The Testimony

Everything on the way to the supermarket was closed, which must have been because of the static. It was a Monday, there was no reason for anything to be shut, and the supermarket was 24 hours anyway, so we thought it would be fine. When we got there though, there weren’t any members of staff around, and the front door had been opened – David noticed it – forced back, we reckoned. The place was full – if you weren’t at church you were shopping, right? – and everybody was just grabbing at the meats and fish, and those aisles were pretty bare, so we headed straight for the tinned stuff, baked beans and soups and tins of olives and anchovies – anything that we could eat cold, basically – and then ran to the wine, got what we could. We weren’t fussy – it was to get pissed, not worry about the quality of the grape – so we took the German shit, the Rieslings, the Blue Nun, the sweet stuff that nobody else wanted. I found some German ‘champagne’ and showed it to David, and we both laughed but we took it anyway, because it was free, and it would do the job.

Then we heard people screaming by the front and there was this guy with an enormous white beard, down to his chest, and he was waving this old rifle around, that looked like it was an antique, even. Oh my God! David shouted (and we found that pretty funny when we left, and thought about it). The old man was threatening to shoot people unless they left the supermarket – You will all repent! he kept shouting – so we took that as our cue to run. The glass by the wine had been smashed along the front of the shop, so we picked the trolley up, lifted it over, and we started to run with it up the street. The guy saw us and chased after us – he was barefoot, and he cut himself over the glass, and I shouted back, Stop and fix yourself! and then he screamed, Take this! and we both stopped and braced ourselves, because we thought he was going to shoot at us. (I don’t know why we stopped running; seems pretty stupid, thinking about it now.) But he didn’t fire; he threw the gun at us instead, at our feet, and I went and picked it up, put it in the trolley. You never know, I said. When we had made it to the top of the hill I took it out to look at it, stared down the barrel, made pew-pew noises. We opened a box of the wine, started guzzling it as we walked back – much slower than the walk there – and when we got in David took the gun to hide it before Audrey saw it, because she would have totally freaked out.

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

We had a statement prepared that POTUS was going to go on air with. It was the fourth or fifth draft, maybe, and we never wrote that many. We were a two-draft administration – the writing staff getting one out, then I made changes, sometimes POTUS changed a word or two. That was usually it, but this one, POTUS insisted on going over everything himself. And it kept changing. The first draft was about how we didn’t have the right answers but we had our best men working on it; the second was about how the answer might not be the important thing, and maybe the question that it raised was what mattered; the third draft was about speculation being a dangerous thing (and that was aimed at both the press and every other country across the entire god-damned world); the fourth draft was just begging people to keep themselves under control. We had to face the rioting head on, we knew that. What we heard – the static, whatever – was still there, but suddenly we, as an administration, didn’t care as much what it was, because reports were coming in from LA, from Texas, from Chicago, reports about the people of America becoming restless.

You know, actually, that’s not true. They were restless before the static happened. We’d spent nearly twenty years going no lower than a Yellow alert level. That is, by definition, telling the people that there’s a Significant Risk of Terrorist Attacks. We went up to Orange for almost every holiday, it felt like, and that was High Risk. We even hit Red once, near the end of Obama’s first term, when we had intel about a much larger attack that never happened, something to do with our relationship with Iran. That wasn’t the only alert: every few years somebody stepped forward with a car bomb and a promise, threatening something worse, and they did their damage – sometimes only emotional, because we were fragile, as a nation – and we never heard from them again. We got coded messages, grainy cell-phone footage of somebody that they tried to make the new Bin Laden, but nothing ever stuck. All it did was make half the people nervous, the other half complacent. So, yeah, the natives were restless to begin with, and we didn’t have an excuse or an explanation for the static, not even close. POTUS’ statement was the best we could manage, asking people to stay calm, to try and get back to normality. He asked that the people going to worship stayed as civil as possible, and remembered that everybody had their own ways of worship, we were a multicultural society, you know the sort of thing. He said, If you think that there’s a chance you could be involved in a riotous act – I absolutely cringed, because we should have caught that word, stopped it sounding like he was talking about a fucking party – just walk away, and let the authorities deal with it. It was those riots we were most worried about, because they were starting up as reports of small groups breaking the front windows of shops, smashing up parked cars, but we knew how they ended.

When he had read the statement – straight down the line in the press briefing room, straight into Camera 1, just as he was trained to do – he took some questions, and one of the reporters asked him why he thought that people were rioting. We understand that hearing what we heard played with everybody’s emotions, she said to him, but why do you think some people have turned to violence? Shouldn’t we all be trying to get into God’s good books?

