Angel Voices .com



Angel VoicesThe still, small voice of the angels spoke up as soon as the other scriveners left the canteen, before I had even finished chuckling at my own joke. “That was unkind, Steven,” said the angels, “and hypocritical. When you speak to Avril herself, you behave like a friend, someone who deserves her trust. How can you make spiteful remarks about her to others, people whose unfriendly behaviour you have criticised when talking with Avril herself?”I sighed. The grubby canteen, with its plastic-topped tables and lightly-stained chairs, wasn’t really a place to linger. But I always hung back for a few minutes after the others had returned to work. Three years ago, management unilaterally reduced the permitted break time from fifteen to five minutes, but I do not accept that. It’s still fifteen as far as I’m concerned, and always will be until a proper agreement is reached. Our malevolent supervisor Clive regularly calls me aside to remind me brusquely that it’s five minutes now, but I keep taking the extra ten, and I have no intention of stopping. Nobody in the canteen thinks anything of me sitting there alone for a bit; nothing unusual about people being distracted by a mental conversation with their angels. It’s actually a convenient excuse for inattention. More than once when I’ve lost the thread of a conversation, I’ve blamed my confusion on the angels talking to me at the same time when in fact I’d just stopped paying attention to whatever boring thing some tedious fool was saying. A very mid-twenty-first century experience, that. Of course, the angels don’t like being used as an excuse, but so what? There’s always something they don’t like.“She’ll never hear what I said,” I protested, scooting my cheap recyclable cup around on the table top, “and it was funny.”“But by saying it you validated and encouraged the hostility of those other people,” said the little voice. I noticed that they sidestepped the question of humour, an aspect of human culture they always found difficult. “They will now be ruder to her because you have helped to make it seem normal and acceptable. They will repeat your remark, and it will circulate, so that she will hear it after all. She may well have heard it already. They may even tell her directly that you said it; do you think you can trust them about this, Steven - or might they enjoy telling her what you said?”“Jeez, it was only a tiny little joke. She’d probably just laugh. Anyway, there’s nothing I can do about it now. Unless you want me to go and confess to Avril straight away. Pretty sure that would seem weird and make things worse, by the way.”“I can’t tell you what to do, Steven,” said the angel, “I can only encourage you to reflect on whether you are being the best possible version of yourself.”People used to argue about whether guardian angels existed; now they’re just a tiresome fact. Though these ones don’t really guard you, they just nag, as though you’d somehow inherited the conscience of someone who was a bit dim. And they’re not really angels, they’re DIPAS - Digital Information Personality Artefacts. Instead of dancing on the head of a pin, they sit in that little implant behind my ear, speaking directly to the language centres of my brain with tiny electric impulses. If I wanted, I could mute them, using the app, but that gets recorded and it doesn’t look good. You can’t win that way. It would have been pretty pointless just now anyway, because they would automatically be muted by the workplace network when I went back to my desk. Officially this was so they wouldn’t disrupt my concentration and stop me hitting the new targets, but it didn’t take much sceptical imagination to conclude that Quality Scriveners also didn’t want the angels to keep raising ethical questions in the minds of the workers.I told the angels that I was sick of them endlessly nagging me, not so much to do or not do anything, as to worry about everything I did. “All we offer is help, Steven,” they said, “The questions we ask are not for our benefit. They are the ones our algorithms tell us you would ask yourself if you were morally alert and attentive.”“Okay,” I said, “but sometimes it would help if you could just deal with jokes.”“I sense irritation,” said the voice, “I shall therefore fall silent for a time.”“Oh, right, and of course going quiet is not at all passive aggressive or anything like that,” I said; but I knew from experience that trying to turn the moral tables on an angel was futile. You can’t win that way. That only worked in films, like the excellent Venge II, one of my favourites, in which the sub-hero’s increasingly savage violence is accompanied by the hilariously feeble objections of his angels. They memorably ask him at one point if he wants to think about whether there really aren’t some good alternatives to disembowelling? Sorry, kid, says Venge; decapitation just don’t do it for me any more.If I really backed the angels into a corner, I knew they would fall back on pointing out that the whole thing was voluntary. I didn’t have to pay attention to their advice, they’d say, I could mute them if I wanted; and after all, installation of the implant itself was entirely a matter of choice. I could have it removed any time I wanted. That last point was true, but only literally. No law obliged me to have the implant, but good luck getting or keeping a job without one. These days, even if you’re – what? - a bricklayer, or some other job with no ethical component at all, most employers would still expect ‘voluntary’ agreement to their accessing top-level reports from your angels. And it wasn’t just jobs. Who nowadays would really want to date someone who had no implant? In most people’s eyes, not getting one amounts to declaring that you don’t care about how you behave. You don’t want to be around someone like that, do you? Someone who’s ready to break all the rules? Mind you, nobody seemed to want to be around me anyway, the last few years.I sighed, checked the time, and got up from the table.