by Terri Reid
“Before—not before you were born, but before you were old enough to remember—people talked about similar things. Smaller things, but otherwise the same. But we knew that, for the most part at least, these things weren’t true. Or had an explanation that we could understand.”
“And now?”
“Now we never know what the hell is real. The world used to be a lot more…boring, I guess. Boring, but in a good way. A bit safer. More comprehensible.”
“Mmm,” Rachel said. “So.” She paused. “The Kids. There wasn’t anything like them, before?”
A few people sitting at the same long cafeteria table softly cleared their throats and slid a little further down.
“No,” Bob said. He brought another spoonful of cereal halfway up to his mouth. “Well….” He stared into space for the barest of moments. “No.” The spoon went into his mouth.
“Aw, come on!” Rachel said. “Tell me!”
“They aren’t anything you need to concern yourself with.”
“Considering that I could be joining them one day whether I concern—”
“Don’t!” He put his spoon down with a sharp clatter. “Don’t—just don’t.”
Neither of them said anything for a while.
“Look,” she said. “I know—I know you’re scared. You and mom. And everyone else with kids.”
Bob said nothing.
“But don’t I deserve to understand what might happen to me one day?”
He sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. He pushed his bowl of cereal away.
“If it manifests, it begins to do so around sixteen,” Bob said, keeping his voice low. “Give or take.”
“So,” she said, her voice low. “Next year.” She pressed her lips tightly together.
He put a hand on her shoulder. “It’s the hardest year. But you’ll be fine.”
She tried to smile. “Keep going.”
A few people at the other end of the table left. Some others started giving Bob sideways glances.
“The subject shows an abnormally improved vocabulary. They won’t notice anything, and those around them won’t either, for a time. It starts off small, a few uncommon words here and there. Then more and more until they start sounding like a dictionary. It’s usually not until the last few weeks that it becomes obvious. And I’ve always considered that a small blessing. A short time to contemplate.
“Their use of the words starts to become strange. Odd or idiosyncratic usage, things like that. We can normally make sense of what they’re saying, albeit with difficulty, almost up to the end. At that point it devolves into nonsense, even more nonsense than what the kids in the city spout. The end stage is usually accompanied by some seizing, but not always. Occasionally they just pass out.”
She was quiet, staring at her father and hardly blinking. Perhaps a little pale.
“After that, they’re gone.” His voice cracked at ‘gone,’ and he stopped. He licked his lips and swallowed, then continued.
“We’re not sure how much of themselves they remember. They don’t engage with us while they’re here. At the beginning, we tried to restrain them, keep them from leaving. But they fought. Wrested themselves from strong hands, struggled violently against every restraint we could find, and attacked anyone trying to keep them from going where they somehow knew they needed to go. Yelling their mish-mash of speech through all of it, voices warped with remarkable rage.
“So we let them go, then, as we do now. Partly because it’s futile to spend so much time and effort keeping them here without unintentionally injuring them, partly because of how…difficult it was to see them like that. They find their way to the others. We don’t know how, but they make it there, and safely. And they’re calm when they get there. The picture of calm. Eerie, sometimes. We bring food to them every few weeks, to help them along, and they’re all smiles and indifference. No foaming anger or flailing punches.
“Cognitively, they function. On some kind of level, at least. They talk to each other. We don’t know if they’re actually articulating anything to one another, but by every appearance they seem to communicate. They manage to coordinate themselves somehow, because they survive together. They gather food, they prepare shelter, and nothing gets neglected.
“They occupy themselves in their down time as well. They chat, far more than could possibly be necessary just to figure out who’s going to do what and when. It’s impossible to tell what they’re talking about, of course, but sometimes from the tone, or the inflection, or the affect, you can get a feeling for the conversation. Very engaged, whatever it is they’re saying.” He trailed off.
Still pale and enrapt, Rachel asked, “Tell me about the sculptures.”
He smiled. “Yes, of course you’ve heard of that. There isn’t much to tell, really. More often than not, they have some kind of structure in progress. Scrap metal, wood, salvaged furniture, plastics, whatever they can get their hands on that isn’t necessary for survival, they put into it. Strange, misshapen things that don’t look to be attempting to capture the likeness of anything. Abstract. Building for the sake of building, or some attempt at art, or something else, we don’t know. Still, they’re definitely…interesting to look at.” A few images flashed in his mind of the twisted shapes, full of sharp points or edges that almost seemed to attempt at some recognizable form, but ultimately dissolved into nothing. He shook them away.
“Once they’ve finished a structure, they destroy it,” he continued. “Tear it down or, more frequently, burn it. And they all gather around it and watch it go….” He trailed off again, putting the tip of his thumb up under his chin.
She waited, but he didn’t start again. “What else?” she said.
He didn’t answer.
“Dad?”
“What? Oh. That’s it, really. We don’t know very much, to be honest. When a new case becomes apparent, we’ll study the patient for as long as we can. Do some brain scans, if possible. We’ve gathered a lot of data, but whatever this is, it doesn’t seem to play by the rules. The way the rules were before, anyway. As we understood them. Maybe there were never any rules to begin with.”
