Beneath the view scope, Tomsen’s mouth widens into a toothy grin. “Muter of mouths, choker of throats, confuser of pigeons. The only reason this”—she hefts the ham radio—“is not a box full of friends. And in exactly several minutes—”
The building flashes white. There’s a muffled thump. Then the entire structure collapses, sinking into a pit that the water promptly fills, erasing all evidence that a building was ever there.
I feel a shift in the air. A tingling sensation. Or perhaps a sudden lack of one.
“Yes!” Tomsen screams so loud everyone jumps, and I step back to avoid her swinging arms. “Burn and drown! You’re done! You’re toppled!”
“That was it?” Julie says with wide eyes. “That was the jammer?”
“Yes!” Tomsen screams again, then drops into a low, rapid-fire babbling. “At first I thought it’d be Freedom Tower but if Axiom knew about the facility they’d have hijacked it by now so it had to be better hidden and probably improbable, not some big obvious antenna but something built to hide forever like maybe an inverted tower, some kind of geologic induction to make the earth itself a transmitter or maybe—”
“Tomsen!” Julie cuts her off, and points to the radio in her hand, which is still jabbering propaganda. “Try it.”
Tomsen freezes, nods, and twists the frequency knob away from Fed FM.
A scratchy, warbling tone like microphone feedback. Like a police whistle calling STOP. It’s a little quieter. It cuts in and out, leaving half seconds of silence. But it remains.
Tomsen’s face slackens. She clicks the transmit button. “Hello?”
Noise.
She twists the knob, listening, searching. “Hello?” she says. “Hello?”
A few muffled voices. A few ghostly outlines of syllables. Intercepted walkie chatter or just Fed FM bleeding through the bands, staining all the airwaves.
“Hello?” she says, quieter with each repeat. “Is anyone there?”
Julie shakes her head and sags against the railing. “Fuck.”
I look at the ground. I feel knowledge pooling in my head, weighing it down. I sink onto a bench next to a skeleton in a Brooklyn Cyclones shirt and I watch the storm drift out to sea.
Nora puts a hand on Tomsen’s shoulder. “You’re sure that was the place?”
“I stood right in front of the machine!” Tomsen shouts, and Nora steps back, startled. “It looked like a Hadron Collider turned vertical, huge and horrible like the mouth behind everything! The bomb was still right where I hid it, I set the timer and dropped it in and watched it blow up so it should—there should be—” She hits herself in the head with the radio, hard enough to hurt. “I don’t understand.”
She keeps twisting the knob. Everyone is silent, listening to the squeals and screeches of a smothered world.
Nora lets out a long sigh and looks around for a place to sit. She finds a skeletal couple holding hands on a bench, shoves the woman to the ground, and plops down next to the man. “It’s weird that Old Gov called their isolation machine ‘BABL,’?” she says, almost to herself. “Been a while since I’ve read Genesis but wasn’t the Tower of Babel supposed to unify people?”
“?‘And the whole earth was of one language and one speech,’?” Tomsen recites as she wrestles with the radio. “?‘And they said, “Come, let us build us a city and a tower whose top may reach unto Heaven, and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.”’?”
Nora nods. “Right, so how does—”
“?‘And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the children of men built,’?” Tomsen continues, jerking the knob through the same channels again and again. “?‘And the Lord said, “Behold, the people are one and they have all one language, and this they begin to do, and now nothing will be withheld from them which they have imagined to do.”’?”
Nora shoots Julie an amused look, but Julie is staring at Tomsen, listening intently. I am listening, too, letting this familiar tale from my past echo loudly in my basement, waking its lonely occupant.
Tomsen adds a prankish snigger as she quotes the Lord: “?‘“Come, let us go down and confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.” So the Lord scattered them abroad upon the face of the earth, and they left off building the city.’?”
“It was the exact opposite of a jammer,” Julie mutters. “It was communication and cooperation. A common cause to unite the world. Why did that scare God?”
“Why did it scare Old Gov?” Tomsen says. “Why does it scare anyone who wants to sit at the top? Because hierarchies are lies. Because no one needs the alpha. He gets to the top by puffing and bluffing until we all believe he belongs there. When your power is built on ignorance, you don’t want people talking to each other.”
The wretch is watching me from the bottom of the basement stairs. He is holding out a box. Take it, he says. Do something good with it.
What if they don’t understand? What if they hate me?
He climbs to the top of the stairs and sets the box at my feet. You’ve survived a dozen suicides with these people. What’s one more leap?
I close my eyes and pick up the box.