Have you ever sat inside an anechoic chamber? Just staring at the jagged peaks, troughs and asymmetrical recesses carved into foot-thick, off-white foam on all six surfaces? The irregular shapes scatter sound in all directions except yours, absorbing everything. And I mean everything. Not even my quickening breaths bounce back. The result is… eerie. Isolating. Downright oppressive. The claustrophobic nothingness swamps every sense and makes the room seem way smaller than its two-metre sides suggest.
Even some mundane act, like mindlessly humming as you search for clothes in a closet, reflects sound and reaffirms your existence. But in here, it's dead. Utterly dead. No reflections. No echo. No nothing. The silence is too loud, to the point you can hear yourself think, and that’s beyond disturbing.
I clutch my knees, hugging them to my body, sinking further into the floor of undulating, greyish foam. If it is the floor. After a while you get disoriented and start to wonder which way is up. I can't even see which surface the door is on. Still, it's better than the alternative. I keep telling myself that.
The chamber is in the basement of the university where I work. Well, worked. The Washington-based IT department still haven't revoked my access. Guess they won't get round to it now. Not after… God, I don't even want to think about it.
But I do. Because what else is there to think about in here? The more I think, the more it scares me, and the smaller the room feels. I've only been here a few hours. Five? Six? I check my watch. Jeez. Eight. It already feels like days. I can now appreciate why sensory deprivation is used as a torture device. How long before I go mad? Probably not long. I'm hyper aware of every thought, like Professor X wearing the Cerebro helmet. Wish I had one to locate Georgia. I pray she's okay and swipe away a tear from my cheek.
Eight hours. How much longer? My panic rises and I lash out, grabbing the nearest can. Tuna. It'll have to do. I yank the ring pull, rummage for a fork and shovel some in. I'd like to say chewing helps my nerves subside, but even eating is amplified in my head. Every click of my jaw, every squish of the meat between my teeth is right there. Omnipresent. Invasive. Irritating.
It sounds ridiculous but the deafening silence is impossible to ignore. Picture that deadened world when stepping out into a blanket of fresh snowfall. The muted barking dogs and shouts of children racing sledges in the nearby park. Multiply that degree of quiet by a thousand. No, a million. And erase everyone else. That's what it's like in here.
Absence.
It’s worse because I love socialising. Human contact. Bowling. Cinema. Sharing stories, laughs and a beer. But normal stuff’s taken a backseat recently as leaders like Trump, Putin, Jong Un, and Li Qiang square up to one another. It’s pathetic. They’re acting like petulant kids, but I guess we couldn’t expect a Chinese diplomat to be executed on foreign soil without blowback when we lied about our involvement.
Who could have predicted the conspiracy theorists were right and the CIA were behind it. And when that domino fell, the whole house of cards began to quake. The climate change agenda, the pandemic, nine-eleven, the Iraq war, Al Qaeda, ISIS, Israel/Palestine, and God knows what else. Whistleblowers crawled out, then swarmed to reveal the CIA’s sticky fingers in them all; anything regarding money, power and control over the planet's dwindling resources. It's sick. The world turned on America, and Trump—or more likely the people pulling the strings behind him—panicked.
What the hell's going on out there? I need to know. Not knowing is worse than knowing. Isn't it? But the anechoic chamber is performing its primary function well: keeping radio frequency signals out. Although this one is mostly used for testing loudspeaker designs, its basement location shielded from the outside, as well as the absorption properties of the foam and ferrite tiles beneath, means my phone would have permanently shown No Signal if I hadn’t turned it off. Figured I might need to conserve battery power after I fled.
I left the newscaster urging action, stuffed clothes and tins of food and anything else I could carry in my rucksack and ran into the street, past block after block of apartments, ignoring the stop-walk signs and honking traffic at intersections, repeatedly getting Georgia's voicemail.
As I climbed the university steps and burst into the building, my lungs were on fire. I hurried across the lobby to the stairwell in the corner. Took the stairs down three at a time, waved my card at the door sensor and charged into the basement housing its insulated chamber; the only safe space I could think of. Sanctity. Or hell, isolated from colleagues, friends, girlfriend… I cursed not being able to reach her. I should try again. That would be the smart thing to do. The brave thing.
Plus, I can learn if the reports were true.
I chew my lip. I have to know.
Standing, I stretch. Steel. Hunt for the exit and find it. Forge out and have never been so relieved to hear my own footsteps as I run upstairs to the lobby. Cross it.
My phone pings. Multiple times. Messages from Georgia; rising punctuation levels:
Are you okay?
Did you get out??
Call me!!!
I do as soon as I race into the street, pandemonium around me. “Thank God,” she answers. “Where are you?”
“The university. It's chaos. People. Abandoned cars everywhere.”
Her voice is shaky. “Run! RUN!”
“Where?”
“Anywhere! The city's next. Meet me in—”
There’s a blinding flash above. The line goes dead. Then a deafening, vacuum of silence. Worse than the chamber, if that's possible.
I freeze. Look up like everyone else. The blast hits, shockwave vaporising cars, buildings and me, the mushroom cloud billowing skyward.
