The Testimony
Before The Broadcast I would have described myself as a faded agnostic – faded, mostly, because I rarely thought about what I believed or didn’t. Once I thought that I had a tumour so I prayed that it wasn’t, and it wasn’t; it was a cyst, just a lump. Of course, through that I found out what was really wrong with me, and that led me towards a potentially abbreviated lifetime of pills and medicaments, so horses for courses. Either way, the praying didn’t do me any favours. I didn’t have the patience to listen to preaching before The Broadcast, and I certainly didn’t have the patience after it. I didn’t think that it was God. I didn’t know what it was. I was part of that enormous percentage of the population that was just wholly confused. Regardless, I smiled and nodded, because it felt like a time to be polite, and the scruff began fidgeting. You know when you see shoplifters, and you can tell that they’re shoplifters because of the way that they glance, all nerves and false confidence? So when the train started approaching I got up, walked down a way towards the map on the wall, even though I knew full well where I was going. When the train stopped I kept walking down a few carriages away from him, and I sat opposite the only other person in the carriage, an Asian girl – Japanese, I think. She smiled politely, and I smiled back, and it was friendly and quiet and I was away from him. Phew, relief, et cetera.
We were four or five stops along when I heard the door at the end of the carriage click, and the man stepped through, so I put my head down, tried to ignore him, but the Japanese girl, bless her cotton socks, smiled at him. He started speaking to her, rambling on about retribution and penance. He’s here among us, he said, even though it was patently clear that she didn’t understand what he was saying. Then he said something about eternal rest, about sending us all to eternal rest and I thought, What if he’s got a knife? What will I do? I was ready to, I don’t know, throw myself at him or something, at least try to wrestle him to the ground, but he stopped, turned back towards the door. Soon, we will all be dead, he said, and he opened the door again and stepped out, and to one side between the carriages. I screamed, I’m sure, and so did the girl, and we heard his body as it smacked against the glass windows, pinballing between the carriage and the wall.
We pulled into the station and the girl threw herself through the doors onto the platform. I followed her out, checked she was okay, but she suddenly seemed terrified of me, as if I was going to turn on her, as if we hadn’t both been in the same predicament. Clearly, I was the crazy man’s accomplice. I was home half an hour later, and I spent the day watching the news wondering if they would mention him, but they didn’t. Of course they didn’t; he was just another one of the many. A week previous and I wouldn’t have been able to escape hearing about him, at least for the first couple of hours after he died.
Hameed Yusuf Ahmed, imam, Leeds
I kept thinking about the boy – he didn’t even tell me his name, in case I went back to his imam in Birmingham (or wherever) and told them about him, I suspect – all through the day, the night. Samia had prepared dinner for us, as always, and we spoke about our day. We didn’t have any children. I told her about the boy, and she made noises. He should have known better, she said. I know, I know, I told her. But he didn’t. He came to me, and we should be glad of that. He really thought that he made The Broadcast happen? Yes, I said, he was convinced.
When we were both sitting down, Samia asked me what I thought it was. Really, what did you think? What do you think it was? By that point I had seen a newspaper on the way home, seen the theories, but I didn’t know what it was. I told Samia that, and she seemed disappointed. I thought you might have had an idea. I have ideas, I said, I have ideas that it was satellites, or something wrong with the radio, like the scientists are all saying. You don’t think it could be God, then? No, I said, and nobody in their right mind would. We ate in silence, and I worried that she wanted more from me, an answer. To what? I don’t know. We went to bed, and I slept, and I had the most vivid dream.
In my dream, God – my God, Allah, the sustainer, the one who guides – was real, tangible, a person. I cannot remember what He looked like; I forgot that as soon as I woke, but I knew that I had seen Him. The rest of the dream … I couldn’t remember the rest. I remembered seeing God, and that was enough. I woke up before Samia, made my way downstairs in the darkness, put the television on. I had almost forgotten that we were all in this together; the newsreaders reminded me. I sat at the kitchen table and read my book. Samia appeared after a while, told me that I was running late. You need to get dressed, she said. I didn’t tell her about the dream, because of what it could mean, seeing God like that. I couldn’t tell her that I had put a form to Him, or that I had had the dream at all. She would have asked what it meant, if it came from prophecy or the devil, and I did not know. I said the prayers with the rest of the believers – we were less than half our usual number, though I can’t now say for sure that it was because of The Broadcast, and not just me miscounting, or worrying too much – and then went to go back home, to eat, to ready myself for the rest of the day. The people didn’t leave; they waited outside the library-office for me, suddenly full of questions, so I went straight to them. That was my role; that was why God chose me. I was of those who knew that praying to Him came above all else.
