The Bunny Scriptures

The Children of Men Pt.2

2011-08-21T00:25:00.002-05:00

XV

Dalli told me her mom was a painter, and loved art. I looked at her paintings; she was immensely talented. Very mathematical about her landscapes. Her finished works are like a dream. One of her sisters was a year older than her, and liked to listen to music, and played violin. The one younger didn't do much, but she was always playing with this radio in the room beneath the surface satellite dish. Their father died trying to protect them three years ago. They've been collecting materials from the village at night ever since. She said nothing made her father sad. That made me feel pretty bad about myself in comparison.

I've been scrounging the village for curiosities. It's really all I can do to keep my mind off of things. I found a little round table and two chairs to go along with it. I put that out front of the bunker and I usually drink coffee there. Sometimes I'm attacked by a zombie or a bot. It's worth it, if I get to stare at the city for the first hour of my day.

The fogs work very systematically. In the morning, everything is terribly enveloped in the stuff; everything is a solid grey shape in the distance. The city still sparkles all the same, though; two towers around the pyramid, surrounded by mountains. The sun rises directly left of the city, facing it from the bunker door. As the fogs start to dissipate, they form into huge columns, and settle in enormous puddles on the ground. The puddles are anything like a few meters wide and about a foot deep at most; but they're hundreds of meters long, arrayed in almost perfect rows. Then, some clouds meander through the air in wisps only about fifty feet off the ground, and soon everything is clear and covered in dew. The world is colorful and bright for about ten minutes - then, the silvering of the day begins.

XVI

The clean water well works now, so we've been showering plenty. That's all I have to say about that, really.

I looked over her memorabilia of her father. There's a whole table loaded with pictures and items that belonged to him, with huge dusty candles on them, all on a bright red embroidered fabric. He's smiling in every one. It's the sort of smile that makes someone ugly, but that sort of folds in on itself, because it's clearly a happy thing. They buried him in the town cemetery. He had blue eyes and brown hair, and he always wore sneakers. Dalli asked me if I wanted to wear his old shoes. I said they weren't for me.

The way I see her sitting and doing something - knitting something, or drawing something - she seems unnatural, or awkward. There's something wrong; it's obvious, what it is. I wish I had never seen a girl who had to see these things happen. Nothing will ever be right again. My present efforts are all I can do to try to fix her. It's only a little better for me, because I'm doing just fine.

XVII

Two nights ago I dreamt of a war. I guess it was between the humans and the machines. All of it struck a deep nerve of fear in me; it was almost constant horror. The men were put through as many gunshots as they could survive; women had their flesh torn from their bones; children were brutally beaten and dismembered alive. And I was one of the aggressors. I saw the emaciated forms of children at my feet. I watched women with no skinn crawl around on the ground. I saw houses on fire with flaming human figures running out of them, and I had started the fire. I watched myself put a gun to the skull of a kneeling child and pull the trigger. Their heads exploded in blood and their eyes popped out. I cut off a woman's head and threw it to the pigs. There was a courtyard littered with stains of coagulated blood and human remains. I jumped awake as I found myself laughing and beating a line of hostages' faces in with a hammer.

I was sweating profusely. Dalli had left her room and come to sleep beside me; as I jumped awake, she flew out of the bed and huddled in the corner. I said I was sorry and she came back to bed; I told her I just had a bad dream. Having been woken up, I went to the kitchen to get a glass of milk. When I came back, I fell asleep, but had an even worse dream.

There was a grid of warehouses somewhere in the plains, on a beautiful day in the spring; we were herding naked, starved, diseased prisoners into them by the score. They had been drugged so heavily that they were ready to obey any order. Thereby, we had decided to run some experiments in testing the human will. We stood them up on bleachers and posed graphite blades in front of them. We asked them to jump forward, and their necks connected exactly with the blades. All of them were beheaded at once, and their bodies fell limp over the stands. Another group ran straight into a bar holding out blades, that their bodies slumped to the ground and their head fell after them. We repeated both experiments multiple times.

The dream shifted, and suddenly I was apparently someone else entirely. It was me and three other people hunting for some kind of horrifying animal. Imagine a small alligator that has fur instead of scales, a nose like an anteater, white skin underneath and enormous black pupils. Its fur is stiff and dry; the creature itself is disgusting. We hunted them with rifles and stowed them in a shed we had put on wheels. After about a few minutes we were happened upon by a thin, silver robot that was about thirty stories high, and had a hunched and collected sort of head and boney, metal fingers. It trapped us in it grasp, and I blacked out in the dream.

Still in the dream, I "woke up" in a horrible confusion, in some kind of churning pile or pool of screaming, raving animals. I made my way to the surface and beheld the single most horrifying sight of my life: thousands of screaming, raving, rabid, frail, panicking animals of all kinds in a vat that was a thousand feet across and probably a thousand feet deep. Everything was scratching and killing and trying to make sense of things. Some humans were caught in the disarray. The noise, the sanguinary screeching, far exceeded disturbing. It was all around me. Some snipers up above were picking off the humans. I tried to look for my friends, but their skulls popped as I pointed them out of the fray. At last, I found the last of my partners, but he was being grappled by one of the beasts we had been hunting. I grabbed a flashlight from my belt and beat it in the face until it was dead, then pried him loose.

We dashed over the mess, operating on sheer adrenaline. As we flew, I noticed that there were four immense panels leaning down into the bowl; they looked like four huge cheese-graters. But there was a human head sticking out of each hole, like they were seated in them. All of them were adjusted so their heads fitted the requirements. A bunch of gibberish sounded over a phantom intercom, and a lever was apparently pulled. A blade flew down the bottom side of the grater and beheaded everyone who sat inside. Their heads rolled into the bowl, and their bodies slid beneath. My friend and I reached the edge as a horrendous rumbling occurred, and we climbed onto a catwalk that reached over the bowl.

As we hung from the railing, we witnessed the jumble of creatures begin to shrink into the whole as a terrible grinding sound shimmered from the deep. We watched thousands of animals sink into a fifty-foot garbage disposer. Before the stewards came out again, we followed the catwalk in a frail rush to a ladder and climbed down, into a hallway with a light at the end. We sprinted to the end in primal fear, and soon met with the same woods in which we walked earlier.

Our running slowed to a heaving breathing and collapsing upon the ground. I was wide-eyed, watching the sky. My partner walked a few steps ahead, pulled the handgun from out of his belt, and shot himself, I suspected out of irreparable mental distortion. I woke up from the dream, and it was day. I had coffee as normally goes out front, and killed three feral robots.

The Children of Men

2011-08-15T10:09:00.000-05:00

I

Found notebook, pen, in house. Bombed out. I'm tired.

II

Found some bots. Shot them all, dead. Feel to writing fun shit. Can't think right. Another day I hope alright again. Head hurts always. Not easy to write, it's not. Trying really hard.

III

Sky always white. Rains often. Mountains around valley, I am in the second one. Barren, houses around. Robots and zombies, they try to kill me, I kill them instead with gun. Gun easy to use, point and fucking shoot. Fucking shit ass bitch fuck ass, dick. Fuck you. Cursing helps me think. I write better when I fucking curse. Words go together alright then. At a fire I made, piece out.

IV

In valley, there are houses. I find food and good things in the houses. Rooms are bed, food, white bowl, clothes, dark, hollow sitting. Like bed rooms, great for sleeping. Always dead children in the houses. Fun to shoot.

Robots. They are like people or horses. Horses are hard shooting, people easy. Horses are big, people small. Horse fast, people slow. Make really scary noises, sound digtl.

Zombies. Are gray flesh people, crazy as heck. Try to eat skin brains or blood. I like shooting them and hear screaming. Robots have good scream, too. But scream from steeds, horses. Loud, screechy. This is a semicolon; [u]fuck[/u].

V

Remembered more things today. I remembered syntax. Real important, syntax. Fuck this is really hard. Head hurts and eyes drip with blood. Today is a shit ass day, fuck.

VI

Love the clouds. Vast, majestic. More words today. Why am I stupid?

Today I found some sunglasses. they say "Wayfarer" on side. They're cool as heck. They were in a bed room on a table of drawers with mirror. Lots of other colorful shit. Girl was on bed, mostly decayed. She must have had a fat ass, because it was not as thin as it should have been by then.

VII

Today I had an epiphany. I remembered language in its entirety, so now I can write better. Cursing helps me think; that has not changed.

Zombies are seriously goddamn annoying. They're all fucking decaying and loud and they try to tear shit up; it's gay as hell. My rifle is like an arm, though, and I can kill things real easy. There's always ammo around. Robots are usually the same, only they move faster and are real smart. After a bunch of them mobbed me I started getting the hang of how they all work. At night, I always sleep on the ground floor in a house with my ear on the floor so I am more sensitive to vibrations. Never act sensibly around them; always be unpredictable.

Houses are all bombed out and cracked up. There's unperishable food everywhere, in most kitchens. In the middle of the whole valley is a yellow house with a small kitchen. There's a small table, with two chairs by the window. There were two black skeletons sat at the table, not moving, of course. Cool.

I like jelly a lot I just take jars around with me and eat with a spoon. I don't get sick, but sometimes my eyes bleed. It really hurts. I wish they didn't, and I don't know why they do. I'm okay, though.

Sometimes I think about memories. They happen occasionally. I remember being at gardens in really nice places with peacocks walking around. There are a lot of really nice sculptures and fountains. The ground here is either tall grass or all broken up and cratered. The indentations rise up like waves, and they've grown to stay like that. I'm sure it was bombed. But I don't know if there was a war.

I'd like to write more, but I'm tired. Good night.

VIII

Found a campsite by the mountains that surround the valley. Lots of normal people like me. They all have guns and food.

I don't need to be here, because I find food fine, and I don't seem to be susceptible to robots and zombies. I've let them attack me before, and they can't seem to hurt me. They say I am cool.

When they asked me what my name was, I couldn't remember. But I was thinking about a couple memories when they asked, a movie I liked and a song I liked. ISo I said, Joaquin Robinson. It's a good name.

They have a book here called the Kapliad. They say it's about a city called Runark, which split in two. The new city was called Babylon. That name rings a bell with me. The main character seems really cool. He's chill as fuck. Wore a grey gas mask, red hoody, jeans, Chucks. They tell me he's still alive. Cool.

Some things I should have said earlier:

There's a city on the other side of the valley. It's called 9830389. It's populated entirely by robots. They won't tell me more about it. The valley is miles wide. It's totally enclosed by things that are either mountains or just cliffs. It's extremely hard to get out. Some people live in the mountains.

When I went outside my tent, I noticed there's a really big pyramid and a bunch of towers in the city. You can see the lights through the really thick fog. I feel like sitting and writing more, as long as I'm at the camp. I am still regaining thoughts. Very slow.

I have spoken to a woman here in private. Her name is Laena. She told me that 9830389 has a few human inhabitants. When you get there, if you want to live in the city, they run a series of tests to confirm your ability to peacefully live in the city. Most people who go there do not survive the tests. I may go there if I have to.

Laena has gone to bed. I'm going to go to bed, too. Good night.

IX

I have decided to stay at the camp and read the entirety of the Kapliad. For some reason, I feel like it would be very liberating. It don't feel like I need to curse or pass destructive emotions when I am endorsed by intelligence in its simplest manifestation. At present, my comprehensive vocabulary has been released by some even fresher epiphany, however my imaginative and abstracting capabilities still seem to suffer some unexplainable depression. I am very passionately drawn in by words; I feel as if a grand expanse of turmoil and wisdom lies conveniently at my feet, summarized into a simple and plain series of vivid aphorisms. I will write again, only having finished reading this mysterious volume.

X

Many things have happened since my last entry, and lots of time has elapsed, so I'l try my best to summarize and address them as well as I can. I have fully remembered everything, and so I will begin from there.

I awoke in an underground test facility. The room in which I awoke was all white, there was a dead woman in a lab coat against the wall, and there was a TV in the corner near the door. The facility itself was strewn with the bodies of scientists and workers; everything was ravaged and destroyed. All the clocks were dead, and I had no access to the surface. I wandered this place looking for food for approximately ten days; there were multiple cafeterias all around, and I soon drew the conclusion that the place was remarkably enormous.

During this time, I was completely conscious and regular. Of course, I was incredibly confused, but everything was otherwise straightforward. All I had was a robe that I had stolen from someone's locker; eventually I took the uniform of a dead guard and his handgun as well.

The lab itself was apparently designed for research on cyborgs. I didn't appear to have any augmentations whatsoever. Some rooms were identical to the one in which I awoke, although it seemed as though the patients didn't exactly survive. One of them was the upper half of a body with the tailbone hanging down - no muscle or flesh, just organs suspended by a wire prefecture in the ribcage. He or she had crawled a few feet from the incubator before expiring, and the whole floor was pooled with blood. Their eyes were rolled back into their head, and so I guessed they had undergone leagues of pain.

Another one was essentially just a skeleton, only the brain and spinal cord were in perfect codition, and there was a metal box on the back of the skull. There were two grey spheres for eyesi n the sockets, and its bones were laced with a sort of metal wire concentrated to various points, which I assumed were its muscles. This one was sitting on the bench outside, a trail of blood leading to it. I tried to wake it up, but it wouldn't respond.

Another was just a shapely woman with a strange machine enclosing her head. She had apparently made it just down the hallway before collapsing; her skin, I soon discovered, was systematically sliced all over in patterns, and she was surrounded by a great pool of her own blood.

My wanderings were eventually concluded as I met up with two other survivors. One had a sort of silver visor for a head and the other a dark glass prism. Both of them appeared to be nothing short of robots, clad in lab coats, shirts and pants that they had taken from the locker room. They were peaceful, and actually very intelligent and wonderful to speak to, even in the midst of so much violence and destruction.

They told me they had been awake for about the same amount of time as me, and that they were both good friends before they were taken here. They remembered their lives before they came here, that they had both been fatally wounded in the war, and had signed up to donate their bodies for research. Apparently, I must have done the same, although they weren't sure what had been done to me. It soon became apparent that I had been internally modified to affect my physical capabilities, because I demonstrated running up and down the hall at inhuman speeds, I had exceptional strength (picking up a refrigerator, ripping off doors, throwing benches), and I had a photographic memory.

In the middle of the conversation they began to randomly ask me various questions. I didn't know the answer to any of them, and they concluded by declaring that I must have been human. They told me that I had hesitated and shaken my head before trying to come up with an answer, and that nothing I said was repetitive. Then they began to poke and prod me until I grew literally angry. Finally, they told me a joke that was hard to understand, which I laughed at after some deep deliberation.

The conversation eventually turned on them, and I asked them about the same dial boards that each of them had on their left arms. After inspecting them for some time, the one with the silver head pressed a button, and the board illuminated with blue lights. The other did the same. There were four dials, which read, "Anger", "Separation", "Depression", and "Revelation."

For a few moments, I watched them curiously and carefully turning the knobs, before I looked up into the darkness of their metal helmets and saw something incredible. The one with the silver head had only a black strip before his eyes through which to see, whereas the one with the prism of glass had an entire face through which to portray what I saw: it seemed as though their every thought was meticulously displayed in their faces, which suddenly became a remarkably vivid collage of LED images. They seemed to be computer monitors without pixels, as if I was staring at real life. I saw beautiful stretches of woods from the backseat of a car, I saw the stars at night, a birthday party, images of classical paintings and films, television, music videos, and various other beautiful, as well as ugly, displays of human imagination.

