Strangled Silence

by Oisin McGann

  He beamed at his own joke. Tariq swore under his breath and looked out of the window for something more interesting to catch his attention.

  'No, we wanted to get more involved on a developmental level,' Scott went on. 'In fact, we were getting concerned about the poor state of education our new recruits were demonstrating when they joined up. And the program I'm going to tell you about is a result of years spent designing a way to correct this problem.

  'We have come up with a computer game that was originally intended to instruct in battlefield strategy, but we have since found to be extremely beneficial in education . . . in fact, in any area of teaching. We call this game program MindFeed. We think of it as . . . ammunition for the brain.'

  He grinned again. A number of the boys exchanged glances. This was the kind of education they were looking for.

  'Over the next few months,' Scott continued, 'you will be given the opportunity to take different classes through the playing of games on MindFeed: Maths, History, Science . . . but today we're going to start with Geography.

  'The point of all this is to improve your receptiveness to these subjects by making them fun. We all learn better when we're enjoying what we are doing, and boys in particular tend to thrive in a competitive environment. MindFeed will also improve your hand–eye coordination and will contribute to your computer skills.

  'Now, with Ms Maijani's permission, I'd like to take you all down to the computer room, where we'll set each of you up with a player identity.'

  Ms Maijani's permission was grudgingly given and there was a rush for the door as the boys raced to get to the computer room to nab the best PCs. Tariq was more interested than he wanted to admit, but as he went to follow the mob out of the room a hand pulled him back.

  'Tariq,' his teacher said. 'I'd wipe off that eyeliner before you join the class, if I were you. I don't think they approve of that kind of face paint in the army. What would your dad say?'

  'He'd say you're right; the army's got too many poofs already,' Tariq replied. 'But then he is a marine.'

  Ms Maijani burst out laughing and he made his escape before she could pull him up for his homophobic language.

  Amina was exhausted by the time she got home, so she was in no mood for one of Tariq's explosions of adolescent enthusiasm.

  'But you should see it, it's brilliant!' he told her excitedly. 'It's like taking your classes on a PlayStation! We played this Geography game where they picked countries at random from the syllabus, right? And you could choose to bomb places or drop aid parcels. But to make the drops in the right place, you had to learn about the country, so you could recognize the drop-zones. It was cool! I learned more in one class than I normally do in a month!'

  'I'm delighted for you,' Amina sighed, as she looked around the living room for the TV remote control.

  She noticed the remains of the eyeliner on his lids and made a mental note to keep her make-up under lock and key from now on. She had barely got in the door when Tariq had cornered her and had launched into his spiel. This was what she got for asking about his day. Switching on the TV, she flopped into an armchair, focusing her entire attention on a music programme, hoping her brother would get the hint.

  He didn't.

  'But they said this game was only one part of it,' Tariq went on. 'There's a driving game for Geography too, and a speedboat one. Tomorrow we're going to be doing Biology using a shoot-'em-up game. You have to name the parts you're hitting on the bad guys – y'know, like all the organs and stuff—'

  'That's gross!' Amina protested, turning the volume up.

  'That's what some of the other girls said, but they still want to try it,' he said, nodding. 'Then there's a counter-terrorism . . . er, spy-type game for some of the foreign languages and—'

  'OK, I get it, it's the best thing since sliced bread!' Amina snapped. 'Now quieten down or get lost, I'm trying to watch telly!'

  He sat on the arm of the couch, visibly pentup, and tried to watch the dishevelled guitar band wrangle music from their instruments. Music wound out of the entertainment system's waist-high speakers, fading from the indie band as the screen changed image into cello strings stirring as if deep beneath ocean waves. A jagged power chord tore across the melodic sound, shattering the soft intro as the latest hit from Absent Conscience, 'I Love Hurting You With Honesty', grated into the living room. Amina tutted and went to change the channel.

  'Oi!' Tariq cried. 'I like this one!'

  'It's rubbish!' she retorted.

