The Sounds of Life

Her bed started shaking softly at precisely 6 am, it only took her a few seconds to wake up. She looked at the screen, made a motion with her hand and it came to life showing a news segment, the news caster presenting the news in a sign language.

Fifteen minutes later she was in her children’s room, shaking them softly to wake them up. The younger one got up almost immediately while the older one needed some convincing. “Good morning!” she finally signed slowly through a yawn, her eyes still partially closed.

Downstairs at the kitchen, her younger son was sitting at the dinner table watching a cartoon on a slim handheld device, the dialogue between the characters continuously appearing at the top of the screen. She makes a motion towards a larger screen on one of the kitchen’s walls, and the screen turned on with the news segment still going on, this time though there was a huge announcement at the bottom of the screen, white text over a red background:

Well ,it’s not like he had anyone to talk to anymore, he must have gotten pretty lonely.

It’s been 120 years since humanity had started losing its sense of hearing, the overexposure to all kinds of noise, heavy reliance on headphones, along with a little bit of evolutionary misfortune have proven to be a deadly combo.
Around 30 years after the start of that pandemic, the so-called “red hand revolutions” consolidated power all across the globe firmly into the hands of people who have lost the ability to hear. Pushing “listeners” to the sidelines and starting decades of discrimination, and eventually genocide, against them.
And now the last of them is dying, from now on no one is going to know what it truly means to hear the sounds of life.

Well, not really, she thought looking at her son.
She was not sure, but he always seemed different, made moves and actions that pointed more towards someone who can hear.
It’s exceedingly rare, but it still happens that children are born with the full range of senses, and they always go through government mandated surgery to “correct the deficiency” early on in their lives, sometimes within their first week.

There were others of course. They are not talked about often, but there are rumors of entire groups of listeners that had survived the genocide, there are people who might have managed to hide the fact that they can hear and managed to blend in with the society, and then there are kids like her son who might have been misdiagnosed during birth.
Maybe, she reminded herself, you are only speculating.

The news caster was breaking the news with an obvious smile on his face.

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