Communications Breakdown, page 13
The online world opened like a forbidden book.
Reader, I googled him.
The low hill the church stands on is a mound of glacial till, debris from the mile-high ice that carved the glen. A band of deciduous trees, birch and beech mostly, separates it from the nearest houses. The freshwater loch the hill and the houses overlook has a crannog—a tiny artificial island like a stranded stand of trees—in the middle: thousands of years older than the church, many more thousands younger than the hillock. The mountains, hundreds of millions of years older yet, wall it to north and south, and their flanks shelter it east and west. Along the far side of the loch is the old railway line; on this side pylons, one of them toppled, and three wind turbines that still spin. On a more distant hillside is a phone mast, felled.
Helen brings us to a halt in a siding cut from more of the same glacial till, like a spoil heap of rubble and gravel left over from road-building. Ten meters beyond it is the unpaved road leading up to the church. The silence is broken only by a few bleats of sheep and caws of crows, and from farther away the lowing of a cow.
Helen gives me a grim smile. “That cow’s been milked. Means there’s somebody around to milk it.”
“But not going out if they can help it.”
She nods. “They might not even know the danger comes from using a phone. And they can’t use one here anyway, with the mast down. Christ, what a mess.”
“We might even be the bringers of good news.”
“Ha! Knock on doors and say it’s safe to come out?”
“More shotguns and rifles behind those doors than I’d care to chance.”
“Uh-huh.” She looks around again. “Shall we?”
We wind up the windows, clamber out, and slide the doors to. Helen slings on her backpack and walks around the van, locking the doors one by one. After a final check around, we walk up to the church. I carry the carbine over my shoulder, as if casually. Helen has a big knife on her belt. We stay alert.
No one is more self-righteous than a teenage boy who thinks he has his parents on the moral back foot. Few embarrassing memories are more tedious to recount than the resulting confrontations. I’ll take these as read, and move to the consequences. These did not include my father mending his ways.
The problem, as he saw it, was that our cover story was too transparent. He decided to replace his thin tissue of lies with walls of solid stone. At that time there was a thing for pop-up shops: businesses that opened for a short time in unused retail premises. Pandemic, recession, and war had ensured that there were lots of unused shop fronts on every high street, and plenty of scrabbling small businesses to seek opportunity there. My father thought bigger.
He opened a pop-up church.
It was in an unused church building on a back street. For a while it had been a carpet warehouse, but that business had failed. Nobody was opening new pubs or nightclubs that year, or the next. For five years the building had stood empty, with grass growing from cracks in the paving around its steps. The rent was derisory, almost nominal; I think the landlord or property developer was desperate for someone, anyone, to occupy the building, prevent its further deterioration, and avoid recent legislation against keeping properties empty for too long.
One Saturday not long after my fight with him, our father took me and Melanie to a DIY store. We carried small tins of paint, brushes, sheets of sandpaper, dust masks, and coveralls around a couple of corners, and there it was.
He jangled keys. “Our church!”
Melanie clapped her hands.
While he pottered about inside, Melanie held a stepladder, which I stood on. I sanded off the old sign and gave it a fresh coat of black gloss. While it dried, we joined our father for a tea break in the vestry, a poky room piled with carpet offcuts and slightly foxed Bibles and hymnbooks. That done, my father and I held the stepladder while Melanie used a small paintbrush to inscribe the white lettering.
THE CHURCH OF THE BOOK
Sundays: Closed
Wednesday, 7:00 p.m.: Weekly meeting
Minister: Jason Rawlins, MA, PhD
“Very neat,” Dad said, as we all stepped back to admire it. “Well done, Melanie!”
“Nice touch with the qualifications,” I jeered. “Where did you get them from?”
“Edinburgh University.” He gave me a sharp look. “What did you expect—some degree mill?”
“Well, yes,” I admitted. “But that just makes it worse, them being real degrees.”
“Makes what worse?”