That raised a laugh around the room from everybody but POTUS. The first thing is, he said, we don’t know if it actually was a God, or indeed what it was. We’d be fools to jump to the conclusion that it’s any sort of higher power; it’s just as likely, if not more likely, to be something entirely explainable, and we’ve got our best people on it. I knew what was coming after that answer, so I made my way to the side of the room, tried to get somebody to get him off the podium, but it was too late. He was saying something about people and zealotry, and Jesus fucking Christ, that was going to hurt us, I knew, and then that same journalist asked the killer question, the one that we had danced around for so long. Mr President, she asked, do you believe in God? We had avoided it the whole way through the campaign, getting him to swear on Bibles and go to church and be a total hypocrite in service to his country – and we had the most right-wing running mate we could find, in bed with so many churches and anti-abortion clinics that it made most of us feel sick – but nobody had ever asked him outright. It was like Scooby-Doo; we would have gotten away with it if it hadn’t been for that meddling journalist. Don’t answer, I said, over and over, but he did, because he was the President, and Presidents always answered questions honestly in times of strife, right?

I am not a man of faith, he said, and then all you could see or hear were flashbulbs and shouts of follow-ups. Looking back now, it helped: it moved the news cycle on past the riots, just for a second.

Phil Gossard, sales executive, London

When I finally left work I knew that the only way I’d make it home would be to walk. It was only a couple of miles as the crow flies, but London being London, walking that was going to be a trek. I kept trying to call Karen to see if she managed to pick up Jess from school but the phone lines were dead. I didn’t know this then, but there’s a lock that the government can put onto phone lines in states of emergency, like a terrorist attack, and that’s what I think the person with access to the on/off button thought. But, it could have just been New Year’s Eve syndrome, when the lines are clogged. No idea, and we never found out, of course.

There was a riot – although, it wasn’t so much a riot when you saw it as a protest, a gathering, but every protest has the possibility of turning nasty at a moment’s notice, that’s what they said on the news – so I avoided the centre as much as I could. I clung to the river until I reached World’s End, then cut north. Karen wasn’t there when I got home, and there weren’t any messages, so I started to make dinner, get it all ready to be cooked when they finally turned up.

What else do you do?

Meredith Lieberstein, retiree, New York City

Leonard was the sort of man who wanted to be a part of the action. He hated armchair pundits. I have to be out there, he said, so I let him go, because there was no way that I could stop him, not when he was in that sort of mood. He wanted to see what it was like out there, he told me. That wouldn’t stop me worrying; didn’t stop me worrying twenty years ago, wouldn’t stop me worrying now. He liked to antagonize people as well, just having fun, but they didn’t always see it that way. He came back soaking wet half an hour later. Where were you? I asked, and he smirked. I went to St Philip’s, he said, and I spoke to some of the people there, and they put the fire extinguishers onto me. That damn smirk of his. I swear, he said, I didn’t say anything. We both knew he was lying, of course, but I let it go, because that’s why I loved him. I told him to take the sweater off so that I could wash it, but those white extinguisher-powder stains wouldn’t shift. I always assumed that the stuff was washable, but apparently not. At least, not from cashmere, it wasn’t.

Mei Hsüeh, professional gamer, Shanghai

We were raiding the tomb of the Night-King, one of the three Gods we hadn’t yet taken down, because you needed a party of at least twelve, preferably twenty or so, and our guild wasn’t one of the biggest, and most of the guild were from Europe, so getting together at the right time was a nightmare, because when I was on they were at work. I went professional a few years ago anyway, because I had some amazing instanced weapons, some armour, and I was forging my own stuff which I could sell to the noobs for an insane mark-up – like, the sort of price my old economics teacher would have been so proud of me for – so I was full-time online, never having to leave Barleycorn.

(Outside of it all: I had an apartment, and cupboards full of ramen noodles, which my mother hated, because she said I should eat Chinese noodles, and a fridge full of bottles of Mountain Dew and Red Bull, imported from this shop in the Bund. I had a 3gb fibre-optic line, which was the best I could get in my apartment, but I wanted an upgrade, so was thinking of going wireless, but hadn’t.)

We were mid-raid when we heard the static for the first time, and we didn’t know what to think – we did think it was something in-game, and they had been doing these events, heralding the arrival of the next expansion, and this new enemy, this dragon called The Redeemer – so we just got on after it finished. Some people said it was everywhere, and that was fine, because the dungeons weren’t going to raid themselves.

