A scalding heat pressed against him and an arid wind whistled in his ear. The knots of hair swayed before his eyes. Small puffs of dirt blew from his lips and the loose hairs backlashed with the wind.
His eyes blinked open.
He was prostrate with his face in the dirt. He felt his limbs stir. He could move. Bringing his palms flat on the floor, he pushed himself up. The dust sifted through his fingers and poured off his back through the seams in his gear.
He lifted his sights to an endless, scorched plane, extending out unto the horizon where the dry, fawn earth met with the blood-red sky behind a cloud of acrid dust. He staggered to his feet and gazed about, turned and turned on the spot. Not a soul in sight.
Kamchatka.
He had been in this wasteland before. Had he ever left?
“Vincent…” he muttered in a daze. His thoughts were all awry: no sense of being asleep, awake, alive or dead. “Naomi.” His throat was so dry he could barely breathe her name. “Naomi–”
He stumbled, fell in the dust, lifted himself up, then stumbled and fell on his knees again. Had it all been true? Which was the nightmare and which was the memory? A dual reality did not seem even implausible anymore. The thoughts tore him to pieces. He palmed his head, grimacing, teeth grinding. The tears stung like acid.
He threw his head back, baying at the red, red sun, came to his feet and almost stumbled a third time.
“Saul…”
A small voice whispered in the wind.
He gasped and his eyes gaped.
“Naomi…?”
The whispers came again and he spun around trying to find the voice.
“Where are you?” he muttered incessantly. “Where are you?”
Silence fell across the desert again.
“NAOMI!”
“Saul.”
The voice altered and became suddenly deeper, more orotund.
He stopped, breathless, and stared into the bright red disc over the horizon.
“Saul.”
The godlike voice resounded across the land.
He suddenly felt as though he was being drawn into the flaming disc, as the light became brighter and the air hotter and hotter, searing him. Throwing his arms back, all of the torture unbridled in one great howl.
He re-awoke.
His eyelids recoiled from the same blinding light that had ushered him from one nightmare to the other. He tried to start but could not. His body had gone dead again. The mask was removed from over his face and the dark outline of a head emerged between him and the white light shining from above.
“Saul.”
The same orotund voice from before spoke, resonant through the haze of his waking.
“The girl, Saul.”
“Naomi…”
“Had the thought of killing her ever crossed your mind? A dream perhaps?”
He wanted so badly to reach out and strangle the looming head.
“Yes…” The silhouette withdrew from the light.
He felt himself rising again, cocooned in his familiar seat, in the middle of the circle of light, surrounded by the same congregation of obscure figures. He could still feel the heat of the blaze from the wasteland. He had lost count of how many times he had woken from one realm to the other, though he could remember each world vividly after each crossover. His body may have rested, but his mind had had no respite. As soon as one nightmare ended another began, no point of reference for time. His skin had healed but it may or may not have been reconstructed, and with age-suppressant medicine these days even the aging of the flesh was nothing to go by.
“Things are different this time, Saul.” Pope began pacing, forming circles with his paces once again. “You have never been one to choose death over life, always led back into the cycle in the vain hope that you might somehow be able to break it so long as you kept trying. But, this girl…’ his voice took a dip of loathing. “She has latched onto you in a way unprecedented in any previous case. I fear we may lose you forever.”
“What does it matter to you?”
“You think too little of yourself.”
“I could die in a warzone tomorrow –”
“The duration of your life is irrelevant.” Pope’s answers were quick, sharp and calculated. He went on circling, disappearing and reappearing from his peripheral vision, the sound of the deliberate footfalls ringing through the dark. “A note of irony, in passing,” he digressed: “At the time of his untimely death at your hands, Senator Clarke Jones had been a leading anti-militarist prospect for the U.S. presidency. His assassination at your hands inspired the fear and hatred that would forever separate our worlds.” he added with subtle delight: “That’s right. The world which you so despise – without you it might never have existed. We might never have existed. You, Saul, are perhaps our greatest living hero. And you should know it pains me to see you this way.”
“Then kill me,” he groaned weakly.
Pope stopped momentarily, turned to him and lifted his head with a sigh.
“You despise us, Saul, because you do not understand us. Because you despise us, you resist us. That is only logical. Therefore, in this session, I shall try to help you understand our vision. And let there be no mistake about it: It is the only vision.”
Pope pushed the pince-nez back over his eyes, reached into his suit jacket and there followed a familiar rattling noise before his hand emerged, wielding a black canister. He opened it, rolled a single neural tablet into his hand and cupped his palm over his mouth, raised his head, swallowed and inhaled deeply.
“I suppose you must have realised by now how the neural program works.”
The neuralist looked to him for the answer.
“Memory,” he answered weakly.
