Right Angles

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say.

I wish I’d been in space when they had said that, so I hadn’t heard them. But, alas, I was on Earth, and I heard. I heard a lot in my job, heard a lot more in my neighborhood, and I ignored pretty much all of it. Some because I was told to, the rest because . . . Well, it’s just easier, you know? To ignore it, that is.

When they gave me the whole ‘scream’ line, though, I listened. Not because it was a such a good, pithy line; Ridley Scott’s Alien did that tagline first, and arguably did it better. Probably the use of second person, if you ask me, which really drives the message home: ‘No one can hear you scream’. You. I don’t care about you, though. You can scream all you like. I cared about them screaming.

And that was the problem. I couldn’t help listening to everyone else’s screams. Couldn’t tune them out. I’d walk out of the office, blissfully insulated from everything but sound. I tried whistling, actually, but always ended up harmonizing with them. Humming didn’t help, either, unless I blocked them out with one long, monotonous hum, and that made me feel like I was going insane.

So I listened. I tried not to look, tried to autopilot myself from the office to my Millennial Edition Own-A-Home SiloPod™ (monthly subscription for use of door and window not included) (ownership subject to credit checks, employer validation checks and social media engagement checks, to be performed quarterly by the Happy Credit & Wellness Co Inc). My eyes strayed though. I was always a sucker for morbid curiosity, and the people on the streets were morbid.

In most cases, their SiloPods had ejected them because they had defaulted on their payments, failed one of the various checks, or didn’t meet or exceed their local Neighborhood Standards Policy. Whatever the reason, the result was the same: the SiloPod would tilt up and drop them on to the street, like a tiny house doing a human turd. It sounds heartless, but the SiloPods were just doing what they were programmed to do, so you can’t blame them.

Hypothetically, if you’re in a position to get ejected from a SiloPod, you almost certainly can’t afford an insulation suit, so there you are, on the street, quite literally roasting in the heat. Without an insulation suit, you’re also being consumed by mosquitoes, which have proliferated en masse in the newfound humidity of London. And your eyes would be bleeding, of course, because nobody is immune to Needlefever anymore with the Razor Pollen count being off the charts. Climate change, you know? At least it’s sunny.

Not a good time to be homeless, though. So there’s a lot to scream about, and a lot of people doing the screaming, but at least the screams are punctuated by the occasional sneeze. The Needlefever sneezes sound better than the screams, and I hear they’re dreadfully satisfying, but they’re usually accompanied by a little spray of blood from the throat lacerations, so you want to hear their jolly sounds without seeing them.

Let’s be clear, though, people don’t just scream for the hell of it. There was a Public Service Broadcast a few years ago which said that if you can’t afford an insulation suit or healthcare or pain medication then it’s OK because you can just scream and it releases endorphins which lessen the pain. And people really took that to heart.

We call them Howlers, which isn’t very inventive, and also isn’t very accurate, because they don’t howl like wolves, they scream like people. Mothers are biologically attuned to respond to the sound of a child’s scream, but a solo adult is biologically attuned to want to kick a Howler in the throat.

Too much?

I’ve never actually done that, by the way. Kick someone in the throat. Silencing just one Howler would do no good at all, and I’m not sure my insulation suit bends that way.

Christ, I’ve talked about screaming a lot. Don’t mean to get hung up on it. It’s just . . . You get fixated on it after a while, you know? It becomes normal, almost comforting. Not right there, in the mix, obviously. Not when you’re hearing it. Right there, in the mix, it pierces your neocortex and, I swear to God, it makes you twitch. I would see people walking down the street, from office to SiloPod, eyes averted, and they would be cringing away from the Howlers. Whether that was a physical or a psychological response I couldn’t tell you, but they looked in pain. I sympathized, of course, but I tried to sympathize with the Howlers, too. It’s hard having no money or social media engagement, because there’s really no opportunity to come back from that.

Except for one.

Full disclosure: I reached a point when I had no money or social media engagement. Didn’t howl about it, though. Instead, I pulled myself up by my bootstraps and signed up to the Musketeers programme, ‘One for All, One for All’. I wasn’t a Musketeer, I was just a lowly new recruit; they called us the Real Avengers, and then tried to change the font on the billboards to make it look like Angels, but they botched it and we became known as the Right Angles. Doesn’t matter. I didn’t do it for the glory. The billboards all burned up anyway.

Anyway, I did it for the escape. When I was a kid, someone asked me, “Would you accept a one-way ticket to Mars if it meant you were the first person there but you had no way back?”

I said, “Absolutely.”

They all said, “Why? You’ll be forgotten in a desert wasteland and there’s so much more to explore on Earth.”

Joke’s on them, the Earth is the desert wasteland now. Which is precisely the point: if I, of all people, am the first person on Mars, what sort of state must the Earth be in?

Turns out, a screaming, boiling mess is the answer.

It was an easy decision to sign up, aided only by the incessant knocking at my SiloPod door and the cartoonishly wide smiles of the Musketeer Missionaries. Yes, their pamphlets were a bit cultish, but they’d put a lot of effort in and they had a lot of tax-free financial backing, so when they offered the chance to leave Earth and all its scream-filled atmosphere behind, I jumped at it. Jumped into a space suit, jumped into a space ship, and jumped off into space, happy as a clam. For a time.

Turns out the Musketeers ‘don’t believe’ in music, which I found odd, because I was quite sure I could prove not only that it existed, but also that it was quite popular outside of their circles. They believed, instead, in the beauty of silence. Specifically, though, they believed in opening one’s mind to the Word of God, except they thought God was a race of a hyper-intelligent aliens, so I found it hard to believe nobody could convince them that music was a real thing.

On the ship, there were six Musketeers and six Right Angles, including me, and let’s get one thing straight right from the off: us Right Angles didn’t subscribe to the same philosophy as the Musketeers, not at all, but we didn’t have very long to vent those sentiments before we were blasted off into space. And then we couldn’t vent at all.

In fact, we very quickly felt trapped in our suits, like the people on Earth felt trapped without theirs. We couldn’t move, we were strapped to our seats; each of us was just a head in a bubble for the long road ahead. We sat in a circle, all facing inwards, Musketeers on one side and Right Angles on the other, our eyes free to roam the cabin and our ears closed to it all. No radio comms linking human to fellow human. Certainly no music, heaven forbid. Just the insipid trickle of oxygen to keep us alive. I could hear my own pulse, and I wasn’t sure if that was in my head or in the fishbowl of my helmet. After a while, I tried not to look at the Musketeers opposite me, because looking at them meant eye contact, and they just would not stop smiling. It was creepy, like they just genuinely loved that incessant quiet.

I was not so fortunate. I didn’t like being alone with my own thoughts, not for that long. Every so often I would scream, just to break my own silence, but I would do so through only the tiniest crack of my mouth because I didn’t want the leering Musketeers opposite to notice. Screaming with your mouth barely open makes it come out as a sort of haunted wail, but it helped. Every time I did it, it helped.

Until something screamed back.

I didn’t hear it in my ears, I heard it in my head. In my mind. The Musketeers heard it, too, because when it screamed, they closed their eyes and smiled wider.

It took me at least an hour of scrunching my face up, trying in vain to close my mind to it, before I realized two things: first, that I was completely incapable of blocking it out; that I would hear the screams whether I listened or not; that the vacuum of space doesn’t, in fact, mute everything. Second, that the screams were accompanied by thoughts, and convictions, and sentiments, images and feelings, screamed directly into my mind.

Three things, actually. The third was that there was no ‘it’ screaming.

There was a ‘them’.

In time, I learnt to call them Screamers. And I wondered: had I imagined music, after all?