  'How would you know? You don't even listen to their music! You switch off as soon as they come on!'

  Amina tossed the remote to him and strode out of the room. Behind her, in their harsh mixture of death metal and hip-hop, the self-proclaimed 'junk poets' snarled their opening lyrics:

  'You've hated me since the day I was born/Tried to drown my dreams, tried to send me to war/But you love me now 'cos you need my power/So I tighten my grip with each passing hour . . .'

  She grabbed her phone, dialling Dani's number as she headed upstairs to her room. Dani had her phone switched off. Amina scrolled down through her friends' numbers, but then gave up, deciding she didn't want to talk to anyone after all. She put on her stereo and started reading instead.

  Amina had grown out of her angry music phase and as the Absent Conscience bass beat pounded through the floor of her bedroom, interfering with her own tunes, she hoped Tariq would soon follow her example. She was surprised at his excitement over the army's 'learning game'. Tariq had rebelled against their father's hopes to raise another marine, expressing a complete lack of interest in all things military – but then, growing up on military bases took much of the idealism out of soldiering. Now her brother seemed determined to seek out every antisocial habit that would annoy his parents at home and make him an outsider in school.

  Whatever, she thought. He'll mellow out eventually. We all do.

  The news was filled with reports and debates on the War for Freedom. What had begun as a concerted campaign to wipe out Muslim extremists across the world had become a never-ending series of reactions to any revolutionary movement that didn't like Western foreigners meddling in their country's affairs. And those movements were growing steadily in number.

  Sinnostan featured regularly on the news reports. A barren, mountainous country, its deeply carved valleys and ridged hillsides were thought to offer hiding places to camps training terrorists, who then swarmed to Western Europe and the United States to do their worst. Its poverty-stricken people – the Sinnostanis, as they were known to the soldiers cursed with patrolling their godforsaken country – barely scratched a living from the unforgiving landscape. They were thought to be ripe for the mixture of religious extremism and fanatical nationalism that made the most dangerous revolutionaries.

  Ivor sat in his black-leather lounger and watched the reports. They didn't tell half the story. For a start, you couldn't get into the damn place. Half the roads were only passable by mule or packhorse. Making an assault on any of these camps meant hauling troops hundreds of miles across formidable terrain, which made them vulnerable to ambushes. Flying was a risky business too. Nowadays, every self-respecting mountain fighter carried a surface-to-air missile launcher or two.

  The mountains roasted you in summer and froze you in winter. The wind up there had to be experienced to be believed. Ivor still shivered at the memory of it cutting like knives through his parka on the rocky slopes of Myapin. It did have its advantages: apparently the cold could help keep casualties alive – they lost less blood when they were hypothermic.

  And there were plenty of casualties, but not so many that the politicians had to call it an all-out 'war'. With the fighting happening in small, savage, isolated clusters, less than a thousand soldiers had been flown home in body bags. Body armour that protected the torso meant there were more amputations than deaths – not that you saw much of that on the news. The government was a bit sensitive about images of men and women with missing limbs and many of t
he news agencies voluntarily censored their own footage. Ivor's hand went up to his right eye, touching the hard glass beneath his eyelids.

  One of the reasons the news organizations were so helpful was that it was almost impossible to get reporters into the areas where the fighting was taking place. They had to have a military escort, because killing reporters – or better yet, taking them hostage, releasing video footage on a website and then killing them – was a sure way to get headlines. And terrorists loved headlines. Like everyone said, there was no such thing as bad publicity.

  Reporters who tagged along with the troops had to behave themselves. Anyone who filed a story that was too critical of their hosts didn't get to ride in any more helicopters.

  It was easier still to let literate soldiers like Ivor do all the 'investigating' and then the real reporters could just sit and wait for the military press briefings. Why risk your life going looking for a story when it could be delivered straight to you? Besides, it was expensive to send someone halfway around the world.

  But Ivor knew how accurate his stories had been once the top brass had filtered out all the juicy stuff.

