The Left-Behind

by Ewa Mazierska

Part 1 appears in this issue.

conclusion

‘Can I opt out from this trial?’ Lea asked a woman who was leading one of the pre-testing sessions.

‘Why do you want to do that?’ asked the woman.

‘I would like to keep my thoughts private,’ said Lea.

‘Honest people have nothing to hide,’ said the woman.

‘They might want to hide this very fact, in order not be taken advantage of,’ said Lea.

‘This exercise is not about curtailing people’s privacy or censoring their thoughts, but about working more efficiently and improving communication. This is how humanity develops: by changing the modes of communication. Once one mode ceases being efficient, another needs to be introduced. We are now on the threshold of the communication revolution, but to make it happen, we need to show commitment.’

‘Can you explain to me why the old mode of communication stopped being efficient? Why people can’t speak or write correctly anymore?’ asked Lea.

‘This is an evolutionary thing. Certain organs regress or disappear when they stop being useful, like tails on monkeys when they developed into humans. Of course, there are always “dinosaurs,” who keep their extra teeth or useless tails and even groom them as if they were a sign of superiority. But they delude themselves by thinking that they matter; they are irrelevant or even obstructive. It is in these organs that toxins accumulate.’

Lea wasn’t convinced by this argument, which sounded memorised and recited, so there was no point to discuss it any further, especially as her interlocutor produced an above-average amount of orange light that made Lea almost dizzy.

‘Returning to your question, I will have to talk to my boss. I will let you know as soon as I find out,’ said the woman.

The following week Lea learnt that going through the training was not compulsory, but was essential for keeping her professorial job and salary. The alternative was to get redeployed, either to the university catering services or to estate management, moving furniture and other stuff along with the robots.

She decided to go to catering as she couldn’t do heavy lifting. She was sad to tell Alex, since he had always been proud that his mother was a professor, but it turned out that he wasn’t too concerned. He said that they would manage even on her reduced wages; they were used to modest living and, thanks to working in the kitchen, Lea was allowed to bring uneaten food back home.

In fact, there was so much wasted food these days that the leftovers were enough for all three of them. The government boasted that the epidemic of obesity was finally averted but, in Lea’s view, it had less to do with the policies of public health or self-restraint than with the general lethargy enveloping the population.

Some of her new co-workers, like Lea, found themselves in catering because of their refusal to wear the gear provided by Pineapple. They made their choices for various reasons. A couple of union activists objected because they were politically-minded and didn’t want their thoughts being censored. Two lecturers from psychology said they were prone to migraines and dizziness and believed that the ‘helmet’ would trigger their illnesses.

There was also a woman from the fashion department who refused this gear because she specialised in designing hats and regarded the headgear hideous and a threat to her job. These people were all called the ‘Left-Behind.’ It was meant to be a term of abuse, but it was embraced by the people the expression denoted. ‘We, the Left-Behind must stick together,’ they said and they greeted each other by putting their hands on their heads, as if to show that nothing, literally and figuratively, was exerting pressure on their brains; they were their own masters.

Lea looked at this budding symbolism with amusement, yet she succumbed to it, because she didn’t want to be left behind even by the Left=Behind. She wanted to belong somewhere, not so much for her own sake as for Alex’s.

Lea quite liked her new work, not least because half of the people who were working in catering hadn’t become deaf, and even when they were making wraps and sandwiches, they engaged in conversation. They also didn’t mind speaking their minds.

But even the most outspoken complained that ‘speaking one’s mind’ didn’t mean what it used to, because society had lost the ability to judge others’ outspokenness. The language of most people had become reduced to the basics and such layers of linguistic expression as irony went unnoticed by its recipients.

One day after work, Lea found in her pigeonhole a piece of paper inviting her to a meeting at the home of Eric, the professor of neurosurgery. He had been demoted to the status of assistant gardener. He lived in a part of Marston that Lea had never visited before. There were about ten people when Lea arrived, mostly university folk, but there was also a woman who used to be a member of the City Council and had been fired when she demanded that a quarter of the city become an Internet-free area.

They started the meeting by introducing themselves, and then Eric said, ‘We’re meeting here because we are concerned about the future: our own future and that of our children and grandchildren. We are called the Left-Behind, but I believe that it is the rest of the world which is moving backwards while we, at least, have managed to stand still.’

‘Why do you think so?’ somebody asked.

