The Left-Behind
by Ewa Mazierska
part 1
Lea wasn’t sure when she started to feel different, but probably it was in London, during one of the conference dinners, to which she was invited with other university guests, all coming from language departments. She found herself sitting in a corner with only one person sitting next to her, a Chinese man, who quickly finished his meal and left.
After that, Lea could move one place and sit next to a French woman, but she was immersed in a conversation with a countryman, to whom she showed something on her mobile phone. Lea didn’t want to intrude and the strong orange light coming from this woman’s phone disturbed her. She moved even more to the edge of the table to stay away from the light.
Lea didn’t have her mobile phone with her because she hardly used it. She preferred to have different equipment for different purposes. To take photos, she used a camera. To find a new place, she consulted first a traditional map and then she drew her own small map which she held in her hand when looking for her destination. Most importantly, however, Lea simply did not like the look and touch of smartphones. For her, a smartphone was like a cross between a grenade and a rodent, waiting for a right moment to blow one’s hand or bite one’s ear; therefore, she normally left it at home and took it only when travelling abroad. Even then, she put it at the bottom of her suitcase, where its battery quietly ran down.
Lea’s ‘smartphonophobia’ didn’t go unnoticed. People asked her how she managed to survive being so ‘disconnected.’ When she explained, they gave her funny looks or, with ironic smiles, wished her good luck in moving against the tide.
A couple of weeks after the episode in the restaurant, Lea noticed that most people’s smartphones emitted an orange light and that when looked from a particular angle, the ears and hands of some of the smartphone users were also glowing with orange light, albeit much weaker than that which the phones emitted.
Lea didn’t share this observation with anybody so as not to reinforce her reputation as an eccentric. However, at home, she took the smartphone away from Alex, her son, replacing it with an old model of a mobile phone and asked him not to use it, unless absolutely necessary.
Since then, she spent much time teaching Alex the skills one needed when one didn’t have a phone, such as using maps and playing music from vinyl records and CDs. To make him keener, she told him that this was what she and her father used to do when they were young, long before Alex was born.
Alex was initially dismissive of this ‘back to the old days’ exercise but later started to enjoy the old devices or those without any electronic equipment whatsoever, such as when cycling with Lea to the neighbouring villages and having lunch in the old-style cafés.
It was on such trips that Alex also discovered the orange light originating from the bodies of some guests. Unlike Lea, for him, the light had different intensities and shapes: on some occasions, Alex saw a glow, on others, sharp rays piercing the air and reaching as far as the ceiling.
‘The orange monsters are trying to find the best way to take over people’s bodies and launch an attack,’ he said to Lea, pointing out to her a particularly strong orange ray, which for her, however, looked like a fragment of a blurred rainbow.
‘Shh, don’t say that to anybody,’ said his mother. ‘People will take us for nutters.’
‘But we’re not,’ protested Alex.
‘I know, but as long as the rest of the world doesn’t see the world the way we do, our perceptions are not valid.’
On one visit to the café some twenty miles from home, Lea saw that light also emanated from Alex, and it was green. When, by chance, he lifted his hand, sharp green rays crossed in the air with one man’s orange rays. The man must have got a strong headache as a result, because he buried his head in his hands and went to the waitress asking for Aspirin.
For the duration of their stay, the guests’ smartphones stopped working. In consequence, some people left before they finished their meals and one went to the manager accusing her of creating ‘white space’ to force the customers to eat more. Lea and Alex found this accusation rather funny, but they kept quiet and left when there were still several customers, so they wouldn’t be identified as the culprits.
After that, they tried to avoid this café. Luckily, it coincided with a beginning of a period of short days and heavy rain, followed by an unusually severe winter, which put Lea and Alex off from cycling. They spent most of their weekends at home, reading books, listening to music and playing board games. They also hugged a lot and touched each others’ hands.
Although the contact was enjoyable by itself and the two had been affectionate all of Alex’s life, they felt that now there was more to it than cuddling, for every time their bodies touched, a refreshing coolness moved between them, and they became more energetic. Without saying a word, they knew when it was happening and giggled when it did so.
When winter passed, many of the children in Alex’s school got ear infections. It was attributed to a nasty virus that had arrived in the North of England with the bad weather. Its peculiarity consisted of attacking only one ear: the right, in the case of right-handed-children and the left, in case of the left-handed ones. It caused a burning pain and black discharge, which looked like ash mixed with saliva.