I indicated this to them by saying, "Wow, I wish I could do that." They soon recognized this on each other's faces and spent a while transacting their thoughts. We soon discovered that they could manipulate what emotions they felt and what appeared on the screen by turning the knobs on their arms. They managed somehow to generate very distinct and clear images, like smiley-faces and lines from poems they ad memorized. A moment of silence fell on us as they spent time reveling in their own fascination. Across the face of the one with the prism head, I saw an inscription that read much like the [i]Kapliad[/i] in diction, although I didn't quite know what it was from. Having accessed my photographic memory, I can now distinctly recall that it said, "Thou turnest man to destruction; again thou sayest, Come again, ye children of men."

But soon this fascination passed as a noise came from down the hall, and the three of us looked to see a humanoid machine, or a robot, standing at the end. Both of them seemed to react rather frightened, but I managed to step forth and attempt to interact with it. Suddenly it came bounding towards me, and I instantly deliberated that it was attacking. Without thinking I brandished my handgun and shot it to the ground. I said it was strange that I had wandered for days without seeing anything, but was attacked as soon as I met up with other people. We decided that marauding machines were likely attracted to a multitude of people, and that we should either keep moving or leave each other.

The latter idea seemed like the worse one, and so we carried on through the lab, until finally we came upon the lab's server hub. All the computers in the facility were blackscreened, and we reckoned that they all worked on the same network. The two of them took on the task quite enthusiastically, and I stayed behind on the lookout for more machines. They managed to turn them back on within minutes, and we accessed the computer outside the hub.

I asked them if they would find the records regarding all of our designs, out of a very sentimental curiosity. They sat at the terminal as I watched guard in the hallway. We were attacked three times in the first half our or so, and we soon realized that we had attracted many marauders after the initial attack. Fortunately, I had taken a few extra magazines from the guard just in case.

They had to move back and forth between the server hub and the computer, because they had to continuously break through authorization requests, although I never inquired to how they did it. The attacks became more frequent, and they began to come in two's and threes. There were feral robots, outcast humans, and even what I can only describe as robotic quadrupeds, like robotic panthers or tigers. Either side of the hallway was littered with bodies, and I began to hurry my two friends.

First, they accessed their own records. They had a completely robotic exterior, but they retained their own brains and vital organs. After accessing mine, they found that I did retain my vital organs, but there were no notes regarding my brain. I accepted this a little uneasily, although we concluded simply that nothing happened to it. However, none of the records were updated after about six months ago from that time. They owed this to the several racks of destroyed servers in the hub, which were probably the last ones used.

Not long afterwards, finding nothing more to research and having become overrun by ferals and outcasts, we decided that it was about time to leave. Before we left, they looked up a map of the facility (which was harrowingly complex) and quickly found their way to the security locker rooms. Once there, they took uniforms like my own and we all took rifles and plenty of ammunition. They proved to be just as skilled at shooting as me, and so we managed to safely make our way to the exit and fight our way out. which was through a long, dark corridor of stairs leading straight up. Suddenly struck by a diverse feeling of intrigue, I decided to let them go ahead, having warmly embraced them at the approval of my survival, and I returned to the desk in the ravaged lobby to access the computer there. I heard them fighting off a few ferals outside as I would occasionally turn and kill one of my own.

I accessed my records again and skimmed over them madly. Eventually, the two of them were far enough away that the outcasts were more attracted to them, and after a few minutes there were only those who remained in the compound. At that point I had become overwhelmed by the horrible banging and screeching of the machines, and I soon became horribly annoyed at the prospect of seeing another one. As I pulled up another tab in my profile I read a particularly important note, which told that I would, within the first two weeks, undergo a violent impairment of mental capabilities that will serve as an automatic reset button designed for reeducation. But there were no scientists or lab assistants around to reeducate me, and so I was left to fend for myself in the wasteland.

I was overcome by insufferable rage and hatred towards absolutely everything that crossed my mind. I murdered every living thing I came in contact with, to the extent that I learned to survive based on my very nature of the time. Everything was subconsciously inherent, and almost nothing was a fully conscious endeavor. I was, for something like six months, an absolute child, scrounging for ammunition and nourishment at every hour of the day, until I felt like going to sleep. The act of murdering and taking was a game, and I became a champion. Sometimes I fear that I had perhaps murdered even the innocent, a potential reality that has recently grown to haunt me. But as I began to emerge from this stupod, I soon concluded that I was only inclined to kill that which might kill me.

The world began to change with the reading of the [i]Kapliad[/i]. Everything I knew and all with which I was familiar suddenly developed meaning and consistency. Living organisms were born, experienced sensations, judged these emotions, and died. The sun rose in the east, settled in the west, and was followed by the landscape of the Cosmos. Intelligence was the greatest tool a survivor could ever know, the ultimate weapon of a champion, and the final resolve of all death and suffering in the universe.

As soon as I had completed the first few chapters of the tome, I reveled in a terrible depression that was occasionally enlightened by faint and inconceivable nuances in my intellect, that flowers had color or that the world carried on in cycles. After a while, I left teh camp, curious to wander the wasteland and reflect on all I had ever seen in the last few months of my self-reeducation.

I took time not just to scrounge for food but to admire the figures of robots strewn across the ground, the vacant expression in feral mens' faces, and the story to be told of a bombed out house whose family was left huddled and dead in the basement. Perhaps they all committed suicide. Perhaps they froze during winter. Was there a war here? Was it genocide? Or was this a degree of civilization that had almost made it - a society of outcasts that had almost met with success, but failed the testament of reality, and collapsed under its own futile attempts. Gradually I became more and more horrified, having learned the true nature of the wasteland.

Throughout my wanderings of the Valley itself in the last few weeks since I left the camp. I feel much less like a child, more like an adult, at last. There's nothing more horrifying to me than the knowledge that I was once blissfully ignorant and conceited, that I may have once murdered an innocent person, or perhaps a multitude of them, and taken all for which they were worth. The simple idea of killing something that wears clothes, builds houses and preaches peace is enough for me to turn to suicide. But I refuse to succumb to such a fate, and so I will press on, so that I might manage to transgress all that makes me ill with myself and formulate a far more reasonable future. Hopefully, one day, I will escape the Valley. I may even care to move to Babylon.

XI

The Valley is home now. There's really not much to it; it's incredibly wide, almost no features, dilapidated houses everywhere, and everything is shrouded in some degree of fog. The ground is always changing elevation, so you're either walking up or down at any point in time - and it's not uniform, which makes me think this place was bombed sometime in the past. Imagine a giant bowl enclosed by immense ridges on every side - and no matter how long you walk, the ridges never seem to get any closer. This all is then surrounded by a hundred miles of mountains, also in every direction, and borders on the Fields of Runark in the north. Leaving is a big deal.

9830389 lies at the southern end of the Valley. Through the fog, you can always make out the citadel and a couple of towers on either side - all of it is sparkling with lights everywhere, as if someone dashed the whole city with glitter. The citadel is a giant pyramid, and I think the two Dukes live there. I don't know much else about the city, other than that it's a city of robots. Sometimes I think about trying to live there, but I hear the only humans who go there are people who want to die. The Admission Council will readily execute anyone who asks. And besides, the admission test usually rejects anything covered in tissue. But maybe I'll pass, who knows?

That's pretty much the Valley in summary. I spend all my time moving from house to house, gathering up supplies. Every new house is like a puzzle: trying to find out where the family ultimately expired, where they thought it was a godo place to hide ammunition, where their food stash was, what kind of people they were based on what stuff they had lying around, rich or poor, good people or bad people. I spend the day there fighting any robots who discover I'm there so that they don't eat me at night. When night comes, I usually sleep in the attic or something, so I can just jump off the roof and run my ass out of there if I need to. Oh yeah - I can withstand some pretty heavy falls. Feels good, really.

Of course, I'm not the only one looking for places to sleep and things to eat; there's always another band of marauders I have to kill from across a depression, or feral things I have to tear to pieces before they give up. Population-wise, the Valley is surprisingly rich. Not as though you're bumping into people, but you're always going to happen upon someone else throughout the day. Where do they come from? I don't know. But they're always hostile, and they're always trying to murder as many things as possible. Maybe they understand they won't survive anyway, so they're just trying to make their way while they can. Although, as long as they're shooting at something, they're probably not going to survive. It's a very obnoxious paradox.

All of the other marauders carry subordinate guns to mine, and I'm physically adept in comparison anyway, so I always leave a fight unscathed. I'm really afraid to get shot, but I know it's going to happen eventually. Still, no reason worrying about it. I don't ever expect to die, but I'm still very sure that it will probably happen one of these days. There's no way you can tell. Marauders are scheming, and ferals are in more places than you think. I'm constantly getting jumped on and shot at, and I can never tell when it will happen. One of these days.

XII

The idea of an actual wasteland didn't sink in until the last few days: it was, without surprise, a land that had been laid waste. Judging by the wide array of dilapidated buildings all around the Valley, which are all stocked with food and supplies for war, I could hardly help but deduce that this whole place was once at war. Everywhere, I see similar models of robots and the horrendously decayed figures of men who seem to have missed the part where they became skeletons, and remained dark grey cadavers for eternity. There is the occasional maddening roar of industry from the City, which thunders overhead like the voice of a god.

The whole landscape is incomplete without the addition of fleshy and metallic corpses sunk into the ground, usually gripping rifles, or something of the sort. There are bunkers still burgeoning with maniacal humanoid machines and walking corpses caught in a fury. Earlier today I entered a cement building on top of a short hill that seemed like some kind of battlement. Everything was close-up, so I only had my handgun out. It was a cramped array of hallways and windows that had all been broken in. Relief is the indication of a place being clear; I wave my gun around the hallways without making a noise, and the sheer degree of potential chaos, the fear of the unknown and the probability of extreme danger, is so nerve-racking that I've actually exceed my wits and commenced to screaming and curling up on the ground.

The robots are completely silent, except for the sound of machinery working inside of them. That's the most horrifying aspect, the fact that they're next to silent. Sometimes it feels like I'm staring at the skeleton of a metal human being. Maybe that's just my imagination. It always feels, to some degree, painful, whenever I rip a robot to pieces with my bare hands and throw it on the ground. I sometimes wonder if my brain is a machine, too; but I always remember that tearing a human apart is ten times as terrible as tearing a robot apart.

Like I said, all the robots look essentially the same. More importantly, so do the humans. They're 97% men; women are always dressed like they had just been doing the dishes. There are children, too. This is all excluding the houses, which are only occasionally single-family houses. There are often entire families there, and all the houses are crazy barricaded. If they were just plain old houses with holes in them, I would never consider squatting there; they're all boarded up and plated with iron. Sometimes, though, I find a family that's been absolutely torn to pieces; there are just bones and rotten flesh everywhere. They were either people or soldiers; either way, I never take those ones.

An update on my physical attributes: I'm horribly strong. I can punch out walls and run like a leopard. I can break spines with either my arms or legs and throw people up to ten feet. At one point I kicked a guy in the lower stomach and he landed about ten feet away on his face. I think he was dead, too. I'm punched a skull so hard I broke it, I fell twenty feet and it hardly fazed me, and punches to the face are only annoying.

XIII

It was a war between humans and machines. No one won, I guess. I'll have to go into detail as to how I've discovered this:

There was what must have been a very expensive estate sitting on a plateau around the north of the Valley (in other news, I've managed to visibly grow closer to the ridges). It was surrounded in hedges, gardens, dry fountains, a gazebo, and plenty of wrought iron things. The back half was slouching from the rest of the house; the whole thing was split perfectly in two, it seemed, the earth beneath the slouching part having been badly eroded with time.

At first, I approached it calmly and slowly, but soon enough I realized that there was no one there. Sometimes I come to a place where I'm positive there's nothing dangerous around, and I'm usually right. I walked through the front gate, even though I came at it from the side - it seemed like a more dignified thing to do. There were, of course, bodies of robots and humans everywhere, sunk into things and lying over the hedges like they were stretching their backs really hard. A lot of humans were lined up and hunched in at the fountains, as if they had all been drowned.

The interior of the house felt like a haunted mansion - which it probably was. The front room immense, and seemed to conceive of the whole house. An immense staircase sat just ahead of the front door; the very top of the stairs marks the household divide, and the back half seems to abide by a slightly more brutal degree of gravity. I hopped over the gap that had cracked between the top step and the second-floor walkway - the house shook as if read to fall over. The chandelier behind me, about fifteen feet wide, fell and shattered on the floor.

After that, there was total silence. As the inane ringing faded out, I looked back ahead of me and saw something run through the forward doorway. It walked in two legs and hardly made a noise. I tiptoed through the door with ballerina-grade carefulness and found myself before a window that encompassed the entirety of the outside wall. There was only the sight of dead people all over the garden and those impossible ridges on the other side of a horrible stretch of nothing, all shrouded in mist. I looked around, and the whole place was empty. There were bookshelves against the three inner walls, all of them brimming; one table sat diagonally before a glorious armchair, and the carpets on the floor were more ornate than my brain.

I looked behind the armchair and didn't find it; the only other place to look was a doorway on the opposite side of the room. It was the darkest doorway I'd ever seen. Flashlight in hand, I entered the room and found the Royal Bathroom, evidently installed just for the Royal Study. There was a little girl in the tub. She wore a white dress, had blond hair and blue eyes, and looked about eight years old. Immediately I said,

"Don't worry. I'm not going to hurt you. What's your name?"

She was crunched up in the corner. She peeked out of her arms at me with red around her eyes and shakily said, "Dalli."

"Well," I said, "how'd you get here?"

"I ran away," she said.

"Wow," I told her. "That's brave, but you shouldn't have done that. It's extremely dangerous out here. Do you live in a safe place?"

"Yeah," she said. "We live in a bunker."

"There you go," I said. "And I guess you don't know the way home from here?"

"No," she said. "I've never seen this place before."

"Are you hungry?"

"Yeah," she said.

I gave her some bread and over-fried ground beef from my backpack and let her have some water. I asked, "Is your family okay?"

"Yeah," she said.

"Why'd you run away?" I asked.

"Because my sisters said they hated me," she replied.

"Man," I said. "They didn't mean that. They probably don't know what they're talking about."

She just kept crying.

"I'll help you find your way home," I told her.

"You will?"

"Yeah, definitely," I said. " But you gotta be willing to be brave again. You're not gonna get hurt as long as you're with me. We really gotta find your home, you know."

She agreed to come with me. I let her have my bullet proof vest, and I got her a little girl's robe from a bedroom in the mansion. We met with plenty of violence along the way, and none of it was well received. She became more and more disturbed as time went on. I could hardly stop her crying sometimes, and I began to consider just leaving her. I definitely decided against it. Whenever we met with maniacs with guns, she would just hide behind me and wait until they were all dead. I once had to protect her from straight-up feral men, who seemed more eager to destroy her before me. I think one of them slapped her once; but only because I kicked him seven feet away as he reached his hand out at her.

Along the way, I happened to say, "What is all this, anyway?" I spoke in the context of all the dead things lying around.

So, she told me the story. I reckoned I should have told you all of that just to take care of the reason I learned it from a little girl.

It was a war between humans and machines. The formation of a new kingdom had gone horribly wrong. The founders were split between two sides; those who wanted it built on the work of machines, and those who wanted it populated by men. A robot majority would eventually result in the eradication of all human life; generations would simply cease to reproduce, and machines would take over. On the other hand, if only humans ruled, the result might be a series of tragedies and the ultimate downfall of the kingdom. Battles were fought all throughout the Valley. Once, the Valley was populated by sparse communities of free peoples, until the kingdom decided to take it for itself. After fifty years, everything became what it is now.

