Day 150 - Babel - Chapter 46 (2225 words)

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BABEL

By Wayne Webb

CHAPTER 46

In the last twenty four hours there were two million new people in the Loop and the signal grew in strength through the thirty three new nodes that the new arrivals from New Zealand managed to connect with. The remaining eleven with had joined with Philip and strengthened the signal locally to Bob the Pilot and Evan. Another eighteen had joined as Evan had gotten off the Boat in Parramatta and put in a public area while the Watch were deciding where to put him to be watched, and instead they got sixteen people all acting together to free themselves and walk away. Evan and his new friends went straight back to the boat and came back to where he has started, arriving as the stronger signal was now drawing the Aussie Babel together into a central area, the former Charles Kingsford Smith Airport. Bob had the hardest job but as the other two started drawing Babel towards them the people guarding him were distracted and he managed to find four more people, who were less mobile and had not left at the same pace as every other able bodied person in that location. He connected them and together they found a vehicle and went in the opposite direction in case anything went horribly wrong at the airport.

People were streaming in, taking boats and vehicles and coming in as close as possible to the airport. They hit the motorways and main roads and filled them with people like they had gathered in downtown Auckland. The Babel had to get to the Motorways and highways and connected there, standing in 2 person wide lines and stretching for miles and filling up rapidly. The roads began to spiderweb outwards from the airport as the Babel flooded into the arterials with new found purpose. They could not communicate with them, the signal that was being routed through them was from the ships, the Host or Hosts whatever they were, Philip had been on the ship and seen no one and got sense of individuality from being there or hearing from them directly. Even the direct messages, few and far between though they were, felt like they came from THEM, not from a person or single entity. It was all thoughts and feelings of we, us and them. Plurality that was no difference now.

They could not tell how many people there were until they made the connecting touch and brought them into the Loop. For now they could sense that there were crowds and crowds of people coming, the drama in the warehouse was over and the masses were thronged peacefully, looking as benign and unthreatening as possible despite the nervousness of the trigger happy Watchmen who had so far taken no action against the Babel.

Philip did not need to connect to understand the tension in them, he could see it through his own eyes where he stood and the armed men that stood between the nodes and the as yet unconnected Babel that were only a few hundred metres away. They could have run, made a break for it and connected one two of the roads that connected to the airport, from that strand the others would Loop in and then the City would be awash with connected Babel. Philip had plans and opportunities running through his mind as he could hear now with great clarity the majority of the imagery and feelings from his homeland across the sea. The signal was still not as pure as it had been standing in Auckland without the body of water dampening the connection, but it was still there. Now that there were thirty six connected that message was clearer.

Do no harm. It was the Hippocratic oath and while there were no words the sense of that principle and the protective feelings in engendered in people was what floated to the top, heavy with caduceus pictures running about in conjunction with the feelings he felt it was clear to Philip that the Loop and he himself was not interested in the fringe suggestions of do or die, death or glory runs to make the Loop. He had to negotiate with the armed men and put them at their ease and reduce the threat.

He could see the crowd gathering and they all stood stock still awaiting the Nodes who would come and connect them, they did not know that yet, they were just waiting for the next step and then when it happened they would understand and be Looped into the knowledge, the shared history, memory and oversight of their Kiwi cousins, first in and a stepping stone to bigger lands and larger populations.

Philip was not the first to see it, and the person who saw it didn't actually process what he was seeing either, but the Loop, with the stronger signal and the hundreds of thousands of eyes processing with them they picked it up first. One of the people, the talking Few that were armed and organised, one of them was blanked out, swaying where she stood and ignoring the world around her. The other members of the armed guards had not noticed, the Nodes who stood with Philip were scanning the crowd and adjusting to the sudden influx of information and sensation to their brains. Someone saw it though, the stiffness in her limbs, the rigidity of her pose when others around her moved, jittery and nervous in readiness for whatever would come next. Once it became obvious that she was being driven, the logical conclusion was drawn, that she was not immune like the bulk of the remaining Few, she was like Benny and had avoided the virus in the first round.

Now they knew what to do, they needed to connect to her, make her the thirty seventh Node and then she could convince, explain or reason with the others who stood there with guns trained on them. One of them needed to get to the girl and then it would be plain sailing. The oldest of the group, was a man who was far from frail but he had a trustworthy face and he knew that he had a kind of rapport with one of the armed guards, they had a sign language worked out that they had used in previous jobs, which is why we had often been on these little excursions to help out. He did not know the boy's name or much about him except that they had a small bond that could forma bridge.

