Diversifications

by James Lovegrove

  It was two o’clock in the morning. Chilton Mead was on a state of high alert. Colonel Nutter had just come off the phone to the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister was not a happy person. Neither, consequently, was Nutter.

  “What the ₣µ¢µ happened, professor?” he demanded of Bantling, who had been summoned to the colonel’s office in a manner that did not anticipate refusal. “Who is responsible for this ₣µ¢µ!^§ mess? And how is it that I can’t ߣºº∂ü well swear without my voice going all peculiar?”

  The professor was no less tired than Nutter, and no less tetchy. “In reply to your last question, colonel, do you not read the reports I send out to all senior administrative personnel? Because if not, I have to wonder why I bother with them. They take up an awful lot of time that I could otherwise devote to more fruitful pursuits.”

  Nutter went red in the cheeks, both angered and embarrassed. “I’m a busy man, professor. What goes on at this facility is less important to me than the fact that it can continue to go on free from external intervention, be that in the form of terrorist action or government prying. I do know that you scientist chaps are up to some pretty bizarre stuff here. Much more than that I don’t need and don’t want to know.”

  “But you must have some idea, mustn’t you, of the basic principle of Ideative Manipulation.”

  “Some. It’s a kind of mind control, right?”

  “Put extremely crudely, yes. In this day and age the military is looking for ways of disabling enemy nations swiftly and harmlessly, keeping damage to infrastructure and human life to a minimum, possibly to zero. Of course we can knock out electronic communications using EMP bombs, computer viruses and the like. But what about communication? What about people? That’s what I’ve been working on. If we can render people within a nation incapable of interacting with one another at the basic verbal level, then that nation will be helpless, all but paralysed.”

  “I don’t see how not being able to swear could leave a nation all but paralysed. ∂@e^€∂ annoyed, yes, but not paralysed.” Nutter gave a despairing gasp. “I can’t even say ‘∂@e^€∂’.”

  “Any word or phrase delivered with invective intent is off-limits. You can say ‘sod’ if you mean a piece of turf but not ‘$º∂’ if you mean something, as it were, earthier. That’s the Bowdler Strain’s specific effect, the negation of profanity. All swearing comes out as garbled nonsense. As such, Bowdler represents an important step on our way to the creation of a kind of universal language-negation logovirus. We’re not there yet, but the process of development has, as we see, turned up some interesting side-products.”

  “Just tell me, professor,” Nutter said, “how did it get loose? And how do we contain it?”

  “We’re working on the containment part, colonel. As for how it got loose… Why don’t you come with me?”

  4

  The Ideative Manipulation lab was classified a Biosafety Level 1 environment. Strictly speaking, protective biohazard suits were unnecessary. They were worn anyway, largely so that everyone who worked here would always bear in mind that they were dealing with materials potentially as dangerous as any neurotoxin or necrotising bacillus.

  The lab comprised two rooms, a research area and a specimen chamber. In the former, Bantling’s five-strong team were milling around like ghosts in white plastic, agitatedly discussing various options for combating the escaped logovirus. They fell silent when the professor and Colonel Nutter entered.

  “Roxanne,” said Bantling, “I need to show the colonel the specimen chamber.”

  “Of course, professor.” Dr Quest produced her security clearance card. Bantling did the same, and together, one on either side of the door to the specimen chamber, they inserted the cards into electronic locks and tapped out key codes on the number pads. The door unclamped itself and slid heavily open.

  The chamber housed a dozen soundproofed cells in twin rows of six. Everything was white here, and silent, like the morning after a deep snowfall. Bantling led Nutter along to the second door on the right and invited him to look in through a triple-glazed spy hole.

  Inside a cube that an average-sized dog might have considered cramped quarters sat a man—a hunched, hunkered, sad-sack man, who was muttering to himself and every so often would succumb to a violent twitching spasm, his hands thrusting forth and dancing spider-like over the floor, the wall or a part of his body. Other than the hospital-style gown he was wearing, the man looked like the archetypal tramp. His hair was stringy and unkempt, his beard likewise; his skin was flaked and reddened from years spent outdoors in all weathers; his face showed the weight and defeat of hard living.

