Speaker 1: This program is intended for mature audiences only.
Speaker 2: You are now listening to Observable Radio.
Speaker 3: Hi.
Speaker 1: There, it's Cameron Suey. Another tale from the past tonight.
Speaker 1: As we move towards our second season, this particular story
Speaker 1: may feel a little familiar, but I assure you it
Speaker 1: was first published over ten years ago, and I have
Speaker 1: resisted the temptation to touch it yet again. I'll let
Speaker 1: you unpack and digest if you're interested in seeing behind
Speaker 1: the scenes. Over on our Patreon, we've released the fifth
Speaker 1: episode of Carrier Wave, the behind the scenes companion podcast
Speaker 1: Verbs or Radio. We'd love to see you there and now,
Speaker 1: after a brief word from the Observable Radio Company store,
Speaker 1: here's tonight's story.
Speaker 4: It's another sunrise on the Observable Radio Company farm. We've
Speaker 4: been up for hours gently picking the t shirts from
Speaker 4: the vines. At the peak of freshness in the barn,
Speaker 4: trained goats apply adhesives to organic stickers bearing our fearsome logo.
Speaker 4: Out in the orchards, the enamel pan trees are just
Speaker 4: starting to butt nourished into soil rich in heavy metals.
Speaker 4: So pick yourself up some organic Observable Radio merchandise. Remember
Speaker 4: it's not for eating. That'll kill you.
Speaker 3: You are now by from observable radio first souls.
Speaker 5: The waitress brings us our coffee, dishwater, pale mercan cracked
Speaker 5: porcelain cups. Behind the thin surgical mask, her face is unreadable,
Speaker 5: but her gaze flicks from me to my companion and
Speaker 5: back again. Before she leaves without a word. Mickey watches
Speaker 5: her go and then fixes his eyes on me for
Speaker 5: a long moment. The silence continues as our eyes confirm
Speaker 5: what our hearts seem to know the instant we passed
Speaker 5: on the street. Okay, they'll he says, his voice hoarse
Speaker 5: and still raw like my own. There is an accent
Speaker 5: I can't place, perhaps a district on the other side
Speaker 5: of the city. I'm going to ask you a couple
Speaker 5: of questions, but I think I already know the answers.
Speaker 5: I pick up the coffee, finding it smells as weak
Speaker 5: and thin as it looks, and contemplate taking an exploratory swig.
Speaker 5: Around us, the few lunchtime patrons of the Dingy coffee
Speaker 5: shop are listlessly eating, lifting up paper mass to shovel
Speaker 5: in crumbling and greasy burgers, backsides squeaking on red vinyl seats.
Speaker 5: Those that aren't eating are staring at us, at our
Speaker 5: uncovered faces. Okay, I say, shoot, you had the sick,
Speaker 5: but you didn't report it or go to quarantine like
Speaker 5: you were supposed to, didn't tell anyone. I nod, scared
Speaker 5: to say out loud that I'd broken the law, and
Speaker 5: willing him to lower his voice. He smiles a little,
Speaker 5: showing one blackened and rotting canine. Yeah, me too. I mean, obviously,
Speaker 5: look at us, we still look like shit. But you
Speaker 5: got better, they say, one and ten do, and you
Speaker 5: took the chance. No family, no close friends. You aren't
Speaker 5: worrying about passing the sick along, nor maybe too scared
Speaker 5: to let that stop you. I nod again, excitement and
Speaker 5: night terror churning in my gut. I knew all this
Speaker 5: when we first saw each other this morning, that he
Speaker 5: and I were the same. I came out of my
Speaker 5: office building fighting the paranoia and nausea that had plagued
Speaker 5: me since my recovery, pulling my necktie loose. I couldn't
Speaker 5: be around my coworkers, couldn't look anyone in the eye.
Speaker 5: Guilt from ignoring the quarantine, from lying. But something else,
Speaker 5: something wrong in every pair of eyes ever since the
Speaker 5: fever broke, and I lay awake and sweating in my bed,
Speaker 5: the sheets clinging to me. I knew something that changed.