The city concluded on a harrowing compromise; the kingdom would be populated by men, but all of them were to be augmented by machines. At first, this seemed like a gloriously peaceful resolve, but soon it became an enormous mistake. The applied cyborg technology served as the government's grip on all citizens; politics and economics were eradicated, and everyone worked regardless of their own free will. They're allowed minimal amounts of free time, which is growing shorter and shorter every day. I asked her how she knows all this; she said they listened into the city's underground radio, which is clear all the way past Babylon. She says the DJ's are two robots who only entered in the last year or so. Cathedral bells rang in my my head; I told her I may know them.

We arrived at her bunker after about a week. It was in the middle of an abandoned village that still had salvageable materials in the houses. In the last few days, she began to recognize the countryside a lot better based on the landmarks, and at last we found her cement abode peeking out of a short hill. She departed from me in the last stretch of fifty feet or so and when screaming towards the door. Before she even reached it, the door swung open, and two girls a little older than her came out and embraced her. A beautiful grown woman rushed out behind them with one hand over her mouth and the other on her chest. Home at last.

A quadruped machine jumped out from behind a burnt-out townhouse. The girls dispersed and screamed violently. Before I had my rifle in my hands, the steed had pounced, and in a second, Dalli was the only one not scraped into a mess of flesh and blood against the ground. I placed seven bullets in it and threw my rifle on the ground. I fell on my knees and squeezed my head; Dalli just screamed and buried her face in the ground. The steed fizzled out and died at last. Of all the fucking shit I've ever seen in this fucking Wasteland, this is the fucking worst. Why did I have to see this? Why is this happening to me? Who the fuck am I, and why the fuck am I here? What the fuck am I trying to do?

I took her inside and we didn't sleep through the night. I scribbled this out and now I'm just about ready to have some nightmares. Good night.

XIII

It's been seven days in the bunker. Six days ago, I shoveled up the remains of her family and buried them in a shallow grave.

The bunker is stocked for seven people to survive for three years. There's plenty of coffee; I usually have five or six cups a day. There are cigarettes, too, but I only smoke outside, because the vent system isn't direct enough to act as a sink for the smoke. Every day is corrupted by the reminder of what happened. Nothing relieves the mortifying pain of tragedy. Death is very easy to grasp, but tragedy is a whole other world apart - a much, much greater world.

The city is practically calling to me. It's visible outside the door, looking down the street. Two towers, the one on the right taller than the other; between them is a pyramid more immense than anything I've ever seen. There are light sparkling everywhere. On the opposite side of a hopelessly wide stretch of wasteland lies paradise, unparalleled.

XIV

I still have the Kapliad on me. Thumbed through a few pages, read the last few chapters. Apparently, it was written by a rabbit; although the idea of a classic historical account being written by a rabbit is ridiculous, it still seems like a pedestrian sort of idea. Dalli confirmed that rabbits are normal in "this world." She told me this planet is called War Planet. There are ten kingdoms and about twenty billion inhabitants - at least, that's as many as they can count. There are portions of the world that have yet to be discovered, so there may be sophisticated life there, as well. Rabbits hail from Leporia; humans hail from Silvarum; saxonites hail from Antoria; mariners hail from any given place in the ocean. The first two are the most prevalent; the second two are usually considered third or fourth down the list.

We've discussed going to 9830389. She told me they might let her stay there simply because she's a child, but I'd be much more of a dilemma. If I don't even know what sort of a being I am, then I'm not sure how well I'd come across. Apparently, they operate on interrogations and extended surgery sessions. And, of course, they execute anyone who asks. Maybe I'll ask them about that.

She always thanks me for saving her. All that does is revive the fact that her family was mercilessly robbed from this world in front of her eyes, before she blinked. When I go out to smoke, I just stare at the quadruped and flourish with rage. This is always followed by a glimpse at the city. Maybe that means something; maybe it doesn't. I remind myself of the message I saw in the robot guy's face: "Thou turnest man to destruction; again thou sayest, Come again, ye children of men." I didn't find it anywhere in the Kapliad, I don't think.

So that's what they are, those dead and feral abominations of metal and flesh: they're the children. They were conceived by unobliging intentions; they were set into motion on the basis of a surely reasonable goal; left to their own designs, they were machinated into self-genocide. The men that made them look away, rubbing their chins and pondering. The data is in; the experiment concludes. A kingdom of loathing results.

Tempest, prosaic

2011-08-08T20:28:00.002-05:00

The clouds congregate. All the sky grows barren and white – the earth, grey and trodden with rain; a storm blossoms over the horizon between. Showering darkness proceeds endlessly over the wetlands, and the woods, the moors, the mountains, and the slopes of the dew-laden downs. By the design of their own hysterics, the concepts of the world’s kingdom turn against each other; crow rending vulture, brother killing brother, the sky befalling the earth.

Lightning strikes the ground, hurricanes lacerate the arboreal domain, and cyclones loom over land and sea. All the globe is a churning deluge. Those previous assets of the terrain are without form or reason, particles lapsing through the maelstrom of the deep. Storm clouds roar with destruction from above, and the loam boils with the turbine of disarray from below. The chaotic abyss prevails.

And at the height of all godless impurity and malice, the heavens are flooded with light, and sunshine perforates the storm. The darkness dissipates; the tempest relents; peace draws slowly across the settling wasteland, and the earth rebuilds itself again.

Phantom Pt.1

2011-05-11T07:06:00.001-05:00

Amidst the white and endless sky,
The clouds revolve and tremble;
Turgid tempest blossoms nigh,
Where rage and wrath assemble.

Through lust and mediocrity,
Mankind fell ill to feeling;
There sullen sought monstrosity
Left man and kindred reeling.

Then storm on darkened gables drew,
And turbid gales did linger,
In districts blood and bleating knew,
Where swords rest cold in fingers.

So silence veiled the lost remains,
And nature ceased to stir;
The slain deluged the streets and lanes,
Where frigid drafts abjure.

And somewhere in a city square,
A squire wrote in blood
Upon a pristine wall left there,
Whose sermon looms above:

"In every square of land and plain,
The story read the same;
Tempest high and lowly maimed,
Till only grace remained."

And on the arid, level wasteland,
Stranger by his trade,
Did wander still and sterile sand,
As time itself decayed.

A sanguine cloak his shoulders bore,
That flickered in the gales;
A sword and shield his stock and store,
And mead and rancid kale.

A sanguine hood engulfed his head;
A metal mask he wore,
That neither love nor hatred bred;
No character it bore.

Across the aural desert laid,
A shadow drew adrift;
A rising fog in colonnades
Amassed in storm clouds swift.

Graceful heavens, burdened be,
Grew dark with clouds and thunder.
Cyclones loomed on land and sea:
The dark is torn asunder.

The silence is eviscerated;
Lightning strikes the ground –
An ashen spot incinerated
Smokes without a sound.

Phantom rises ashes from,
A shadow cloaken darkly;
Bound to rise when kingdom come,
Obeying burden starkly.

Darkness clothed the Phantom wholly,
Floating round his form;
Pluming shadow bathed him fully,
Wav'ring null of norm.

Shining eyes of white there sunken
Glared at stranger wayward;
Hollow, absent, morbid-drunken
Eyes returned the favor.

Phantom, morbid, loft and lordly
Hovered there before;
Stranger fast stood wise and worldly,
Wand'ring forth no more.

"Phantom, art you?" spoke the Stranger,
Paying pleasance slowly.
"Art you not a spectral ranger,
Hunting vengeance lowly?"

"Stranger," morbid Phantom roared,
His booming voice resounding,
"All these golden sands I lord,
As they are of my founding.
"Bid me neither high nor low
Your judgment right or wrongly;
Conjure all the grace you know,
And bide in patience strongly.
"A moment now of tragedy
May ward you from my preaching;
Take me not as deity,
But shepherd for your teaching.
"I am all of lost society,
A shadow of the dead,
Whose souls transcend reality,
Where man to fate is fed.
"Hatred, rage, and malice straining,
Suffering befalls;
All our hopes and dreams remaining
Spoiled on the walls.
And all my wanted words retaining
Strike me ill with gall.

"Fogs drew out injustice on
A many heath and hill;
Our brazen blades were thrust upon
By black and godless will.
In forests dark with morning dew,
On pristine marble stairs,
In hovels where our children grew –
You'll find our bodies there.
"Cold and pale and silently,
Our forms are left to rot,
And all those manners violently
Our minds, as well, begot.
"Now darkly do our souls persist
And see upon our gloom:
In phantom ranks we now enlist
To dwell within our doom.
And no human life shall hence subsist
To occupy this room.

"But you there, strange and wayward one,
See neither fear nor virtue,
Whilst tread you 'neath a friendless sun,
Whilst all the earth desert you.
Now all our homes sit silently
In brisk and tranquil fogs;
Our forms portray impiety,
Disgraced by feral dogs.
What claim you to our empty homes?
What providence dispels you?
Will quaff you all the graceful loam,
And live by what compels you?"

"Presume of me no more, my friend,"
The Stranger said to Ghost.
"My stroll, I hope, shall never end,
Of which I make the most!
I find your grim philosophy
Revealing of your style;
It's really very awfully
Distraught, abstract, and vile!
Why do you strain vitality
To level with your wrongs?
For even past finality,
Your vice shall make you strong;
The birds acclaim reality
With sweet and vivid songs."

And here the sky grew dark and rolled;
The Phantom's rage congests;
The placid breeze relapsed with cold –
A hellish voice protests:

"What stretch of imbecility
Allows you on this earth?
What bitch of ill fertility
Was cursed to fare your birth?
Whose teaching told such twisted myths?
What fables do you serve?
Your sightless words have granted you
A grand esteem of nerve!
To thence perceive my words abstract
Should show to you your faults;
How vast the span of spoilt tact
That's justified your vault!
And thus, by all our force remaining,
Numerous we are,
We shan't permit your footsteps gaining
Distance, near or far;
And there upon those heaths and hills,
Through hollowed homes of old,
In sunshine and in shadow still,
You'll wander, free and bold!
And all our strange and wanting rage
Has suffered no recourse,
'For all the tragic world's a stage,
And all our lines remorse.'
Our sorrow flows throughout this cage,
Whose river knows no source."

Emily Pt.1

2011-04-01T16:18:00.001-05:00

Emily

These days, life is a rather simple ordeal. Breakfast precedes every event in the day, then I prepare, then I’m off to do business whereabouts. I’m not much like all those other aristocrats, who all know stuff like Latin and Ancient Greek, and who have big vocabularies, but I’m sure I’ll find it in me to tell you the story of how I met my wife, Emily.

A long time ago, I was what we called a “peasant.” My home was a dark flat in a low part of London, and all the buildings were squeezed together so there was just enough room. I saw kids in gangs on the street all the time, and they’d give me a hard time, say I’ve got nothin’ going with my life because I don’t go to school. Granted, it was a pretty analytical point for a bunch of poor kids, but I guess that shows their determination in belittling their fellow man. They did get me down sometimes. I’ll admit that because I’d rather just tell the truth. They didn’t seem to tell the truth much.

Because we couldn’t afford school, I just walked around the city all day. Sometimes I’d take a walk by the harbor and see my uncle. He was a good guy. He sat in at his dad’s Latin lectures when he was a kid, so he would always go on about Ancient Roman kings and wars. I’d walk up, and he’d yell, “Paulinius Tulinius Tarquinius Superbus the Fifty-Third! All hail!” I’d start walking all proud and he and all his friends would bow on the ground. Good lot, them.

I liked Trafalgar Square, too – now that was a nice place to be. I liked that because of those beautiful buildings around there, and the fountain, and that you could really see the sky. And all those ornate gables that rose about, the column, that gallery – they all seemed to say “Hello, how are you today?” when you looked at them. That’s how it was for me, at least. I think I was just a little insane in those days.

Last of all, I’d visit Hyde Park, my favorite place on the face of the earth. God really did a good job on that place. The Row, Carriage Drive, the Serpentine – if I could write volumes on any one subject in my life, they would be about the still and the peace around the Park. Grey or blue the day may be, it doesn’t a difference to me – I thought that up one day when I was walking on the Row and I heard a group of string players, whom I saw beneath a tent beside the Serpentine. No one was watching them, which was really curious, but they still played like they were going to hell otherwise. I stayed and watched for only a while because I had so much to do before the day was done. Those sorts of days were good, because I always busied myself around the city, or the park, and yet I never actually had anything to do.

But that was sort of the gist of walking around London, is that it looks good no matter what the weather is. I think a lot of people designed it so that it would still look good in the rain, because a lot of this gothic architecture seems to do that. Maybe people were generally just real sad or angry when they built that stuff. Besides that, whoever built it did a real good job on it. There’s nothing really that’s made to be only so good – it’s like they really put forth the extent of what they were given when they built the place. I mean, I couldn’t do nothing like any of that, but I’m sure others could, like those masons way back when. It’s that sort of history that makes walking around a place really enjoyable. There’s a grace about everything you look at, and it’s not something you point out or rave about, but it’s rather ingrained in your head all the while.

You can walk at your speed wherever you’re going, and there’s always time to look around and enjoy things while you do it. And there’s always something to enjoy, whether it’s some palace in the park or just a house that looks like it belongs in a book. When the sunshine’s all about everything, you can make out the features on it in good detail, like heaven put a few rays of grace on the faces of those glorious buildings about, and the gardens all around them. And if the rain’s got you, don’t worry about it – you’re just in a different world, looking at a different kind of beautiful.

Some days I’d just spend a long while standing between Kensington Palace and the pond out front of it. Other days I’d never stop walking, and I’d never be still for a moment. Doing these things was a real science to me. I was never really happy or sad, but just sort of complete. It’s all I wanted to do, and it’s all I did. I would stand by the gatepost about the busy places and just watch people. I wondered why they were all so busy, or what it was they were so concerned about, particularly in such a pretty place as London.

Of course, between the daylights, I had to have a place to sleep and eat. That was usually when the day was done, because I would have to go home. The place where I lived was, as I’ve said, pretty dim a place, but that wasn’t quite what I was worried about as I was walking back home. I had just got done looking around at all these accomplishments of building things with bare hands and now I had to go back to the boys on the corner and my parents of Ire. I walked with my hands in my pockets, and I looked at the ground. That wasn’t like me. I looked and waved and smiled at all my friends and neighbors I passed, because it was always a good affair to see them, but it would change as I got close to the complex. I wasn’t all that pressed to look about the world at that time.

When I got to the front door of the building, I really had to concentrate, because the halls were full of kids running about, who were usually about my age. They’d yell things at me, and I’d just have to pretend like they weren’t. When I got to my apartment, which was on the fourth floor, I knocked, because I didn’t have a key. My parents would yell from the other side,
“Who’s that there?”
“Paul,” I’d say.
They come stomping up from the other side, and it was always scary to hear that. The doorknob would rattle, and then the door would fly open, and my dad would be there in a stained button shirt, frowning at me, and he’d say, “Ain’t you got a key?”
“No,” I said.
“Why not?” he’d say.
“You said I’d lose it,” I’d say.
“Oh,” he says. “Right.” Then he’d walk in and leave me to shut the door.
I’d go straight to my room, because I didn’t want to get in front of my parents and have them hound me with questions. They used to ask, “Wha’ve you been doing,” and “Where you been,” and all I would be able to say is “Walking about,” and that wouldn’t make them happy at all. They’d want me to get a job. I just ignore them and run into my room. I really didn’t want a job.

My mum stood in the kitchen and did dishes while she yelled at my dad. I didn’t like hearing that. He’d just sit there and read books. When I wanted to try to act like I wasn’t there, I would sit at my desk by the window and write about what I’d done that day, and what I’d do the next. After that, I’d try to sneak out and get dinner. When I went to bed, my parents were always yelling, and so I might have had to squeeze the pillow over my head to drown it out. I didn’t sleep well, you know. I always had bags around my eyes. In the night, I might be awake real late, and I’d think about all the ugly things about me, around where I lived and why they were that way, and I’d start feeling really low. Some kids might have gotten in a fight on the street, or they’re pulling the close off some poor girl, or my mum’s screaming at my dad real loud, till Ms. Kent would come over and ask her nicely to be quiet. It all happened in some poorly put-up walls, through windows that no one wants to be there, in a part of a city where no one wants to be. I’d get close to crying, but I never would, and I never did. That’s not what a good man does.