The doctors didn’t know what to do apart from give the children antibiotics and vitamins because they were not familiar with such an ailment. Alex was the only child in his year who didn’t get the illness. He told his form tutor that this was most likely because he had stopped using a mobile phone, but she laughed it off, saying that it was proved beyond doubt that smartphones were completely safe and that the school was not a place to spread conspiracy theories.
But during the same meeting, she praised Alex for making progress in practically all of his subjects. In less than a year, he had moved from being an average pupil to the top of his class. Alex believed that this was not because he had gotten much better but because the rest of his class had gotten worse. However, he didn’t say so, because he didn’t want to offend anybody.
Eventually the ear infections cleared up, but the children emerged from the illness weaker. Most lost hearing in one ear and, after some time, in the other, as well as their appetite and energy. A year after the mysterious illness, only about a dozen kids in Alex’s school were still able to hear, and the school had to adapt to teaching all children as if they were deaf.
The same pattern could be observed across the whole region; children got ear infections that debilitated them. Lea was surprised that the media kept quiet about this epidemic; the only sign that it was acknowledged was indirect: the health section of the BBC website heralded the lowering rates of child obesity in Lancashire and Yorkshire, and the area’s drive to learn sign language, which was presented as a sign of the growing inclusivity of the British society, particularly the North.
Alex didn’t mind using sign language at school, but this made him eager to return home, where he could chat with his mother in their usual noisy way, with talking being mixed with laughing. In fact, every day he came home anxious that Lea might also lose her voice, because deafness and muteness were becoming more common also among the adult population.
Quietly and gradually, sign language became the dominant language not only at schools, but also in the offices of all sorts of businesses and even the Parliament. Rather than fighting to translate sound language into sign language, now those who weren’t deaf demanded that the sound language be preserved in national institutions, but their plight was usually dismissed as bigotry.
The spread of deafness and muteness affected the way films and music were produced and consumed. There was a massive return to silent cinema. New films were made without sound; old films were subtitled or discarded if it was deemed unprofitable to subtitle them. The makers and distributors of these films argued that only now cinema was fulfilling its promise of becoming a universal language; the century of sound cinema had been a step back on the road to achieving this goal.
There was also a return to black and white films, as people were increasingly insensitive to colour but, here, the resistance was stronger, especially from the arthouse directors’ lobby who didn’t want to lose their distinction from those producing commercial films.
In music, the louder instruments got prevalence over the quieter ones. Drums and bass guitars dominated the stage, rendering acoustic guitars, pianos and flutes redundant. Despite such adjustments, there was simply less demand for music, and musicians filled the queues for unemployment benefits. Many became homeless. One could see them begging on the streets of Marston, propped by their silent guitars, to indicate that they were not ordinary junkies or weaklings kicked out from their houses by their girlfriends, but a nobler kind, like the victims of tsunamis or political persecution.
The problem was that the streets were now full of such destitute ex-professionals, surrounding themselves by their now obsolete instruments, and almost nobody paid any attention to them. Everybody in Lea’s work agreed that it was only a matter of time before the university folk joined them but, for some strange reason, this moment kept being postponed.
Lea, who was both charitable and a music lover, was spending a large part of her salary handing money to the begging musicians. Eventually, she offered one such musician, a young man named Daniel with a sunny face and large dark eyes, who turned out to be half-Cuban and half-Hungarian, a room in their house. She thought, perhaps irrationally, that since Daniel knew three languages, he might keep his voice longer than most people.
Daniel was happy to move in. He admired Lea’s collection of Spanish books and conversed with her in this language. Sometimes Alex joined in, as the silence surrounding him outside of home made him eager to learn foreign languages, something he hadn’t wanted to do previously.
Daniel also played board games with Lea and Alex and started to teach Alex how to play guitar and drums, even though previously music had been Alex’s least favourite subject at school, at least until it had been quietly abolished due to the spread of deafness.
For Alex’s thirteenth birthday, Lea bought her son not one, but two guitars and a drum kit, since they were now sold for pennies. Daniel also turned out to be very good in repairing things in the house and even making furniture. Like Alex, he was also chatty and in a short time Alex and Daniel became best friends.