She didn’t press him for any more, and they picked at the rest of their breakfast in silence. The sideways glances from fellow breakfast-goers stopped after a bit, but every so often someone would shift uncomfortably in their seats.
“They really don’t look like anything?” she asked after a while. “The things they build, I mean.”
“No.” He put his spoon down, his appetite evaporated. “Sometimes we see things in them. The way you see shapes in the clouds. Or anywhere. Just the human brain trying to make sense of random input.”
*
Voices crackled out of the speakers.
“Rococo splash rococo gnash down preternatural glossy sieve of rococo. Patter spots the pattern lump rococo to the lingering apple of dye down rococo.”
“Excavate grounds preaching towering rinds toward excavated slumber. Wear brake streak with moss flute to the excavation.”
“Yin.”
“Balter and fry?”
“Rococo rococo rococo down drive petal shute rococo leaf dreads rococo pine.”
“Numinous rumblings from parted swords in numinous.”
“Rococo rococo.”
“Anapest of prodigious hearth to wasted anapest smiles on top of winter.”
“Rococo drives rococo plinth for rococo blizzards doomed toward forward hives.”
“Hmm.”
“Mm.”
Bob and Phil sat at their posts, still and listening. Bob with thumb under chin, Phil with hands folded in lap.
“It’s obvious she’s found her keyword,” Phil said. The speakers still spewed the kids’ mangled English.
“Yes.”
“But the frequency is strangely high.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“Which we’ve seen before. Just not this high, as far as I can remember. And definitely not persisting for this long. A
nd on a few occasions, the other kids have said ‘rococo’ back, almost like they’re responding. Or catching on to something she’s saying.”
“Right.”
“Bob? Are you listening?”
Bob blinked and looked at Phil. “Hmm?”
“What do you think it means?”
He started to tap his chin. “It might not mean anything. Just because it’s new doesn’t mean it’s significant.”
“What if it’s not? The number of cases has gone down drastically. The protocols have worked, or something else has. Maybe our children’s minds have just gotten stronger, somehow. I don’t know. But whatever going on, what if It’s….” Phil hesitated.
“What?”
“…Mutating. Changing itself. Trying to overcome immunity.”
“You make it sound like it knows it’s being resisted.”
“Is that really so crazy?”
“…No.”
“Exactly. I—”
“Rococo,” came Rachel’s voice over the speaker.
*
“What do you think?”
“It’s…a whale?”
Rachel grimaced. “Of course it’s a whale!” She waved a hand at the small sculpture she had placed on Bob’s desk. “What do you think about it? Is it good? Is it bad?”
“It’s…it looks a little menacing, actually. Is that what you were going for?”
She sighed. “Sort of. But less menacing, more…imposing. Monolithic. Working in small scale makes that all but impossible, though. And I know we can’t really spare a whole lot for non-essential stuff. It’s still frustrating though.”
He was quiet for a few seconds as he scrutinized the sculpture. “Why a whale, though?”
She shrugged. “It’s supposed to be, like, Leviathan. I was skimming through some of the books in the library. Something about a huge, unstoppable, powerful thing just kind of resonated with me, I guess. A big mysterious thing that can’t be comprehended. The idea stuck in my head. It felt relevant, I think. To the world today. You know, with everything going on.” She looked away.
Bob smiled. He tousled her hair. “Well,” he said, “you’re well on your way to tapping into the zeitgeist, if nothing else. That’s valuable to an artist.”
She tried to fix her hair with little success. “Not if it’s the last zeit to ever have a geist.”
He took a breath to say something, but stopped. He chewed his bottom lip. “Maybe. Or maybe it’s more important now than ever to leave something behind besides ruined wonders and broken tools.”
“Why? Anything we leave will be long gone by the time anything else comes this way. Aliens or otherwise. We are the only things that give what we do any meaning.”
“Have you been reading Nietzsche again?”
“Dad.”
“Fine, fine. Alright, look. It’s going to take more than a few ghouls and ghosts to finally do us in. You’ve been reading what history texts we have here, right? Plagues, meteors, global warming, nuclear weapons, and one super-volcano. We almost didn’t make it, did you know that? No one’s really sure of the exact number, but the ancient human population once dipped down to somewhere under ten-thousand. Some radical estimates of a mere thousand. And before the Collapse, we were over nine billion strong. We’re survivors.”
“That’s only true until it isn’t.”
“That’s why you need to be positive. Tenacious. Ready to bite and scratch to earn the future of the species. We will do what it takes to persist, even if that means having to radically change. We should always be hopeful we can continue on along the path we started, the way we are now, but if we can’t, if we continue to be beaten back…. Well, then the ones who survive the culling will get to decide what the species becomes. Even if that means we have to become monsters to survive monsters.”
“Now who’s been reading darkly realist philosophy?”
“Evolution doesn’t have any preferences, Rachel. What becomes useful to survival, survives.”
*
“Bob. Bob! Bob come on you need to hear this.”