Phil Gossard, sales executive, London
We were just about to leave the house when somebody rang about Jess’ school, on a round robin, saying that they were shut for the day. The school was attached to a convent, and the nuns were too preoccupied to even think about teaching. Jess was chuffed. I think my prayer worked, she said, and I told her that it was a distinct possibility, even though I was sure that it wasn’t. I’ll definitely pray for a dog tonight, she said. Fine, I told her, you do that. My offices were shut for the day as well – a personal day for all, the email from head office said – so Jess begged Karen to take the day off so that we could all do something. I can’t, she said, because hospitals don’t shut down just because everybody suddenly thinks they’ve got religion. Jess and I spent the morning on the sofa watching terrible daytime TV; one of those talk shows was asking if people’s relationships had changed because of The Broadcast. It was – and this isn’t surprising, I suppose, but – it was everywhere.
Dafni Haza, political speechwriter, Tel Aviv
I didn’t sleep; none of us did. And I wish that I could have said I spent some time deliberating over what it was, but I didn’t do that, either. We had a constant stream of telephone calls from all sides, and I had to have conversations with people at every stage of government to get the message in our first governmental address correct. They hired me for my ability to write the words that they would want to be heard saying, but even then they had their own ideas to the point where I discovered I was nothing more than a transcriber, tidying their phrases into slightly tidier ones. Nobody in the office had any time for thinking for themselves, because it was all so frantic. Then I had a call from the Prime Minister.
The Prime Minister was a terrifying woman, but strong, and you had to respect her for that. When she was chosen to lead it was under this veil of friendliness and light, because that’s the image the Knesset gave out; but in international waters she was terrifying. It’s what the country needed, apparently. She will sort out the problems in the West Bank, we were told, and she’ll stabilize international relations. Those were the promises, and whether she kept them or not, she was who the Knesset elected, and we chose who was in control of the Knesset, so we were … I don’t want to say, to blame, because that sounds negative, but we made a choice, as a people; we were responsible. She was known as a leader who didn’t take chances, and who was opinionated and strong in discussion, and who was not swayed by the thought of war. And her office called me, and told me that we needed to have a meeting. This was to be one of the first tasks of my new role; my predecessor had told me that he hadn’t had cause to meet with the Prime Minister once in his two years in this role.
I was taken by car to her offices, even though they were only ten streets away and I could have walked it – I was used to walking everywhere, that was how I stayed fit – and then scanned through security, made to take off my shoes, empty my pockets and my handbag. They made me turn my telephone on, to prove that it was real, and I saw that I had seven messages when I did, which meant Lev was getting impatient with me. I would have hell when I got home, I knew that, but some things were more important. The Prime Minster’s office was painted entirely white, with a wooden desk, pictures – both of family, and religious – on the wall behind her, but nothing else. She wore her hair not unlike mine, though she was blonde, dyed but perfectly so, so that you couldn’t tell, even from her eyebrows. So, you’re the writer? she asked. She smoked a cigarette, and indoors, no less, even though her party reinforced the smoking ban in Israel. I am, I told her, and I was going to say something else – something kind and respectful, regardless of whether I felt that respect for her – but she interrupted me. Here’s a telephone number, she said, straight to me. I want to be able to get you directly, none of this going through middlemen and assistants, okay? There’s going to need to be a connection between us, a dialogue, so the message doesn’t get diluted. Are you okay with that?
That sounds fine, I said, so I just call you directly? Any time; you need to know the message, you talk to me, and we’ll put it out there. She gave me a telephone, a mobile, government issue. Only I have that number, she said, so that I can always reach you. For now, just tell the people that we’re working on it, that we’ll have answers very soon. You know the problems: this can’t become about religion, not here, because that will make everything so much worse. Okay? Okay, I said, and then she put her head down and started writing something. After a few seconds it was clear that it wasn’t for me, so I backed out, and I waited outside the door. I kept thinking about the messages that Lev had left for me, and told myself I would call him when I had the chance – if I had the chance.
THE SPARROWS ARE FLYING
Tom Gibson, news anchor, New York City
At four in the morning we had a roundtable, representatives from all major faiths. The point was to find an order, a structure. We were under instructions from the government – stepping in in a way that I hadn’t seen them do since we left Iraq – to represent as many faiths as we could get our hands on. There was unrest in lots of the communities, people who didn’t necessarily worship the same deities as everybody else – let alone speak English – and we had to make sure that everybody was catered for. Only problem was, that was one hell of a lot of people, and we had to give them all a slot. Fine. But before they went on air, they all had to sit in a room together and wait their turn. It was all okay – even civil, I’d say – until the atheist guy, some scientist from MIT who wrote some books, had his fifteen minutes, until he started yamming on and on about how stupid everybody else was being. I can’t believe, he kept saying at the start of his sentences: I can’t believe that you people think this could be real; I can’t believe that you’re all so lonely as to believe that God exists, and wants to speak to you; I can’t believe that you’re falling for this. The priests and rabbis and guys in headdresses, they argued blind with him after a while, but then they were arguing with each other, because they had cases for why it was their God, why it wasn’t Christianity’s. Eventually the atheist started getting really annoyed, shouted at the Catholic priest. I can’t believe that you think some man in the clouds is just going to start speaking to us all, and the priest said, Explain what it was then, if it wasn’t that.