  It felt good to despair at the poor quality of the news; it took his mind off his mind. Ben's visit had shaken him up more than he wanted to admit. Ivor had been absolutely sure, he had known with concrete certainty, that somebody had screwed with his head. Now, he was plagued by doubts.

  If Ben was right, there was no conspiracy. If there was no conspiracy, then Ivor really was out of his mind. He had turned it over and over in his head, trying to make sense of it. But the more he thought about it, the more confused he became. Suspicions, questions and paranoia fed on each other, breeding new and more complicated forms of themselves.

  Was he really being watched, or was it all in his imagination? What about the things he'd seen: the faceless people, the vehicles following him down the street? He was never able to get close enough to these watchers to talk to them, but was that just his mind making excuses so that it could prolong the delusion? He didn't even know why they were watching him. If somebody had him under surveillance, why did he assume that they meant him harm? Maybe they were just studying him, or even wanted to protect him from . . . well, anything. Protect him from himself, perhaps.

  He was sure of what he had seen, and of the sense of menace that sent prickles of tension across his skin. But wasn't that the whole thing with delusions? Your brain interpreted your perceptions, so if something went wrong with it, you might be the last person to know. The human brain was not designed to diagnose its own illness. It was like trying to look down your own throat.

  The worst part about this was that there was no way to know for sure if he was mad or not. But if the mental kaleidoscope he was experiencing was sanity, he didn't feel much better about it.

  Ivor held his head in his hands, swearing violently and pulling at his hair. He found himself crying again. He was exhausted from all this. With few friends and no job to keep him busy, he was in danger of losing it completely if he didn't do something.

  Lifting his head, his gaze fell on a scrap of notepaper lying on the coffee table. Amina Mir's number was written on it. He had stopped wearing a watch, so he looked at the clock on the wall in the kitchen; it was after midnight.

  Tomorrow. He'd call her tomorrow.

  He decided to go to bed. He knew that even if he slept, he would have the nightmares again, but he was too tired to worry about it. Let them come; tomorrow, he was going to start asking some serious questions. After all, if he was insane, what harm could it do?

  16

  Contrary to the belief held among the newsroom staff, Amina did not have a problem with changing the cartridge in the photocopier. Any idiot could change a photocopier cartridge, even if they couldn't read the cartoon symbols printed both on the inside of the copier door and on the cartridge itself. That bit was easy.

  She did have a problem with paper jams. For a start, she was amazed that a machine that cost a few thousand quid and weighed almost as much as a small car could be thwarted by a simple sheet of A4. She was also bothered by the fact that she couldn't reach the plug to disconnect it before she stuck her hand into the machine. Most people just left it running, but she was unnerved at the way it sat and hummed at her as she reached her slim hands in between those heavy rollers. So she always turned it off first.

  Sometimes, you could wind the paper out by turning the rollers' handles, but other times you had to get your fingers right in and just wrench it out, hoping it didn't tear.

  This time it tore, and Amina sighed to herself as she got down on her knees and pulled the pieces out one by one, careful to avoid the heated rollers and shaking her head as she got carbon dust all over her fingers.

  When she'd finished wrestling with the copier, she returned to the desk where her next job was waiting: a pile of readers' complaints letters. There was also a message in her inbox telling her to call Ivor McMorris when she got a chance. She took one look at the complaints pile and decided that this seemed like the perfect time.

  As it turned out, he was very apologetic about their last conversation and she found herself apologizing in turn.

  'I'm really sorry about the article,' she told him in a low voice. 'They edited it to death. I mean, I suppose they had to, but I hated—'

  'It's OK, it's OK,' Ivor assured her. 'To be honest, I'm glad in a way. I think . . . I think there might be another angle to the whole thing . . . if you're still interested.'

