MUM'S THE WORD - BHARAT HARIDAS

The green room was small. There was really no need for a green room. He wanted to step out. There was a huge crowd waiting for him. He didn’t try to recognize thE feeling. He became more aware of himself and felt the room restricting his flow of thoughts, or was it the strain that his body and brain cells had accumulated so far. He gave a monotonous voice command; his eyes blinked rapidly and closed.

He thought about the last few times he had spoken to that camera, in his own office, from this chair. But then he was only aware of the main receptors that logged into the system to tune into his broadcast. The network security agent utilized most of the computation power to cut public access. There were countless attacks which jammed many hubs. But it didn’t change anything as usual. Somehow he never expected anything.

But today was a different case all together. These thoughts didn’t stay inside for a long time, they just flowed into one another but not arbitrarily as in a day dream. Instead, they moved with a rare clarity and passed on without any further evaluation or emotion . There were no mental notes or pauses in his flow. He repeated the voice command and bit his tongue. That sensation was very important to him.

He remembered his friend who kept tuning into the broadcast.

“Mr. Livingstone, ha ha just joking, your silence is killing me, the broadcast is losing shape, don’t become unfamiliar with the language we speak”.

Someone knocked twice on the door and announced “Uh..uh another 5 mins, and we are on”.

The voice sounded quite hesitant in the beginning. He was used to this by now, but never fully understood the cause. He remembered that experiment where he tuned into fellow members at the lab. That fraction of time was not easy to crack and the code used to crash. Even the storage device refused to record continuously; that pause always lacked resolution. But this wasn’t the only time the storage device refused to show up the data stream.

There were still some of them floating around the underground market. He had never supported the commercial launch. The majority of the council had played it safe. There were no strong opinions nor opposition. Was it some form of censorship or had the representative body become obsolete with the fragmentation? This question was very important to him today.

He could hear a faint humming of the crowd assembling with accompanying echoes that spread throughout the atrium. He quickly scanned the edge of the arm-rest with his cold and shriveled fingers. As the door opened he exhaled causing a small patch on the transparent (what??). The chair moved smoothly on the floor and found its way to the balcony which cantilevered into the main atrium. That movement into a sudden expanse of space and increase in light did not produce any expected feeling of splendor.

He couldn’t wait any longer. His fingers gripped the arm rest tightly.

“To this day, I count two hundred and fifty years and not a single birthday.”

The audience broke into a meek laughter, but he continued “When the Bill of Accumulated Learning was passed I volunteered without giving it much thought. There was a sense of excitement which I can recall without much affinity….”

Every person assembled in the atrium were evenly lit by the skylight 500 meters above . He was known to start without an introduction and it they considered it a joke and a symptom of his accumulated ego. But nobody remembered that peculiar mannerism today. He slowly moved out of the shadow which fell on the platform while he continued speaking. The audience sheepishly pointed towards the cantilever from all directions and a few eyes still searched the expansive interior surface of this renowned building for him.

No one was surprised when they noticed how his lips remained sealed.

Avy comments:

I think there is much here that can be fleshed out into a very powerful sci-fi story. You can take this forward into a tight powerful story.
You have to build the central character better, give him a better history that will lead the reader to an understanding of the denoument.
The first part of it is kind of confusing – if you read Alannah’s story you will find that the strange sc i-fi system has some sort of explanation that satisfies the reader. I feel you are not giving me enough to feel that I am inside your system.
The transition from that broadcast scenario to the people coming into the atrium etc is fine. But again it is kind of vague as to why he chooses to remain silent, his longevity etc.
The passing mention to the bill of accumulated learning or the notion of the accumulated ego, what drives him to silence etc, is vague.
Again, why the green room? If it has some significance, what is it?
Tease out the central plot, and the sub-plot. What is the dilemma that plagues the central character?

There is a great story here – DIG IT OUT, FLESH IT OUT, CONCRETISE IT.