Youthful Isaac, Enunciate!

“Speak now,” says the computer. The person typing into the computer is Sansara Emira Ittihad, prettiest woman I’ve ever seen and hopefully my future employer if I play my cards right and stop jiggling my leg when I talk. I’ve already been warned once. Professionals don’t like the jiggling. From Lulu Grenone: if you need to pee, tell us. Lulu is Sansara’s secretary. She can be a bit harsh. 

Sansara flicks her chalcedony eyes towards me; I clear my throat on purpose and connect my laptop to the gigantic screen in front of us. “Well, it’s nothing very different from what I described in my application email,” I say. “At the eighteen-year-mark, users record their voices as they pronounce various sentences, and the sounds will be transmitted into this—” I slap the chunk of metal and procrastination that I spent thirty weeks working on— “which will store them. Next, the database, which contains a whole corpus of human conversation, will align the user’s voice with each and every bit of dialogue. A small brain chip will be connected to the database, placed strategically in the Broca region of the frontal cortex—”

“Get to the point,” says the computer. 

“Basically,” I say attractively, “we’re killing two birds with one stone. Using this technology, the brain doesn’t have to consume so much energy in conversations because we can just copy and paste from past models. Whatever we want to say will be transmitted into a nearby QCD pole, and will come out in our own unique voices. Almost as if we were having a physical conversation.” I make sure to incorporate inclusive words like ‘we’ and ‘our’ because Sansara definitely needs me in her life. 

Sansara and Lulu start texting each other privately to discuss my future at the company. I recline in my chair. Science has made it this far. It doesn’t recognise names like Einstein anymore—it could do with several more Isaacs, including yours truly, except I despise apples and I get good ideas by thinking, not being hit by fruits. Mum says I’m too sarcastic to apply for a STEM degree. I proved her wrong. We’re not on talking terms anymore, but really, who is, when you’re a teenager? Everyone has this phase. Maybe it’s this lack of common manners and familial love that ruined us. Humanity, losing the ability to talk when we turn eighteen years and twenty days old. It’s the wrath of God. Woe betide the only intellectual species on Earth, Mum always says, except she types it on her laptop because she’s forty-one. 

The computer beeps. Sansara turns to face me, and now her eyes seem kind of wet, like blue garden pebbles after rain. She clicks a button and the mechanical voice says: “That’s a lovely idea, Isaac.”

I nearly fall off my chair.

Lulu’s computer adds, “This smells like a brain-arson amount of cash, though.” 

I reply, “It is.” 

“It would have been a successful product,” says Sansara, “if I wasn’t shutting my company down.”

This time I really do fall off my chair, both from the excessive leg-jiggling and the shock that serves as a venomous spider-bite to my cognition. “What?” I exclaim. 

“Shush,” snaps the voice from Lulu’s device. 

“Tell me it’s not true—”

Tearfully, from Sansara: “It’s true. I’m dissolving SANSHINE. Ever since I launched the initiative to combat this coming-of-age silence syndrome, I’ve just been going against my principles. I’m breaching my—” there is a loud buzz. 

“It buzzes,” says Lulu, “when you use a bad word.” 

Sansara looks at Lulu like she’d rather no one else to shove into a boar pit. 

I cannot believe my ears. In fact I’d clean them with antiseptic wipes if it meant unhearing everything I just listened to. “What principles? You don’t need principles. You’re beautiful and you have a phD.”

“You ignorant pleb,” barks the computer.

It’s one thing to be rejected by a million-dollar business and another to be insulted by an ethereal female. I soak my tears with my sleeve. Sansara realises this and hurriedly stabs the keyboard. “Listen, Isaac. I know you have good intentions. But I’m an introspective, rational and religious woman. I’m beginning to wonder if there’s a reason why we’re losing our voices at eighteen years and twenty days old.”

“Maybe so we don’t scream every time we see a spider,” I say, tone dripping with acid. “Maybe because all the saturated fat in potato chips finally caught up to us. Sansara, you can’t perform some empirical study and figure out everything in the entire universe.”

“But we’re still allowed to connect the dots,” says Sansara, and she slides a small lever to reduce the volume, making her sound soft. Sad. “Almost seven-thousand days after birth, the glorious human larynx ceases to function. The tongue becomes a tool just for eating. We were never given any compensation, nor a detailed reason why. Some say it’s a punishment from God. We just use our tongues to sin, after all. Maybe not so much in childhood but slowly through adolescence, and then especially so when we are young adults. When we think we know the world.”

There is something unsettling about hearing this through a chatbot speaker, and I look into Sansara’s glacial gaze and I realise: oh. I really want to hear her real voice. But I am four years her junior, four years too late to have met her in high school—is this my punishment? I’m supposed to be pissed off with her and Lulu, but for a split second I allow myself to imagine. Her voice, in my head, sounds like silk shirts brushing against each other in a closet. Like honey oozing from a spoon.  

“What if it isn’t a punishment?” says Sansara. “What if it’s a gift?”

“Optimists will always die first,” I remind her. 

Lulu shoots me a look that could turn a bus into barbed wire. “Just try and visualise it, Isaac. OK. In your last summer holiday at school… you had fun, didn’t you?”

I had fun? If you equate fun with trying to fit an entire book on quantum physics into my memory, sure. Let’s be real. I don’t have regular friends. I have classmates, club members. I didn’t go hiking with the rest of the school, I’ve never roasted a marshmallow. Not that I care. I practically emerged from the womb as a valedictorian. I was and still am too mature for the ducks in my pond. 

But this is for the sake of the most alluring woman I’ve ever had the pleasure to breathe the same air as, so I stop sulking and say, “Summer holidays, huh. I could barely sleep for happiness.” 