  Amina settled back in her chair as he related the conversation he had had with his friend, Ben Considine, and how it had caused the doubts he was having now. Ivor wanted to know if there was any way she could use the resources at the paper to see if there were any other Sinnostan veterans suffering the same symptoms as he was. Perhaps there was more to this than just post-traumatic stress? Amina nodded to herself, thinking of the Agent Orange controversy in Vietnam. The health of thousands of US soldiers (and presumably one or two Vietnamese) had been affected by chemicals – particularly one called Agent Orange that had been used to clear the leaves from jungles, which could hide those pesky Vietcong.

  There had also been stories about chemicals tested on soldiers in the Gulf War in the 1990s that had caused all kinds of side effects. Amina breathed out softly at the thought that Ivor might have something along the same lines. This could be the making of her . . . if only she could come up with some hard evidence.

  'Is there anything you haven't told me?' she asked. 'Maybe something you might have left out before.'

  'I don't think so,' he said. There was a pause and then: 'Did I mention my tooth?'

  'No – what about it?'

  'Somewhere between the bombing and waking up in the hospital, I lost a tooth—'

  'Well . . . you were caught in an explosion,' Amina pointed out gently.

  'Yes, but I'm sure that the tooth was still solidly in place when I was in the helicopter. Like I said, the memory is absolutely vivid. I tasted blood, but all my teeth were still there.'

  'Maybe it was loose, and it came out afterwards?'

  'I dunno. I was lying on my back the whole time. If I'd been unconscious, I would have choked on it. And I'm sure if I'd felt it coming out, I'd remember, y'know? I mean, losing an adult tooth is a serious thing.'

  'Yes, but you had just lost an eye. I'd say that would be quite a distraction.'

  'Even so, I'm sure I'd remember. So that could mean one of two things: either these vividly real memories I have are my mind's way of blocking out some other trauma, or . . .' His voice trailed off.

  'Or what?'

  'Or if these are . . . are implanted memories – and I'm only saying "if " – then maybe I can't remember losing the tooth because I lost it during the process and they didn't know, so they didn't account for it when they manufactured the memories. They didn't know to add a scene to explain why I was missing a tooth.'

  'But who are "they"?'

  'Well, obviously I don't know. That's the who
le point with conspiracies. No doubt it's army intelligence, some shadowy government department or a cabal of power-hungry fiends from the militaryindustrial complex – you know the way.'

  'Yeah; goes without saying really.' Amina smirked.

  He told her about the people he thought were following him, and how he could never get a look at their faces.

  'You mean, you can't see them? Like they're wearing masks?' she pressed him.

  'No. It's more like . . . it's like I can't focus on their faces,' he said, struggling to describe it. 'In fact, that doesn't even . . .' He paused for a moment. 'It's like their faces are blurred – the same way they do on TV when they're hiding somebody's identity, y'know . . .'

  'Yeah, I get it.' She nodded to herself. 'Like when they're keeping a reporter's source anonymous.'

  'Yeah, like that,' Ivor said. 'Except I can see their eyes staring out at me. Just their eyes.'

  Amina was already writing all this down. He told her about his nightmares then too, but neither of them could understand the significance of the roulette wheel, unless it symbolized the arbitrary nature of death or something like that. Amina said she'd look it up in a book about interpreting dreams, but he said he'd tried that and it got him nowhere. And besides, he thought most of the people writing those books were talking out of their arses.

  He'd done a lot of reading up on memory loss as well. Apart from amnesia caused by physical trauma, there was psychogenic amnesia, which came about through psychological factors. Either could apply in his case. He had also learned that your 'episodic' memory could be affected, causing you to forget certain events, or even things like your name, your friends and family, while leaving your 'semantic' memory intact, so you could still remember how to read and write, and that Paris was the capital of France.

  With some reluctance, Ivor told Amina that he had also done extensive reading on mind control: everything from the Chinese attempts to brainwash US prisoners of war in North Korea and the CIA's MK-ULTRA programme in the 1950s to modernday subliminal advertising. But the biggest culprits these days were thought to be religious cults who indoctrinated naïve new converts.