That was the crux of the argument. There was no other explanation, nothing at all; the Catholic guy sat back and smiled, just like he knew that he was right. That was when I was called out of the room, and we were told that there was something happening uptown, and that I should get ready to get back on the air.
Andrew Brubaker, White House Chief of Staff, Washington, DC
I had five minutes free, so Livvy came by and I sat down with her in the gardens and we ate a sandwich she brought along, sharing it. That was nice. I hadn’t even finished when my phone rang, and the pass that they used – The Sparrows Are Flying – meant that I had no choice but to drop it, shout goodbye to her, run inside. The code meant that we had a serious threat. By the time I made it into The Danger Room, it wasn’t just a threat: it was confirmed, going to happen, and we had to accept that.
The New York Times had printed this article in the morning that we should all, collectively, put an end to war. We don’t need to fight any more, the editorial said, because this is it; proof. Every war has been caused by religion, they wrote (which isn’t strictly true, but difficult to argue with). We can end this, because there’s no need to fight any more. It was idealistic nonsense written by idiots. Religion might have started off the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, but we never involved ourselves for religious purposes. People could throw a lot at our motives in the past – oil, money, power – but we, America, hadn’t ever gone to war in the name of God. It had been hundreds of years since the crusades, nearly thousands, but people didn’t forget, apparently. I can’t say for sure that the article was a catalyst, but it ended with a line about Our God, meaning America, meaning Christianity, and that was the biggest issue we had: where to attribute The Broadcast to. Or who, maybe. It was English-speaking, and the accent hard to pin down, but it sounded … It sounded like one of us.
That was POTUS’ first proper terrorist threat, as well. I had been at the White House for the tail years of the Obama administration, I had seen these before, but one this big hadn’t happened yet during this presidency. The threat had come in as being for a targeted attack on New York, and we had word that a device had been left on the corner of 59th and 5th. We didn’t get that info until seconds before it went off; there wasn’t any time for POTUS to even ask what he should do. It was designed to hit foot-fall traffic, tourists, people on their way home. It wasn’t a huge strike; early reports had casualties in the sub-triple-figures category, but that was only because there were far fewer people on the streets than usual. On an average day it would have hit thousands, potentially. More. POTUS was devastated that we didn’t get to it in time. I reassured him; we were given a warning that there was a bomb, not an opportunity to do anything about it, and the two were vastly different.
Mark Kirkman, unemployed, Boston
The bomb was reported live. It wasn’t like some terrorist attacks, where it’s all whispers until they get footage; Fox, CBS, NBC, they all had people on the streets with cameras. They all filmed the smoke, they all got as close as safety or the police would let them. Honestly? For a second, it just felt good having something else to talk about. I know that’s an awful thing to say, but I had spent every minute since that first static wondering why I didn’t hear it, and this … It was something that I could relate to. I used to live in New York City, before I moved to Des Moines. I had worked there, and every bit of it had memories. And the bomb itself, I got that; I had been a street cop for a few years, back before the office job, before I knew what I wanted to actually do. I had worked bombsites, standing there, keeping the crowds back. I recognized the faces of the guys working the scene, in the background of all the footage. I was back in the bar, because I didn’t have anywhere else to be, but this time everybody was asking me questions, about protocol, procedure. Would they have known it was gonna blow? Max asked me. I don’t know, I said. How did it get through? Why didn’t they catch it? That was the biggest question; the next was about who was responsible, and I didn’t have an answer for either.
I hadn’t said anything about not hearing The Broadcast. I didn’t know what it meant, and nobody else would know either. Most people assumed that it was God, and I suspect that they wouldn’t have been thrilled that I didn’t hear him. I kept asking myself, if it was God, what did that mean? I’m not a bad person; I’ve never ruined anybody’s life. Mostly, I’ve stayed quiet, to myself. I had one vice, and it was nowhere near as bad as those some people who had heard The Broadcast were walking around with. I kept quiet about that, and concentrated on the bomb, and that filled about two hours, then the news cycle began flitting between the two: on the one hand we have a specialist telling us what the presence of a God might do to our evolution as a species, our progress; on the other, we have the shocking footage of the inside of the Apple Store, the hole in New York that left numerous people dead, footage of the smoke, the rubble, the bodies. The news channels flitted between the two as if it was a tennis match.