Dhruv Rawat, doctor, Bankipore

My biggest case that day, I remember, was a man with a swollen foot, so swollen he could barely even walk on it. I pricked it and it was swollen with yellow pus, so I sent him to the hospital, but he told me he wouldn’t go, that he didn’t have the time. Can you not do something for me here? he asked, so I did what I could, drained some of it, wrapped it up, sent him on his way. It’s infected, I told him, you have to take care of it, you have to go to a hospital. Okay, okay, he said, I will. After I saw to him I went back to my hotel, and to the restaurant. Mostly, in those days, I didn’t eat meat, and their menu had more vegetable dishes than most, so it suited me. I was eating my dinner when I heard a woman’s voice; it was the news reporter from before. Hello again, she said, you’re staying here as well, or just eating? No, I said, I’m staying here. I thought you lived here, she said. I do, I told her, but I don’t have a place. It’s a long story. I love it here, she said, which I thought must have been a lie, because there wasn’t very much to love, not really; the mountains, sure, and the cricket club, but she would never have been allowed in there – mostly that was for the richer men from Patna, though they had offered me membership when they heard that I had moved into the area, because they liked doctors. The people are so genuine. She said it with real conviction, and I suddenly had to believe her. I asked her why she was there, what she was filming for, and she told me, but I can’t remember now. I’m Adele, she said, and I introduced myself, and we shook hands over the table. That’s when we heard the static for the second time, and I carried on eating, and she watched me as if that was more interesting than the noise itself.

Elijah Said, prisoner on Death Row, Chicago

Even as everybody else scrabbled around in the mud, searching for the cause of the static, I was reading a letter informing me of the date of my impending death. The letter was delivered at its scheduled time, because all of these things had a schedule: when I would be told; when I would be given my time with friends and family; when I would be led to the chair. Usually, such an envelope brought a hush upon the corridor; the prisoner was led to the imminent room with the counsellor, and that only meant one thing, and the corridor would fall silent. Not so for my envelope, as only seconds after it was handed to me, the static began again. There was no counsellor. My clock remained ticking; I prayed to Allah as I read the date, the words that committed me for my past indiscretions.

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

POTUS shouted over the static, Find out what the fuck this is, so I called Meany in R and D, even as it was still going on. We were in a car headed back toward Andrews, to get on the flight that we had abandoned only hours before, and the driver turned around instinctively, because he knew that we weren’t going anywhere. We’d had some intel from a source that it was – and I stress, intel is rarely accurate, never 100 per cent accurate, and frequently completely wrong, because it’s spun out of gossip and rumour itself, for the most part – but we’d had intel that it was some sort of weapon. I had that on a piece of paper handed to me as I got into the car, and I was expecting a briefing on it on the plane, so I knew next to nothing. Meany’s name was on the report, so I called him as soon as it started. Tell me this isn’t a weapon, I said, and he said, Sir, listen; this sounds like a warm-up. Bear in mind, I’ve got Meany in one ear, the damn static inside my head, so I’m shouting. It’s not warming up, it’s here, now, because I can hear it. Are you measuring this, taking readings, finding out where the fuck it’s coming from? Yeah, but there’s nothing, sir, he said. We’ve got oscilloscopes and digital audio stuff, and nothing’s getting picked up, but we can all hear it. And it’s happened twice now, so that might indicate that it’s warming up, or that the first time was a warm-up. I don’t know.

None of us knew. In the FBI – I came from the FBI, FBI to secret service desk job to politics, like that was a normal route – there’s a rule about serial killers. First time they kill it’s to see how it felt, or because it was an accident. The second kill was because they found something in the first that they liked, and they wanted to see if they could recreate that feeling, that high. It can still be a coincidence, and it’s not quite a pattern.

I heard POTUS on the phone to the First Lady, checking on her and the kids, and then … We know it wasn’t static now, right? It was that garbled, fragmented noise that you get when you drive out of a tunnel with the car radio on, as it becomes clearer, picks up the signal again. It suddenly went from noise to words. My Children, it said, and then faded back into the static as quickly as it came. Our driver, I forget his name, he looked like he was going to hurl. Pull over, I screamed at him, and he did. The agents in the vehicles flanking us ran from their cars, swarmed ours, and I threw open my door. Get him to the White House, I said, and then I saw POTUS, and he looked absolutely terrified. I’d seen this man face down talks about nuclear disarmament, negotiate peace treaties, win an election, for God’s sake, and he always looked calm. That was how he was going to be remembered, we always said during the campaign: the calm President, the cool one, the collected one.