Every day Alex was checking if Daniel wasn’t producing any orange light and when he contracted it — usually after his trip to a shop or a local diner — Alex extinguished it through the touch of his ‘green hands.’ He confessed to Lea that he was doing it also at school and, after several of his ‘healing sessions,’ kids were regaining some of their hearing and voice.
Lea asked if the teachers knew about his power, but he said no; he was doing it discreetly, not out of fear of teachers, but in order not to be pestered by the whole school.
The growing deafness slowed communication as everything now had to be written down or conveyed by gestures. People also started to make more mistakes in their writing than before. At Lea’s university, the lecturers got special training to learn what the students intended to say when they wrote gibberish and mark their work according to the merit of their intention.
However, many of those who were meant to teach them also experienced illiteracy of sorts and were unable to decipher either the text or its intentions. Consequently, nobody now wanted to show colleagues how they marked their students’ work for fear of being accused of incompetence.
The management recognised the problem because it, too, was plagued with it. The response was to reduce direct communication to the bare minimum. In order to send an e-mail to an external institution, one had to receive numerous permissions, and even writing to colleagues required vetting by the head of the department and somebody from Human Resources. Lea began to wonder whether other employers adopted the same procedures, but it was impossible to find out, because employers everywhere were secretive about their practices.
As weeks and months passed, Lea’s workplace became quieter, literally and metaphorically, as the people lost the will to write or gesture, as well as their voice. In offices she frequently saw employees scrolling a mouse on a blank computer screen with a vacant expression or moving their finger on the lower parts of their smartphone as if they were reading the Braille alphabet. They even didn’t do it to pretend that they were working, because they didn’t change their behaviour when their superiors came in.
However, there was much talk about the Change. The approaching Change was the explanation and excuse for this stupor, because there was no point in investing one’s energy in the present if the present was meant to be swept away any minute now.
Eventually the Change was bound to happen: the company Pineapple decided to introduce to the market a new smartphone, the ‘Wordless.’ The idea behind it was that people would send messages using a phone which would absorb the person’s thoughts, edit them and pass them to their addressee. This eventually universal telepathy was meant to be the fastest, cheapest and most effective way of communication ever invented.
To transfer their thoughts properly, however, people would have to focus on what they wanted to say or otherwise the wrong messages would be delivered or they would be unreadable or get stuck in the thought-processing centres. One could imagine how dangerous such situation would be if, for example, political and industrial secrets were caught and passed to enemies. A wrong use would also lead to unnecessary use of electricity and e-waste.
In short, there were meant to be great advantages in learning how to use the Pineapple phone well and disadvantages to resisting this great invention. Pineapple admitted that the new phone was a bit bulky, but all great inventions started like that. In due course, it would become smaller and more convenient to use.
Lea’s university signed an agreement with Pineapple to launch a pilot project to assess the effectiveness of the new phone before the device was to be used commercially. The Training Unit was given the task of testing the new technology on its employees. The skill needed to master it was labelled the ‘channelled mode of thinking,’ which consisted of thinking one thought at a time and making sure this thought was directed to the right address, such as a student, a colleague, a manager or somebody external.
Thoughts had to move quickly rather than occupy one’s mind endlessly and be work-centred rather than private or random, as this is what working should be about: being at one’s office not only in one’s body, but also in one’s mind. To participate in this test, the staff was to wear the phone during their working hours. It looked like a helmet, filled with thin cords which attached themselves to the nerves like tentacles of the octopus, except that an octopus has only eight tentacles while this helmet had hundreds.
The tentacles were meant to collect the thoughts and send them to the processing centres which would edit them before passing them further, as well as prepare the statistics for the day: listing how many messages were prepared correctly, how many went adrift, how many stayed in one place as well as the overall quality of intellectual work performed by a given person.
Those who had a low ratio of correct messages were to receive extra support either from motivational speakers or yoga instructors. The former were to help the staff think fast and straightforward; the latter to assist them in concentration on useful thoughts and to clear their heads from ‘dust.’
People gossiped that the best way to pass this test, which would presumably determine one’s continuous employment or lack thereof, was to clear one’s mind with a line of cocaine in the morning. Management must have found out about it because, the very next day, the campus was plastered with posters about the dangers of drugs and warnings that being caught using them equalled instantaneous dismissal.
Copyright © 2025 by Ewa Mazierska
