There’s bleeping and the carriage doors slam shut. The train lurches forward. Like a coin on the tracks, my belief in the redeeming power of unbranded language is flattened. These scratchings are nothing like the whirligig words in books.
The lights in our carriage flash tonic-clonic and then fail. I hear the bruxism of feet on floor. Stillwell clicks on a pocket torch and makes a superior sagittal incision in the nearest box. He pulls out unbranded transdermals and returns to orthopneic position next to me. The torch is pinched between patellae and he appears to be tussling with himself, his right hand grappling with the left shoulder. ‘Probably a body identity disorder. Xenomelia? Neuroimaging of the parietal cortex could be instructive,’ You say. Suddenly, he produces his torn-off patch and holds it up in the torchlight before doubling it over and stuffing it in his lab coat pocket. So it was no mental disorder – he was just wrestling to get the patch off from under his clothing. But You’re quick to retort, ‘Eliminating one pathology doesn’t exclude the presence of another.’
Stillwell drops an unbranded transdermal into my lap before sliding off his seat onto his hands and knees on the carriage floor. You note dyspnoea. But his breathing gradually returns to normal. He rocks back on his heels and props himself against the wall, making no attempt to get back on the fold-down seat.
The torch is off and the darkness heavily bandages my eyes. There is only the dialysis-machine rush and clack of our movement along the track. With no presenting problems, no symptoms or observable behaviours to attach to, You are an embolus adrift, unable to block my natural flow. I make use of the opportunity to pull off the EmPath patch and apply the one Stillwell gave me from the box. I wait for raw language to seep into my skin.
We reach a station and the light screeches into my eyes as the brakes are applied. Stillwell squints at me. ‘That patch. You should know… He did it – your cross-talk. Between sensory systems.’
‘Hmmmm,’ I say, still in the blurbage between patches.
‘Tastures. You call it tastures. Bromide has managed to cook them into his experimental transdermal.’
The word-fuzz is gone. I stare at him.
‘When I said certain things before, like “prosthetic languages”, or thought them loudly enough. There was a gustatory hallucination… tastes in my mouth.’
His voice is low, stooping beneath hearing until it’s struck down mute. Two dumb picker-packers come wheeling into our carriage and start loading boxes onto trolleys. We try not to look at the plundered one. As if not looking will have the same effect on them as their silence has on us. The men leave. We are still stiffened in feigned boredom when the train starts to move again.
I get up and push the incriminating box so it slips back, half toppling onto a shorter stack behind it. When I turn around again, he’s not following my movements, not flame-faced for failing to hide the box immediately after opening it. Anger rises like a peppery tasture. Again the tunnel black is absolute; all my sentience is in my skin. It reminds me of the blind tastings I did. I stumble towards the wall and Stillwell.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says, ‘I came apart under the patch’s aversion therapy. Even speaking EmPath, it was as if my mouth was fixed to the end of a hospital suction hose and the gargle of necrotic flesh, pus, blood or mucus… it decomposed me. Every time I used marginal, barely permissible words like “role play” or thought unspeakable ones. Every time I focused on what we’re doing. I gulped at the sickening stuff.’
‘Why would Bromide make a patch with horrible tastures? Not even true ebrandgelists would buy into it. There’ll be no market for it.’
‘Of course, there were rewards when I stuck closely to EmPath script.’
‘Just desserts.’
‘Yes, custard and doughnuts. But with what we’re doing, what we’re planning, it was all heaving retchingness. I couldn’t go on.’
‘It’s the perfect way to subjumate minds to a brand. Any failure to keep to the lines is punishable by potty mouth.’
‘Dr Bromide will be able to retire on this transdermal technology. The corporations will be queuing up.’
I reach out for the body heat that is the life behind his voice. ‘That’s why we’re doing this. So everyone can see there are other ways with words.’
I say this but I can’t stop worrying at the scabby inscriptions on the wall of the station where we boarded. My own counterargument is that people didn’t know then how narrow the passages of language could become. Not like us. That’s why we’ll do better. We must do better.
We sit together in the sombre sightlessness without speaking, like words lodged in a dark throat. Even with the unbranded LipService, neither of us seems to want to talk. We wait to reach Reactor Station where we’ll burst forth with our new lyricism.
Stillwell has chosen Reactor Station as our destination because, like the chemicals manufacturer that is its namesake and the programming hub’s biggest corporate client, most of the other businesses served are also industrials with limited LipService needs. As a result there are only two permanent programmers who execute patch edits. One for each of us to take on.
‘There’s no other way for us to get them to slurrender the language-programming consoles?’ I ask as the lights of Reactor Station appear at the end of the tunnel.
‘No. It’s better if they’re not just incapacitated but unconscious. And they’ll recover – just like you did. Besides being minimally invasive, this procedure produces cryptogenic results – anyone using the dubway, including operators and mute picker-packers, could be responsible.’
I notice he keeps slipping into EmPath even though we’re both patched into unbranded LipService.
In the goods lift up from the platform, we take off the white coats and pack them into the boxes that Stillwell is still carrying. When the doors open, we step into an automated receiving area. Idle conveyor belts run through gates in a wall where the boxes are scanned for damage and their barcodes checked against the manifest. There’s no one around.
I can’t see how we can get to the programming terminals from here, but Stillwell has already stepped forward to the keypad alongside a door in a corner of the receiving area. He has pulled out his tablet and his fingers row over the black pond like long-legged water striders. He has beautiful fingers.
‘I’ve entered your biometrics into the access system,’ he says. ‘Press your ear into the gel pad and the door will open. When it does, you’ll have to be quick.’
I look at the greenish jelly in a square dish that is attached to the wall by an electrical wire. As my ear sinks into the slime, it oozes soapily into my orifices. I want to spit up the tasture but the door has clicked open and Stillwell is pushing me through it.
My arm pumps the air as I charge across the small office to the programmer furthest from the door. With its backing peeled off, the unbranded transdermal whirbrates whhyyyyy in my hand. He half turns on his chair to see me in a headlong howling to plant the patch on his neck. It sticks, but now his arms are up and we are both tangled in a scrabbling, scratching scrap as he tries to tear if off and I try to stop him. Maybe it’s the adrenaline or the two-patch chemistry, but his skin is quinine bitter and I clamp my jaw against the urge to spill him out from the lock of teeth and arms. Then I feel him pull taut as a snagged thread, his legs extend straight and the air grunts out its escape from his constricted chest. As I pull him clear of the chair and onto the floor, the clonic phase of the seizure starts. His eyes have turned into his skull to search for the poltergeist in the brain that jerks and slams limbs and twitches the curtains of the face. It’s better that way. This is how I must’ve looked in the book repository reception. I wouldn’t want to watch my body do this.