I woke up before my parents always. I’d make myself tea and toast fast as I could, and then I’d set out. And no one else was really awake at that hour, so I just rushed out and was back in the good parts of the city again before anyone was there to hound me or what have you. It would always be bright about that time, and there’d still always be a good many people walking around. Maybe once or twice in the morning I’d stop and watch them, and wonder again what it was they were doing. They all looked pretty silly. That time of the day, the sun was a bit diagonal, so it’d shine right across the faces of the buildings, and it would look really beautiful. Everyone I passed would get a “Good morning” from me. And sometimes someone I passed would say, “Now there’s a good lad.” They day began there.

I remember it was a bright day sometime about April, when I made my way to the library to have a go at the books. I took to the library a lot, mainly because I hadn’t a day of school behind me, but also just because I liked to sit there and read things, and imagine. I sat at a huge table with an immense volume in front of me, and I read a sentence at a time. But I didn’t really just read through it, so to say – I skimmed along the lines, and I could feel when a good sentence was coming up. When I got to that sentence, I read real slowly, then I looked up at the window in the archway ahead of me and I’d think about it as I watched the clouds drift by. I was out of luck if it was a clear day. That day, I was reading the Odyssey. I remembered exactly the line I stopped at, for reasons I still can’t quite explain. It read,

“Lo, how men blame the gods!
From us, they say, comes evil!”

Zeus said that to all the other gods around him, in that fantastic hall they had. I’m pretty sure he’s the father of the gods, and he gathers the clouds. You gotta respect a guy like that, really. But when I left the library that day, I really put it into practice. I looked all about those rich people in carriages, for whom the streets are so wide, and they’re all done up in pristine white, to the point where everything and their horses are white, save for some idle details and the mustaches on their faces. They were always going about as a family, stopping here and there to pick up a bunch of flowers or get an ice cream. I thought it was a pretty good deal that they were born into that kind of life. Everyone I’ve ever known has hated them for it, but I don’t quite know what there is to hate. They seemed to me like they’re doing alright. Maybe it’s just all about money, I thought. That’s a shallow thing to get upset about.

So, my parents will be angry, the blokes will be low, my uncle will laugh, and I’ll be a moron who walks around London all his life. To be honest, I don’t know what there is to complain about, once you’ve squared away what it is that you are. The day went on, and I really started to feel a lot better about home, and my parents, and how honestly senseless all that yelling is. And if the boys give me a hard time, I’ll get through it, and I’ll be all right at the end, long as I know what’s good in life. The day got brighter and clearer as I started to feel better and better, and it seemed as though the planets aligned for me that day.

I made my way to the Park. It was an emerald day there, and the skies were completely clear overhead. All those canopies came together and stirred about in a breeze. All those blades of grass there on the lawn went on until the woods swallowed them up, not far off. I stood by a tree and watched a band play on a wooden stage by the lake. The women wore white, and the men black, and the kids ran about in blue and laughed. I just stood beside, dirty and rotten as I was, because I’m sure they wouldn’t want a poor boy like me sitting around the rows of chairs they had set up. So I stood by with my hands in my pockets and watched the band. They played the kind of music that carries through the air real nice, and has a pretty little melody to it. They stay with you, those songs, and they just make your life better once you hear them.

Then I got looking through the crowd sitting down. They were all dressed alike, so faces got lost once you saw another. The men mostly had those mustaches and hard faces, like they’re really serious all the time. The women either looked like toads done up in white powder or they were really pretty. Some looked older than granddad. I stopped when I saw one face in particular.

It was a girl, must have been about my age. She had long, blond, golden hair tied up behind her head. She had really rich, blue eyes, and skin like cream and silk. There was something about her, I have to say. There was something that made me notice her in particular. Really, she was too fair to be a mortal – she must have been a goddess or something. Maybe she was an angel. She fit the bill. And her face was the kind you could just stare at. And she looked extremely bored – she held her chin in her hand and her eyes were just locked on the band. I realized I was staring at her, and I felt really bad, because you just shouldn’t do that. Her dad, as I guessed the man sitting beside her was, leaned over and whispered something to her. Still, her head was just drooping over her palm, and she leaned lopsided on her right armrest.
Then she looked at me.
Square in the eyes.
I felt a jolt run through me, and I jarred immediately, and fell to the ground. Then I stumbled up and started walking as fast as I could through the woods behind me. Why? I don’t know. I just had to get away. What if she tells her dad, and he comes running after me? What’ll he do to me? Jaysus, I thought. My mum’s Irish, and I always think in Irish when I’m excited.

Then I heard footsteps other than mine behind me in the leaves. I sifted through the trunks a bit faster, from canopy spot to canopy spot, over logs and that, always getting faster, until we were in a running chase. My heart was beating really hard, because I don’t usually run, and he was probably gonna knock me about if he caught me. I just ran, and I didn’t think about anything else.

Then I was on the ground. Something had slammed me in the back really hard, and I fell to the ground like a lummox. My spine was killing me as I lay there, slowly coming to terms with things again. There was a hefty piece of wood lying on the ground beside me, some huge stick. And when I looked up, I didn’t see a mustached top-hatter, or even some bloke. It was the girl. She was all dressed in an ornate white dress and her gloves went up to her elbows. She stood proudly over me with her hands on her hips, so she looked really tall, and she glared at me with those eyes. I was confused and speechless. I propped myself up on my elbow and said,
“You hit me with a piece of wood!”
She was still breathing hard as she just uttered, “Yeh?”
I went again without words. Then I said, “That was a good piece of wood!”
“I just picked it up,” she said, looking over at it.
“Oh,” I said.
“Why were you looking at me?” she shouted suddenly. She used a voice that could burn down a village.
“I dunno,” I said.
“What were you doing?” she asked.
“I dunno,” I said.
“Is that what you do, you just look at people all day?”
“I dunno!”
“Do you know anything?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“I…Paul.”
“I’m Emily,” she said. But she didn’t say it in her burning villages voice. She took on a more peaceful tone.
I was perplexed. I said, “Do you think it’s okay to just throw pieces of wood at people?”
“Don’t be patronizing!” she shouted.
“I’m sorry!” I said.
“I’m being patronizing!” she shouted.
“Right, sorry!”
“And don’t be so meek!” she shouted.
“Sorry,” I said.
“What’d I tell you?” she shouted.
I just looked at her. Then she asked in her quiet voice,
“What’s your last name?”
“Uh, Charleton.”
“Why’d you say ‘uh’?” she shrieked.
“I don’t know!” I pleaded.
“Are you lying to me?” she shouted.
“No!”
“It sounds like ‘charlatan.’”
“Oh.”
“Do you know what that is?”
“No,” I said.
“A liar!” she shrieked. Then she paused. Then she picked up the bit of wood and shouted, “Get up!”
So I got up really fast.
“And stand up straight, with your chest out, for God’s sakes.”
I did, and my back started feeling better. The pain was gone.
“Now you can breathe better,” she said. “I don’t know why you peasants don’t stand up straight.”
“I don’t know, either,” I said.
She paused again. She looked at the wood. She smiled as she said,
“Are you afraid of girls with bits of wood?”
“I guess,” I said. “You threw it really hard. Hit me real good.”
She held it up and looked at it. Then she swung it at me but faked it out, and I shouted, “Oh god!” and cringed back. But she just burst out laughing. Her whole face scrunched up when she did, and she slapped her chest. It was a deep sort of “haw-haw” laugh.
I just got angry at her. I said, “God above! Is this how you deal with people?”
Her laughing died as she said, “I’m really sorry. I’m just mean like that.” She relaxed her shoulders and threw the stick to the ground. Then she told me, “I suggest we start running or something. My dad’s probably coming, and he’s a whole lot of fun. He’ll probably make you work in a factory or something. Come on.”
She grabbed my wrist, and suddenly we were dashing through the woods.

The Peasantry Elite

2011-03-30T22:36:00.001-05:00

The Peasant Elite of the United States of America

A collection of individuals, who have since derived from a line of those who have, at some point in the past, been considered "peasants" in a foreign land, are hereby incapable of having become political points of reference without thorough education in the canonical science of philosophical, governmental, and humanitarian history, and the theories that have arisen and will arise thereof.

The advent of the formation of the United States of America, an event that was ushered through blood and the stubbornness of thought, sent waves of political upheaval through the whole of the European world, such that the turbulence of Europe in the following century may be owed exclusively to the impact of the Declaration of Independence on the seatholders and peasants alike, on the other side of the Pond. Most importantly, the violence wrought by the French people on their aristocrats, a toll in deaths of approximately 44 thousand, may be owed to the extensive buildup of political stifling through many years of governmental callousness to widespread suffering and hardship, initiated at last by an example of violent opposition of people like themselves opposite the Pond, of whom they learned on scraps of paper and words on the breeze. This violence stands firm and evident in the minds of those whom it impacted, primarily the French people themselves, but also quite notably the British, who of all the European world may have received the most obstinate and pretentious of governmental circumstance, although perhaps not the most violent or inhumane.

These reforms, wrought by time and thoroughness of belief in injustice prolonged through the generations, must be considered necessary only in the circumstances that dealt them, much less the continuity of rebelliousness through all generations. Violence is evident only in an antiquated playing field; what fields have we now, the Capitalist Democrats we are, whether liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, but fields of governmental soundness and focus on economics and politics, about an inescapable and often arbitrary aura of complete tranquility? Americans swell at the mere thought of an armed foreigner even touching their shores, and have employed godlike defense thereof, to establish a firm and absolute understanding with those outsiders about the European and Asian world that the American populace is a people of peace and justice. The streets of America are twice as safe from deliberate wrongdoers than the simply insane; a child wandering in the night may be abducted by one of perversion, whereas a man will either be gunned down forthright by an inadvertent attempt at his life, an improbable circumstance, or successfully subdue his assailant on grounds of mediocrity of judgment. America is a sound plane of being, obstructed only by those obstructions predetermined.

But these predeterminations are not without uncertainty. All points thought to be definitive and therefore acted upon in light of their conclusive reasoning will be almost definitely and completely eradicated by the truth of uncertainty. Nothing is definitive in the real world, and neither in the mind of an individual. Jacob Bronowski, who is credited most famously with his television series, The Ascent of Man, placed both feet in the pond into which four million Jews were flushed in the epicenter of their extermination at Auschwitz and explained the invalidity of dogma, arrogance, and ignorance in the civil and righteous plane of reasoning. Violence and suffering are, indeed, wrought in the human world by one's inability to keep their judgment in check, their "deliberate deafness" to the suffering at hand, and the simple fact of wisdom's keep, which is always limited in some way. Therefore, he proclaimed, we must turn to science, not to walk around in white suits, but to act on the order of that which we do not know, or that which may not be true, in order to hereby vanquish suffering once and for all, and correct those who endorse it, regardless of their creed or check or lack of knowledge.

What good, then, is there in a government that operates on definitiveness of action at the present point in time? What does anyone know, regardless of degree in academia or in fluency in political affairs, that may be considered definitive at any point in time? And what good is a government that operates on slow change, perhaps too slow to save lives, or too slow to allow appropriate justice to those who will be repressed for only a set amount of time? What formality of operation reigns supreme over the grace of high wisdom, a superior government that may be applied in present time, purposed by indoctrination to an unexplained thirst for that which must be done, regardless? What purpose has been defined at all by the government of the United States of America, that may be deduced to the most basic of fundamental principles of mankind?

The documents upheld so indisputably by the American public, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, are still subject to immediate, evident, and constant change, on grounds that circumstances cannot be defined on a sheet of paper but only alleviated in real time by real agents of peace, through wisdom that may be reasoned to the beginning of the cosmos itself. How foreign yet is this cosmic wisdom to the present world? When will it become evident, if it is not evident already? Truly, at any given point in time, there is a finer operative to acquire, and life as a mode of being must be transcended by the succession of operatives over immeasurable periods of time, that is, if one wishes to establish a government that simply bears no falsity or mediocrity. Unfortunately, the nature of the populous Man is often overridden by his seemingly unbreakable bond to practice over theory, which may be the only struggle that Man has ever known. Therefore, it is imperative that he should abide by further accessions of thought than those which are immediate, and that he should never cease to ask "Why" about things, until the moment of his death, so that the truth may be embraced once and for all for the remainder of mankind's ascent to righteousness, which has since proven to be a unique one indeed.

He who is a human being is a peasant, and a king, as well. No man or woman who has ever held a throne or an office of authority has deserved that office or throne, but has inherited it wrongly. This is simply the nature of a machine that has been contrived for the convenience of man's dwelling in this realm. It is a very abstract sort of machine. As well, it must be observed that man has fared this realm through his art, much less through his definitiveness in thought, and certainly not in terms that may be considered anything but signature of a human being. He is not a thing of order, but of antiquity; the biological world was nothing like the world we presently know, and was certainly something far removed from the tranquility of the original fertility of earth long ago. It is certainly an abstraction. And these abstractions must be maintained throughout the course of mankind's ascent.

However, they should not be maintained through the loss of blood or the shedding of life, either completely or in measurable quantities, and should be constrained to arenas of expulsion that are ineffectual to the survival of mankind, in one form or another. As I attempt to arrive at one conclusion, another will brew; there is no present or future absolution in the nature of affairs that will ever stand for any period of time longer than that which may be measured. The things that are take nature in the fact of their occurrence, which will take place over an indefinite point of time before fizzling out; the things that will be take nature in the origin of everything; the things that were actually never were at all, for the simple fact that they are not presently occurring. Conclusions will always occur. This may be the nature of all universal affairs, and the purpose of the big bang, that in this realm things simply cannot remain definitive. Oblivion is a constant affair, and therefore may not exist in this realm. Maintenance of a single ideology for any length of time will ensure its destruction; its succession must be planned and accorded upon its publication, so to ensure that it will be caught peacefully in the future by educated hands.

The definitiveness of action will corrupt and dissolve the American world, and the world of government as a whole, inevitably; government is simply a doctrine that will, in one circumstance or another, be succeeded by something inherently superior. One event leads to another; we as forward operators of our preferences of being, not as kings or peasants, but as the sentient descendants of the gravitational cosmos, victims not to our deficiencies in contrived morality but athletes in the theoretical operative of universal complacency, indoctrinated to ourselves, who are one with everyone else, and everything else at that. Many times in my life have I fared the conception that Americans are a stupid collection of individuals. This is false. Americans are not stupid; peasants are stupid. And it just so happens that most of America is populated by peasants. Perhaps this is only one step in achieving a more intelligent way of life.

The Crimson Court

2011-03-23T16:37:00.001-05:00

On a day in the spring, when the bell towers ring,
Many vile a patron gave rout
To the queen and the king, and the squires that sing,
In the courtyards and gardens about.

Many bishops and pawns were left dead on the lawn,
And what glory their murderers quaffed!
As the evening drew on, and the night turned to dawn,
All those killers drank richly and laughed.

But they never quite left all those courtyards bereft,
And they donned all those corsets of gold.
By ambrosia they slept; all those soldiers they kept,
Who did just as those murderers told.

On a day in the fall, from the ramparts and walls,
Many vile a patron gave rout
To those killers of gall in their crystalline halls
In the courtyards and gardens about.