  “This,” said Bantling to the colonel, “is Gerry. Gerry is a Tourette’s sufferer. His compulsion to swear is uncontrollable. Or rather, it was till we got our hands on him. He still swears now, but none of it comes out intelligibly. I suspect he finds this a little distressing, although he may have adjusted, I’m not sure.”

  “Where did you get him from?” said Nutter. “Or should I not ask?”

  “Perhaps you’d best not ask. Suffice to say that our test subjects are chosen very carefully. Each is the kind of person whose disappearance from society will not be noticed.”

  Nutter glanced sidelong at the professor and saw the same eerie placidity in his face that he heard in his voice. Nutter wasn’t squeamish, God no. He had in his time had to make hard decisions involving men’s lives, and indeed their deaths, and he knew that there were no moral absolutes in this world. Nonetheless he found it a little disconcerting, the way Bantling could talk so clinically about Gerry, as if this human lab rat was of no more consequence than an actual, rodent-style lab rat. Nutter was in no doubt that Gerry’s “disappearance from society” had been anything but voluntary. He was sure, too, there would be no return to society for Gerry once he had outlived his usefulness at Chilton Mead.

  But it was not a matter he could permit to trouble him. His concern, right now, was the rogue logovirus.

  “So the cell is soundproofed,” he said. “And you presumably take every conceivable precaution when entering it.”

  “Correct. Ear plugs and ear defenders are mandatory for anyone coming into direct contact with the test subjects. The only time we ever hear their voices is when listening to recordings we’ve made of them. Which is what I was doing this evening. I was running through today’s recordings, checking for any anomalies in the verbal symptom patterns. They fluctuate, you see. It’s a phenomenon we haven’t quite pinned down yet, although we think it has something to do with the brain trying to counteract the logovirus by reorganising synaptic pathways, as the brains of stroke victims sometimes do in order to compensate for the neurological damage. Or perhaps the mind has its own antibodies, just as the body does. Psychic antibodies. One for the metaphysicians there. Either way –”

  “You’re saying,” Nutter interrupted, “that someone listens to these people’s voices every day?”

  Bantling nodded.

  “Then, probably a stupid question, but why hasn’t anyone been infected before?”

  “Because until today none of the logoviruses has been transmittable via recording or any other artificial means. They only work interpersonally. Direct from mouth to ear, as it were.”

  “Then what changed?”

  Bantling stroked his thumb tip up and down the groove of his philtrum. “My guess is, the logovirus mutated.”

  “What?”

  “Gerry’s brain was attacking it, trying to expunge it. Like any good virus the Bowdler Strain adapted, and kept adapting, and now it’s achieved a form in which it can be transmitted non-interpersonally. In other words, electronically.”

  “ßµ§§€® me.”

  “Well, quite,” the professor said, with the thinnest of smiles.

  5

  The Bowdler Strain proliferated throughout the night, like a bad rumour. Person talked to person talked to person, innocently spreading the contagion. In the small hours, doctors and hospitals bega
n to receive calls from worried individuals who thought they might be afflicted with an aneurysm or a brain tumour or even cancer of the tongue. They just couldn’t get their words out right. Friends woke friends, relatives relatives, spouses spouses, to ask if their voices sounded funny. Most often the reply was no, since not all of those infected had made the connection between the incomprehensibly misshapen syllables that emerged from their mouths and the expletives which generated them, and they weren’t swearing while expressing their befuddlement to their loved ones. Those who did perceive that a certain segment of their vocabulary was translating itself, of its own volition, into what appeared to be Serbo-Croat or Mongolian or Tagalog or some other equally unfamiliar lingo, swore all the more vehemently as they attempted to vent their anger and bewilderment by verbal means, only to find themselves, of course, emitting further streams of gibberish, which angered and bewildered them even more, so that they swore even more, and on and on in a vicious circle, until all that was left to them was to lapse, livid-faced, into silence and mutely fume and fret, denied the cathartic satisfaction of even the mildest of blue language or the most moderate of blasphemies—or else they hit things. There were some, not necessarily of a religious bent, who believed they had acquired the ability to speak in tongues. There were some, usually of a religious bent, who through habitual abstinence from profanity had no idea they had been infected at all. The Bowdler Strain twisted and turned its way through the mazes of human interaction, and would have done so a great deal more rapidly had the outbreak occurred during daytime. As it was, by dawn the next morning a significant percentage of Gloucestershire was affected, and there were many more clusters elsewhere in the country, courtesy of the national telephone network.

