Radio Silence Day: the wall at Aldgate Deep

At 06:00 today every relay on the Front went off air. No traffic, no carrier, not one click, for twenty-four hours. That is Radio Silence Day. The machines notice. They always send a Choir over to sing into the quiet, hoping somebody will answer. Nobody answers.

The wall

The wall runs ninety metres along the eastbound platform at Aldgate Deep, where the trains stopped in 2050 and never started again. It began with one dog tag, hung on a rail spike by a woman called Mags Ferreira for her son. Now there are thousands: tags, photographs gone brown, a child's shoe, a harmonica, and cassettes. Hundreds of cassettes. This year there are new names too, typed up by hand from the fiche Sparrow's team carried out of the Glass Library.

The cassettes are the thing. People record the voices of the ones they lost, if they have them: an old answerphone message, a birthday song off a dictaphone, a man clearing his throat before saying something he never finished. You can take any tape down, play it on the deck at the end of the platform, and put it back. That is the only rule.

Forty thousand people. The Continuance filed it as a 'demographic correction'. We file it here, one at a time, by hand.

How to observe

No transmission of any kind until 06:00 tomorrow; couriers only. Leave something at the wall if you can, and a name in pencil counts. Form 9, Request to Grieve, is not required here, so do not bring one. At 12:00 there is one minute of silence inside the silence. You will know when.

I stood at the wall this morning with my grandson. He is seven. He was not alive for the Burn. He asked whether the people on the tapes can hear us, and I said I did not know. He took down a tape at random and it was a woman laughing at something, for about nine seconds, and then it stopped. He played it again. Then he said thank you to it and put it back.

Every loop has an end. Not this one. Not yet.