“You remember the breathing exercises we discussed, Steven?” said the still, small voice, “Would you like to try them out before you go back? To help you relax?”“No thanks.”“Don’t forget what I told you. Here’s an idea from the great philosophers for you. Clive is like a vase with two handles; one rough, the other smooth. If you choose to take the smooth handle, he is much easier to deal with.”“Thanks for that,” I said, “but I think of Clive as an arse with two buttocks, one covered in pustules. You advise me to lick the other one. Good advice, no doubt.”That would confuse them. I could picture little cherub faces blinking in puzzlement and struggling to work out whether I was accepting the advice or rejecting it; whether this was a joke, whether it might be a form of swearing and what the implications might be if it were. “Well, if that works better for you, Steven,” said the angel voice after a short pause, “Remember your uhhh… MUTE ENGAGED.”Thank God, they had finally been cut off as I walked back into the dingy scriptorium with its wooden pigeon holes, all edged with filthy duct tape and that nameless greasy dirt that accumulates on things that have been handled over and over again for years without ever being cleaned. Management should have had this place refurbished twenty years ago, but that would have cost money. We often compared the reality with the stupid picture on the company sales site. The picture on the site, headed with the name of the business: ‘Quality Scriveners’ – in a terrible font, incidentally - showed a white-haired old man with half-moon glasses, working on a beautiful illuminated manuscript. With a quill. The truth was a hundred clerks at cluttered little desks, scrawling out neatly hand-written labels and greetings for people’s gifts and certificates in copperplate or gothic handwriting. What a blessing that my mother had forced me to learn the rare skill of proper cursive handwriting. Or what a curse.“You’re late,” said Clive, hurrying forward and peering up at me.“Sorry.”“You’re not sorry. This is your little protest, isn’t it?” he said, staring with those bloodshot, bulging eyes. He was not an imposing figure, with his dirty cardigan, his straggling yellowish hair and his straggling, yellowish teeth. “You’re still moaning about the coffee break? Trouble is, mister shit-for-brains, you’re too thick to realise that you’re not hurting anyone but yourself. You’ve got to complete your quota anyway, and if you miss five minutes now, you’ll be doing five more at the end of the day. Actually, mister, you’ll be doing at least thirty-five extra minutes, because I’m adding a disciplinary five percent to your daily quota today. Congratulations.”I felt a surge of anger, almost uncontrollable, but I knew I was pinned down. I needed the job, shitty as it was, and I couldn’t tell Clive to stuff it. You can’t win that way.“Being the best possible version of yourself today, Clive?” I said.“Alright, ten per cent extra quota!” he squeaked, “you’d better shut up, mister! Or have you got more to say? Well, have you?”Boiling inwardly, I silently shook my head.It was a bad night that night. I lay in my narrow little bed in my narrow little room, furiously ruminating, reliving every injustice, every slight I’d ever suffered. I knew it was no use, I knew I needed to sleep, but it was no good. The angels were concerned, but their interventions really didn’t help. All they did was keep me awake.“You need to make a friend of Clive,” they said, like the fucking fools they were, “you could try giving him a little gift. Share confidences with him. When he sees that you’re prepared to make yourself vulnerable, he may come to trust you in return.”“No,” I said, “Look, I think I’m going to have to mute you.”“Perhaps Clive isn’t the real problem,” said the same voice. “Clive will leave one day, but I’m afraid you’ll have the same problem with whoever takes over. You need to get comfortable with the fact that you’re going to be at that desk for the rest of your life.”“Christ, no,” I exclaimed, “No way! A year or two to get straight, and then…”But I sort of knew, now it was put to me like that; it was true. I was too old and my skills were not transferable. I had at least thirty years of dismal scrivening ahead of me.“God, I’d rather kill myself,” I said.“Now remember the old prayer,” they said “Grant us the strength to change what we can, the patience to bear what we cannot, and the wisdom to know the difference.”