Phantom, first few verses

2011-03-15T18:21:00.002-05:00

Amidst the white and endless sky,

The clouds revolve and tremble;

Turgid tempest blossoms nigh,

Where rage and wrath assemble.

Through lust and mediocrity,

Mankind fell ill to feeling;

There sullen sought monstrosity,

Left man and kindred reeling.

Then storm on darkened gables drew,

And turbid gales did linger,

In districts blood and bleating knew,

Where swords rest cold in fingers.

So silence veiled the lost remains,

And nature ceased to stir;

The slain deluged the streets and lanes,

Where frigid drafts abjure.

And somewhere in a city square,

A squire wrote in blood,

Upon a pristine wall left there,

Whose sermon looms above:

“In every square of land and plain,

The story read the same;

Tempest high and lowly maimed,

Till only grace remained.”

And on the arid, level wasteland,

Stranger by his trade,

Did wander still and sterile sand,

As time itself decayed.

A sanguine cloak his shoulders bore,

That flickered in the gales;

A sword and shield his stock and store,

And mead and rancid kale.

A sanguine hood engulfed his head;

A metal mask he wore,

That neither love nor hatred bred;

No character it bore.

Across the aural desert laid,

A shadow drew adrift;

A rising fog in colonnades

Amassed in stormclouds swift.

Graceful heavens, burdened be,

Grew dark with clouds and thunder.

Cyclones loomed on land and sea:

The dark is torn asunder.

The silence is eviscerated;

Lightning strikes the ground –

An ashen spot incinerated

Smokes without a sound.

Phantom rises ashes from,

A shadow cloaken darkly;

Bound to rise when kingdom come,

Obeying burden starkly.

Darkness clothed the Phantom wholly,

Floating round his form;

Pluming shadow bathed him fully,

Wav’ring null of norm.

Shining eyes of white there sunken

Glared at stranger wayward;

Hollow, absent, morbid-drunken

Eyes returned the favor.

Phantom, morbid, loft and lordly

Hovered there before;

Stranger fast stood wise and worldly,

Wand’ring forth no more.

“Phantom, art you?” spoke the Stranger,

Paying pleasance slowly.

“Art you not a spectral ranger,

Hunting vengeance lowly?”

“Stranger,” morbid Phantom roared,

His booming voice resounding,

“All these golden sands I lord,

As they are of my founding.

“Bid me neither high nor low

Your judgment right or wrongly;

Conjure all the grace you know,

And bide in patience strongly.

“A moment now of tragedy

Way ward you from my preaching;

Take me not as deity,

But shepherd for your teaching.

“I am all of lost society,

A shadow of the dead,

Whose souls transcend reality,

Where man to fate is fed.

“Hatred, rage, and malice straining,

Suffering befalls;

All our hopes and dreams remaining

Spoiled on the walls.

And all my wanted words retaining

Strike me ill with gall.

“Fogs drew out injustice on

A many heath and hill;

Our brazen blades were thrust upon

By black and godless will.

In forests dark with morning dew,

On pristine marble stairs,

In hovels where our children grew –

You’ll find our bodies there.

“Cold and pale and silently,

Our forms are left to rot,

And all those manners violently

Our minds, as well, begot.

“Now darkly do our souls persist

And see upon our gloom,
In phantom ranks we now enlist

To dwell within our doom.

And no human life shall hence subsist

To occupy this room.

The Insulting of the Peasant

2011-02-22T07:32:00.002-05:00

One morning in the manor yard,
Two gents did burble brightly,
Of the turbid times and taxes hard,
And gallant fables knightly!

In the fervor of their frivoled flap,
A peasant wandered stumbly,
Through the orchid patch and Venus traps,
And fell before them humbly.

And O the gents did spray forth tea,
Through puckered lips disgusted,
As the first one globbed with thus decree:
"You splurgid hillock crusted!

"Art you lost of brainy matter, sir,
Or art you simply stolid!?
You do not succeed a mangy cur;
You are hardly worth a bullet!

"O, what sprattle wrought your flurbid form;
What beast took time to birth you?!
You incite me, then, to vomit storms,
And place an evening curfew!

"I can hardly fathom properly,
The pleasance of your species,
You foetid splotch of spoilt piss,
You rankin sack of feces!"

So spake the firstly gent thereof;
The second sauntered spritely,
Towards the brownish, blobbish man whereof,
He sermoned peasant rightly:

"If you'll bid me pardon, peasant, please;
My mode is not humane;
Whereupon my punishment shall cease,
You'll not be quite so sane!

"In your closet I'll stuff thirty cod,
A salmon in each shoe,
In your pants go seven sturgeon odd,
Ten tuna in your loo!

"In your knickers I'll shove fifty carp,
A swordfish in each sleeve,
And a crab shall play such horrid harp,
Inside your sweaty greaves!

"Now I must admit apology,
For the terrors there instilled,
But on seeing your biology,
I'd say it fits the bill!"

So sullen sought insult they bore,
The peasant rose against,
And thus those gents he did abhor,
With puerile pestilence:

"You spruppled sprouts abgunct of grace!
You strumpets slopped of shame!
Art you blind of eye or globbed of face,
And don't you know my name?!

"I am Edward Alexander Price,
Sebastian Robert Cole;
I have ruled this land for decade thrice,
I'm King you fluppered foals!

"Now be off upon your teasome routs,
You prightly piles of goop!"
So the King returned to throne so stout,
And outlawed eating soup.

Boards of Canada, Sixtyniner

2011-02-14T20:58:00.001-05:00

Part 1

We were pilgrims two, on a pilgrimage to a place unknown to our peers and all of our kindred, somewhere far north, beyond the outskirts of present imagination. No one had ever a curiosity to venture forth into this demarcation of the unknown, and so nothing was expected as we lapsed across the border and felt an ill wind upon us. What was once a nondescript void became something slightly more alive, as if we had suddenly stepped on hallowed ground, and our robes dragged along the prickling grass below. It was a brown, blurry drear in every direction. There seemed to be nothing here at all.

There was a horribly wide plain all around us, so eerily flat that we could see for miles, and it was punctuated here and there by blotches of the fog and the sunrise on the far horizon. Because we had no map, and knew almost nothing of this place, we were quite certain to run into momentary hardships here and there, whether an encounter with a bear or a lack of food. We brought our canteens, and plenty of bread, and even our lyre and pan flute to keep us entertained by the fire at night, assuming we would have a fire. But regardless, we were hopeful for events to come.

The first day was the most grueling by far. We walked for miles and miles, but came upon nothing. Some eerie humming sounds resonated from the great distances around us, and sounded very traceably like songs. At the end of the day, we found a patch in the void that was populated by four scraggly trees, placed by each other on the vertices of what seemed to be a perfect square. In the middle was an azalea bush that bustled its way between the trunks outward. We came upon this as the sunlight grew scarce, and our energy was almost completely gone. Both of us collapsed on the ground, and slammed hard on the dead, speckling grass and the dead dirt. But our despair gave defeasance to our sleep, and soon I, unable to speak for my comrade, fell asleep quite effortlessly.

We were not in the same place when we awoke. I remember hearing the sound of birds ringing out in mad procession from the woods around us and in the distance; we were, as well, in the woods. It was a very beautiful morning, and the spotted canopy was very brilliantly green of emerald; the sunshine that poured through it was rather ambrosially golden. The air was so crisp and fresh that I felt as if I was breathing in some tropical aroma by the shore, but that didn’t seem to be the case. Zephyr smiled warmly upon my friend and I that morning; the rigors of yesterday were gone, as if completely null and void, and this brand new universe was far more effectively intriguing. So cool were my limbs as I stood up that they all cracked rather thoroughly when I yawned and stretched, and as I let my limbs down, my robe fell upon me again quite gracefully and comfortably.

I had been sleeping in a very fluffy tuft of high and healthy grass, which was indented finely with my shape. It was at the foot of those four trees we saw in the gritty wasteland before; could this whole vivid place have grown lush in the night? My friend awoke on the other side, where I believe he had fallen asleep, and we looked at each other with bewilderment as he sauntered around the corner. We looked around, wandered to gain better vantage of the sights, and eventually rendezvoused to exchange our fascinations.

“Do you think it grew in the night?” I asked him.

And he replied, “I would never have imagined, but we are in a different kind of place. Maybe life is a seasonal thing here? Or maybe it’s a weekly phenomenon?”

I said, “I think we ought to start exploring. Maybe we’ll find civilization sooner or later.”

And so, we began to walk through the wood, which discerned to be an extremely peaceful sanctuary. Everything was extremely healthy, but refined, as if to allow people such as us to walk very comfortably about. Some logs were strewn about here and there, and over a creek. Eventually, we came to a very wide and bright glade, which was almost wholly populated by grassy hills that suddenly humped very playfully over the earth. As we traversed through that, we came to the evident ultimatum of the woods, and found ourselves at a very curious place indeed.

It was a road very flawlessly infused with the ground, and the ground rose up in to the distance hills, and the hills crescendo into a density of monolithic pines before they disappear into the sky. And, as we are learned people, we knew these things were all entities apart, but in our state we felt natural to conclude that the earth, the sky, and everything in between, was very much one.

The road itself was very great, long, solid, and unspeakably refined; it swooped down from the left-bearing hillside and bent towards us, disappearing around the hill directly forward into nowhere through a corridor of overhanging trees. It was gray, and had a very solid, white line in the center. At first, my colleague and I were very afraid that it might have been some immense adder at work to feast on unknowing wanderers! As we began to step backwards, we heard a very terrible roaring sweeping in from the left.

“What do you believe it is?” I asked my friend, as we cowered back towards the woods.

“God knows,” he replied. “But we’re here to explore, and find our way; we should see what it is, and take care not to spare it our lives. Be on your feet, comrade.”

The roaring came at us; it was a man in a very strange white helmet, in a very strange white suit, on a very strange sort of white machine, who sat upon this thin machine of two wheels in a row with fervent relaxation. He came at such an incomprehensible speed that we hardly noticed that he had graduated to a screeching halt sideways in the road, facing us, and kicked a stand down to the ground with his foot as he stepped off and let the contraption go, and it settled comfortably upright as he sauntered towards us. My friend and I stood our ground fast, and waited as he very slowly approached. He wore plain white boots, tan leggings and tan cuirass, and he had white gloves and a white helmet that had a huge, black gap across the front. His eerily nondescript gloves rose to remove the helmet, and we saw that he was actually a rather handsome man, whose bountiful black hair was brushed intelligently to the side. He had a slight tan, and looked upon us with a countenance of the utmost wisdom.

“Might I inquire about your business here, gentlemen?” he asked us very coolly, and casually, and with a voice of humbling power and resolve.

I stepped forth timidly and replied, “My name is Marcus. He behind me is my brother, Michael, and we have come on a pilgrimage to seek out the fabled Boards of Canada.”

“The Boards?” he said. “You know where they are?”

“Not a clue,” I said. “Would you be so kind as to help us?”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know where they are, either. I’ve been a highway patrolman for years now, and I still haven’t found them.”

“You’re a highwayman?” I feared to inquire.

But he only laughed: “No,” he said. “A patrolman. I protect from highwaymen. I patrol this highway, the Bishop Road; it’s my duty. You must not be from anywhere around here.”

“We’re surely not,” I said. “We fell asleep amidst a horrible void yesterday night, but we awoke in the woods behind us this morning, and now we are completely disorientated.”

“I’ve met others like you before,” he said, nodding his head and surveying the highway around him. “Don’t worry, I know how to help you. He walked back to his machine rather collectedly and retrieved of a very fresh-looking sort of parchment, which was stacked like a book, but the binding was at the top in a rectangular band, and it read “Legal Pad” across the top. But on the paper were written five indoctrinations:

1. All is one.

2. Know he whom few isn’t.

3. One is all.

4. Believe in Twoism.

“What does this mean?” I asked.

The man laughed. “Here’s where I say, ‘You gotta figure that out on your own.’ Keep it with you wherever you go here, and you’ll find your way out eventually. This place is very much perplexing, and very foreign to anything you might have back in your own kinda place. So keep yourselves comfortable, and don’t hurry; you’ll be somewhere preferable soon enough.”

As he concluded, he began to walk back to his machine. But I stopped him:

“Wait,” I said. “I’m sorry, but I am extremely curious as to what it is you’re riding. Oh, and, what is your name?”

He turned and smiled warmly as he replied, “They call me Sixtyniner. I’m the saltiest highway patrolman on the road. I began riding bikes back when I was five, and I’ve never stopped since; I got the scars to prove it, too. I don’t make mistakes anymore; I think that’s out of the equation now.”

“How glorious a person you are,” I lauded, clapping my hands together meagerly. “But why is your name a number?”

“It’s my number as patrolman,” he replied. “I’m the sixty-ninth put into duty.” And it was here that his face became grave, and he looked out upon the skyline of the canopy on the left foothill, towards the colonnades of humble clouds above. “I’ve been searching for someone for a long time. Her name is Sixtyten. She came on duty two years ago, and we lost her a year ago. We think the Dayvan Cowboys got to her.”

“The Dayvan Cowboys?” my brother and I inquired in unison.

The gallant one looked over, his helmet still nestled beneath his arm. “Yeah,” he said. “They fly around in the sky in the biggest white dayvan you’ve ever seen in your life. It’s probably a ’91 Shevvy. Covered in hundreds of windows, and in the windows you can see the scoundrels themselves, the goddamn pirates who run around the sky and take our women and coffee just for the fun of it. Oh, and you really oughta know, coffee is very important here. Make sure you’re stocked up at all times. I got a coffee machine on the back of my bike here just to make sure I don’t run out when I’m on duty.”

“That’s absolutely amazing,” I said hastily, emphasizing my sincerity. “But, and I am ashamed to inquire at this point, what of that machine you just mentioned?”

“Oh!” he exclaimed. “Excuse me. I went rambling on again, I apologize. This is a motorcycle. It’s a standard issue 1978, and it serves us all damn well. You might see others like me some places along the road and in the diners and fishing towns; don’t hesitate to ask them for help. And getting back to the coffee, before I forget, let me pour you fellas some coffee in your canteens. You won’t need water anymore here.”

We conceded to hand him our containers as he approached the tall white object on the back of his “motor cycle.” As he approached, we found the canteens to be quite warm, and a simply intoxicating aroma originated from within. “Why, this is simply divine,” I said.

“Oirectine coffee ground,” he said. “Never buy anything else. Remember that name. Now, you fellas need anything else?”

“Not that I can tell,” I said. “Michael?”

My brother shook his head, for he was a mute.

“Very well,” Sixtyniner said as he fastened the helmet back on his head. “Live long, prosper, and watch your way. And if you see a girl on a bike like mine…” His head trailed away towards the ground, and I watched him lapse into his own imagination as he continued, “Don’t hesitate to grab her attention. Follow the road where I go hereafter. Farewell.”

These words having been said in haste, he roared off, and we were left with the pines, and the coffee, and the clouds. Our adventure begins.

The Trials of Gaius Part.1

2011-02-13T19:27:00.003-05:00

There was once a land that was laid far from the consideration of men, during a time when the race of the sentient rabbit was young. This land was called Leporida, although it was also known as the "Island Over Easy," as it so resembled an egg frying in a pan. It was very close to being a perfect circle altogether, and in the center was a very peculiar, round landmass.

This landmass was a very massive plateau, thought to be a mountain that had been cleanly cut in half horizontally by a very frivolous deity. And every morning, the sky over the plateau, when visible, would be radiantly and vividly golden in the morning sun. They called it The Blessing. It cannot be reached, because it sits on a very steep and horribly dangerous incline, which any rabbit has yet to scale in testimony; those who have left to climb it and had not returned either died in their ascent, or found their way to a finer sanctuary.