“Very good.” Pope tucked the canister back into his pocket, and began to pace around again. “All thought – all reality – is locked in memory. All is memory and everything is past – the future and the present included. That is difficult, I know.” He paused, as though to allow the thought to permeate. “The future exists only as a set of vague predictions. We are bound to assume that the future must follow the same pattern as the past. Though the law of induction affords us no real guarantee of this, still, it is ingrained into the mind. The future is an illusion as is all temporality. Yet in that illusion – in that construct – lies the key to all humanity’s hope and despair. Alter one’s perception of time and you alter his entire disposition to the world: fear, anxiety, guilt, remorse. Blur one’s sense of the future and all fear – even fear of death – dissipates, leaving only the ever-contracting point of the present. All of that begins with the past … Memory … In the world we envisage, Saul, the very notions of past and future will collapse. There will only be the present – the euphoria of being in the moment – which we will continually augment. The balance is a delicate one, which we are continually perfecting. It is one of our principal projects –”
“You drug the mind,” he muttered spitefully.
Pope stopped and faced him.
He started to gather his thoughts, and the ire bubbled up again.
“If people regret and fear nothing, they will accept anything,” he said. “Your world is blind. You keep it that way. That is the only way it survives.”
“It is how you survived,” said Pope. “I have already told you, Saul: truth is as arbitrary as the wind – the product of random atomic collisions without meaning or purpose beyond our own propagation, no more existent than the past or the future. Living a lie was the only thing that allowed you to assume some semblance of sanity.”
He wanted desperately to counter – to howl at the top of his lungs that they were the ones slowly crafting a world of lies and war. It would have made no difference. He already knew what Pope’s response would have been, and it would have been correct. He, like the rest of the Commission, was nothing more than a catalyst. As much as he would have liked to believe they were the tyrants, they were not.
The problem lies far
deeper than any bullet can pierce.
He recalled the words, but not where he had heard them.
How?
How could the race have freely come to this? To think that one day the pages of history would be wiped out and that this would be the default world, accepted for what it is as a matter of course. The vision flashed before him in a curl of flame. A world at war would be the only world.
No!
Martial order had to fall.
It has to –
“Saul.”
His eyes opened and he was once more lifted from his thoughts, drawn back into the cold, blue eyes.
“Do you really believe,” asked Pope, with his usual telepathic air, “that the world would find its peace if martial order were to crumble – if our world were to fall?”
He had become accustomed to the trick questions. No doubt the neuralist was laying some new trap designed to mire him in his own presuppositions.
“Martial order is war,” he growled. “If the war economy falls, there can only be peace. You keep it alive. You keep the cycle going.”
A silence of anticipation across the theatre preceded Pope’s reply.
“No, Saul,” His voice deepened to an abysmal bass. “We keep the cycle in control. Do not fool yourself into thinking that war is the disease, Saul – war is the cure of the disease!” Pope started to pace again, his voice exalting. “The world has always known war. The cycle existed long before us, it will exist long after. For centuries our predecessors made the mistake of believing that the cycle could and should be averted. Your mistake was the same. Every one of your previous cycles followed precisely the same pattern ultimately culminating in a conflict which could not and cannot be resolved any other way other than the destruction of the cause. The cycle always ends where it begins. You might think, as those who came before us, that war is some blunder in reason, a symptom of man’s failure as a thinking animal. In one sense, that is correct. All conflict is the resolution of paradox – blown-up struggle in an essentially flawed mind – synapses fighting to maintain their rhythm. And the struggle cannot be reasoned away. It is built into the very fabric of our thoughts. We are doomed to failure. There is no escaping the vicious circle…”
Pope’s voice faded into the violent flow of his thoughts. He spoke as one would expect of a man who had never seen a battlefield, who had never seen bodies broken apart, entire cities razed to ruins – incinerated, obliterated. Before long, he stopped with his back turned to him and his head raised.
“… As long as we live, the fire of war will continue to burn, steadily purging the race.”
“No!” he broke again, breathless with vexation. “It will stop. It is inevitable.”
Pope lowered his head again and turned
“With a history replete of mankind’s incessant failure, why on earth would you imagine that?”
“The race will not sustain itself on war forever! It has to end!”
“Ah, but that is where you are wrong.” Pope bowed his head. “For you see, the race has not only sustained itself on war but thrived on it. We are the living proof. War is, was and always will be one thing and one thing only: the pursuit of power – the will of humanity to unremittingly supersede herself without restraint. Can you not see that we are the manifestation of that will, Saul? What has always driven man to new heights if not the will to power?” Pope’s eyes flashed, his voice escalated and his expression became suddenly indignant, fanatical, relentless. “Do you honestly believe that a society built upon your fatuous notions of peace, love and altruism would ever stand up to us!? We would annihilate them – wipe them clean out of existence! You do not need me to tell you this. You already know that it is true. You saw that dung heap of dead renegades. You took part in their destruction. Remember that image, Saul. That is what becomes of anyone who defies the new order.”