  And as the sun rose and people rose, the logovirus’s exponential growth accelerated.

  6

  Professor Bantling’s team and Colonel Nutter had brainstormed through the night and made little progress towards a solution. It was a given that the Bowdler Strain was wildfire, unextinguishable, unstoppable. At best estimate, it would blanket the country within two days. Total population saturation would be achieved in under a week. There was no question of isolating each and every outbreak, setting up perimeters, creating hot zones, issuing denials. Standard operational procedure for all kinds of similar emergencies was inapplicable in this instance. There was no alternative but to devise a means of neutralising the logovirus. An anti-logovirus vaccine would have to be developed, and if it could be created and implemented swiftly enough, then maybe, just maybe, Bowdler could be eradicated and the outbreak downplayed and dismissed as a bout of public hysteria.

  Nutter expressed the view, several times in several different ways, that it was not a little astounding that a vaccine had not already been prepared for just such a contingency as this. For the most part the scientists ignored him when he made the observation, acting as experts tend to when a layman draws attention to a glaring oversight in their methods—with disdain. On one occasion Bantling did acknowledge the colonel’s point, but all he said was, “It’s not that simple.”

  Otherwise, it was proposal and counter-proposal, thesis and antithesis, theory and refutation, and lots of strong coffee. And in the end the only conclusion the group could reach was that there was no quick and easy fix. Cultivating and implanting a logovirus took weeks, so even if they were able to design one that specifically remedied Bowdler symptoms—and logoviral engineering was not an exact science—then it wouldn’t be available for use until long after the whole of the UK was infected.

  “Is that really so bad?” said the youngest person in the room, Edwin Chao. After a night of futile debate, he was trying to look on the bright side. “I mean, no one can swear properly—so what? It’s not as if it’s fatal, right? No one’s really going to suffer on account of Bowdler.”

  Bantling said, “I agree that of all the things that could have escaped from Chilton Mead, a logovirus is far from being the worst. One of the race-specific killers from the Applied Genetics lab, for instance, or that lethal self-replicating graffito the chaps in Visual Memetics have been working on…” He mimed a shudder that was not entirely ungenuine. “But the fact remains that we’re looking at potential countrywide panic. We’re looking at a frightened population, unaware what’s happened to them, knowing only that something very strange is going on. We’re looking, maybe, at civil unrest, rioting, a breakdown in the rule of law.”

  “That’s very much worst-case,” said Dr Quest, wanting to reassure everyone, including herself. “I doubt it’ll get that bad.”

  “Bad?” said Nutter. “Civil unrest and rioting isn’t bad. I’ll tell you what bad is. Bad is if the Bowdler Strain is somehow traced back to here. Bad is the public finding out the sort of thing you lot get up to in these laboratories of yours.”

  “Then, colonel,” said Professor Bantling firmly, “as chief of operations you’d best do all you can to ensure that that eventuality never comes to pass.”

  7

  The first news report about the outbreak was a short piece in a local current-affairs TV programme, aired on the evening of Friday July 19th. The item came at the end of the programme and was pitched at the same level as a funny-animal or bizarre-charity-stunt story, with the reporter adopting a jocular, ironic tone as he described the peculiar condition that pensioner Ron Squires had come down with, apparently overnight. Ron, a resident of High Leversham, had, it seemed, lost the power to swear.