No historical record stood that outlined any detail of this place, for all historical records were of wars and kingships. As all of the known Leporida was dank and dreary marshland, The Blessing was thought to be, veritably, a brilliant paradise, rife with brazen sunshine that poured in colonnades through the dense canopies of shining emerald and played in grace on the floods and floras of the galen wood, and reigned in epic breadth on the vibrant white and yellow of the meadows where larks sang of sunshine.

From this belief, the early race of rabbits extrapolated horrid hardships. Feuds were commonplace between counties and provinces, and those in control knew little more than the thirst for power and wealth. Tyrants succeeded tyrants; bloody crusades were halted by genocide; chaos was upon the face of order, from the turbulent sea to the base of the fabled paradise. Because the ocean around the island was so notorious for housing bloodthirsty sea-beasts, hellacious crags, and tempests comparable to divine malice, no rabbit left the nutriment of life on land, and never felt the necessity for adventure. So much more sensible was the impulse to turn back to the old country and wage war, rather than attempt to comprehend a surely foreign, a validly horrific, and a fully mysterious abyss.

Clad in leather and rusting chainmail, holding tight their blades and bludgeons, the rabbits sought hard and bloody resolve on everyone who were not kindred, or who thought with slight adversity, even confining their malice to their immediate vicinity, whether neighbor or brother. There were almost as many allegiances as there were villages, and so these sanguinary feuds were carried out without a moment of forethought. The rabbits were dirty, starved, antiquated, and barbaric; there were few things for which to live, and many things for which to die. Battles carried out between trees, over swamps, on the riverbanks, through the creeks, and in successions of arrows from the canopies. Most of the villages were built on wooden basins, and commonly faced turbulence with the man beasts of the bog, such as crocodiles and great bullfrogs that would swallow a rabbit whole. Suffering was the key to life in those days.

There lived in this country a rabbit named Marcus Gaius Scintillius, although his friends knew him as Gaius. He was a farmer on The Plains, one of its few cultivators, for The Plains were exclusive to a single bare portion of the island, and his laborious craft was valuable to the nourishment of rabbits far and wide. Born and raised on farming, educated well in the succession of plant over plant, he became quite content with his knowledge early on, and took no heed of the feudalism of the nation around him, and for a while, the bloodshed took no heed to him. Immersed in his trade, he remained very quaint; he raised a family of two boys and a girl, whom he loved extraordinarily, and helped his wife graciously in maintaining the household. Often he wrote in a journal, and wrote letters to his distant friends, because he was quite fascinated in hobbies of writing, whether transitory languages or the compilation of histories. He kept many books on his shelf, and took strife to contribute to his own library.

But this life was very fragile, as he understood, and he was often struck by anxieties, when he would imagine feuds passing over his tract of land. The worst of all his nightmares had come upon him one night, when the counties of Lindengale and Stratloss clashed in the fields and woods about his home. All his family retreated with him to the cellar, and they tried duly to wait until the morning came, and the battle was done. As they nearly had all fallen asleep, the door to the cellar swung open, and barbarians raided the house relentlessly. In this offensive, Gaius’ family was seized, and the brutes asked him the county from which he hailed. Unknowing of the affiliation of the colors they wore, he pleaded Lindengale; with this, the barbarians spilled his wife’s blood and carried off his children.

Robbed of all his most precious denominations, and left to bury his love in a shallow grave, he mourned every day of his life thereafter. In the daylight, he worked until he could work no more, and at night, he cried in a similar manner. He scoured the countryside by letter, searching for his daughter and two sons through his friends, who were peppered throughout the island. But no one knew, and they sent him gifts and condolences. However, no reassurance remained that might repeal his despair, except the embracement of his prides and his joys; still, he would fall short of repayment for his losses.

His life grew quainter, and closer. The empty room of his house disheartened him, that those to whom they belonged may never return. He found solace in his study, and would occasionally venture to the nearby town to retrieve books from the dark and dilapidated library. One day, after a ruckus in the night, he found the library had been half-burned, and noble rabbits were laid dead in the streets. The countryside became grey, and towns fell beneath monoliths of turgid smoke. Sometimes, bands of ironclad crusaders would approach him and ask his allegiance at bladepoint. Learning of their colors, he would respond accordingly, and they would take a bushel of carrots or corn before leaving him to his disturbances.

As he had no one to talk to, and no virtue, he studied the woods in the day, and the sky at night. He furthered his knowledge in the succession of new life over old in the fallen logs and saplings laid about. Sometimes a herd of deer would scurry off from the still distance, or birds were fly away suddenly. On some occasions, he would elude a band of crusaders scouring for Stratlosians, who would kill anything they saw regardless, but were not expedient or determined in dispatching. And in the darkness, he would make bonfires and sit about them as he stared into the sky. The next morning, he might draw out constellations he saw on paper, or document the motion of different celestial bodies, perhaps the wanderings of the Milky Way and Andromeda, which drew very slightly closer in his recurring observations.

For twenty years he lived in this manner. His journal was rife with his expressive rage, malice, and sorrow. In his solitude, he turned to his study for joy, but it only served him so much. Tea, bed, and breakfast were all he had left to himself. His philosophies surmounted his joy, and he was left to disparage the pieces that made him up.

Annually, he made trips to the city, where he sold the finest bits and pieces of his crops. One his twentieth trip since the night of his loss, he experienced something very perturbing: the capital city of Lindengale was in utter disarray. He holed himself and his crops into an inn on the square, where he waited for the riots outside to end. In the meantime, he was served hastily prepared tea and stale bread, due to the innkeeper’s preoccupation in arguments that occurred just outside his window. Through this window, he watched brother turn on brother, and the screaming was so loud and concentrated that he could hardly sleep through the night. Twice, he jumped up in the night, believing that he was experiencing a horrible nightmare, only to find that his dreams had been led on by what he heard in the streets, and that his nightmares were real. As he would look out, he would see one rabbit causing violence upon another.

But his expenses ran out, the innkeeper was unsympathetic, and a band of Burgundian crusaders had taken his crops forthright, opposable only in combat; Gaius did not have a mace, as they did. A crowd had amassed in the square, and the Burgundians were flurried for their contraband. Blood was spilled, and Gaius watched the rabble incur unspeakable abomination. Bludgeons were swung, blades were thrust, and arrows were flung from the windows. Gaius scrambled for safety amidst complete chaos, splattered in the blood of those around him, trying in vain to seek an alleyway or cellar in which to duck. He watched skulls explode about him, and stomachs slice open, and fists thrown at faces until they seemed as faces no more. Rabbits lay abstract on the ground. The clouds above him congregated, and thunder roared. White fur turned to red, and the skies mobilized into darkness. He looked over and saw that the Burgundian chieftain was standing atop his cart full of goods, screaming triumphantly over the whole of the crowd, holding his blade high in the air.

Gaius flew into blind malice. He felt the despair in his heart, the labors he brought upon himself so fervently in the last twenty years, the strength he had accumulated from so much hard work in a blithe attempt to surmount his horror with rage. He took haste in approaching the Burgundian brutes. Hazily, he arrested and turned the weapons against the guards about the cart, dropping them like a cat upon mice, until he knocked the last one out with his fist and took the sword he held, which was stained in innocent blood. Gaius alighted the carriage and stood before the droning brute; the crowd silenced, and they looked upon the passion that had succeeded over the previous holders of power. Quietly, placidly, and surely, Gaius addressed the brute thus: “Be off my cart,” he said, “or bid me reason why I should not subtract you from this world.”

Horror came over the face of that vile Burgundian. The bludgeon fell from his grip as he tripped off the cart and fell on his back, then was seized by a troupe of enraged patrons from Eurlingdale. As if conscious of the attention he had acquired, and awe he had struck, he grasped his control tight and turned to the populace as he harangued with conjurations of deep and dire origin:
“Friends, Lindens, men of country, spare me a moment of your attention. For the many years I have been alive, I have grown parallel to the violence wrought on the motherland of Leporida; but many years ago, perhaps twice a decade, my most beautiful and benevolent wife was relieved of her life, and my children were taken away from me.”

Silence fell in absolution, and Gaius paused to look at the ground and close his eyes, as the pain ran through him like lightning. He continued,

“The men who did this wore blue, and they called themselves the Stralosians, but I did not thirst for the destruction of Stratloss; and my family was beautiful, and they were disgraced by unprecedented injustice, but I did not seek revenge; I only cried, mind you. And this I have done every day of my life since then, as I near my midlife a hollow rabbit. I find I am one of many; behold the whole of our single, lonely country as it is and inquire as to how it is we will survive ourselves, should we continue on our crusades, whether against each other, or in conflicts over a phantom paradise. By what providence do we capitulate to fear, and doubt, and dogma, but the providence of our own arrogance, and ignorance?

“You can see the clouds on the horizon, and hear the thunder in the sky; if we do not seek out our hovels now, the tempest will consume us; as I have optimism for the aftermath, I would be dismayed to emerge and find I am the only one left. But this storm is not the work of some heavenly force, or god; it is the work of us. Never a hand but our own has grasped a blade; never an outrage was felt but in our own animosity; never a war was waged by truth, but only by injustice; see, then, what injustice has done to us.

“We are a humble people. Ultimately, we are driven by very fragile reasoning. For whom or what do we truly fight, but truth and complacency? How will we justify our violences? I have seen the smoke in the distance, and the libraries burned, and the streets littered with the spoils of death. Is this the nature of peace? Are we simply to know chaos before order?

“We are very unlike the creatures of the swamps. Where they adhere to greed and natural linearity, we have retained some meager representations of law; if only we should have practiced order, as well. Where they live in nature itself, we have conceived of shelter. And, of course, where they are blunt and coarse, whether in body or mind, we are soft and fragile. We could not have come from the marsh; we could only have originated from a place that shares specific attributes as us – fragile, refined, and beautiful.

“Perhaps we came from there,” he said as he pointed his blade toward The Blessing, which loomed over the canopy. “Perhaps that place holds ruins of ancient Leporidaean civilization, sitting idly amongst the emerald and the gold. In these lands, the dark of the moors and marshes, we never seem to retain sacredness for very long. We become angry, and conflicted, permeated by some endless measure of temperament and dogma.

“But who are we to return to The Blessing? Look at these things we have done, these turbulent arts of vendetta and phantom priority, and ask yourself if we so deserve a place like The Blessing anymore. Who is a person, who believes in phantoms? What is a reason that brings us to our knees, that drags us through terror and tragedy? Why do we frolic and creep through mud like salamanders? Since our departure from that sacred place, we have changed. We are flawed, we are angry, and we are lusting of blithe personal gain.

“And so, we have no reason, and we have nowhere to go. If we cannot acquire power or strength, you may ask, what remains? Many times I had seen the ocean in my youth, for my father was a fisherman. I remember the turning of the waves, the turbulence at the edge of the tide’s wake, and the joy I had in thrashing about its physics. But I have grown since then; the world has lost some wonderment, and now there is only reason. However, the ocean still calls to me. I yearn to see it again, as I would sometimes stare out into the endlessness of the blue as a child, and I would contemplate: this blue cannot go on forever, I thought. And the trees we see around us, and their shores, and the mountains and valleys and plains and all the beauty on this strange and lonely island, cannot be all that exists in the whole of the world. Perhaps we just live in a mysterious place.

“There were only meager vessels that ever did venture out into the sea; they brought back stories of fierce beasts, of violent storms, and of great stress dealt upon them in the interim. But this is only a worn man’s tale; what would the recollection of a curious mind bring us? Would it have noticed islands, remedied flaws in the ship’s design, or studied weather patterns? What is there in this world for someone who is incurious and demeaning, but misery?

“We must leave the island. The Blessing makes us yearn, and the marshes make us perish. How many wars must we fight in this place before we conclude that it is unsuitable for life? How much love must we expend before we learn of the tragedies of hatred? When will we capitulate to that which is evident, and cast away our ideas of fantasy, of worlds that will never be reached by greed and superstition? When will we thirst for a more beautiful morning, and do away with the tragedies we have amounted in the night? When will the time to pretend be done, and the time to create be upon us? When will we be a peaceful race? When will we begin to live? May we contribute to these morbid banks no longer, and may these rivers of blood run dry, once and for all.”

With this, he collapsed into tears, and the clouds above him dissipated as the sun shone through, and galvanized the faces of the onlookers. The crowd rejoiced passionately. They took him carefully in his hands and supported him well off the cart, as he was taken to an inn and sat down with a warm meal and a fireplace. The riots thus halted, the malice was thus appealed to, and the violence was left in history.

Word spread fast of his speech. With it speed, the swords and bludgeons of all the barbarians were cast into closets, and treaties were forged with obliged expedience in the following months. Villagers approached their burned libraries and collected of the books that remained. Letters were written and received with determined vigor, and they spread the popular ideology across the country.

Feuds simply ceased. The gray of the marshes was met with artisanship in sophisticated design, and sport in fighting its beasts. Hearths became the center of every household, and lanterns adorned the porches of those friendly abodes in the night. Peace flew swiftly over the whole of the old country.

Gaius spent his days writing awhile, as he was given parchment and pens. Many curious patrons approached him and asked him questions about life, careful not to test his complacency.

Because he still lived at the inn, he was often pandering to these askers, but eventually he was informed of a university that had been established in his honor. He was granted therein a grand study, and a righteous dormitory arrangement. The office was octagonal, and adorned with high ceilings, tall windows overlooking the Ptelethorian Fjord, an immense desk, and shelves stacked with all worthy histories and literary canons that remained. He wore robes, fancied, tea, and hobbied endlessly to write; peace, he felt, was finally upon him.

Olympus

2011-01-16T23:50:00.002-05:00

I was a soldier. The beginning of my tenure during Revelation was spent positioned on a mountain beneath the Saskatchewan Mortality Terminal. They performed surgeries on me, to augment upon my head a gas mask, and a control board on my left forearm. These were permanent augmentations. I was dressed in the standard dark trench coat, conveniently denoting of Nazi Officer attire. I had an adapted American M14 rifle, which was ideal of execution in more ways than one. No part of my flesh was to show; I was overwhelmed by utility and must have appeared inhuman to everyone.

I remember holding on to a tree on the side of that mountain, looking down at a turbine twenty feet ahead of me, which condensed flesh, bone, and organ into a fine mist that was expelled out the other side. People processed down the face of the mountain, without emotion in their face or inquiry in their actions in their minds, blindly walking face-first into this immense turbine. Occasionally, someone would simply ricochet off the fan blades at the forefront of the turbine and be thrown limply into the air, left to fall on the dead foliage and lie there, twitching. There was a breeze; it was a peaceful morning.

My job there was to maintain the fan and execute anyone to whom this happened. An old man and a young girl holding hands approach the fan; the old man is vaporized, whereas the girl is flung into the air, and she floated at the crest of her trajectory very gracefully before slamming into the ground again. I took my hand off the tree, picked up my rifle sluggishly, and began to lumber over to her. Along the way, a man grabbed my arm and said, “Come with us, brother.” I respond, “I’ll be there soon. Don’t worry.”
The girl was still ticking and twitching on the ground when I reached her. She had beautiful, golden hair and light skin. The flesh of her face was peeled halfway off, and I could see a deep groove in her skull where the bone was indented by the blade. I pointed the muzzle of my rifle at her head and stared down the outside of the barrel. I pulled the trigger, and her head exploded. The glass eyeholes and the attenuation of sound in my mask allowed me to refrain from blinking or wincing, so I watched it play out vividly. It’s strange, how tissue and dead foliage mixes.