Andrew Brubaker, White House Chief of Staff, Washington, DC
We had POTUS ready to speak to the nation within the hour. I wrote the speech for him, because it had to be ready to go direct to air: we, America, have to stay strong until we have answers. The grotesque act of terrorism toward us will not go unpunished, and right now, we’re closing in on the perpetrators. We’ll do our best to keep you safe, America.
Meredith Lieberstein, retiree, New York City
Leonard was furious, watching the President give that speech. They’re going to attack somebody, he said, they’re going to attack somebody, you just watch. I made him go to bed early that night, because he was so on edge, and he was making me irritable, but I couldn’t sleep because he wouldn’t stop grinding his teeth.
Mei Hsüeh, professional gamer, Shanghai
We went down to fourteen when we lost a Goblin Wizard called Stryfe, because he said there was something happening in New York, something about the emergency services. He was lucky we weren’t on a role-playing server. On those games, you even mention a real-world place, you can get banned, or at least shouted out of town. He quit halfway through killing the dragon, leaving us one healer down, but we weren’t angry with him. He told us that there was a bomb or something before he quit, so we knew what was going on a few minutes before the news channels even did.
Andrew Brubaker, White House Chief of Staff, Washington, DC
The most important thing is to keep control. In a situation where you could just lose it, where it’s ready to slip away at a moment’s notice, you cling on and pray. Straight after his TV statement we were in The Danger Room asking if there were any more coming; we had every informant we knew reporting in with what they knew. We have to know who’s responsible, POTUS kept saying, because this cannot go unpunished. He sat at the table as we all told him what we knew, and he acted like the sort of President you see on TV, gritting his teeth, his hands in fists on the table. Calm down, I told him. You can’t do anything if you’re this stressed. Somebody asked if we should get the Vice President along. Does he know about what happened? I asked, and they said that he did. Well, that’s good enough, I told them. Last thing we needed was him storming the hallways; that would have sent POTUS’ blood pressure through the damn roof.
We knew a lot about the attacks, because of the delivery, the trigger we found at the scene, the body. I call it a body; it was shreds of skin burned into the flame-retardant belt that the IED had been strapped to. DNA markers told us that the attacker was from Iran, or the region; we just needed to know who he was working for. Over the few years before Iran had become more of a problem, or their people had, the amount of smaller attacks attributed to cells started in the country had grown exponentially. Nothing serious – car bombs here and there, more threats than actual successful attacks – but Iran, they were the buzzword. Twenty years ago it was all Iraq and Afghanistan; now it was Iran. We didn’t announce where he came from. People were making assumptions, and they were assuming correctly, but assumptions were still far less dangerous than them actually knowing.
We had moved up to Orange alert as a reaction, without us having to even make an announcement when we heard The Broadcast, just in case. Then the bomb went off in Nevada, and the ones in Omaha and Baltimore, and before we could even breathe we kicked it up to Red. (But as the press pointed out, we’d never been at anything less than Yellow, not since we introduced the scale back at the start of the century, so it shouldn’t be a shock that we were so willing to move on it.)
Ed Meany, research and development scientist, Virginia
We all had friends in the Nevada office; most of us used to work with guys who were stationed there. We didn’t know what they were working on, but as soon as it blew we were told that we weren’t to say a word to anybody about it. We were all under the heaviest NDAs that ever existed anyway, so it wasn’t like any of us were in the habit of casually speaking to the press. If anything leaked out of that administration, it was meant to. The rest of the stuff? It never made it to the public. When we saw POTUS making a statement a few minutes later, he said that the Nevada office was a basic science lab; he didn’t mention the links with the army it had. He might not have even known; so much was run without going through POTUS, so that he had plausible deniability. I mean, Jesus, stuff was run through with Brubaker’s knowledge, if it had the right clearance. Sometimes, everybody had to be kept in the dark. Even then, when everything was in danger of going to shit, the most important thing was that we kept our secrets in place.
Andrew Brubaker, White House Chief of Staff, Washington, DC
We lost a town hall in Baltimore, a (mercifully near-empty) mall in Houston, injuries not deaths. And we lost a research facility in Nevada, so there were clean-up crews sent in to deal with that. Why those targets? We had no idea. The MO was different at each one, as well; if they didn’t all hit at the same time we’d have questioned whether they were even related. One of the joint chiefs suggested that whoever did the attack – meaning, the organization rather than the individuals – that they had been waiting for this, or that they were all in place already, waiting for something. If they were responsible for The Broadcast, he said, this was superbly orchestrated; if they weren’t, it was just incredible. We’ll worry about those, he said, and he put a staffer on it. They’ll need clean-up crews; you’ve got bigger things on your plate. I did.