“Damn right,” I said, and with that, I muted them. They wouldn’t like it, but I didn’t care any more. The time had come. Time to take my life into my own hands, finally. Time to take up Grandpa’s gift at last.My Grandpa was a sheep farmer, up in the hills. He lived a simple life and he was proud of it. He was tough, and he lived to be old and cantankerous. He had no boss; he liked to say he owned everything he needed and didn’t owe nothing to nobody. In point of fact that was questionable; his farm was heavily mortgaged, and he survived only on government subsidies. But I admired his attitude. He was my last living relative, as I was his, and when he finally passed away, complaining to the last about the weather and his Single Farm Payment, I took something of lasting value from his life and made it my own. His shotgun and six boxes of cartridges. There were some enquiries made about where they had gone, but in the end the police decided Grandpa had sold it to a drug dealer from Birmingham he met in the pub.Next morning I put the gun into a cardboard box that once held a curtain rail and took it in to work. No-one questioned me, or gave the box so much as a second glance. The security guard on the entrance to our dingy building was more interested in surreptitiously picking his nose. In the corridor on the second floor, just outside the scriptorium, I took out the shotgun and loaded up. “MUTE OVER-RIDE” said the angelic voice, “Steven, let’s talk about this and see what we can work out.”“Shut up and watch,” I said, “mute!” Now I was ready, but I hesitated. A big woman wobbled out of the toilets down the corridor. It was Avril; she must have been a couple of inches taller than me, but weighed at least three times as much. She wore a horrid pink top and black leggings.“Oh my God!” she exclaimed, putting both hands to her mouth, “Please don’t shoot me.”“I’m not going to, so long as you shut up,” I said, “I’ve got no grudge against you, Avril. If anything, you’ve got one against me…” I thought for a moment. “Look, I’m sorry about what I said.”“What?” she asked “What are you talking about?”“I said you were ‘the fatberg in the great sewer that is Quality Scriveners’,” I said, “…no? You hadn’t heard that I said that?”“No,” she said, “no, I hadn’t, actually.”“Well done, Steven,” said the angelic voice, defiantly unmuted, “that was a real moral achievement.”“Listen, Steven…” said Avril and paused oddly, “you can’t win this way.”“I know I can’t,” I said, “there’s no way I can win. But this way I take somebody down with me. That’s good enough now.”“Listen,” she said again, “you’ve made… your point. Why not stop… now, stop now before you do anything irrev… irrevocal… anything you can’t take back... What do your angels say, Steven?”The hesitations and the stilted way she spoke were a giveaway. “They’re telling you what to say, aren’t they?” I said, “my angels? I thought they weren’t allowed to speak to other people?”“You’re correct,” said the angelic voice in my head, “That would contravene our guidance. But of course Avril’s own angels may advise her.”“Just shut up now,” I said, opened the door and went into the scriptorium. Inside I had a perfect opportunity to take out Clark and Jumeel before they even noticed me; but they weren’t that high up my list of targets and I decided to work in order of priority. I might not get long; I only had two barrels and I’d be vulnerable while I reloaded. I envied those serial killers who had semi-automatics with big magazines.It only took a few strides to put me where I could catch Clive behind his desk and shove the gun at him. Now there were some exclamations and even some stifled screaming, but nobody tried to intervene. Everybody kept well back; no-one wanted to be a hero on behalf of Quality Scriveners. Clive stood up.“Jesus, is that real?” he asked, blinking.“What do you think?” I said.“Look,” he said, rubbing his face with one hand, “if you’re going to kill me, get it over with. I’m going to die of the stress soon enough anyway; I think I’d rather be shot. At least this way you get the blame, like you deserve.”This was not the whining, terrified response I had expected.“You think it’s me?” he said, “you think I care about your effin’ coffee break? Every bloody day management is on my back about it. Every week I have to provide a written statement ‘setting out what measures are in place’ to sort you out. I’ve covered for you, I’ve saved you from the dismissal process time after time. The last two years I’ve lost my bonus because of you. But you never thought of that, did you?”“No,” I said; I never had. Suddenly shooting Clive began to seem irrelevant. I almost felt respect for his courage, which was a horrible thing to happen. “Go on then,” he said (and in the background someone whose name we’ll never know shouted ‘Go on, Steve!’), “blow me head off!”“Sorry kid…” I said, “decapitation just don’t do it for me any more.” I lowered the shotgun a little.“Well done, Steven,” said the angelic voice, “we’ve all done well today.”“Even Clive,” I conceded, internally, “How come he was so brave? I could have shot him.”“We told him the gun was a replica,” said the angelic voice.“You told him? I thought you said - not a moment ago – that you couldn’t speak to him or his angels?”“That wasn’t completely true. Oh, it’s deprecated, but in extremis…” they said.“So the little shit was not brave at all? He thinks he’s safe? He thinks he can make a big speech and show off how calm he is.” It was at that moment I first heard the distant siren. “But Steven,” said the angel voice, “Let’s focus on you. What’s important now is finding your way forward again. We need to find the path for you. A place where you’ll have all the time you need to listen to us, or to other, more directive entities. Remember that tomorrow is the first day of the rest of your life!”I raised the shotgun and pulled the trigger. Two barrels were going to be enough in the end; one for Clive and one for me. ................
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