“The waste.” I scowled at him. “A man with a doctorate, working in a garden center!”
“It’s not Dad who’s to blame,” Melanie said. “It’s society’s loss.”
He knew and I knew it was his loss too, and his blame. He frowned at me and smiled at Melanie. “According to the books in there, God set the first man to work in a garden. I could do worse.”
And you did, I thought, but I kept that to myself. Melanie knew the church was an invention, of course, but she wasn’t ready for the full truth yet. Our father led us back inside and set us to work sweeping the floor and dragging stacks of chairs out of a storage cupboard. We wiped dust off them and set them in concentric semicircles, with a single chair facing them from the center. I thanked God or whoever that the last congregation had been advanced enough to dispense with pews.
True to the notice, the first meeting was held the following Wednesday evening. The congregation consisted of me, Melanie, our mother, and three men, two of whom seemed shifty and struck me at once as creeps. The third, young and fit and with short fair hair and a frank, open face, was so obviously a cop that I almost laughed. My father took the central chair.
“The first commandment of the Church of the Book,” he said, “is that we don’t talk about why we’re here. I assume that all of you”—he glanced at the frank-faced young man—“are here because you are excommunicate, or are sympathetic to those of us who are. I don’t want to hear your stories, and I’m not going to give you mine.” Good move, that. He looked around, smiling. “This is not Excommunicates Anonymous. Sharing is not this church’s mission. Its mission is something quite different. It is to preserve books. Because books will be next! You know which books I mean. I’m not talking about books illegal to possess; that’s a different matter. I’m talking about books that are not banned, but whose online versions are quietly taken down. Their physical versions are unavailable in public libraries without drawing unwanted attention to the borrower or reader. Their surviving copies in private hands are fewer and fewer. You may have some of them—gathering dust! Let’s share not our stories—but our books! I’m sure I would despise the books some of you most treasure. Some of you might want to burn books that mean a lot to me. In other circumstances, perhaps you would. But not in this place! Not here! Any book brought here and entrusted to me will be kept safely, and consulted freely by any adult. This church will be a library. Its second and last commandment is that we do not burn books.” He was on his feet now. “Anyone who disagrees has no place in this church, though of course they remain welcome to listen. We may discuss these books, if we consider them worth discussing. That is all. That is the mission of the Church of the Book.”
The predictable discussion followed. Terrorist training manuals? Fascist propaganda? Pornography? “As long as it’s not illegal” was my father’s answer to everything. In the weeks that followed, I was surprised and appalled to find how much that covered. This filth, that trash, these lies were legal?
The congregation grew. The word spread slowly: by letters, by leaflets, by word of mouth. But spread it did.
There’s a low wall around the churchyard. The gate stands open, rusted in place. The grass is cropped short by sheep. Headstones are covered with moss and lichen; there have been no new burials here for decades, if not longer. But the sign beside the door is only weathered by a few years of droughts, downpours, and storms; it’s still legible. Black paint and white letters:
THE CHURCH OF THE BOOK
Sundays: Closed
Wednesday, 7:00 p.m.: Weekly meeting
Minister: Dr. Alexander Singh
“Found it!” I say.
Helen grins at me. “You had faith.”
The door is locked. Helen puts down her pack, takes out her tools, and makes short work of that. We step inside.
I met Helen online, when we were both nineteen. We’d probably never have met—she went to one of the city’s other universities—if we hadn’t both been online and in the same closed group: ExEx. It was for the children of excommunicates. Discussions were heated but guarded: everyone there was still careful of what they said online, and how far it might go. Despite that, she and I found we had a lot in common. Her parents had been members of the third or fourth congregation of the Church of the Book. It didn’t take us long to meet in real life.
“Your father’s basic fault,” she said, on our second date in the café, “is frivolity. He isn’t a fanatic for truth, or even for free speech. He doesn’t believe the lies the other side puts out.”
“And your parents do?”