With a good portion of strength, I picked the girl up off the ground and walked over to throw her in the turbine. Having done that, having heard the sick shaving sound of her body being torn up, I stepped aside and looked up the side of the mountain. A peppered procession carried on, comprising of people of both genders, of all ages, and of every race. They were all normal people, dressed in normal clothes, with absent countenances and a mindless inhibition to walk into the gyrating and consuming blades. A popular saying at the time, which I heard as I stood there on the hillside, was “I’ll see you in oblivion.”

The forest there was dead. The trees had long since passed and left their leaves on the ground. You could see the great plains through the bare canopy, a perfectly flat and beige expanse punctuated here and there by abandoned houses or barns, ruined metropolises, and skeletons of ancient villages. There are bands of people who still fight the genocide; sometimes, they hole up in a department store or hide in the basements of old houses, planning life on earth after they’ve been, as they believe they will be, “left alone.” Because of this, we have Colossi.

They’re two hundred feet tall walking alloy skeletons, but their machinery is condensed into a sleek growth symmetrically clumped around their upper torso, so that they have a hunched back and a head receding into their shoulders. Their limbs are very thin, and their legs end not at feet, but into very fine points that stab into the earth as they walk. They are completely silver and featureless, except for a black band across where their eyes should be and a red light on their head that blinks as they process syllables. Their voices are very deep and digital, and they can be heard for miles.

A week later, I was displaced to the Kitchen Sink, the first and original Genocide Machine. The center receptacle is comparatively a giant metal bowl, a hundred feet across. It contains various creatures and animals collected from the vicinity by Colossi, everything from mice to bears. They’re usually scrambling and screaming and crawling all over each other. At the press of a button, they are drained into what may be considered a giant garbage disposal machine. It’s funny to me, how cartoonish it is.

Around the sink are what seem to be four massive cheese graters, sloping down into the bowl. Drugged pedestrians are sat inside it so that their heads are sticking out of the holes, facing in at the bowl. Beneath the surface of the Grater is a grid of blades that is thrust forth to decapitate those seated inside. If they are to tall or short, they are either disposed otherwise or at the behest of misfortune to die inconveniently.

I was the one in the control booth, alongside a couple of other advisors, who were dressed in suits and gas masks similar to mine. As I saw each pedestrian had been placed adequately in their places, I hit a button to initiate the decapitation and dumping process. Their heads popped off and rolled into the bowl below, followed by their limp bodies below the grater. Robotic snipers from above killed any surviving humans, although the wild animals usually consumed them instantly.

I imagined for a moment that I was a survivor in the bowl – daydreaming, if you will. I managed to duck before the blades had cashunked me, and I slid into the bowl with the limp bodies. I must have been terribly horrified. But my horror would magnify as I’d get caught squirming amongst the beasts, fighting against wolverines and bobcats that had been mindlessly frenzied by the psychologically debasing drugs, which were sprayed upon them beforehand. Perhaps I would find a human arm caught in the deluge, and I would have to beat some creature to death to get it off of him. As well, I would need on my side the chance to survive the snipers. There would be skulls bursting all around me in the aftermath of a hellish crack from above. If I managed to survive that and climb down the ladder into the maintenance hall, what would I do? I would have no other choice but to shoot myself; the rest of the world would be, and is, dead. This is all assuming that I was still emotive; the pedestrians have been robbed of emotion or choice by the drugs.

As the snipers kill off the last of the survivors, I see one whom they had missed slip off the edge, securing his grip on the ladder and climbing down. The advisors don’t catch me; I let him go. There is no reason to waste one of our bullets on a man who will take care of himself.

I pull the red lever, which has been appropriately flaked of paint as if splattered with blood, and the rumbling comes. The crowd in the bowl recedes slowly and ominously down into the disposer, and the turbine processes all of it into a river, which pours from a drainage pipe into the plains. The thought of the survivor who escaped crossed my mind again.
A few hours later, my shift having been completed, I took me rifle and patrolled the halls of the compound. I came to the exit corridor and saw the survivor sitting on the floor with his back against the wall. His eyes were alive; I saw a tragedy within them, which gradually grew more vivid as I got closer to him. I stopped a few yards away from him and observed; he had an unkempt beard, scraggly hair, and tan skin. He was breathing inhumanly deep. I said to him,

“I will only kill you if you would prefer it. But out there,” I said, as I pointed to the broad light pouring in from the distant exit at the end of the corridor, “there is only death, and it shall bestow itself upon you far more horrifically than if I were to euthanize you here.”

The man looked up at me rather calmly, and his eyes now had in them a wild animal, a very raw emotion. He picked himself up from off the floor and said, “Horror is a tragic weakness; I prefer to walk in the vibrancies of life abreast and die horrifically than face the darkness of man’s creation, a symbol of superstition, as a dogmatic premonition of salvation. There are many flavors of life, my friend, but there is one death, and death shall come upon me by destiny; I should experience the vivid spectrum of life to its greatest extent before handing myself to an empty and inevitable singularity.” He set himself on his feet and walked out of the tunnel.

Who was to say he was not an intelligent elite? Perhaps I was only the most aware of the human advisors. If I wasn’t, I doubt I could arrive at such a conclusion. But I worked without contest regardless; I expected death like the rest of them. My later missions were the supervisions of the wasteland, or rather; making sure the humans had all died. I spent weeks walking deserts flatter than the earth should allow, happening occasionally upon villages that had resorted to mass suicide. Usually, there was a squad with me, and we would battle with rebel groups who had eluded the drugs. There are often very furious firefights in decrepit settlements, but I had yet to lose a single one of them. They were very serious about winning, but never thought it out enough. We knew how to outmaneuver and destroy them before we even got there.

When not with a squad, I would be traveling by foot between stations through the desert. Once, they told me a direction in which to walk, gave me supplies, and told me to go to the next station. I walked for miles on end before I understood the hopelessness of my cause. They hadn’t supplied me with sufficient water or nourishment. It was not surprising to me; I expected it. My feet carried me on in a haze of morbid hallucinations, of violence and the denial of human temperament. Slowly, I recounted to myself memories of what I had done, the pain I have brought upon a great portion of mankind. I was merely a pawn, but I was put behind the reins of a very great and evil machine. At that present time, I found it impossible to comprehend the concept of regret, a feeling that has yet to terminate.

I found myself walking straight at a Colossus, who had since begun to lumber towards me. I waited momentarily for my demise, contemplating what turgid eviscerations and dissipations I was about to endure. My feet stopped, and I heard it thump ominously onward, growing closer and closer. But as the thumping of its footsteps ceased, and my form was still of shape, I raised my eyes and saw that it had knelt upon one knees, and its right hand was pressed upon the ground facing upward, as if a child coaxing on a kitten. The red light blinked as it bellowed,

“I’m going to Olympus. I suggest you come with me.”

It was then that I was faced with an evident conflict, the choice of life in eternity or death in eternity. As I had been endowed mentally with a psychological depression on temperament, the advent of progressive consideration had left me very confused. Rather than disregard the Colossus outright, I had taken a moment to think about its offer. My cognizance experienced a relapse; perhaps the depression was, to a small degree, broken or surmounted by the temptation to live in Olympus.

I walked towards him as I dropped my rifle. My footsteps broke the waves that ran on the surface of the sand, and the wind seemed to press against me furiously. But I stepped upon his palm, and suddenly, I began to rise. Fluidly, the distance between the horizons shrank, and the Colossus hummed, as it slowly stood upright. It stopped, and I surveyed the world for as far as I could see. There were only dark, desolate plains and plateaus, and the sky was particularly blue. But it was extremely quiet that high in the air; I wonder if, by some degeneration of self-restrain, I managed to transcend an instant of enjoyment at that time.

The giant moved me to its chest, and a small doorway opened in it. I walked in. The doors closed behind me, and I was left in a quaint space, surrounded by dark machines with blinking lights. I assumed they were computers. There was a low and quiet humming, which seemed to be everywhere. I moved on, having to duck slightly, and found stairs that twisted through the mess of computers and up into a circular room, in which was a ladder. As I climbed further up the ladder, I found that I was approaching a much lighter place, which was on the other side of a trap door.

I flung the trap door open and climbed into a place that was comparatively extremely bright. My eyes adjusted, and I saw that I had come to the cockpit. But it seemed only to be a room; on one side, there was a grand window punctuated by immense panes; on the other, just a wall, but the entire room was a dome. It appeared that the head of the Colossus was almost completely empty. At the center of the windows was a regal armchair, which looked Victorian, striped in gold and white. Before it was a very nondescriptly white control panel, studded with dials that were glowing blue. As I sat in the chair, the lights all went out but for one in the center, which was flashing. I pressed it, and the Colossus began moving.

Relaxation set in on me as I reclined in the armchair and began to undo straps in my uniform. The armchair was surprisingly comfortable. At that point, I was sure I was far from anxiety, which was the leading depression on my psychologically clarity. Suffice to say, the spell was broken. My ideologies were far behind me.

Since I have arrived at Olympus, I was educated for a time on astronomy and astrophysics, then granted a complex of my own to live in. There is a bedroom, a great hall, a library, a kitchen, and a bathroom. It is entirely Victorian, like the armchair, as well as generally very white. The great hall is endowed with very large windows, and it is completely subject to whatever I may want to place in it. Robots usually wheel out a chair and a coffee table, where I sit in the morning and have tea. In the library, which is also very much a study, there is a computer terminal where I might track the progress of an exploration satellite that had been gifted to me by the community. So far, some of the other Olympians have found mundane instances of life; I’ve merely been collecting data about planets that have already been discovered.
As I was sitting in front of the computer terminal one morning I saw something very interesting on the screen. My satellite had been floating from earth for a while, and I wondered what image I might conceive of if I were to turn it around and render an image of the earth. It was a very inconsiderably small dot, which was very strangely discolored, suspended in a beam of light. This was the miniscule point in the universe that harnessed everything that has ever been known or done. Perhaps the genocide of the ignorant wasn’t as serious a matter as I thought.

There are public places in Olympus. They’re primarily cafes and gardens, the latter commonly being extremely vibrant with plant life, styled by the Olympians and maintained by robots. One evening, after I had finished writing a few pages on the structure of 303’s atmosphere, I decided to have a carbonated beverage at the Northern garden. A man approached me and asked if he could sit with me, and I said it was fine. We were having a conversation about Neo-platonic philosophy when he denoted something that had happened to him. He said he had escaped from the Kitchen Sink.

At the time, I had been removed of my gas mask and control panel and augmented with a blank, white face and synthetic biological material; he couldn’t have recognized my face or my voice. The voice with which I spoke to him was also my natural voice, not a synthetic one. But as I got a better look at him, I noticed that he was, indeed, the man in the tunnel to whom I had spoken about death. He told me that he was picked up by a Colossus, and I said the same thing happened to me. When he asked me if I ever worked at the Kitchen Sink, I simply told him that I didn’t.

This is the whole of my life at the moment. I wear normal clothes, I exercise occasionally, and I quite like classical music and gardening. I enjoy refilling my bird feeder; because I was trained so rigorously, I walk very systematically, and so the birds feel safe in flocking upon me as I pour food into their feeder once or twice a week. Very often do I fancy sitting on the deck outside my study and watch the fog clear over the pine forest that covers the mountains like a blanket, and hearing the silence that shrouds it all. Life has begun again.

I do a lot of writing as well. Poetry is very interesting to me, I enjoy reading and speculating upon points in history, and the library is full of all kinds of classic literature, which I have yet to complete. Occasionally, the things I write are permeated by a very strange emotion influenced by the memories that exist from the old days. But that was the past, and it is gone, never to confront me again. We are a flawlessly intelligent race again, and we have been immortalized by nanobots, left to die only by means by which we had not foreseen. And even then, such unseen premonitions can often be remedied in the present. The Olympians harness in their hands the power of gods; it was no wonder they chose to discard of the ignorant in exchange for an endless moment at peace in the sky.

Prospekt's March - Chapters 1 & 2 Scrapped

2011-01-06T15:23:00.001-05:00

Prospekt’s March

Version 1

Saturday, December 18^th, 2010

Acknowledgements:

Coldplay

J.R.R. Tolkien

Carl Sagan

Jacob Bronowski

Half Life 2

Mahiro Maeda

Hayao Miyazaki

1svaffel

Markorepairs

Boards of Canada

Crystal Castles

Life

Technicolor

Whereupon the summer has gone, and the air is due to chill, the frigid face of an old world looms again in a land far away, a land forgotten in time, in history, and in politics. It is the heart of the heart, the head of the spirit of mankind, and the last bastion of safety from the rigors bestowed by the commerce of human progress. This land is constituted by invigorations of dark woodlands, recessions of flowing downlands, and vast and abysmal plagues of wide wetlands. Here and there, in the pockets between ranges of mountains, at the foot of the foothills, one may find villages bustling with the old and weary, alive with the curious and young. Life is a rarity in this place; men are so few and far between that there is no conflict, there is no hardship, and there is always a place for someone to go, whether for privacy, or social relief, or perhaps just to venture into the majesty of this old and weathered world.

The woodlands are old – ancient, if you will. The arbors there have histories since before the presence of men, and therefore, man has come to learn from them. There are glades where progression ran free, sanctums where logs have compiled and maintained in accordance with the succession of smaller beings, of animals and fauna alike, where metropolises have grown strong and stable. Diversity rules; stability is natural; thought and outrage towards indignation are, for the moment, beyond the comprehension of these simple societies. Sometimes, they grow taller than they are strong, and they fall back to the ground. Populations of bacteria, microbes, amoebae, all the way up to squirrels, grow so great and vast in their quaint empires that nature has no choice but to knock them down. Phantoms walk through the corridors of history, there in the dark and ominous woods, phantoms of empires once mighty, then fallen in their own meager and unfortunate arrogance, an arrogance not to be discouraged, but indulged, so that another empire may come along one day and understand; for the woods are derived from succession.

There is a breeze that throngs the face of this weathered world; the fields of wheat sway, the trees in the foothills shiver, and the wind plays cold upon the dew-laden downs. The downs tell a blundering tale; they are always very deep, very wide, and avail expansive lengths by which they occur. Never a plane has flown over them, or a traveler passed by them, or many other people in the world lived, without understanding the dramas of these ancient and eviscerating delineations in the face of the earth. The kids call them canyons, and the men call them football training. At the top of them, you will find a very subtle lip, which crescendos fervently into the air, if only to fall and flow painfully, awkwardly, and horrifically into the plains below. The image of the trees and shrubberies falling down their faces may revere illustrations of gross chaos, and the brutal turbulence going down does well to inform of a time of anguish and horror in the history of this kingdom, the greatest of natural blunders that ever were.

Where there are no woods or mountains, and where the downlands have yet to strike, there is an unimaginably immense collection of flat and fertile ground. Puddles accumulate in colonnades the size of lakes; a soft, damp, and dark soil prevails where there are no plagues of wild grass; on the horizon you may see a few trees looming in the corner of your vision, swaying peacefully in the wind, straight and open in their freedom on the open plains. And in some places, you can see forever, for there are no hills or woods to behold, and the downs have a tendency to swallow up the horizon. There are no people here, there are no creatures, and there are no disturbances; harmony prevails in the wide wetlands of yore.

There was once a town called Kaden. It was nestled tight between the girths of two mountain ranges, in a valley deep and wide, which eventually became one with the wetlands. Kaden was the home of many a worthy scholars, of men and women who have seen the world outside and felt the rigors of true worth. They chose, in their later days, to live in a very quaint and complacent community together, a sanctuary for people like them. Houses there are made of wood; they are laden well and heavy with the brilliant warmth of hearths and lanterns studding domiciles inside and out. They glow in the sanctity of the night, like wells of hope for those passing by. No pirate, scoundrel, or criminal traveling in the night could resist the homeliness of this sacred place; they’d be drunken in the smell of the roasts, dazzled by the lights hanging over the porches and peering out from within, and galvanized by the smiles on the faces of its vibrant natives. It was a place that was, quite simply and for all intents and purposes, wonderful.

