Abandoned world: the Awareness - стр. 10

– You know, every time, I worry a lot. I worry that I won't be able to find the right words… put those words in the right order even… I worry that I'll go hoarse while I'm saying something… But you know… I never worry about being heard      I'm proud to say that all the time, all the years that

I've been serving Apollo-24, I've spent hand in hand with the most loyal and worthy people on Earth, who have survived and who are capable of any task… – having finished this phrase, Peyton took the water bottle that stood on the podium and poured some liquid into the glass that stood next to it.

He knew perfectly well that the only thing people would hear now was the slight clink of glass against each other, and then the sound of water being poured.

Moreover, he knew very well how this sound was heard from different points in the audience, because once he had specifically asked his assistant to pour water into a glass while Peyton himself would run around the empty auditorium and listen from different places to see how well this sound could be heard in the speakers. Then he did the same thing with a slight toss of the pen from his hand to the podium stand. Then with a deep sigh. Then with a cough      And so on until

the entire list he had prepared in advance was complete. Sometimes he even added something new to it and went back to experimenting, each time finding something new for himself.

Of course, he did not stop there. And then he asked the assistant to look in different directions: straight ahead, to the right, to the left, while he himself was also in different places at that moment and looked at how it should look.

And then he began to experiment with "climbing" out of the grandstand. The thing is that the rostrum itself, due to its massiveness, seriously separated him from everyone else. It turned out that he was hiding behind it. And he would have been happy to throw it away, but some of the elders could not stand more or less long without its help, so he had to leave it as it was. And that was completely at odds with his goals of being as close to everyone as possible, so that they could all be easily controlled.

The only thing that could be done under such conditions was to bring his hands beyond the edges of the podium – to place them on the edge, or to bring them higher so that they would appear as something omnipresent to the audience. And in this configuration, he decided that the barely noticeable could make the difference in this competition for attention. The thing is, people often pay