(FICTION) Silent Night, by Hazel Evans

Short fiction by Hazel Evans for our Digital Dreamland series, exploring a dystopian vignette of the 'read-only internet'. Here, characters speak in glitched stops and starts; they try to reach each other 'telepathically' or else seek connection beyond their failing devices. What kind of encryption is love? What is love's disclosure? We are but worldworn newborns in the glare of Big Tech; Evans portrays an elliptical limbo, one we already know.

Does this work?

No, that wouldn’t work. They could reply to that. 

Tell me something only I know.

Waited.

That’s odd, I’m on Wi-fi and I didn’t connect, I said to Mum.

She shrugged, didn’t know what it meant. She’d spent two decades building a safe zone, but still didn’t speak the language of screens. She was into 0s and 1s. Into them. When we were born, 0s and 1s and the few levels above them were what she worked with. The languages that built the languages.

We were female. We’d walked in and Mum had stood upright, strutting her 68-year-old breasts. The tallest I’d ever seen her. The sexiest.

I don’t think it works like that, I’d said, hunched over, trying to disguise my 38-year-old sex.

Our bags were packed. We’d been packing for months. Like we knew, somehow, what was coming.

I had a toothbrush, nail clippers, a tent. A lot of technology that hadn’t been confiscated. They were smarter than that. 

I looked around, what? A canteen? Men and women, phones and laptops. They kept us together then.

Can you get through, I asked the man sat closest to us.

Yes, but nothing can get out, he said.

I nodded.

It can still get in?

He nodded back, but tentatively, as if he didn’t quite believe it.

Probably generated.

I wish we’d been more prepared. Prepared a secret language. One spoken by no machine. So I’d know if it was you.

What about Umut? Umut and his crew. They’d been here, hadn’t they, and returned? Unless that was all for show.

Mum found explosives in a canvas bag among the things they left outside the safe zone.

I’m alive, I wrote, and then Don’t try to come after me.

We are, us, I could have written.

I’ll do everything I can to get back to you, I wanted to write. But I didn’t want them to see that.

They wouldn’t let you in even if you did. Try.

Their selection process was mysterious.

I know why Mum was chosen. One of the few left. A programmer who quit before the turn of the century. More than quit. Fled to the other end of the spectrum. No internet. No bank account. Nowhere they could get to her.

She always thought they would go after you and me, not her. Because of our blood type, she said.

We laughed at her.

Who are these they you keep referring to, we asked. 

You can’t just keep saying they!

She told me later, after we’d moved into the safe zone, that she’d never really known who they were. She’d just been mimicking the rhetoric of the media. Of the blogs she read on my iPad. She knew but she didn’t know.

Now she was walking around the room. Looking for something. I stayed with our things. Two hand luggage-sized bags were all we had left in the world. Apart from each other. The two of us, together again. For the first time since before you were born.

I wished you were here instead of her. Ungenerous of me.

She was here because she knew her stuff. She knew how to go underneath them. If anyone could get us out, she could.

If she could be bothered.

If they didn’t take advantage of her stuff.

And not in the way she seemed to expect. They’d probably do that too though. Go after her sex. Where she held all her pain.

I can’t find any, she reported back.

Sockets, she meant. For her dial-up cable.

Can you build it from scratch, I asked, doubtful.

She said nothing. Because she was already busy inside, I hoped, trying to build the internet.

I’m sorry I left all those years ago, I wrote. I was running away. Not from you though, you know that, right? I would have taken you with me if I could.

Pressed send, sure you’d never see it.

All I’d ever wished for was the dissolution of borders. Love and the dissolution of borders. No more passports. No more them and us.

What used to be England, or the UK as we called it when we were with foreigners. Gone. All of it a muddle. Wish granted.

Do you have someone waiting for you, I asked the man closest to us.

He nodded and indicated that I was welcome to look at his screen. I stood behind him.

She lay on her front on a plasticky bed, moving back and forth as a man filmed her, shakily.

Is that – your girlfriend?

He didn’t say anything, just carried on, ignoring me.

Mum started writing in one of the notebooks she’d packed. Not 0s and 1s but something that was probably code for it.

What can I do, I asked.

Figure out how to get us out, she said, that’s what I’m doing.

I looked around. People, phones, laptops. No bags. We still had our bags.

Something would happen soon. They would come for us, show us to our room. Or this was our room and they would take our bags away?

Where do you sleep, I asked the man.

He looked at me blankly.

How long have you been here, I asked.

He didn’t know.

Do you remember sleeping?

I tried to reach you telepathically.

Like when you were born and you couldn’t speak back and I held you in my arms, looked into your squinty eyes and told you stories with mine.

Like that time I came back to visit and you announced that you were no longer going to fly or use your phone for unessential things, and we agreed to look at the moon every night and think of each other instead.

It lasted a week.

There were windows, close to the ceiling. It was getting dark. It looked like real darkness but that was unlikely. The walls of the room were white. I went over to one of them, as if to charge my phone in a socket. As I bent down to plug it in, I knocked on the wall. It didn’t make much of a sound, so – thick? Not hollow? Concrete? What did I know? I had no survival skills. I could speak three languages, a bit of C and a lot of CSS. I had always been disproportionately concerned with the surface level of things.

