The Testimony

by James Smythe

  JAMES SMYTHE

  The Testimony

  Copyright

  HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

  1 London Bridge Street,

  London, SE1 9GF

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain by Blue Door 2013

  Copyright © James Smythe 2013

  Cover photograph© Laura Pannack/Gallery Stock

  Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2013

  James Smythe asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

  2

  Source ISBN: 9780007427901

  Ebook Edition © November 2013 ISBN: 9780007427918

  Version 3: 2017-05-24

  Praise for The Testimony:

  ‘[An] utterly gripping and highly original debut novel … a tour de force of virtuoso writing that explodes off the page’

  Daily Mail

  ‘As if Philip K Dick and David Mitchell had collaborated on an episode of The West Wing … unsettling, gripping and hugely thought-provoking’

  FHM

  ‘A fiercely-imagined dystopia of the near future. Intelligent, visionary and compulsively readable’ Alex Preston, author of

  The Revelations

  ‘A literary post-apocalyptic novel built around a clever conceit’

  Guardian

  ‘[A] high-impact, big-concept, apocalyptic thriller’

  Daily Mirror

  Absence of Evidence is not Evidence of Absence.

  Dr Carl Sagan

  (on the potential existence of a deity, or extraterrestrial life)

  Absence of Evidence is not Evidence of Absence.

  Donald Rumsfeld

  (on the potential existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq)

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Praise for The Testimony

  Epigraph

  Static

  We’re Having Problems

  The First Broadcast

  Unravelling

  How it Felt to be Special

  The Sparrows are Flying

  The Second Broadcast

  Hoist that Rag

  Things Falling Apart

  Second Comings and Dragons

  Direct Feed

  Breakdown

  The Last Broadcast

  Reckoning

  Push the Slate

  Banging on Dials

  Losing

  Way Down in the Hole

  Sweating it Out

  Payloads

  Animals in the Dark

  Reconciliations

  Revelations

  Acknowledgments

  Read on for an extract from The Machine

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by James Smythe

  About the Publisher

  STATIC

  Phil Gossard, sales executive, London

  At first, we thought that the noise was just a radio. We didn’t even think about how long it had been since we’d had a real radio anywhere near the office; it just struck us that it was the same noise, tuning it. We were sitting in the office eating our lunches; the sandwich man had done his daily delivery, and I had picked a ham roll. I never had ham. We didn’t eat together, not usually, but we were trying it as something new, get the team together for a daily meal, something more social than just work. It promoted a sense of team-building that the management thought we were missing. At the talks, the meetings, they told us that we should learn to lean on each other more. This is a way to bring you all together, they told us. Three or four bites into the sandwich, I noticed it, niggling; like a radio, as I say, sitting at the back of the room. I asked the rest of them if they could hear it, and they couldn’t at first, and then one of them did – Marcus, I think, from sales – so we followed the noise, tried to find where it was coming from. Is it speakers, from the computers? somebody asked, but it wasn’t that. We thought it was louder as we went towards the window, so we opened them. Where’s it coming from? Marcus asked, but neither of us could tell because it sounded like it was coming from all around us. It seemed stupid to say it at the time, but it seemed like it was coming from inside my head; I didn’t say that, and then the others started to hear it, one by one. The whole thing seemed to take a few minutes, I reckon – but it could have been less, could have been more – and when the static reached its loudest, Bill, our boss, decided to go downstairs, see if it was louder there. We watched him out of the windows, in the street with people from all the other offices, and they all just sort of stood there and listened. Within a couple more minutes everyone from the other offices was either out there as well or crowded round at their own windows, and we were all listening to it. And then it was gone.

  Simon Dabnall, Member of Parliament, London

  It’s a rare day that you have silence in the House of Commons. There was some head of state in from one of the Eastern European nations, and that tended to make some of the back-benchers rowdy, make them show off. That’s attention-grabbers for you. Some of the rabble liked to think that it might make their names stand out for future PM-related references. Sad, really. The visiting chap just sat and stared at the panelling. But it was a loud day anyway: something about the NHS (again), immigrants (again), terrorism controls in the heart of Staines (again), and most of the front-benchers were going at it cats and dogs. That pillock from Chester was waving his hands around as he shouted, like he was being pestered by a wasp, that way that he did, and nobody was listening to him. Then we heard the static – that’s what we all agreed it sounded like, at first, like the sound of televisions in the middle of the night – and Chester stopped his flapping, and we listened. There’s never any sound in the room that we don’t know about – there were no crowds outside, no tours, and it’s about as soundproofed as a room without real soundproofing can get – so we all looked around for the source, heads peeking up like we were meerkats.