In the FBI, it was one kill for a mistake, two because they liked it. We used to sit in the offices and pray that a third body never turned up, because if it did … Well, then you’ve got a real problem on your hands.

THE FIRST BROADCAST (#ulink_723a67a7-31f7-5724-9294-ddf371dae6e3)

Mark Kirkman, unemployed, Boston

I was getting ready to leave the bar – it was still open, daylight outside, or it just hadn’t shut, maybe, because Max was just as interested in watching the TV as the rest of us – when TheBroadcast came, the My Children message. I didn’t know about it at first; I noticed that everybody in the bar suddenly went completely silent, and then I saw it on the TV, as the hosts did exactly the same. Can you hear this? one of them asked. Oh my God, can you hear this? Everybody had that same vacant look on their faces, and I was out of the loop again. I still didn’t hear a thing, and then it was over.

Simon Dabnall, Member of Parliament, London

That first day, we changed, as people. I am all too well aware how terribly melodramatic that sounds, but it’s a truth. Whatever it was that spoke to us during that first Broadcast, everybody – or nearly everybody, I always forget about those few that didn’t hear it – but nearly everybody was joined in something common. Regardless of the truth, it joined us for those brief moments that we were listening to it. If there was any doubt in the minds of the religious, that opening gambit, My Children … it was powerful.

I was hanging around on the South Bank when it happened. It was just starting to rain, and all of a sudden we heard it, and as soon as it finished, there was this cheer, as if we had finally won the World Cup or something, coming from St Paul’s. I couldn’t even begin to head over there, because the streets were so busy, and everybody started rushing that way, as if they were trying to make up for all those years that they spent not praying. I stayed where I was, because I’m rational; because My Children could be the call of any one of billions of parents, not necessarily a deity.

I mean, maybe we’d just tapped into somebody’s angry mother, for a second?

Audrey Clave, linguistics postgraduate student, Marseilles

As soon as we heard the static start up again, I tried to write down every detail that I could hear, that I could pick out from it. I tried to write down the phonetics of the static, you see, to try and see if there was anything in it, running them by Patrice as they came out, to see if he agreed with them. He was off his game, I thought, but he did it, helped me out, and by the time that the voice spoke the page was full of noises and sounds, and then we heard My Children, and I wrote that down as well, and then it ended. We didn’t say anything for ages, not for the longest time, and then I realized that we had the punch line, finally; and maybe the stuff before it, the noises, the static, that was the joke, or the puzzle? I got the team around, said that we had to work on it, but all I really wanted to do was to call my parents (but I knew that they would be at church). It took us a minute or so before somebody remarked that the words were in English. We all understood English perfectly, so I didn’t really notice it, but it was English words that I’d written on the page, and English words that The Broadcast spoke. So then it became, well, why was it in English? Where did it come from?

Jacques Pasceau, linguistics expert, Marseilles

I laughed, and said that if it was English, it clearly wasn’t God, because He would speak in, I don’t know, Aramaic, probably, or something that we didn’t understand. (Or, even better, something that everybody in the whole world understood, their own language, like a magic trick.) Audrey snorted at that, because she wanted to believe that it was God so badly. Maybe it’s because most of the people who pray to Him now speak English? she said. So He chose that language to meet the majority of the people.

The most spoken language is Mandarin, I said, Why didn’t He choose that? Well, maybe He’s not Buddha, Audrey said. Maybe He’s actually our God?

Dominick Volker, drug dealer, Johannesburg

I was in the back of a car being taken to, I don’t know, one of the Jo’burg kêrel houses or other, I forget which. I had been caught taking my money from one of my dealers in Lavender Hill – well out of my usual area, but he had a lot on him, so I had to go down there – and they were taking me off, hoping to pin something on me afterwards. It wouldn’t stick, so I wasn’t worried. There was too much chaos that day for anything to stick.

We passed this group of bergies on the side of the road and the kêrel locks the doors – locks his doors, because all of a sudden he’s afraid! Rough area, this, he says, and I don’t answer. Not talking? You some sort of mompie? No, I tell him, I just don’t want to talk to you, eh? Then he gets a call and pulls over down the road, outside a house, and he comes back two minutes later with this grinning fucking kont, stinking of dagga. This guy laughs as he gets in the back next to me. He does that click thing with his teeth. Fuck’s sake, I say, do I have to sit next to this one? The policeman tells me to shut it, and he starts off again. We’re two minutes down the road – the guy next to me hasn’t stopped smiling the entire time – and then we all start to hear the static again. I thought this was over, the stoner says, and then it gets louder. The guy in front pulls over, stops the engine, and we all just listen, and then we hear it. God. Then the kêrel unlocks his door, gets out, and just walks off, leaving me and this fucking reefer-stinking loser just sitting there, doors locked, right down the road from them fucking bergies. It’s a bloody miracle we made it out alive.