Bob was woken from sleep by furious, violent shaking. He mumbled a handful of curses, nearly falling out of his chair. Satisfied, Phil went back to his own chair, pulled up as close to the speakers as it had ever been.
“What,” Bob said, after righting himself on his own chair.
“Just listen.”
“Rococo,” Rachel’s voice said.
“Balter?” said, of course, Balter.
“Numinous post!”
“Rococo.”
Bob frowned and his brow furrowed. “Sounds like—”
Phil shushed him. Bob continued to listen.
“Balter post!” said the speakers.
“Rococo,” Rachel said, her voice slow and deliberate.
“Excavate!”
“Rococo,” burbled over the speakers, again. But it wasn’t Rachel.
Bob sat up straighter in his chair.
“Mmm, Rococo,” said Rachel.
“Rococo,” said Balter.
“Excavate?”
“Numinous?”
“Rococo,” Rachel and Balter said together, in an almost rhythmic fashion. If Bob’s attention wasn’t entirely focused, his mind might have drifted to the thought of a pair of singers harmonizing.
“Rococo!” said Excavate.
“Hmm! Rococo!” said Numinous.
By now Bob had pulled his chair up and was staring at the speakers with the same look on his face as Phil had had from the start. “But. What? How. Why.”
“Yeah,” said Phil. “This has been going on for maybe…half an hour? Granted, it’s slow. But she seems to convert a small group, starting with one, then that sort of cascades, and then she moves on to the next. I would have shaken you sooner, but at first I wasn’t sure it was really happening. I thought maybe sleep deprivation had finally started to catch up to me.”
“It’s recording, right?”
“Of course.”
“Rococo!” came from the speakers, from a multitude of voices. Bob couldn’t discern how many or which of the kids it came from.
“Should we do something?” Bob asked.
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Call in? Take it back to the others?”
Phil scratched his temple. “I don’t know what good it could do,” he said. “We’d probably do more good just observing a while longer. See if it persists.”
“Persists?”
“They seem to stick to rococo once she…’convinces them’ I guess? But it’s barely been an hour. There’s nothing to say it couldn’t die away. Fade out. Let’s just watch for now. First hand, out the windows here. See what happens.”
“Yeah,” Bob said. “See what happens.”
*
Bob knocked on the door frame. “Rachel?”
“Acknowledge patriarch.”
He walked into the infirmary. Rachel was the only occupant, so she got the bed closest to the door. The doctor and nurses were out; they had the room to themselves.
“I came to…I just wanted to…soon.” He rubbed his eyes. “It will…probably be soon.”
“Prophecy has been vindicated.” She sat on the infirmary bed, hands folded in her lap. Still but for the faintest of shivering.
He pulled a chair up to her bed. “I’m staying here.” He took one of her hands in his. “Nothing is dragging me away.”
She squeezed his hand. “Condemned exile unsettled at gates.”
He wasn’t surprised to find her eyes were dry. He had suspected she had done her crying in the days before, in her room. Where he couldn’t see.
“I—” His voice cracked. He cleared his throat. “I’m sorry.”
“The people do not understand Galileo.”
“This shouldn’t be happening. I should be able to fix this. Nearly a decade of observation, of theories, of work—I should know how it works. Know how to stop the gears, make it go backwards. But I don’t. I only just barely have som
e concept of what it is, and it’s not enough.”
He leaned forward on the bed, head hanging. “Every day I’d come back to you and your mother, watching you grow up, wondering ‘Will she need me to save her? Will I be ready if the time comes?’ And then we lost—lost your mother—”
She squeezed his hand again. A few solitary wet spots had appeared on the sheets below his face.
“Ragnarok,” she said.
Bob smiled, just a little bit. They sat in comfortable silence.
*
Bob and Phil stared blankly out the window at the kids. The intersection was sparsely populated now; the kids had begun to move further into the city.
“How old is William, again?” Bob asked.
“Three.”
It was a few minutes before either of them said anything else. The kids outside were busy working on their latest sculpture. It was the most solid—and simple—of their efforts to date: a four-sided, tapering column that ended in a point. It looked remarkably like one of the obelisks of ancient Egypt, and Bob wasn’t so sure it was a coincidence.
“That’s the youngest so far, right?”
Phil slowly blinked. “Yeah.”
Silence, again.
“How—how many is that, now?”
Phil scratched his temple. “Under the threshold age? Or, what was the threshold age. I don’t know. A dozen, maybe? Two? More? Less?”
“All starting with rococo. Hardly any build up, and scarcely any seizures at the conclusion. It’s like it fully colonized a single word. Worked out the kinks.”
Phil grunted. The kids abandoned their obelisk, most likely to find more material.
“Do you think,” Bob said. “Do you think it was always headed toward this? Or did something change?”
“All I know is that things started feeling weird once your daughter showed up at the kids’ intersection.”
“You got something you want to say to me, Phil?”
Phil closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. “No,” he said. “No, I’m sorry, I’m just…tired. Scared. Empty.”