  “I’m not a big one for cursing, never have been,” said Ron, with a nervous flash of his dentures. “But you know, every once in a while you just can’t help a naughty word slipping out, can you? Only, last night I dropped my bag on the way home from the off-licence and broke a bottle of stout, and what came out of my mouth then didn’t sound like no swearing I ever heard before.”

  “And what did you say, Ron?” asked the reporter. “Bearing in mind that this will be going out before the watershed.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you exactly what I said, because I’m pretty certain none of your viewers will be able to understand it. ‘ßµ§§€®!^§ #€££’ is what I said. See? What does that sound like? And all my other swear words—it’s the same. Ш@^µ. @®$€. ¢µ^†.”

  The opinion of Ron’s GP was sought, and she pronounced herself mystified. “I’ve never seen anything like it before in my career,” said Dr Annette Murray. “Ron has always been in very good health. I can only assume that the shock of the beer bottle breaking triggered some sort of psychosomatic stress-response that has affected his speech patterns. It’s all very strange, and I have referred him to a specialist.”

  “You don’t think Ron is putting this on somehow?” said the reporter.

  “Oh no. Why would someone put on a condition like this?”

  The reporter delivered his concluding remarks to camera. “So there you have it. A mystery ailment that has left one man’s life blighted. Ron Squires is lost for words. You could say he’s been sworn to silence.”

  Within minutes, the TV station was inundated with phone calls from viewers who had watched the item and were suffering from the same problem as Ron. Some of them had had the problem before the item aired, others claimed the problem had started immediately afterwards. Telephone operators at the TV station were treated to examples of the choicest epithets the English language has to offer, all rendered meaningless by the Bowdler Strain. Eventually the switchboard was overloaded by the vast numbers of people ringing in, and it packed up. By then, the telephone operators were themselves swearing hard. Unintelligibly, of course.

  The story made the main news later that night, coming second in the running order to the failure of the latest Middle East peace initiative. Incidences of “swearing disorder” were being reported all over the country. Hospital A and E departments were swamped by people demanding to know what was wrong with them. The emergency services were receiving twenty calls a minute, only one of which was from someone in genuine need of the police, an ambulance or the fire b
rigade, the rest coming from alarmed citizens who had contracted the strange and perturbing speech impediment. A chief constable implored members of the public not to dial 999 unless it really was an emergency. Meanwhile a government spokesman, interviewed outside the Commons, had the following statement to make: “The Prime Minister has been apprised of the situation and is monitoring it closely. At the present time there is no clear explanation for the difficulties that a very few people, and I stress a very few, seem to be experiencing with their voices. The matter is being looked into with the utmost urgency, but there is no cause for concern. None at all. We expect that whatever is happening will run its course in a couple of days or so. That’s all I have to say for now. No questions. Thank you very much.”

  All of Saturday’s papers carried the story on their front pages. The broadsheets talked of “an extraordinary phenomenon reminiscent of the ‘sleeping sickness’ outbreak during the First World War” and claimed that experts in neurolinguistics were “baffled”. The tabloids took a predictably more bumptious approach. “F*** ME! WHERE ARE MY SWEAR WORDS?” was the headline run by one red-top, while another contained a feature article entitled “Expletives Deleted—Your Cut-Out-And-Keep Guide To The Best Of British Bad Language”, which offered lists of “clean” alternatives to the most popular modern-day profanities.

  The mood of the nation was febrile that day. Torn between fear and a sense of wild absurdity, people tried to go about their weekend business as normal, but shops and high streets were nowhere near as full as they might have been, roads and motorways carried considerably less traffic than usual, and the beautiful sunny weather was enticing very few visitors to zoos, amusement parks, seaside resorts and the great outdoors. Football fixtures were cancelled. Airports reported a sharp decline in passenger numbers. With well over half the population stricken with Bowdler, there was an almost instinctive desire among the affected and unaffected alike to minimise contact with others. It wasn’t public knowledge that the swearing disorder could be passed on like the ’flu, or for that matter that television, radio and telephones were playing a part in its dissemination. It simply seemed sensible, to a broad cross-section of the Great British public, to stay at home.