he was in that moment though she had been thinking about George, she had been pulling a significant amount of power and focus away from the wharf and from Victor in her pursuit, she split the Loop in half without knowing that there was a division in it. The Loop was still active though, and then when the bomb exploded all thoughts of everything disappeared in a flash of white and Anne, along with nearly a million other people, shut down again.

When she woke up it was dark, they could not see George and he was gone, out of the Loop. It was days later he was seen again, with Victor, the man that had delivered the pain and suffering that everyone had felt. This time when they knew he was there, with the other man they could not read, the Loop was more circumspect and approached them with a plan. They saw the shots, they saw George dive into the water, watched Victor look around and eventually give up before driving the boat away with some Sea Sparrow missiles, four of them in a low riding boat and then a few feet from the edge of the dock, he disappeared.

When George came out of the water he was being watched, and Anne was seeing him in the Loop as the car she was in drove down Lake Road to the Devonport shoreline and the Naval Base where he stood. She could see him long before she arrived and the feelings in her were intense, multiplied and confusing because there was no feedback, no response and no understanding. She had been Looped in for a little over a week and she already felt like everything outside of it hurt her when it was not in it with her.

When she got out of the car everyone felt her elation and her rush at the shock in his eyes, because everyone could tell that it was a good reaction, not a bad one. This was what love looked like from the outside, they could all experience it in the Loop and know it, feel it and it would not be deceptive it was as honest an emotion as you could get. This was surprising and unpredictable and therefore the power in it was unbelievable, Anne thought she may faint but one point eight million hands steadied her in unison.

When he spoke she recognised her own name in his voice. She could not speak to him directly, but she had not come alone, the Loop had prepared and used the new connection they had made, the singularly unique member of the Loop who had never been infected with the Babel, but was not immune to it or the Loop.

Benny was standing next to her and he spoke as she thought the only thing she and the others could make sense of.

“Hello George.”