  When it was over – quick as it began, as if somebody just flicked a switch and turned the power off – we just sat there, and nobody said anything for the longest time, until the speaker told us to reconvene the following day. We all shuffled out onto the riverbank, seemingly along with everybody else on both sides of the river, and we just milled around. It’s like a fire drill, somebody joked, but it wasn’t really a joke. The tubes, the buses, nothing was running – everybody froze because this was an event – so we were all just stranded there.

  Jacques Pasceau, linguistics expert, Marseilles

  It was like you were trying to tune into the right frequency but you were wearing ear-muffs, that’s how clear the noise was. We were working on a translation of something – me, Audrey, Patrice, David, Jolie – working on verbs, some dull shit like that for an undergrad class I was tutoring, and suddenly there it was, Chhhhhhhhhhh. I’ve never heard anything like it. I mean, people called it stati
c, but I thought it was more like a growl, even. I said that out loud when it was finished and we were just talking about it over and over, and Audrey said that I was being stupid, but you know, I wasn’t, not really.

  Meredith Lieberstein, retiree, New York City

  12th of April, life is normal. 13th of April, still normal. 14th of April, everything gets torn apart, or put back together, whichever way you want to think of it. We had only just woken up – Leonard’s bladder, same as every night, tick tock – when it happened. I had the TV on, quietly, because I wasn’t completely awake, and I thought it was coming from that at first, then they went to one of those We Have A Fault screens, and the noise didn’t stop. When Leonard came back he flicked around through the channels, trying to find CNN – because that had never gone down, not that we could remember, or BBC World – but that was the same. We Have A Fault. How often do you need the news to tell you what’s actually going on these days, anyway? The one time we needed it, and it was no help at all. Eventually one of them came back – Fox was first, I think, because I remember Leonard joking about there being a first time for everything – and they started telling us what we already knew, with no explanations. There has been an event, they said. Within minutes they were referring to the noise as static, though we thought it sounded more like paper being crumpled. Leonard was watching, flicking the channels, when we heard the beeping from outside, so I went out onto the fire stairs. Cars were logged up around the park, people out of them and walking around. You could see that they were scared, even from four floors up. Look at this, Leonard said, and I went back in to see the helicopter footage of the Brooklyn Bridge – those were the days when they constantly had the helicopters out, circling the city at night just waiting for something to happen, convinced that, sooner or later, they would be in the right place at the right time – and the bridge was chock-full of cars, some of them empty, some of them crashed (because the drivers had been fiddling with their radios or headsets, looking for the source of the static, I’d guess). This was – Fox News called it – a Community Event, capital C, capital E, like a ceasefire or an election or garden barbecues on the 4th of July.

  Andrew Brubaker, White House Chief of Staff, Washington, DC

  We were talking through POTUS’ schedule, because something had to be added, visiting some library because he had said something about funding them – I don’t know, small-time stuff. It was ten minutes to wheels up, cabin doors were sealed, press were all seated, and then we heard the static. When you’re with the President of the United States sitting on Air Force One and you hear a noise like that? You assume it’s an attack.

  Piers Anderson, private military contractor, the Middle East

  As a soldier, no matter what you’re doing – sleeping, on a recce, whatever – you hear a noise you haven’t heard before, you damn well listen. We were packing, and there was a handover at the camp happening. We’d been on recon, which was all we ever did in those days. It had been a couple of decades since we’d actually needed to be out there in any great number, but people – the people with the money and the power – were still scared. The Yanks were taking it over from us, which was a hell of a relief, let me tell you. We weren’t having a party, exactly, but we were happy to be leaving, and then we heard the static. Somebody asked if it wasn’t just the sand. We’d had storms a few days previous, and it was a bit easier to assume that it might be that than … well, whatever it was. I’ve seen the footage on the news now of people going crazy because of it, panicking, all that, but we just tried to get on with our jobs. We loaded the trucks, took them to the airfield. A random noise might have made us prick up our ears, but there was no way it was stopping us getting home, I’ll tell you that for nothing. What did stop us coming home? Orders. We were barely on the plane when we were told that we weren’t going anywhere, that we were to stay put until the government knew what the hell it was that made the noise. That meant that somebody somewhere was worried that it was terror-related, so we knew we’d be there for the long haul.

