Unspoken

On February 6th, 2018, Dave Richards went to sleep in his camp bunk in Kugluktuk, Nunavut. He was exceptionally tired after his day of exploration near the Coppermine river. Dave had spent nearly 16 hours trudging over uneven ground, covered in mountainous snow drifts, in temperatures that were flirting with minus 50 degrees Celsius. It is difficult to put in to words, the life sucking ability of extreme cold on an individual’s body, it comes down to a feeling: one of exhaustion, defeat, acquiescence. Dave had surrendered to his body’s demands and drifted into a deep sleep to allow it to regenerate.

When Dave awoke he felt completely renewed, he laid in his bed, rubbed his eyes, stretched a little bit and pulled his blankets tight, to soak up as much warmth as he could from the covers, before, once again, exposing himself to the cold. While glancing around, however, something about the room seemed to be slightly off: it was a small room, as it should have been, with a bed, a desk and an open door to his private bathroom, these things were as he remembered them, but something was wrong.

He looked around the room, trying to put his finger on the problem: what was it that was different, there was his suitcase; there were his work boots; the desk; the door; the window…wait…the window. The window shone brightly with sunlight, this couldn’t be, unless he had slept until noon, but no, he realised that even if he had slept until noon the sun would not be this full, this bright, this was a summer sun. “What the hell is going on?” Dave muttered.

Mr. Richards got up, quickly dressed and ran out into the hallway of his dorm, that is when he truly became concerned. The hallway to his dorm had changed, epically. Everything about the hall was different, gone were the cream, vinyl, textured walls with the peeling partitions. The patterned carpet likewise was gone. The dim incandescent lights had been replaced by a general illumination, that seemed to emanate from the walls and ceiling themselves. The floor had been replaced with a solid slab, that struck him as concrete when he looked at it, but felt closer to thick cork on his feet. Panic set in.

Dave ran down the hall, only now noticing that the other dorm rooms were also gone, headed toward the end of the hallway. It took him a few minutes to realise that there was no door where he expected one to be. Only a flat smooth wall. He slowed his jog and began to walk, bewildered, while his body slowed his mind began to race, trying to piece together the situation he found himself in. As he neared the end of the hallway, the wall suddenly disappeared, with a near silent whooshing sound. What Dave saw beyond that wall was more than his mind could handle. The panic reached its high-water mark and Dave turned and ran back to his room, slamming the door he jumped under the covers and cowered, shaking, his mind completely unable to piece together thoughts.

What Dave had seen was a laboratory of sorts. Beakers and tubes lined the counters in the center of the room, and hieroglyphic holograms floated in mid air. These objects were surrounded by, or more so integrated with, lush plants, shrubs and small trees. There were what looked like the screens of tablets or smart phones, but they were floating in mid air—the fruit of the trees and shrubs that surrounded them—the characters were foreign and they were nearly transparent and without substance.

In time Dave managed to get himself together enough to, once again, scan his room. To his surprise he saw what looked like food, in an odd dish on his desk. Steam rose from the paste like substance and the smells made his stomach voice it’s hollowness. He dipped a finger into the paste, finding it warm to the touch and thick. Slowly he sniffed the paste on his finger, and, finding the smell somewhat intriguing, he tried a taste. His taste buds howled with happiness, the flavour was impossible to explain, but his body knew that it was good. Finding himself famished, he began to wolf the food down with his fingers, ignoring the ceramic looking utensil that sat beside the dish.

For the next few days, Dave did not leave his room. He spent his time staring out the window, trying to come to terms with where he was. The sun was much too high in the sky to still be shining down on him in Nunavut. It was obvious to him that he was no longer there. The city scape outside his window was completely foreign to him. The tall buildings were so integrated with the lush vegetation, it was difficult to discern where the man-made structures ended and the flora and fauna began. The huge glass windows revealed even more vegetation inside the buildings. Indeed, the only room he had seen that was not sharing space with flowers and bushes was the one he was currently in.

Food would appear when he was hungry and the dishes would disappear after he had finished eating. This type of living was not foreign to Mr. Richards, years of working in remote camps had seasoned him to long periods of time just thinking amongst himself. But, he was starting to wonder where the people were and why nobody had come to talk to him. The streets were too far down to see pedestrians and the only people he even glimpsed were blurry shadows walking amongst the trees and shrubs in the buildings across from his window. Eventually, he realised, he would have to venture out.

