James Smythe - The Testimony

We spend our days walking, or taking trips to the library a few villages over. It’s up and running again, and we get books that we would never otherwise have had the time to read, and we light a fire and sit there and eat something that we’ve grown out the back and we read. I never think about government now, and I haven’t missed it yet, not even for a second.

I ran out of my pills a few weeks ago, and I went to the chemist to ask for more, but they didn’t have them. We think that’s special order, she said, bless her. It’s a chemist that works out of the back half of a post office, can you believe that? I don’t know why I was surprised. Can you order some for me? I asked, and she said that she would, but weeks passed. Supply is slow, she said when I went back, and I said that it was fine. Are they urgent? she asked, and I realized that she can’t have even been the real chemist, because she didn’t know what they were for. No, they’re not, I told her. I didn’t tell Piers that I’d run out, and he didn’t ask, which either means that he didn’t notice that I wasn’t taking them, or he just didn’t want to say. After a few weeks without them I didn’t feel ill, and then, months passed, and I still didn’t feel ill. I made an appointment at a doctor’s surgery, one down in Cardiff. I’m heading there for the day, I told Piers – this was close to Christmas (which survived, thank heavens for commercialism!), so he didn’t question it, because I said that I wanted to do some shopping for him, secret stuff – and I caught the bus in, and waited like everybody else, like every other patient. He made me do the customary ahhs and coughs, and then said that I looked to be in fine health. We’ll test your bloods, but it looks like your body’s doing a fine job. He wrote me a new prescription, which I collected from the Boots in the centre, but kept unopened.

A week later he phoned, and cleared his throat. Can you come in? he asked. We need another sample, so I duly obliged, and, a week after that, he sat down opposite me and told me that he was very sorry, but the doctors that gave me my initial diagnosis must have been mistaken. We’ve run the tests multiple times, now, and the margin of error on this many tests… Well, it’s non-existent. First time, he said, in his built-for-singing voice, must have been a false-positive. On the bus back I remembered that virus that I had in the mid-Nineties, like the flu but so much worse, how much it took out of me, how I felt as if I were dying. I remember the doctors doing their tests, and I remember them making their prognoses, and me forcing them to re-test, because I was so scared. I remember how I had to start living with it, and what that took, and I remember how it changed me. And I knew – I knew – that these things didn’t just heal, or disappear, or fade, not like that.

When I got back, Piers was making lunch. I didn’t say anything, because there didn’t seem to be that much point, not really. I spent every day after that wondering if I would catch something, if, finally, this doctor’s opinion would be proven wrong. I didn’t take my medicine, and nothing’s happened, not yet. Nothing bad, at least.

Ed Meany, research and development scientist, Virginia

I didn’t go back to the government, to their labs. They offered me a job in Rockville, doing what I was doing but with more money, a car, an apartment. I turned them down. We need somebody to tell us what the biological agent was, to solve that, they said. They sent agents, men in suits to my front door, and they begged me. I didn’t go with them, because they just wanted something that they could weaponize, that they could do something with. They didn’t want the time post- Broadcast to be all for nothing. I turned them down. Fine, they said, work on The Broadcast , tell us what that was, and I turned that down as well. That’s a lost cause, I said; there’s no way to track it unless we get another one. Well, maybe we will, they said. I don’t want to study it anyway, I said. That was a lie. Let’s just leave it at, We had a few good years, and I’ll see you when it’s time for my pension. They didn’t like it, but they stopped pestering me after I shut the door on them for the tenth, eleventh time.

I moved to Portland a few months later. It’s a nice enough place, mostly, busy. Much busier after The Broadcast , the locals say. I had some friends who did independent R and D here, and they gave me a corner of their labs for research stuff. I can’t pay them, because what I’m working on doesn’t pay. I had all the test results either on the laptop or on USB drives or on paper, the physical reports. Nobody ever noticed that they were missing because nobody ever knew that they should be there in the first place, and the teams searching the labs in DC aren’t scientists, or clued in, from what I’ve heard. I wanted to try and work out what happened, both of the things that the US government asked me to do, but not for them. This was something else, a puzzle. People used to ask me why I wanted to be a scientist, and I would tell them that, when I was a kid, I loved puzzles. Science – or discovery , that’s a better word for it – was what drove me, what made me want to learn. There are things that happen, I would say, and I want to know how, why. It’s the same reason that people read crime novels: there’s a murder, and they want to know who did it. I want to know who did it. I’ve worked on The Broadcast , and on the plague, the sickness, whatever you want to call it, for months now. There are no answers. I have a cough and I hack up blood and something that, I swear, looks like ash, black and powdery, like nothing my body should be able to create, but I don’t go back for my check-ups, because I know what they’ll tell me. I come into work and I get on with it, because I have the test results and no way to thread them together.

Last week I got a delivery, a UPS van outside the offices. According to the note inside – which I think came from Andrew Brubaker, based on the handwriting, but I can’t be sure, because it wasn’t signed – I was a hard man to track down. I didn’t give the government a forwarding address, and I wasn’t listed as living here. I had been paying for everything in cash. I don’t know why I wanted to stay under the radar, but I did. Anyway, the delivery. It was files and files, bound with elastic bands, then hard drive backups of those files. Nothing really made all that much sense – most of it was plans for deployment of weapons, nuclear weapons, statistics, weapon casings – but there was one file on the hard drive that I couldn’t open properly, corrupted – don’t know what by. I got it open in a hex-editor in the end, which meant all the pictures were gone, but the words were mostly there. It was a file about the US’s involvement with biological warfare testing, a list of dates and cases and trials and the names of the people doing the tests. The last entry in the file, the last bit of text, was for a test codenamed Orpheus , a test spearheaded by Sam Tate, out of the Nevada office; something about biological agents that carried on the winds, that put a stop to people’s immune systems. I threw the box out with the garbage and tried as hard as I could to forget about it, and I concentrated on working out how we all heard The Broadcast at exactly the same time, because that , that was the real puzzle.

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

Livvy and I lived out on the boat until she died, which was nearly three years after we moved onto it. It wasn’t until she was gone that I went back to DC – or, close to DC, to Front Royal, which was where the majority of the government were set up in those days. (They tried putting themselves in Bethesda, but the levels seemed to change with the wind, and it was deemed too unsafe, so they had to move even further out.) They asked me to go in and chat with the new President, who was a nice guy, really nice guy. I knew him from when he was a senator, because he supported us on a lot of issues. They asked me to take a post, and I – gratefully – declined. They didn’t push the matter; I was glad. I didn’t want to tell them that it was guilt-related, because that would have soured things. They seemed to think I was some sort of hero, though God knows how they got to that point. It’s amazing how, when your name isn’t on documents, and when you have plausible deniability, you can get away with anything. They let me spend some time cleaning out my stuff, which I did. Everything that they had managed to salvage from the White House was stored in a warehouse just off 88. I didn’t even look through it; all the weapons reports that ended up on desks, all the stats, the facts and figures, most of it gone through with black marker, making sure anything important or secretive was erased from history. What could I do with them? I picked out a few, anything important – stuff I knew about but ignored, mostly – and decided that I’d send them to Meany, wherever he was. If I knew him, he wouldn’t be giving up on his research.