‘The people who surround us are gradually losing their senses. It started with hearing, but now it is also sight, smell, taste and touch. And with the loss of the senses, comes the loss of intellectual power, as it is the use of the senses that allows us to develop intellect, as John Locke observed as early as the seventeenth century. And when both the senses and intellect are impaired, the will to live also diminishes.’

‘We are told that the loss of the senses has to do with development of intellect. The more intelligent people are, the less they need their senses. Pure intellect is meant to compensate for these losses,’ said a woman from Psychology.

‘I think this theory is false,’ Eric replied. ‘Intellect is not autonomous; it cannot develop in the void,’

‘If that is the case, why is all this happening?’ asked Lea.

‘I’m not sure,’ Eric replied, ‘but I believe that it has to do with the consequences of long-term exposure to substances used in computers and, even more so, smartphones.’

‘What substances?’ asked somebody whom Lea had never met before.

‘I don’t know,’ said Eric. ‘I am — — or, rather, I was — a neurosurgeon, not a chemist, but I think it is not a single element, such as mercury, whose effect on the body is fairly well known, but a combination. And since as many as 62 different types of metals go into an average smartphone, it is very difficult to say which combination is most dangerous. It might be copper and neodymium, gold and terbium, zinc and dysprosium or all of them.

‘But even before this epidemic, I discovered that some smartphones emit an orange glow that has the power to penetrate one’s body, like sunlight penetrating bodies of people who spend too much time sunbathing. Once it has moved under the skin, it slowly destroys what is there, like the mysterious virus we heard about last year. Has anybody noticed the orange glow?’

Lea, of course, knew it very well, as well as the green glow, but she didn’t want to bring it up, at least not until the others did.

There was only one person who admitted to having seen it, a guy from Criminology who specialised in explosives. Correctly, he also noticed that the light took two forms: rays and an amorphous glow. ‘Rays are for shooting, glow is for strangling,’ he said in an impassive voice.

‘Why can’t the rest of us see it?’ asked a man with thick glasses and bulging eyes, which made Lea giggle silently.

‘It’s possible that together with getting weaker, we lose the power to notice what happens to us,’ said Eric. ‘Ignorance is a means of putting up with loss.’

‘So we are doomed?’ asked the woman from the fashion department.

‘I hope not. There were plagues in the past which decimated communities but, in the end, these communities managed to survive. Sometimes the epidemic simply went away; on other occasions, a cure was invented, like antibiotics. Here it seems to me that the first stage to halt the plague should be to give up smartphones. Instead, what we see is Pineapple introducing a more lethal version, which uses all these rare metals in larger quantities and produces more orange light, which goes straight to people’s brains.’

‘Why do they do it? Do they want to destroy us?’ asked the ex-council employee.

‘We cannot exclude that possibility, but I think it has more to do with a need to conceal the old flaws. Once everybody is using the new version of the smartphone, nobody will ask what was wrong with the old version. This is how technology develops. Who these days, apart from historians, ponders on the disadvantages of using a jenny or printing machines? But I think we need to resist the change because the new smartphone is more dangerous than anything previously invented. It is not like a new jenny, but a new guillotine.’

‘Why is this scheme being piloted in England, rather than in the States, where the company has its headquarters or in China, where most of the smartphones are produced?’ asked a man who used to teach in Sociology.

‘Good question,’ said Eric. ‘In fact, the pilot schemes are running in these countries as well. England, however, was chosen, because here the gap between what the people think and say publicly was deemed the greatest, and this is especially the case in Marston. The assumption is that if the English people can be trained to “say” what they “think,” everybody can. But this is exactly the reason why we shouldn’t allow this to happen.’

‘What should we do?’

‘First we should resist the experiment: not allow the orange light to penetrate our bodies and those of our kids. We also need to have our eyes open to people who might have developed anti-bodies, anti-rays. It is they who will show us a way out of this apocalypse.’

‘How do we recognise them?’

‘I’m not sure yet, but I know that there are already people working on constructing equipment which would capture the orange radiation. The hope is that it will be able also to identify the benign radiation. Most likely its carriers, our saviours, will be young and for some reason have been sheltered from the orange light until they were able to fight it. We need to have them on our side and extract their secret.’

‘Surely we cannot do it without their consent and that of their parents,’ said Lea.

‘Why shouldn’t they consent when the saving of humanity is at stake?’ asked Eric rhetorically.