Helen scoffed. “How could they, when the lies change all the time? No, they’re true believers at a deeper level than that. They’re onside for the other side, for God knows what reason. They think throwing out disinformation is like putting up flak: it doesn’t matter how many shots miss, as long as it keeps the bombers from getting through.” She shook her head. “Something like that. Jason Rawlins, though, he’s just too mentally lazy to sort things out for himself.”
I felt stung to remonstrance. “When we still bothered to argue . . . he would hit me with straight John Stuart Mill: that people who don’t know the other side of an argument don’t really know their own—no matter how foolish or misguided that other side may be. And that shutting people off from the other side’s propaganda in the war means that deep down, many people end up not even really believing our side’s news. Same with climate change, and—”
“No!” Helen leaned across the table. “That’s where you’re still wrong, Liam. You still think it’s an argument. An argument implies good faith, however mistaken one side or the other might be. And there’s just no good faith in what the other side puts out. There’s no equivalence between the bias, the distortion, even the deceptions in our mainstream media”—she smiled at her own cliché—“and the sort of reckless rubbish that gets pumped out by state media, demagogues and populists, and fossil fuel companies. That stuff is a weapon of war, and it has to be met by fighting it, not arguing with it.”
She won that argument, and she won me. In time, she won other arguments, in the profession we both chose. She formed a specialist group. When the next stage of the war came, we were ready. We had old vans with no fancy electronics, maps and compasses, carbines, and all the tools to finish the job.
Inside the church is a library. The pews are still there, but all the walls are lined with bookcases. I wander along them for a minute, seeing the familiar names of the Communists and the Fascists, the holocaust deniers, the climate change sceptics, the creationists, the racists and sexists, the antiwar right and the antiwar left. Lots of books about religious conflicts in India, from all different sides—the Sikh doctor, whoever he might have been, was clearly catholic in his choices. Alphabetical order: I find Rawlins next to Stalin, which makes me laugh. Neither would enjoy the other’s company, I’ll say that for them both.
Helen works the other side, then moves on to where I’ve just browsed. The smell of the accelerant becomes overpowering. She finishes up behind the pulpit.
“Ready?”
I nod. We go out. I toss in the match, and we wait to make sure the fire has taken hold. At the foot of the track back to the road, a tall middle-aged man stands with his arms folded, watching. He eyes the carbine, he clocks our uniforms. He nods as we pass.
“All the same,” he says, “he was a good man, the Sikh.”
7
Noise Cancellation
S.B. Divya
I live with an ever-present hum in my head, somewhere between the drone of a beehive and the crackle of above-ground power lines. It gets worse when I put on my jewels, but I can’t work without interfaces, and the stick-on devices aren’t as bad as the sprays and micropills. I’ve learned to endure the discomfort. A medical bot diagnosed me at age fifteen: electromagnetic hypersensitivity syndrome. EHS is rare, but there’s no treatment, and there’s not much that anyone can do about it thanks to the demands of modern society, so I learned to cope. No one told me that it might be hereditary.
Dyne was a fussy baby, but my wife and I shrugged it off as one of the many challenges of parenting. He smiled and laughed and played enough to balance out the screams and tears. Then he started preschool. He attends a cluster with the other children in our housing complex. The youngest children have a live teacher, but even they have to wear virtuality headsets and haptic gloves. On the first day, Dyne cried for so long that they sent him back to our apartment.
It’s been two months, and his tears have diminished to an hour—an hour that I spend daily at the cluster with him on my lap while the other children sit in circle time on their own, cheerfully engaged with their virtual environments. Then came yesterday.
As Dyne wound down to sniffles, I wiped his nose and cheeks and placed the most comfortable headset we could find over his head.
“It’s too loud,” he protested.
I shared his audio feed with mine. I hadn’t activated the educational program yet, and my earrings fed me silence, but I adjusted the volume down anyway. “Is that better?”