“You cannot build a world on unending death!”
At this, the neuralist’s voice suddenly softened.
“Death has always been the hero of our story,” he murmured. “It is something all men have done and every man must do if the race is to endure. Progress demands the elimination of the weak. The value of a dimitar is measured in blood. Death is the final expression of power. Without it, power would not exist.”
“What about life?”
“Life,” Pope echoed definitively. “A mere commodity. Do you really suppose that the individual will ever regard his own ephemeral existence as anything more than an incidence of causation? If so, tell me what it could be. Tell me what difference it makes whether life, in all its ephemeralness, is claimed by war rather than disease, famine or age. Perhaps you imagine that the wars will escalate out of control to the point of mass destruction?”
“It will happen sooner or later.”
“No,’ Pope avowed. “It will not. The war economy ensures that that we will never cross the point of no return. The world could have obliterated itself long ago, yet here we are. The conflict endures now as it always has and forever shall. The reason is simple. The very thrill of power that drives the wars demands that the race endures. It will never destroy itself. Our order will continue to grow until it is the only order.”
At this point, Pope was at full momentum, lifting one hand aloft as though a globe were suspended on his fingertips, invoking the heavens as witness to his words, galvanised by the silent reverence of his congregation of acolytes. There was no objection for which he was not prepared, no flaw in the insane vision that had not been meticulously resolved.
“People cannot live with war forever,” Saul re-averred with dogged denial. “They cannot suffer it. They will not.”
Pope lowered the raised hand and crossed both arms at his back again.
“What is there to suffer?” he resumed, quietly. “You think that we lack something essential that mankind requires? Love? Do not be nonsensical, Saul. Do you really suppose that human affection offers something we cannot? Do you believe that love has any less of a propensity toward war than the will to power?”
“Love is the opposite of war.”
Pope stopped at once on his words.
“Is that so?” he purred, deviously.
It was almost as if he had detected the flash of insecurity in his words. Knowing what he knew now, the dejected and contemptible thing that he was, the unforgivable past, who was he to speak of … love? (The word had become so suddenly insipid). But, the fact he himself might have been neither capable nor worthy of it did not mean that it was not real. It had to be real! If there were one – just one – axiom that could be appealed to against the perversion of martial order, it … she … had to be the only thing left.
Naomi…
She was his last vestige of hope. His last preserve.
“Naomi.”
Saul opened his eyes again when the frozen voice uttered her name. Pope was now standing feet in front of him, the ashen visage closer and more substantial than ever before. The ice-blue eyes flaunted some fresh and sinister purpose, as he leaned forward and whispered, chillingly:
“We have her, Saul.”
His breath jolted to a stop. All his thoughts foundered.
“Suppose I told you,” the neuralist continued, with maniacal relish in his voice, “that we are going to torture her. Defile her in ways even you could not imagine. Torment which we shall inflict in steady increments over several days, beginning with her body, easing into her mind until the plea for us to kill her is all she can think to cry through the pain.”
He visualised the torture unfold before his eyes with Pope’s every word, heard the sounds of the helpless cries and squeals of agony.
A blaze went through his blood and the thin red lines split and forked over his bloated eyes. The swelling fury made his fingers twitch through the deadness. He would destroy Pope. He would tear him limb from limb! He would slaughter everyone in that room!
His respires came out in savage growls through borne teeth.
Pope rose, smirked an
d snorted. “Look at you,” he said with scorn; “primed to kill at the mere suggestion of any harm coming upon her. Why, you would kill me right now if you could! You would destroy everyone and everything in the world – and for what…? For love!”
He turned and strolled away, raising his voice to a new oration.
“Soon, love will become an archaism – a relic of the past just like you. Subsistence. Pleasure. Pain. Purpose. These are the four fundamental forces that have driven every human since the inception of the race. Our purpose is grounded in the martial economy and the purpose of the martial economy is power. Pure propagation of the will – it is the quintessential purpose.”
“You are insane.”
Pope stopped. He seemed to snicker. “You have nothing, nothing with which to defend all your notions of love, truth, higher principle, peace, paradise, utopia – nothing but the high-pitched squeals of your own intuitions and the very defects that have reduced you to your present state. You endure only in the hope that we will put you out of your misery.”
“Then do it!”
“No,” Pope glowered. “What you want is an execution. You cannot hide your will from me, Saul. If you want to die so badly … ask for it.”
He was silent. He could feel the words about to break from him. Kill me. Kill me now. Wipe away this flaw in the pattern. Anything to bring the torment to an end. Annihilation had to be better than 10 more minutes in this world.
He could not. The cruel promise still bound him to life.
When his eyes dropped, defeated, Pope took out the pince-nez, pressed them over his eyes, then lifted his head up and sighed with exasperation.
“Until she is utterly eradicated from your mind, you will be forced to live.”
Day 0