‘Maybe they want to be left in peace. Maybe their parents want them to be left in peace,’ continued Lea, thinking that she’d already said too much.

‘This would be very selfish of them,’ said Eric.

On the way back, Eric and his friend gave everybody a bunch of leaflets to distribute. Fittingly, they were printed on the old, yellowish paper which had practically stopped being used some years previously and was quietly rotting in the rooms housing defunct equipment, such as photocopiers and scanners.

Its author, on behalf of the ‘Resistance’ asked that people stop using the helmets and ‘regain their voice.’ Lea threw them in a bin on the way to the railway station, which took her almost an hour to get to. She was thinking how Marston had changed since she started working there twenty-six years previously.

On the winter day of her job interview she thought how she’d never seen as nice a place as Marston. All the shops were beautifully decorated: Debenhams, BHS, Marks and Spencer and dozens of independent shops. And over the next fifteen years or so all of them were gone. Only food shops remained, but they were also decimated.

Against the background of their disappearance, restaurants, pubs, hairdressers and beauty salons became more prominent. It stayed this way for a while until a new app helped people cut their own hair and they stopped going to restaurants because of the crowds of homeless people living in abandoned shops nearby.

Back at home Lea asked Alex and Daniel whether they attracted any unusual attention at school. They didn’t.

‘Okay, but don’t agree to wear a helmet or give blood or saliva or anything,’ she said.

Eric’s predictions turned out right. Although still few people were able to see the orange light, in the next year. belief in its existence became almost universal. This could be gauged by the ferocity with which the government and the established media rejected its existence as a conspiracy. ‘There is no orange light,’ was a message which appeared on the screens of computers and mobile phones, as well as on posters and billboards.

Inevitably, as soon as such posters were put up, people crossed out the ‘no.’ As in the past, tattoo parlours became popular, and now cities were filled with shops selling meters measuring one’s ‘orange radiation,’ as well as measuring it on their premises. They were all illegal, but nobody cared; after many years of disappearing professions, it was one which offset, albeit in a small measure, the losses of industry and trade.

Soon the orange light meter sellers started to offer pills and tonics reducing the radiation. Again, the authorities warned against their ineffectiveness and toxicity, but this was seen widely as a proof that they were actually working. However, people were waiting for the true breakthrough, something that would allow them not only to slow the penetration of orange light but regenerate their bodies.

One day, Alex came to Lea’s work to fetch her to see Daniel’s gig. Paradoxically, Daniel had started to get more work recently, not because people were regaining their hearing but because those who were still able to hear were looking for spaces where they could meet like-minded or, rather, like-sensed people. During the concerts people would often throw their arms forward. This was to show that no orange light emanated from their hands, that there were no traitors among them.

Lea was reluctant to do so, as she didn’t like to participate in public displays of emotions. But, as the people around her looked at her, she did so and so did Alex. It was then that everybody noticed that they both produced more green light than the rest of the people in the room put together. Especially Alex: the rays from his hands managed to reach the farthest corners of the hall, changing the gloomy room into something like an old-style disco.

After the concert, Lea and Alex were surrounded by the rest of the audience. The people asked Alex to touch them on their ears, the top of their heads, their mouths. Alex did as he was asked, and some people put money into his pocket whilst he was doing it. But that wasn’t the end of it. He was asked to meet their relatives and friends. One woman said that she could arrange a large-scale ‘healing session’ in an old church.

Lea decided to intervene. She jumped in front of her son, saying, ‘Please, leave him alone. He’s just a boy, and we don’t need your money.’

Lea took the notes out of Alex’s pockets and tried to give them back, but nobody accepted them. ‘Keep them, keep them,’ they were shouting.

Lea and Alex returned home by taxi. As they were leaving, people stood by the wayside, waving to them. It appeared that there were more of them now than there were at the concert.

Back home, Lea said to Alex, ‘We cannot stay in this city. If more people learn about your ability to produce green light, we will be besieged. Somebody might want to kill you to extract the light from your body. We have to escape.’

‘Mum, we cannot run away; these are my people. If I don’t save them, they will perish.’

Daniel joined in, adding, ‘Alex is right. We have to stay here,’ and Daniel embraced Lea and Alex, and Alex embraced Daniel and Lea. Lea also, somewhat against her will, stretched her arms out and put them around Daniel and Alex, so that they created a circle. Then Lea noticed that there was a second circle surrounding them, made of green light. It didn’t stay still, it moved as if in a joyful dance.