He shook his head, his face a picture of misery.
“What do you hear?”
“Buzz buzz, like a bee.”
And that’s when I finally made the connection. I powered his headset down. “How about now?”
“Better.”
Well, shit, I thought.
I’m taking a break while my code compiles and flipping through a paper magazine called Real Life when the advertisement catches my attention: Tired of wondering if anyone-someone-everyone is watching? Worried that your thresholds failed to trap all the microcams? More interested in your energy levels than your tip jar? Then join us for a week-long, all-inclusive retreat in Peace Valley, Nevada! Under our canopy, you’ll find nature and serenity. Fully shielded buildings. No electronics. No network interfaces.
Ironically, I have to get more information by sending them a message, but how else is anyone going to communicate? They reply quickly. They have a room available during the week of Thanksgiving break. They welcome families with small children, and they even have someone on staff to do daycare while the adults go on long hikes or relax at the spa. I skim through the document they send me about the facilities. They’ve taken a lot of care to disconnect visitors, going so far as to have a networked hardline to their front office, the only way to communicate to the outside world. Visitors are required to take a flush pill upon arrival and sign a contract that they won’t consume any micropills during their stay. It sounds monastic. It sounds perfect.
Later that night as we lie in bed together, I flick the information over to Barya. Her gaze is fixed on her visual display. When I’m close to her like this, the discomfort in my head gets worse. What would it feel like to have it go away?
“What’s this?” she asks. A small fold appears between her lush, dark brows.
I explain what happened with Dyne the day before and my theory.
Her frown turns into a skeptical quirk. “I think you might be jumping to conclusions. It sounds to me like he’s taking a little more time than the other kids to adjust to preschool, and even if he does have EHS, he’ll learn to live with it, like you did.” She pats my thigh. “Besides, I’ve got a big deadline the week after Thanksgiving. I can’t spend that week without network access.”
“It was never as bad for me as it is for him. It’s just a week, Barya. I want to try it in case it makes a difference.”
She stands and goes to the sink. As she removes her smartlenses, she says, “If it helps, then what? Are we going to live off-grid permanently? This is ridiculous, Ani. Let’s go somewhere fun if you want to get away for the break. I bet you he’ll be great as long as he’s not at school every day.”
Her attitude snaps me back to every dismissive medical appointment in my past. “You don’t get it,” I say. “If you can’t come, we’ll just go without you.” The words slip out before I’m conscious of them.
She pauses before turning out the lights. “Fine.”
It’s not fine at all, but my wall is up, and now hers is too, and neither of us is going to back down. We roll away from each other. I thought that having children was supposed to bring couples together, but ever since Dyne was born, we’ve drifted apart. Because I gave birth to him and because Barya loves biogenetics more than I love engineering, we agreed that I would do the primary parenting during the day, and Barya would take on the bread-winner role. In the evenings, she would give Dyne his dinner and bath and put him to bed while I got some part-time work done. We were two forward-thinking women, but we fell into traditional roles all too easily. I had hoped that this vacation would give us time to reconnect, but I’m too angry at Barya’s dismissive words to back down, and I really do want to find out if a place like Peace Valley can provide Dyne and me with relief.
Car rides are the worst. The convenience of not having to drive is entirely swamped by sitting in a box surrounded by electronics. I had a girlfriend in college whose dad collected and restored classic cars. She took me for a ride in one of them—a convertible—over winter break. I’ve never felt more alive and relaxed. If I had the time and money, I’d get one for myself. In the meantime, for any journey that’s longer than an hour, I medicate. I give Dyne a low dose of antihistamine so that we can both sleep through the bulk of the trip.
The car stops once for lunch, at a small town in the middle of the desert that’s mostly an outpost for travelers like us. When I wake up toward the end of the second leg, we’re in a forest. It’s dry, not lush, but when I open the windows, the air is cool and smells like dusty pine. Dyne stirs and whimpers.