  Tom Gibson, news anchor, New York City

  I was putting my tie on again. We were at commercials, and I’d been watching it on the monitors the whole broadcast, mocking me, crooked across my shirt. I called for the floor manager to do it, but she was fumbling through so I snapped it away and used the picture coming off camera 2 to set it straight. When the static started we thought it was coming from the equipment, so my producer shouted up to the booth to check, but they said everything was functioning normally, but they could hear it as well, and they were soundproofed. It got louder and louder and then we realized that we were meant to have gone back on the air, so they played the filler screen while I got myself together. Somebody looked out of the windows, down at Times Square, and everybody was looking up. They all heard it, they said, so I made the decision to talk about it on air. We were the first to, first on with a report about what we would come to know as The Broadcast.

  Isabella Dulli, nun, Vatican City

  Part of our day was being a presence; being around with the people, walking around the City and spreading the word of God to them. Because that was why they were there, visiting us; to see the Holy Father and get his blessing, and to be so close to God, as those of us in service to Him were. The queues were always so long, at the ticket office, and we took it in turns to visit with the people as they waited, to talk with them of God’s majesty. The day of the static, that was my day, my only one of the month, where I was attending the queues. The people started queuing in the very early hours, before the sun was even up, because the Tomb of St Peter was only open so very rarely. They wanted to see it so much, because it was so old. In the guest-book, they write that it smells holy, and that they can really feel Christ’s presence there, the gaze of God Himself. I always laughed at that, because I said, You can feel His gaze everywhere, and they said, I know, but here especially. I enjoyed my days working around the Basilica, because everybody was always in awe. The morning of the static, I was so happy, ready for the day; I was down by the crowds, and they were asking me questions about my piety, about what it was like to be so close to God’s love – It is a miracle, I would say, it is like no love that I have ever known before, and it is incomparable, original and beautiful and wonderful – and I was answering them as I always did. I was in a photograph with some gentlemen, come over from Germany, posing for them when I – we all – heard it. The tour guide that they had asked to take the photograph told us to say, Thanks be to God, and then we heard it. The Germans said the phrase – I know, because I heard them, but they were so far away as to be blocked out, like they were in another room, shut away behind doors – but I didn’t, because the static came, and everybody started panicking. All I could think was, Please, God, let this sound in our ears be a good thing.

  Mark Kirkman, unemployed, Boston

  I didn’t hear it. I was in a bar, should have been in bed already, and everybody else stopped, listened, switched the music off. I tried really hard, once I worked out what was going on, but I just couldn’t hear it.

  Theodor Fyodorov, unemployed, Moscow

  I was in bed, because Anastasia didn’t have class. She had a bag of pot with her, so we did what we always did – put cartoons on, smoked pot in bed (I didn’t have the heating on most of the time, not until it was so cold that the pipes would freeze if I didn’t turn it on), and then I cooked breakfast, and we read books – she loved reading, loved reading all the English-language books, not even translated, showing off to me, because she knew I didn’t read anything in Russian, let alone English. We were in bed when we heard the static, and it freaked her out at first, like a cat hearing a noise it doesn’t expect; then she settled down, and we swapped cartoons for the news.

  María Marcos Callas, housewife, Barcelona

  We were staying in the city, for our anniversary. We always went back every five years or so, because it was where he proposed to me, in the Basilica, which was my favourite church. I had spent the morning
praying by myself, as I did most mornings, and I was getting ready to finish before the service began. I prayed by myself because it was a way to truly get God to hear you through all of the other voices, you see – you pray so hard amongst a sea of ambivalence, and your prayer rises above the darkness – and then, all of a sudden, He started to speak to me, to us, to the world. We couldn’t hear Him, of course, because He spoke in tongues, but it was His divine power. Romans chapter ten, verse seventeen: So Faith comes by hearing, and hearing comes as the Word of God. I sat there and wept, because I couldn’t believe that He had chosen me, and then I saw that others had heard it, and I wept because it meant that we were all hearing Him, all of us, and we were all saved.

  Dafni Haza, political speechwriter, Tel Aviv

  I had just started my job that day, and one of the first tasks as part of my position was to issue a statement reassuring the people, letting them know that their government was looking into the situation. It was the same in every single country around the world; but I was new, and the people of Israel expected statements, so I wrote them. It wasn’t an order. Part of the role involved thinking for myself, thinking on my feet, being pre-emptive. I had always been good with words. It was a particular skill of mine, to be able to phrase them the right way. My father used to say that I could sell anything, and that I should go into sales, into marketing; I agreed, but wanted to do something with those skills, something more than just selling. I wanted to go into politics, so that’s what I worked for. Speech-writing was the way in: I was good at spinning things, making them sound good, or true. The static was there, everybody heard it, and everybody wanted to know what it was. It was my responsibility to give them an answer that came from the government itself, and reassurance was the government’s watchword. That’s the way that it works.