I still had my cartridge, which I’d carried around for so long that I now kept hanging from my hip. It couldn’t do much - just help with sums and history and taking notes and stuff. But I discovered that I could use it to record things.
I’ve always heard things in colours. Hard to explain, but a certain sound will look different to me, will have a colour behind it, and that colour will give me a feeling, which helps me remember it.
I thought if I went around recording sounds it’d help me find a place with a colour that I liked. So I sat at the back of the other groups, and listened.
The soft fingers tapping away at screens – grey.
The wheezing of pneumatics as the waste compression system squeezed down – grey.
The noodles, boiling and rolling in starchy white water, in huge plastic tubs – grey.
The calm voices behind the doors of the psych cloisters– grey.
One day, I found someone from Engineering had dropped a metal nut on the floor. I picked it up, and just threw it as hard as I could.
It bounced off one wall, ricocheted off the plasteel, pinged off a handrail, and rattled down some stairs.
The explosion of colour was incredible. A bright orange, and zaps of red and yellow.
I ran to the nut, started recording, and threw it again. And again.
That’s when I heard footsteps coming towards me, for the first time. They sounded black, and terrible.
‘Your noise has disturbed others in the area,’ they said. ‘Your behaviour is inconsiderate, and unproductive.’
‘But, I’m just…’
I was just doing my job. A job that no one asked for, and that no one wanted. A job that didn’t do anything for anyone else – just for me.
But I kept going, and soon there was nothing else left to record. I had recorded the sleeping breaths of the habitation domes.
I had recorded the steady, neverending drizzle of the showers. I had recorded the soft mewling of the newborns in the incubation wards, under the hush of the aircon.
By the time the others from my first cohort moved past their apprenticeships, I was well and truly bored. And so, one day, I decided to try something new.
I would make my own noise. Something exciting for my collection.
I was alone, standing in the middle of a long, narrow corridor when this thought occurred to me. I already used my voice for speaking, occasionally. I’d learnt the pale, understated murmur we all used. But what if I squished my voice around a bit?
I took a deep breath, tensed up my vocal cords, and made a quiet ‘ooooh’. Grey, still, but underneath was a hint of something else. Pink, maybe? A shimmer of blue?
I tried again.
‘Ooooh. Oooooooooh.’
I tensed and relaxed and fumbled my voice around in my throat. After a half an hour I could see the difference.
Teal! With a flash of orange! I hit record.
‘Oooooh-iiiii-eeee-iiiii-eeee!’
Flowers bloomed in my mind’s eye, and for a few seconds I felt powerful.
But that night, as I lay on a fresh sleeping pad in a room full of others, I felt uneasy. Somehow, deep down, I knew what I had done was wrong.
Dirty, somehow.
Our home was clean and quiet for a reason – yet here was I, ‘oooh-ing’ sneakily in corridors, like a criminal.
I reached for my cartridge to erase the recording. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. So instead I lay there, sleepless and ashamed, until the lights began to glow the next morning.