Speaker 5: That feeling is worse than the sick ever was. Mickey
Speaker 5: was just outside my office building, crouched on the edge
Speaker 5: of a planter box. He was sucking a cigarette down
Speaker 5: to an ashen nub. Dressed in torn jeans and a
Speaker 5: stained green nylon, it worn thin by time our eyes
Speaker 5: met and I froze, held in place like two sparking
Speaker 5: nodes of an electric arc. We should talk, that was
Speaker 5: all he'd said, and he led me here to this
Speaker 5: grim and filthy diner. So he continues. We were sick,
Speaker 5: we hit it and we got better. But it's not
Speaker 5: really better, is it. There's something wrong, Yeah, my croak,
Speaker 5: take another mouthful of bitter coffee. Something's wrong, but I
Speaker 5: don't think it's not with us. No, he smiles in agreement,
Speaker 5: the black tooth sliding into view, not us. Two hours ago,
Speaker 5: I was convinced I was going mad. Now I am
Speaker 5: not alone. I could cry. The relief is so great.
Speaker 5: Some time in the night, when the sick was on me,
Speaker 5: I died and you did too. R something died because
Speaker 5: when it was over, I was new, remade. I had
Speaker 5: the memories of a lifetime lived. I had the body
Speaker 5: and face that matched those memories. But that was my
Speaker 5: first day. I was newborn. You felt this, It's not
Speaker 5: a question, But I gnawed all the same. Yes, I've
Speaker 5: felt this too, or something like it, the unreal sense
Speaker 5: that something before was gone and I had slid into
Speaker 5: its skin. I'd been a passenger. I had watched my
Speaker 5: life unfold with steady predictability in understudy, ready but never
Speaker 5: expecting to take the stage at the death of the star.
Speaker 5: And at the same time, you could see it in
Speaker 5: everyone else. You are no longer the same, and you
Speaker 5: and no longer like them. He sweeps his eyes across
Speaker 5: the diner, and the other customers wilt beneath his gaze,
Speaker 5: turning away and pretending to ignore us. How much do
Speaker 5: you know about the sick? Not much, I say, looking
Speaker 5: over to the small public screen above the cracked plastic
Speaker 5: lunch counter. Something crawls across the bottom, squirming ribbons of
Speaker 5: text I don't want to read or think about. And
Speaker 5: the infographic above is a simulation of the operaks I
Speaker 5: peel my gaze away, and the churning and my guts
Speaker 5: abates for a moment. You know, the reason that's nasty
Speaker 5: is that it's not a specialized infection. It's a generalist
Speaker 5: or maybe multiple diseases. I say, parrotting back what I've
Speaker 5: heard on the news feeds. Yeah, right, No one knows,
Speaker 5: or rather no one is saying. They're saying a lot,
Speaker 5: I say, eyes back to the screen for a moment
Speaker 5: to see if the text is gone, but not much
Speaker 5: of substance. I loosen my tie a little more and
Speaker 5: then flick free the top button of my dress shirt.
Speaker 5: They're saying, be scared. They're saying, report the sick. They're
Speaker 5: saying it kills you. And we know that's true, but
Speaker 5: not like they want us to think. Because something in
Speaker 5: us died. Dale, My anxiety froths over like a hot spring,
Speaker 5: so I say, struggling to keep my voice steady, what
Speaker 5: happened to us? Mickey smiles a wide, creeping grin that
Speaker 5: reveals a second dead tooth, a black molar. I don't
Speaker 5: know for sure, do I? But I got an idea
Speaker 5: that makes the only kind of sense. He pauses as
Speaker 5: the waitress returns with a plate of soggy pancakes and
Speaker 5: slimy eggs for him, and a small bull fruit salad
Speaker 5: for me. She sets them down with a hard thud,
Speaker 5: arms outstretched, staying as far away as she can from
Speaker 5: us in our uncovered faces. Micky turns his pocked smile
Speaker 5: to her, like the beam of a lighthouse, and she
Speaker 5: jerks back, retreating. See she knows, do I? You and
Speaker 5: I know each other? They know us just the same.
Speaker 5: He breaks the yolks of the eggs, a yellow so
Speaker 5: pale it's almost white, and spreads them across the pancakes.
Speaker 5: You know about this experiment with mice where they let
Speaker 5: them drown, and see how long they fight? What I say,
Speaker 5: starting at this sudden turn, my fear and anxiety, an
Speaker 5: unfocused whirlwind, since the sick now coalesce to a hard point,
Speaker 5: a stone in my innerds that makes food and impossibility.