The following day, Dave Richards began to explore. At first, he explored the hallway outside his room, but, finding only the one exit and nothing else of interest, he expanded his survey into the laboratory type room. There was, indeed, some sort of computer interface floating in mid air, and he found that he could interact with it easily with gestures. It did him little good, however, as the language was completely foreign to him. There were three exits in the room, one of which appeared to be an elevator, or an empty broom closet. The other two led down hallways, similar to the one outside his room.

Dave spent a little time in the elevator looking room, trying to figure out if it was, indeed, an elevator, but finding no buttons he soon moved on. The first hallway he explored seemed to go on forever, but no other doors appeared, or so he thought. After walking what seemed like an eternity down the hallway, he turned around and headed back to the lab. As he walked he trailed his hands on the luminescent walls and, suddenly, a door opened to his right. Inside he saw what looked like a startled man, except the man was not the type of man that Dave was familiar with. Once again, he ran back to his room to hide in his isolation.

The man had looked like a generic human, too tall, and too robust, to be the sort of man that Dave was familiar with, but everything else was close to what he was used to. His skin seemed to be a blend of all the familiar skin colors, and yet, did not seem to fall in any familiar category. The eyes were too wide, the nose too flat, the mouth pursed and small. Close, but no cigar, as far as Dave was concerned. The only thing that kept him at ease was the complete absence of aggression from the man. Mr. Richards had been around all types, and knew consciously and instinctively that this man was no fighter, no aggression lurked in the shadows of his eyes. Indeed, the man seemed to be very meek, terrified even.

The next time Dave stepped out, he spent more time playing with the holographic tablets. Finally, he hit pay dirt. After gesturing to a word, that kept showing up on all the pages he visited, a drop-down menu appeared. There, in familiar letters, was the word “English.” He gestured to it, and a whole world opened itself to him. The tablet was a sort of scientific Wikipedia, with a biology section, physics, chemistry and the one that Dave had hoped for the most: History. He was about to find out where he was, specifically, when he was.

Dave Richards learned that roughly 7 thousand years had passed since he had gone to sleep in his little camp room. Later that night, what turned out to be a nuclear apocalypse, began to play out. With bombs being launched from numerous nations, starting with North Korea, then the US, Russia, China, India and Pakistan. Roughly 300 hundred nukes were detonated of various capabilities, the strongest being 3 Tsar Bombas that landed on US soil. A nuclear winter so fierce and rapid, that it completely defied all scientific predictions, came over the world. Several dirty bombs had knocked out the power grids and the world descended into a frozen darkness. A deep freeze that would last over 2 thousand years.

Few people survived the bombings, less the radiation fallout, and even fewer survived the deep freeze. By the time the world began to once again warm, there were less than 30,000 surviving descendants. Innovation and creativity had kept them alive. Over time they came together and began to, once again, develop a society. For three thousand years they advanced, very rapidly, technologically. Afraid of repeating past mistakes, the descendants began to bio-engineer aggression out of the race. Soon, humanity no longer used verbal language, as they developed such detailed non-verbal communication, it was no longer necessary to talk. In time, their vocal cords shrank and ceased to work. All rules and laws became unspoken. All customs and appropriate behaviours became “known.” In time, they learned to modify the genome to allow for near perpetual life and ceased having children.

Accidental death was infrequent and unlikely. The population was easily replenished when numbers dropped too low and all individuals were born with all the knowledge they required. All information and science was shared among the people and they developed a society that lived in harmony with nature and the planet. After weeks of reading, Dave concluded that the people that now lived had found his frozen body and brought him back to life. Equipped with his new knowledge he went out into the silent world.

At first, he relished in the silence, but over time he became bored and began to act out. Dave, not preloaded with the unspoken knowledge required to exist in this society, soon began to break rules and laws. He was precocious, sometimes aggressive, finally he was violent and eventually found himself in a cell.

Unbeknownst to him, his genome had also been modified to provide everlasting life. His captors, being averse to death, made sure he could do no harm to himself, but could not allow him out into the world without reconditioning. He rejected attempts at further modifications and lashed out at any visitor to his cell. Soon, he was simply left alone. He tried to starve himself, but found, to his dismay, that he could not resist the warm paste that showed up in his cell as he became hungry. Dave Richards was this incarnation of humanity’s biggest and only mistake. There he lived, and still lives, in isolation, in his little cell. His existence, and indeed, his state of mind, best left unspoken.