The Testimony. James Smythe
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Название: The Testimony
Автор: James Smythe
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Приключения: прочее
isbn: 9780007427918
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Andrew Brubaker, White House Chief of Staff, Washington, DC
POTUS shouted over the static, Find out what the fuck this is, so I called Meany in R and D, even as it was still going on. We were in a car headed back toward Andrews, to get on the flight that we had abandoned only hours before, and the driver turned around instinctively, because he knew that we weren’t going anywhere. We’d had some intel from a source that it was – and I stress, intel is rarely accurate, never 100 per cent accurate, and frequently completely wrong, because it’s spun out of gossip and rumour itself, for the most part – but we’d had intel that it was some sort of weapon. I had that on a piece of paper handed to me as I got into the car, and I was expecting a briefing on it on the plane, so I knew next to nothing. Meany’s name was on the report, so I called him as soon as it started. Tell me this isn’t a weapon, I said, and he said, Sir, listen; this sounds like a warm-up. Bear in mind, I’ve got Meany in one ear, the damn static inside my head, so I’m shouting. It’s not warming up, it’s here, now, because I can hear it. Are you measuring this, taking readings, finding out where the fuck it’s coming from? Yeah, but there’s nothing, sir, he said. We’ve got oscilloscopes and digital audio stuff, and nothing’s getting picked up, but we can all hear it. And it’s happened twice now, so that might indicate that it’s warming up, or that the first time was a warm-up. I don’t know.
None of us knew. In the FBI – I came from the FBI, FBI to secret service desk job to politics, like that was a normal route – there’s a rule about serial killers. First time they kill it’s to see how it felt, or because it was an accident. The second kill was because they found something in the first that they liked, and they wanted to see if they could recreate that feeling, that high. It can still be a coincidence, and it’s not quite a pattern.
I heard POTUS on the phone to the First Lady, checking on her and the kids, and then … We know it wasn’t static now, right? It was that garbled, fragmented noise that you get when you drive out of a tunnel with the car radio on, as it becomes clearer, picks up the signal again. It suddenly went from noise to words. My Children, it said, and then faded back into the static as quickly as it came. Our driver, I forget his name, he looked like he was going to hurl. Pull over, I screamed at him, and he did. The agents in the vehicles flanking us ran from their cars, swarmed ours, and I threw open my door. Get him to the White House, I said, and then I saw POTUS, and he looked absolutely terrified. I’d seen this man face down talks about nuclear disarmament, negotiate peace treaties, win an election, for God’s sake, and he always looked calm. That was how he was going to be remembered, we always said during the campaign: the calm President, the cool one, the collected one.
In the FBI, it was one kill for a mistake, two because they liked it. We used to sit in the offices and pray that a third body never turned up, because if it did … Well, then you’ve got a real problem on your hands.
Mark Kirkman, unemployed, Boston
I was getting ready to leave the bar – it was still open, daylight outside, or it just hadn’t shut, maybe, because Max was just as interested in watching the TV as the rest of us – when The Broadcast came, the My Children message. I didn’t know about it at first; I noticed that everybody in the bar suddenly went completely silent, and then I saw it on the TV, as the hosts did exactly the same. Can you hear this? one of them asked. Oh my God, can you hear this? Everybody had that same vacant look on their faces, and I was out of the loop again. I still didn’t hear a thing, and then it was over.
Simon Dabnall, Member of Parliament, London
That first day, we changed, as people. I am all too well aware how terribly melodramatic that sounds, but it’s a truth. Whatever it was that spoke to us during that first Broadcast, everybody – or nearly everybody, I always forget about those few that didn’t hear it – but nearly everybody was joined in something common. Regardless of the truth, it joined us for those brief moments that we were listening to it. If there was any doubt in the minds of the religious, that opening gambit, My Children … it was powerful.
I was hanging around on the South Bank when it happened. It was just starting to rain, and all of a sudden we heard it, and as soon as it finished, there was this cheer, as if we had finally won the World Cup or something, coming from St Paul’s. I couldn’t even begin to head over there, because the streets were so busy, and everybody started rushing that way, as if they were trying to make up for all those years that they spent not praying. I stayed where I was, because I’m rational; because My Children could be the call of any one of billions of parents, not necessarily a deity.
I mean, maybe we’d just tapped into somebody’s angry mother, for a second?
Audrey Clave, linguistics postgraduate student, Marseilles
As soon as we heard the static start up again, I tried to write down every detail that I could hear, that I could pick out from it. I tried to write down the phonetics of the static, you see, to try and see if there was anything in it, running them by Patrice as they came out, to see if he agreed with them. He was off his game, I thought, but he did it, helped me out, and by the time that the voice spoke the page was full of noises and sounds, and then we heard My Children, and I wrote that down as well, and then it ended. We didn’t say anything for ages, not for the longest time, and then I realized that we had the punch line, finally; and maybe the stuff before it, the noises, the static, that was the joke, or the puzzle? I got the team around, said that we had to work on it, but all I really wanted to do was to call my parents (but I knew that they would be at church). It took us a minute or so before somebody remarked that the words were in English. We all understood English perfectly, so I didn’t really notice it, but it was English words that I’d written on the page, and English words that The Broadcast spoke. So then it became, well, why was it in English? Where did it come from?
Jacques Pasceau, linguistics expert, Marseilles
I laughed, and said that if it was English, it clearly wasn’t God, because He would speak in, I don’t know, Aramaic, probably, or something that we didn’t understand. (Or, even better, something that everybody in the whole world understood, their own language, like a magic trick.) Audrey snorted at that, because she wanted to believe that it was God so badly. Maybe it’s because most of the people who pray to Him now speak English? she said. So He chose that language to meet the majority of the people.
The most spoken language is Mandarin, I said, Why didn’t He choose that? Well, maybe He’s not Buddha, Audrey said. Maybe He’s actually our God?
Dominick Volker, drug dealer, Johannesburg
I was in the back of a car being taken to, I don’t know, one of the Jo’burg kêrel houses or other, I forget which. I had been caught taking my money from one of my dealers in Lavender Hill – well out of my usual area, but he had a lot on him, so I had to go down there – and they were taking me off, hoping to pin something on me afterwards. It wouldn’t stick, so I wasn’t worried. There was too much chaos that day for anything to stick.
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