I took a photo of the room. Of the people and Mum, having forgotten her sexy survival strategy, hunched over her notebook as usual. I’d always thought she was writing notes about the state of the world, the state of our relationship, all the things she wished she was brave enough to say to me. I opened Instagram, tapped the +, it opened my photo stream, but it wasn’t there. The photo I’d just taken wasn’t there.

How did we get here? I couldn’t remember.

In a dream I’d had a week ago, we’d been in India and you’d had the flu. They’d taken you for isolation, even though no one else was isolating. I managed to track down the building where they had you, somehow – it was a dream – and I was knocking on the thick, concrete walls, calling your name, when I woke up. You rolled over sleepily.

What do you want, you’d asked.

I wanted to reach you. I wanted to reach out. All these laptops, phones, trying to do the same. How long had they been at it? I went back to the table where Mum sat hunched over her notebook and the man sat hunched over his laptop. I was worried she’d attract attention with the notebook, but no one seemed to be paying us any. I tapped the man on his shoulder.

What do you do here, I asked.

Do you do other things than this, I meant.

He looked around cautiously, then whispered:

Don’t be seen to be communicating too much in person.

I waited for more, but he was already back inside his screen, scanning the read-only internet.

Back home, back in school, whenever it went quiet because people were so focussed on their work, someone would start singing Silent Night, really quietly. Then, one by one, we’d all join in. Until the conspiratorial looks we gave each other as we sang became too much and burst us into laughter.

I googled our names and the words captured and hostage.

It wouldn’t be in the news but I thought you might try to send me a message that way.

Nothing. Probably for the best.

If an escape attempt were to be made, it would have to come from the inside.

What had Umut said?

You just talk to them, he’d said.

It was alright for him, he spoke Turkish.

Although I had no idea where we were or if they understood Turkish.

Talking to them didn’t seem like an option. Mum was absorbed, everyone else was absorbed. I was the only one not looking at something. Who was looking at me?

I looked back at my phone just in case.

Opened settings, turned Wi-fi off. Prayed for 5G, even for E.

There was a moment, a blinking circle, a flash of something – 3G? – then nothing.

If only I’d done as you had and kept my first phone without internet. With the old whatever it was. The thing that sent texts and made calls. Then I might have been able to reach you. They probably wouldn’t have thought of that.

Talk to them. OK, Umut.

I walked over to a thin, blonde woman sat on a pleather sofa, staring into a phone.

Hello, I said.

Salut, j’ai dit.

Hej, sagde jeg.

Like a machine.

She looked confused. I’d confused her already.

But confused was better than blank. I pictured her patting the space next to her inviting me to sit, then I sat.

Which –, I started.

English is fine, she said. Surprisingly clear.

Who are you, I asked.

Ida, she said.

Spanish for going, or departure. Things were looking up.

Norwegian, I asked.

She nodded.

Where did you come from?

I can’t say, she said.

More nodding.

I want to try and get out, I whispered, invitingly.

She said nothing. Looked around as the man had, then back into her screen.

What if we could just walk out? Perhaps no one had ever tried.

No door.

Ah.

But hadn’t we entered through a door? I wasn’t sure.

I hoped this too was a dream. A continuation of the series of being stuck on the inside or outside of thick, concrete walls. And soon I would wake up in the safe zone and there you’d be, a few metres away in your bed. I’d ruffle your hair awake and we’d get up and you’d feed the chickens while I made breakfast. Mum would join us in the evening – she preferred to be awake during moonlight hours – and we’d play a board game and eat some apple and blackberry pie, just like the old days.

Something had to happen. How could I bring these people together? I was good at building communities, online at least. Or with cake, IRL. What else could we gather around? What did we have in common? What did we desire?

Getting out didn’t seem to be it.

What about the old days? They were innocent enough. Nostalgia was still allowed, surely?

I looked around again. We were all adults. Mum one of the oldest. The blonde woman, Ida, one of the youngest.

Or love?

Love was probably what we had in common.

We’d never been very good at expressing love to each other. To things, concepts and ideologies, sure. We could wax lyrical about all that. A family of waxers.

You expressed your love with wood. 

I planted fifty trees for you, you’d say on Christmas day, your face shining.

And then you’d write little notes to us, carved into the base of the wooden candle holders you made. Three holes, a candle for each of us.

I climbed onto the table, as if to say something. Nobody noticed. 

I waved my arms around.

Shone my phone torch into people’s faces. A few twitched.

Follow for follow, I shouted.

A couple looked up. Saw me standing on a table and looked quickly down again.

I sat down next to Mum. She glanced at me. Then back at her notebook.

Siiiilent night, hooooly night, I began, a whisper.

Nothing.

Aaaaall is calm, all is bright. A touch louder.

I felt like giggling.

Oops. I didn’t know the words.

Laa la laa lala la lala la, I sang.

Holy infant so tender and mild.

Sleep in heavenly peeee-eace, slee-eep in heavenly peace.

Still nothing.

I took a breath.

Began again.

~

Author: Hazel Evans

Published: 3/6/25