He stood in front of the boy his hands held out open palmed and saw only fear and mistrust in his eyes. He kept the gaze, the hundreds of thousands of minds at his back willing him to stay the course and show his innocence and the trustworthiness that he had built. The young man stood his ground, but something in the way he looked at him was working and he lowered his gun. The older man Lars, raised both hands, palms still outwards and then nodded and pointed at the girl indicating that he would go to her, possibly to help. The young man, shouted something to the others and they turned to look at the girl, the tension rising again as they suspect foul play or that the Babel acting so strangely are to blame.

Lars takes a step forwards his hands held outwards again but gets the butt of a gun to his temple, knocking him backwards and down to his knees, blood seeping from a cut in his forehead. Groggily he gets up and holds his hands against the shouting and points again at the girl. More screaming of anger and fear from the men with guns, but the younger man is arguing with them and shouting back, apparently defending the old man he knew and liked, who was now bleeding and swaying unsteadily on his feet. His patience thin the younger man pushes the others aside and helps the man to his feet, lurching him forward as he does so.

Lars is within inches of the girl and he shifts his weight and falls forward as if fainting and catches himself on her as the men surrounding him yell and protest, pulling him upwards and away from the girl.

Michelle Lee was immobilised by a buzzing sound in her head, she felt the need to move to be somewhere but she didn't know where. Her legs wanted to move, her body wouldn't do what she wanted it to. There were people around her but she could not really hear them. She had been in the Watch for a few weeks, no one had really known that she was not affected by the Babel, she lived out in the country in an Artistic Commune and had been on her own private walkabout in the Bush when the first round of the Babel hit, she avoided the flu symptoms. She continued on with he Communal life even after they lost the ability to speak and read, though she still could it was a useless skill without someone to converse with. Reading was ok for her to do things to keep them working and running their home, as much as possible anyway. Eventually they ran out of things and she joined the camps and refuges in the City, coming down out of the mountains and the bush above Sydney well out west and she worked with the Babel camps, joining in and helping with farming and crops, even working with kids.

It was a long while before she came into contact with a member of the Watch, and quite by accident that she realised that they could talk too. None of the guards usually bothered with words or instructions to the Babel, and Michelle just accepted the way things were, learning to farm and cook, care for kids all by just doing what others were doing, not being told but experiencing the lesson to learn it. She was cutting some vegetables for a meal when she slipped and stabbed her fingertip with he knife, not a big cut but enough to make her swear.

She was heard, she was found soon after dressing her cut she had the first conversation she had with another person in years. After that it was a whirlwind of being brought into the Watch, shown the ropes and given some training with weapons and dealing with the Babel. She was not interested in being a guard, brandishing a weapon of any kind of doing any of the things that the Watch did. It was necessary to contribute what she could so she got into food production and help organise the plantings and the distribution of basic foods to the parts of town where people were less able to look after themselves, the elderly and the infirm, the ones that survived the initial shock or had grown old enough or become sick enough in the intervening years.

When the plane landed she was shanghaied almost into coming along to bolster numbers for the welcoming committee, she had been nearby and was another warm body that they would have behind them when whoever or whatever departed from the plane, something that no one had seen in years.

She was dazed, confused and disconnected from reality, the incessant noise and sensation in her head was debilitating, she felt this need and drive to move but had no sense of direction or deep purpose, so she stayed put. Until Lars touched her, his weathered, calloused hand made a firm imprint on her shoulder and then the veil fell away and she was in the Loop.

The noise in her head was suddenly the loudest thing in the world, but it was clear and precise, though she could now see, feel and hear everything and everyone in the locality that was in the Loop. In a few seconds of swaying and blinking she was brought up to speed and knew exactly what was going on. She felt and saw Lars from his own perspective as knees and arms stabbed into him, pressing him into the jagged an unforgiving edges of the road surface. She was in and now that vague sense without direction or intent was like a white hot light, intense and unavoidable, she knew exactly what to do.

“Get off of me! Him! Get off of him now!” She screamed, louder than she intended, but the volume of thought inside her had been dialed way up so she was overcompensating.

She tried explaining to the Watch about the Loop and the nine hundred thousand in the New Zealand and the Ships that hung in the Sky, but the prevailing though among them was that she had gone mad so she just ignored them and pushed a hole in the ranks, and pulled Philip and a few others through. She manhandled them until she got her way and in the confusion broke enough of the concentration that the Nodes, could all connect with the front edge of the lines of Babel, by walking the few short meters under the disoriented Watch.

Then everyone was in the Loop, and more were connecting and pouring in as the outer areas came closer to the Roads where they were all linked.