Dhruv Rawat, doctor, Bankipore

It was first thing in the morning, which was my busiest time, because everybody came before they went to work. Lots of the jobs started early and ended earlier, so I was always busy, it seemed. This one day there wasn’t a queue, which was rare, or so it seemed; I never had a chance to actually look outside to see, but there was always somebody at the door as soon as one patient had left, always another waiting to tell me about their illnesses. That morning I had the man with the bad foot back in, and he had put it up on my table. I took care of it, he said, I swear to you, I swear. You didn’t, I said to him, because if you had, you wouldn’t be back here. Did you go to the hospital? I asked. No, he said. The parts where I had cut it, tested it, drained it, they were black around the holes; The flesh has turned necrotic, I told him. What does that mean? It means that you have to have it cut off; not the foot, just the dead flesh, before it spreads. You’ll have to go to the hospital right now; I’ll take you there myself if you can’t walk or drive. No, he said, no, it’s fine. You cut the dead flesh off yourself. I trust you. I told him that I wasn’t equipped, but he insisted, pointing at the scalpel that was in the medical kit on my desk. You can use that, I have a strong pain threshold, I can take it. I had lifted the scalpel, and I was dangling it over his foot – because I knew this man, and I knew that he wouldn’t leave until he was satisfied, or he would leave and he would hobble around on his rotting foot until it was forcibly removed from his body, which would be the eventual outcome – and then The Broadcast happened. I sat there with the scalpel against his skin and listened to it, and he went quiet as well, for a while. When it was done he said, Well? Are you going to cut it off then? I will, I told him, just later. I went out onto the street to see what was going on – because it was inconceivable that it was in my head, no matter what it felt like – and it was … It was like a fly, buzzing around. Everybody was looking around for it, looking up in the sky to see if there would be something there to give them answers.

Isabella Dulli, nun, Vatican City

After the static, because they didn’t know what it was, they stopped the tourists from going into the Basilica, and certainly from going down into the tomb. It is so fragile; they only let 200 people in every month, that is why it gets so busy, why the tourists are so desperate to see it when we do let them, why they queue all night, sometimes, travel from hundreds of miles away. The tour guides took them away from the queue, told them to head up to the square, that they would have to come back. Most of them said it was fine; some of them complained. There’s no way you can come in, because it might be unstable. Then, we didn’t know if it was just from the building, or the electrics. I went down into the Basilica anyway, because I had been looking forward to it for days. It smelled so old, still, even with all the cleaning that they did, for preservation. It smelled of stone and dust, and there were very few places I loved more in the world, partly because of that very smell. I went down into the darkness – because the lights are so dim, it is always dark in the tomb, and there are always guides, because the ground is still unstable, like a building site in so many ways – and I knelt in front of the tomb itself to pray to the father of our church. I wasn’t praying for anything at all; only praying as I always did, out of love. Then I heard it, His voice, so strong through the darkness, but not the darkness of the tomb, the darkness of my heart, of the world; it was not frightening, or threatening. It was just all that I could hear. I thought of all of the faithful written about through history who He spoke to, His voice so strong; and I thought, and me. I was joining those whom He loved the most, who He was so close to as to spread His word directly, to fortify belief and to set His awe in the minds of His people. I cried in the darkness; my tears patted the stone of the tomb, and I was so happy right then, knowing that this was the happiest moment of my life; everything built up to that, and I would never be alone again. It was me and my God, and we were together.

Tom Gibson, news anchor, New York City

As senior anchor I had certain privileges. I got to pull rank on shifts, and as mine came to an end, after a very long day, My Children hit, and I decided that I wasn’t going anywhere. As soon as we heard what The Broadcast was saying, I knew that this could be the biggest news story of all time.

Meredith Lieberstein, retiree, New York City

The priests on the news after that first Broadcast looked so smug. There is nothing worse than a smug priest, Leonard said. He got so angry with one of them – I told you so, I said this was the case, the priest kept saying to the reporter; This is the Lord come back to speak to us – that he threw a tangerine at the television. It split all over the screen, burst like a water bomb. He cleaned it down – his temper never lasted for more than a single, regrettable second – but the apartment smelt of it all day, of that sharp citrus smell. It’s nice when it comes from a scented air freshener; it’s horrid to live with it all day when it’s not, so sweet and bitter and real.