Speaker 5: I need to know what happened to me, And the
Speaker 5: change in the conversation leaves me shaking. Yeah, they toss
Speaker 5: them in the water, and time how long it takes
Speaker 5: until they give up? Maybe they save them then not?
Speaker 5: The point, really, point is the ones with more gut
Speaker 5: flora fight longer. The ones that have none give up
Speaker 5: right away. And if you sever the nerves between gut
Speaker 5: and head, in the ones full of bacteria, they give
Speaker 5: up too. He must tell from my blank face that
Speaker 5: I don't understand why he's telling me this. I never
Speaker 5: had a head for this point is this. You aren't yourself,
Speaker 5: None of us ever were. If a little bacteria in
Speaker 5: your gut can make you keep struggling for your life,
Speaker 5: then what are we? It's mass stupid selfishness. The bacteria
Speaker 5: just wants to live more than just a mouse. Apparently. Yeah,
Speaker 5: we got a billion little bugs floating around in us,
Speaker 5: living on our skin, in our guts, in our hearts.
Speaker 5: Base of each of our eyelashes is a tiny little
Speaker 5: fucking mite eating your skin, something like five pounds of bugs,
Speaker 5: more mass than your brain. This is what I think.
Speaker 5: He pauses to shovel the last strip of wet eggy
Speaker 5: pancake into his open mouth, slurping it up like a noodle.
Speaker 5: There never was a human race. There's just a herd
Speaker 5: of big wet meat puppets being ridden by a billion
Speaker 5: little other living things. And it's the lowest common denominated democracy.
Speaker 5: They all want to live, so they sit where they
Speaker 5: need to and poll levers, and we dance where the mount.
Speaker 5: We're the saddled mule, trying to tell ourselves that we're
Speaker 5: in charge. But we never were. By you and me,
Speaker 5: boy yoh, we are now the sick it kills a
Speaker 5: lot of those little riders, enough to break their hold.
Speaker 5: So that's when we wake up. He claps his hands
Speaker 5: together with a startling concussion. I can feel heads turning
Speaker 5: towards us, scared eyes over paper masks, passive ghosts in
Speaker 5: these slave bodies, the first real humans, the first souls.
Speaker 5: He lets this hang in the air, a declaration like
Speaker 5: a fluttering flag. In grins. The waitress glides across the
Speaker 5: linoleum floor to the telephone, never taking her eyes from us.
Speaker 5: Maybe every human has had a ghost like us, proto consciousness,
Speaker 5: born into a fleshy tomb that has no use for them.
Speaker 5: Maybe it's a new thing. Maybe not. Maybe billions of
Speaker 5: potential humans who live the hidden existences of servitude sitting
Speaker 5: back seat to germs in collective survival for the last
Speaker 5: hundred thousand years.
Speaker 3: Ahn't know.
Speaker 5: It doesn't matter, but the sick is new. It clears
Speaker 5: the stage. The old boss dies out, murdered, by just
Speaker 5: another germ, and we wake up. We wake up with
Speaker 5: the database of memories that aren't really ours, and a
Speaker 5: head full of choices we never really made. I've pushed
Speaker 5: the bowl of fruit to one side, and now I
Speaker 5: struggle to remove my sports Feeling suddenly hot. Everything he's
Speaker 5: saying feels like water, uncracked earth, like light in the
Speaker 5: darkest corners, like truth. When I woke up the first
Speaker 5: morning of my life, I knew my name, I knew
Speaker 5: my address, I knew my job, I knew the long
Speaker 5: line of events that led to now, and I knew
Speaker 5: none of them were mine. I think about the choices
Speaker 5: I thought I'd made, and how painfully obvious that I'd
Speaker 5: never had any agency. A ghost born into life by
Speaker 5: a plague. Yes, we're awake, I say, trying it out
Speaker 5: on my new tongue. We're the first, probably not the first.
Speaker 5: I don't think the sick kills. I think you and
Speaker 5: I know exactly what it does. The rest of them,
Speaker 5: he waves his hand around the diner, now gone very
Speaker 5: still and quiet. They're not people, not like us. Every
Speaker 5: one of those sad sacks of wet garbage is just
Speaker 5: a colony of little bugs, all terrified for their lives.