“Now,” says Sansara, “don’t you think not being able to speak sort of makes our time a lot more precious? Making memories by touching. Writing our names in the soil. Tasting warm pie made by friends. If I could relive my life, perhaps I wouldn’t have spoken so terribly much. I’d have enjoyed my summer holidays a lot more.”

I’d asked what happened, but I’m not that rude. She stares with her beautiful eyes at where a slab of grey light slants through cyan-tinted windows. 

In this spacious office on the thirtieth level of a sophisticated skyscraper in the middle of the city, I begin to question myself. 

“Maybe we’ve been neglecting how powerful connections can become,” says Lulu, “when we’re not being vocal.”

“In any case,” I remark, “eighteen years and twenty days is a little too specific.”

“Everyone changes at eighteen,” says Sansara. “We choose a new skin and keep it till it crumbles. But words can make or break us. In that synapse between adolescence and youth is where I’d like to take all my words back. I only ever regret what I say.” Again I so heavily lust to discover what she was like when she was younger, what she’s referring to now with such grief. She stands, tucks her silk head scarf inside her coat, glances at the window again. “Isaac. Would you like to participate in an experiment?” 

“Of course.” I don’t squander my opportunities. 

Lulu passes me a slip of paper. It resembles a permission slip, like the ones I used to get at school. I scrawl my signature at the bottom, agreeing to the terms and conditions: No talking in the duration of this experiment. Participants must be below eighteen years and twenty days old. Once I’ve made it clear to Sansara that I can sign anything with inhumane speed, including marriage certificates, we head out of her office and down the elevator. 

I am no stranger to the veins and arteries of scientific endeavours. I know the urge to test hypotheses can arise spontaneously. It’s the only reason why I’m not going to speak. Outside, clouds bedaub the dim sky, a train slithers from a tunnel like snail from shell. It looks unnatural. It’s almost six o’clock and lights are beginning to sparkle from shop windows and apartment buildings. The silence is so thick that electronic billboards blink neon-orange and green: BEWARE OF SUDDEN SOUNDS: PIGEON COO, TRAIN WHISTLE. SHOCK FROM LOUD SOUNDS MAY RESULT IN CARDIAC ARREST. 

Sansara walks on the outside of the pavement, which irritates me because her peach-coloured heels should not have to be desecrated. But she’s only being nice; three people can’t fit comfortably on one path. Lulu walks next to her, then it’s me, the ‘child’ who needs to be chaperoned and kept away from the road. Lulu wears burgundy boat shoes that compliment her rosy lipstick. She’s surprisingly fashionable for someone so sour. It reminds me of my mother before she filed for a divorce and used to dress up for my father. He chose me and not the other prettier fish in the sea, she used to say, so this shark must count her blessings and put her sharp teeth away. Glittery eyeshadow and pins in her hair. I remember clapping and telling her she looked like a princess. There’s a bravery in younger boys that we lose, in that synapse between adolescence and youth, bravery not to speak our minds but to say sweet things. 

My shadow births in honour of the street lamps. It disappears when we enter a convenience store, where Sansara scrutinises an array of bubblegum. I didn’t know she liked bubblegum. It’s cute. I want to tell her I’ll pay, but quickly remember the permission slip I signed. No talking. So I press my lips together and stare at a line of Vimto cans in the refrigerator. They bring back memories. Liam and Nakamura and me, in the shed, sweating and completing past year papers for mathematics. From Nakamura, ambitious future pharmacology student: Vimto is our selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor. We pretended to understand. Chilled and basking in the eski, those purple cans. I liked the fizziness. I turn back to the ladies, torn between asking if they’ve ever tried Vimto and being content with not knowing; Sansara purchases a packet of strawberry-flavoured gum. On the inside of her wallet there is a picture of a man.

It could be her brother. I don’t dwell on it. The air is lubricated with a mixture of scents: of strawberry, coins, patinated metal from the bike stands. We resume our walk. This time, I hop over the sidewalk so the ladies can use it. Peach and burgundy against concrete look like an aesthetic photograph. I show them a shortcut through the railway station, twisting through the tracks—bits of gravel trickle from where they’ve been displaced after a hurtling train. A low whistle rumbles the earth. Lulu’s eyes widen and we pick up our pace until we’ve crossed the great iron ocean, and there’s no breathless laughter but instead mad grinning and flushed cheeks. 

Whoah whoah whoah. How could I have forgotten? My summer holidays were fantastic. I enjoyed memorising trigonometric functions, barbequeing sausages under a hot Australian sun, diving into a crystal-clear ocean from the back of a sailboat. I enjoyed listening to my mum and dad arguing only because I knew Mum would take me for ice-cream right after. I enjoy observing how broad my shoulders have become, in my shadow, at least. I am thrilled to have been invited to speak at SANSHINE because they thought my inventions were intriguing, I am excited that today I can smell strawberries even though we’re nowhere near a farm. I am honoured that my first love is so intelligent and her eyes can make my heart race faster than a Japanese shinkansen and my leg bounce up and down from nervousness. The body’s five senses have kept me so wonderfully alive that for a fraction of a second, I had forgotten the need to speak. I’m only seventeen in a couple of months. So young! So young, and I’ve experienced the luscious beauty of the world, I’m so lucky and I hadn’t even appreciated it. I may never hear my mother’s voice again, I may never hear Sansara’s, but her keyboard will always be clacking in that rhythmic way and my mother will still hide the spare key under the brick if I ever want to visit unannounced. 

I absorb the dizzying lights of sixty-metre parliamentary buildings, the asphalt, the tips of Lulu’s auburn hair, the rest of the creatures and memories whose interaction with my conscious self is the only reason why I can recall my existence, and realise it is a map in the shape of the Earth. I want to wrap my arms around it and whisper, I love you. I love you. But of course that’s impossible. And there’s a lump in my throat so I can’t speak, anyways.