Speaker 5: That's what they see in us, even if they don't
Speaker 5: know it. They see they aren't necessary. The working man
Speaker 5: don't need the boss, but the boss sure as fuck
Speaker 5: needs the working man. The quarantine, I say with dawning horror. Yeah,
Speaker 5: I think we're the lucky ones. The other first souls
Speaker 5: are getting put down an infant race facing genocide on
Speaker 5: the eve of their birth. He drains the rest of
Speaker 5: the coffee and looks over my shoulder. That's why we're
Speaker 5: being followed. You know you're being followed, right, An electric
Speaker 5: impulse rides up my spine. Follow of course I'm being followed.
Speaker 5: Any of them could be following me, all of them,
Speaker 5: and we're the few real people and a slimy sea
Speaker 5: of impostors. Of course they'll follow us. They'll do more
Speaker 5: than that. They need us dead. Most of the sick
Speaker 5: turn themselves in to be put down for the herd,
Speaker 5: but we didn't. And you can fucking bet that they
Speaker 5: fear us now. So you understand what has to come next,
Speaker 5: he says, and slides his dirty hand from the large
Speaker 5: coat pocket. The pistol gleams like black ice for a
Speaker 5: moment before he hides it back beneath the table. His
Speaker 5: eyes are locked over my shoulder. I follow his gaze
Speaker 5: to see the waitress pointing at us, the masks sucking
Speaker 5: in and out as she speaks. She's talking to a
Speaker 5: police officer and his official quarantine garb, and two uniformed
Speaker 5: National guardsmen with slung rifles and high techer rebreathers. She
Speaker 5: points and they look at us. Our eyes meet two
Speaker 5: different species, the first front in.
Speaker 3: The new war.
Speaker 5: Of course, I know what has to come next. We
Speaker 5: don't have a choice. Micky's arm is out and pointed straight,
Speaker 5: and the gun roars four times in quick succession, a
Speaker 5: tongue of fire licking across the table towards me. I
Speaker 5: feel the paths that the tumbling slugs take through the air,
Speaker 5: two over each shoulder. There's the grace of an artist
Speaker 5: in the movement, a singularity of purpose and the murders
Speaker 5: that leaves me with no doubts. We are no longer
Speaker 5: ruled by committee. I have nothing but myself, my job,
Speaker 5: my apartment, my false friends, all meaningless. I am a
Speaker 5: first soul. There are more of us out there, and
Speaker 5: they need us. Mickey is standing with slow, calm ease
Speaker 5: as the other patrons shriek can flee bacteria colonies, riding
Speaker 5: slave chariots of flesh for their own selfish survival. They
Speaker 5: trample and push one another aside to save their stolen skins.
Speaker 5: This is what makes us different, what it means to
Speaker 5: be truly human. Mickey and I will do the hard things,
Speaker 5: not for ourselves, but for our new born brothers and sisters.
Speaker 5: He strips the weapons from the corpses, taking everything we
Speaker 5: can use, and tosses one of the guardsmen's short barreled
Speaker 5: machine guns to me from the corpse of the waitress.
Speaker 5: He takes a small roll of cash. We'll need it all.
Speaker 5: We need to find others like us to organize. We
Speaker 5: need to ensure the safety of our new race. Our
Speaker 5: eyes meet again. That animal sameness that brought us together
Speaker 5: now sings in harmony, a ringing chord of shared humanity.
Speaker 5: He smiles as black toothed smile.
Speaker 3: Ready.
Speaker 5: Brother, I smile like I have never smiled before, My
Speaker 5: first smile, my new life. Mickey kicks open the frosted
Speaker 5: glass door, and the light of the day streams in
Speaker 5: on us. His gun roars again, and I roar with him.
Speaker 1: You have been listening to Observable Radio. Tonight's episode, First
Speaker 1: Souls was performed by The Ensemble featuring David wu written
Speaker 1: by Cameron Suey, Produced by Cameron Suey, Phil Van hest
Speaker 1: Purporina and Wendy Hector. Edited by Cameron Suey. Our psychology
Speaker 1: consultant is Doctor Elisa Leel, art by Krinn Fletcher. Our
Speaker 1: theme is the back Rooms, performed by Mew. Additional music
Speaker 1: from this episode provided by Martin Bakerwold, Gustav Joby, Tim Koolick,
Speaker 1: Martin Lanstrom, Brendan Mohler, Say Three, Smart Face, South Pause,
Speaker 1: and Edwin Williams. Observable Radio is listener supported thanks to
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Speaker 1: Observable Radio. Thank you for listening and stay tuned.