Even in the darkness of the world around them, in the commonality of dankness that prevails in the weatherly wetlands, the people of Kaden absolutely refuse to accept the simple idea of natural misery. They have markets on weekends, they feel eager enthusiasm to share a grin, and their culture is centered on festivity and feasts. Birthdays in this town simply do not occur unless everyone has made something to eat, tables have been placed here and there, and the succession of life is celebrated accordingly before the day is done. And when the birthday is gone, it will be spoken of for weeks afterwards, and they’ll laugh about it for years to come.

There’s always something cooking; there’s always someone laughing; there’s always someone working hard and thinking. Most of its inhabitants are deeply enthralled on the subject of philosophical discourse, for, in years of yore gone by, one finds little to do but contemplate the validities of life, and conjecture on the sanctity of peace and civility. Though they may live in what may be equated to routines, they would not be quick to discredit the importance of progress in light of the human species as a whole. A messenger comes by every now and then with a satchel full of newspapers from the nearby metropolis, at the behest of those who still wonder about the world outside. Some of them have radios, but there are only a couple channels that reach those parts. Still, the people of the town persist in consuming information about the world as it turns, and would stop at nothing to maintain their image of the real world as it is.

As many towns like this populate the whole country, many would consider the country to be known as the Land of Coffee Shops. Tea, coffee, and many other relaxing effects remain the highest priority in those corners of the world. Why should anyone grow uncomfortable? There is ample energy and vivid will to maintain a healthy view, minding to leave a little room for skepticism. But alas, there is always going to be something wrong, and the people of Kaden, like many others around the world, are always eager to see what is next to go wrong. Sometimes, it matters, but usually, it does not. There may be someone in town succumbing to social distress, or there may be a disgusting political upheaval. But there’s nothing that a good cup of tea can’t fix.

It is a town of people who know terror and bloodshed, of people who have seen the ugliness of life as it is, and have pressed on regardless. Many people in the metropolises, or in places slightly more populous, may find life to be a dark and depressing place with almost no hope for reform. Kaden is, contrarily, a place full of those who have seen this darkness, but they act quite differently than one might assume. There is a manner of grace about the town, a sincerity of thought and emotion that seems to prevail inexorably. There is always someone smiling, always someone thinking, and always someone enjoying life.

In this town there lived a family named the Makkonens: Mr. Makkonen was a highly esteemed professor, a veteran of one of the most incredible universities in the world. An artist of English he was, and a mastery of words he maintained for the rest of his life, never looking away from the importance of knowing exactly what to say. Mrs. Makkonen, on the other hand, was more of a worker; she hadn’t fared the privilege of attending school, and had nothing else to do but work instead. But she spent many hours per week in the library nearby, and by the time she was nineteen, she was generally more intelligent than anyone who may fancy themselves to be an over-achiever in the academic world. She graduated from college with a Masters degree in theology and went on to teach school in the city. Having found Mr. Makkonen, she decided that it was her duty to start and raise a family that would go forth and know a brighter life than what she had seen in her time.

Thus, they bore two sons: Karl and Marko. Karl was much older than Marko, and was a soldier from day one. His father read him ancient stories of the greatest heroes who ever lived, who fought and served through the darkest conflicts, and who saved the world from the worst tyranny that ever was. Karl often found himself running around the woods, shooting at invisible enemies, or slashing Saracens on the plains, which he imagined to be a sprawling desert. He was terribly fond of strict routines, and often drilled himself before he read the lesson for the day. He was the cleanest, strongest, most comprehensive boy in town, and was determined to become the greatest in the world.

Marko came later on. The boy was quiet, collected, and calculating at all times. He was schooled heavily on the importance of words, and became a master historian before he was ten winters old. Mr. Salminen next door, a professor of Classics, was often set back in awe at the knowledge that the poor, young boy could spew forth. He summarized the course of plagues in the matter of seconds and retained kingdoms of knowledge in the forefront of his mind. Very learned he was, and he was bound eternally to the bosom of a good book. The library that enclosed the living room in his home was always confused and discombobulated, as he would return books with which he wasn’t quite done, or deposit texts in haste, before he lost his train of thought on any one subject. Often did he switch between histories and rhetorical analyses, and often did he find himself reading things he didn’t quite understand. Everything would be clear as day before the day was done.

They sat in a train station far away, off and deep into the city. Jaakko was mesmerized by this place: the platforms were heralded by the prefecture of steel and glass that enclosed the entire station, which resonated the sound of commerce, whether by chattered words, or the sound of footsteps, or the clanging of the steam engines. The prefecture itself was, as he could just barely recall, a dome. He managed as well to discern that the shapes of the steel bars were formed to be what looked like triangles, but seemed almost to be two sided. Alas, they must be diamonds!

He looked up at the man beside him on the bench and tugged on his sleeve, as he pleaded, “Uncle Philip, what are those shapes in the ceiling?”

The weathered man smiled heartily as he looked up and briefly surveyed the geodesic dome. He looked back down at Jaakko and responded, conclusively, “Those are called ‘rhombi.’”

“Rhombi?” the boy echoed.

“Rhombus. ‘Rhombi’ means there is more than one.”

“Is a rhombus just two triangles?” asked the boy.

Mr. Makkonen thought for a second. “They would be, yes. You’re correct.”

Jaakko laughed. As ever, he was always overjoyed to happen upon such striking nuances, and there was always, it seemed, something to earnestly intrigue him. But the train had yet to come for him, and he needed something else to keep his mind at ease. Very quickly, he found himself staring inexorably at the other steam engines sitting around, and all the people cycling in and out of the ornate machines. The people all wore dark clothes, like suits and skirts, and some of them wore wide-brimmed hats. They had purses, briefcases, shoes with big heels, and metal bands on their wrists. Uncle Phil had that same band on his wrist.

“Uncle Philip?” Jaakko entreated, looking up at the man beside him.

The man responded briefly and adequately, “Yes?”

“What’s that on your wrist?”

“This is a watch,” Philip responded.

The girl on the other side of him leaned over and barked, “You know what a watch is, Jaakko!”

“Come on now, Maria,” the man said: “It’s fine for him to explore.”

“Yeah, Maria,” Jaakko chirped. “I’m exploring.”

“You’re just dumb!” she shouted frivolously.

“Oh yeah?” Jaakko remarked. “Ask me anything!”

“Why do they call it a watch?” the girl asked patronizingly.

The boy was at a present loss. His countenance did not falter, and his emotion ran deep for a few moments. Philip smiled, and looked away, as if diverged from the conversation. Jaakko looked up and saw that all the people in the train station would persistently look at this mysterious band on their wrist very prudently, almost unnaturally so. They seemed anxious and worried about this strange thing. At last, he saw the great clock on an ornate beam in the platform between tracks as a train passed by. There were numbers on it: they were in a circle, and so he didn’t seem to understand the number at which they began. He could hardly differentiate one number from another. For a split second, he feared that he might have lost the battle at hand.

Then it hit him. There were numbers on the platform, and there were numbers on the clocks, and the clocks looked just like the watches. As Philip’s watch struck 6:30, so did the clock between the platforms, and a bell clamored. A crowd of people flooded the machine.

“Because they’re watching the time!” Jaakko shouted.

“That’s stupid!” Maria shouted impulsively.

“No,” Philip objected, as if by divine intervention, “he’s absolutely right. They’re clocks that one can wear on their wrist, so that everyone can have a good sense of the time when there wasn’t a big clock around. And, indeed, they are for watching time.”

“But he cheated,” she said; “He figured it out right before he answered!”

“Is there anything wrong with that?” Philip asked her, as he fashioned of a hearty smile.

Jaakko laughed. He was completely ecstatic about his new discovery. The people had new purpose, and so did the trains, and the bands on their wrists. Even the great circle on the ornate beam had its own place in this world. But his fascinations were not done; he was still curious, and the train had yet to come.

Something very surreal began to dawn upon him. He looked at his hands, and he recalled the things that he had done with his hands up to that point; he had made some sand castles on the beach, he potted plants with his parents on their balcony, and he even went fishing once. However, he wasn’t all that great at any of these things. Persistently, his father scrambled with graceful laughter to correct him. And whenever something went hopelessly wrong, the two of them would laugh until they were fresh out of breath. As his fishing pole would fall into the pond, they’d laugh, and his dad would teach him with only one rod; as a plant would fall on the floor of the balcony, it would remain there, for they would build around it a mound of potting soil, and it would grow to be luscious and strong; as his sand castles fell, and the fruits of his labors came crashing down, his sister would come along and help him rebuild it again. But he never could do anything right on his own.

Thus, he was drawn sensationally to the trains. They were brazen with excessively complex patterns that depicted, like on the clock between the platforms, ornate intricacies of what looked like plants, as a plant might be formed into some kind of recurring pattern. He noticed as well that the trains were very strong, and could hold many people, and they would always get going very fast. As well, he couldn’t possibly imagine trying to pick one up; there was so much metal in it that it must have been incredibly heavy. Perplexed he was, for he could hardly grasp how it was that this amazing machine may have come into being. Who made it? How did they make it? And why? He immediately threw out the idea that it was made with hands, because he knew how fallible hands could be. Sometimes he does bad things with them, and sometimes they were good, but he could never imagine putting together something as magnificent as a steam engine. There were too many thoughts, and he simply couldn’t grasp anything if he tried.

He tugged on his uncle’s sleeve again and asked, “Uncle Philip, how do they make trains?”

The grey man smiled again, as he was always enthralled to do, and his face welled up with wrinkles as he responded, “They make them in great factories. They’re buildings that sit far away from the cities, near the beaches, and always in the heart of the grasslands.”
“But how do they make them?” Jaakko asked, as if perturbed that he had yet to receive an answer.

“Ah, I see,” Mr. Makkonen exhaled. “Usually, they have machines. The machines do things automatically, and they can make trains far faster than these, that can get to places in shorter time. But these trains here, I’m sure, were probably all hand-made in an old industrial workshop.”

Jaakko’s mind exploded. “Really?” he exclaimed, gazing at his uncle with eyes wider than the sky.

“Really,” the man confirmed, shaking his head and laughing only a little bit.

Jaakko looked at his hands again. Thoughts ran like furious rivers in his head. It must have taken a lot of people to make them, and it must have taken them a long time, and it must have been extremely hard. He tried dearly to imagine the craftsmanship that had been devoted to the assembly of those incredible machines; they breathed steam like dragons from the stories he had read, and they were studded with brilliant patterns that he could hardly understand, no matter how long he stared at them. Doors opened in his mind in a grand procession, as if he saw life through a whole new set of apertures, in colors he had never known before, under the assumption of possibilities he could not have imagined before, in sunshine unlike anything he had ever seen before, pouring through the rhombi embedded in the girth of the dome of steel and glass. He looked at his hands, and he thought about making something wonderful with them.

Somewhere far off, in the corner of his peripheral consciousness, he heard that familiar whistle, like that which rang as the people began to board the trains. Uncle Phil patted the children on the shoulder and said, “Come on now, we’ve got a train to catch. Grab your things, and make sure you have your passports.” The boy and the girl retrieved booklets from their pockets and showed them to the tall, lanky man who had stood up beside them. Philip himself wore a burgundy corduroy jacket that was densely populated in and out by pockets that had been haggardly fashioned onto them long after their production, retrieving from them the incorrect effects, until he finally came upon his passport in his back pocket. “Do we all have them?” he asked: “Good.”

Jaakko noticed there weren’t many people coming to board his train. Some came in, and some actually went as well, and the conductor would occasionally shake hands and laugh with one of them walking on. The conductor was short, apparently loved to laugh, and held an evident repose like nothing the children had ever seen before; they could hardly imagine that anyone could stand as straight and reserved as he did. He wore big and round glasses, had a dark and massive mustache, and wore white gloves like they had always seen in their picture books. His apparel was navy blue; there was a distinct hat on his head, and dark, shiny shoes on his feet. As the three of them approached, his smile died, and he glared menacingly at Philip. Philip seemed unconcerned; he retrieved the passports from the children and handed them over, as the cartoonish little conductor furrowed his mustache and gave them evil eyes here and there. A true and honest terror grew upon the children.

The conductor announced, having reviewed the passports, “Jaakko Juhola, Maria Juhola, and Philip Makkonen. Why, something must be wrong here – what’s wrong with your name, Phil?”

Philip smiled slightly and looked at him sternly. “I’m not sure,” he replied. “What’s wrong, indeed?”

“What kinda name is ‘Makkonen’?” the conductor asked. “Why don’t you have a pretty name, like Juhola?”

“The passports are forged,” Mr. Makkonen replied. “I tried my hardest to formulate of something uglier than the sight of you, and it seems that I have failed.” The conductor laughed, followed by the laughter of Mr. Makkonen, and they shook hands like true gentlemen.

“It’s good to see you again, man,” the conductor said. “You going back home?”

“Indeed,” Mr. Makkonen responded. “Karl’s coming home from military academy, and I’m horribly homesick.”

“Well,” the conductor said, handing back their passports, “tell Jillian to send me a slice of her meringue sometime. I’ll be eternally indebted to you.”

Duly noted!” Mr. Makkonen declared. “Now, have yourself a wonderful evening, and good luck.”

“Good luck, Phil.”

Jaakko noticed this train was much nicer than the others. It was cleaner, quieter, and more luxurious. Some things about it seemed newer, or more advanced, and the compartments were far more spacious. There were electric lights in this one, and it was generally white and gold on the inside, again, in ornate and intricate designs. As well, there weren’t as many people boarding this one. The boy asked,

“Why aren’t there as many people on here?”

“This is an upper-class train,” Philip replied, as they filed down the corridor. “It’s also reserved for people like me, professors and scholars.”

“Are we special or something?” Maria asked.

“Hardly!” Philip declared. “This train was designed for people like me, by people like me. We are enthusiastic about life, and so we take trains manufactured by those who are enthusiastic about making trains. Those callous malcontents outside can make and enjoy their own trains, for they are hardly any more careful of making them, and they will be accordingly less enthused about the ordeal as a whole.”

Jaakko didn’t quite understand his response, but he accepted it regardless. They found their compartment, which was actually very bright, even though their window faced the inside of the station, and the curtains were closed. The boy set his bags on the floor and walked over to draw the curtains, under the blind assumption that doing so would make anything better. But he had a curious assumption that it would. He became careless to the politics at work in the train around him, and waited to see what would happen through that window. The train started up, the whistle blew, and the show began.

The world outside began to move, but only slightly. The dark people with purses and briefcases, who shuffled here and there inexorably, swiftly sailed away to the right. The train station went with them. Sounds of clanging and banging resounded sequentially from below as the train station disappeared, and there was only the city. He saw shops that were alive with all kinds of fruits and edible effects, people bustling about diversely, he saw parks, statues, squares, and the university on the hill far away. But eventually, the grey of the metropolis grew scarce, and they descended into darkness. A stream of lights flickered on and off into the compartment from above, and the flickering grew so fast that it simply became constant. It seemed they continued to gain speed, almost at an alarming rate, and Jaakko began to grow at least a little scared, for he had never gone that fast in his life. Then, it happened.

The tunnel disappeared, and there were only fields as far as his eyes allowed. They were golden, like honey, and they sat upon occasional foothills that were spotted with clouds moving graciously overhead. He could see the ocean far off, into the distance, beyond the foothills. He stared, and he didn’t seem very intent on looking away. Eventually, the plains faded away, and there was only blue, whether in the sky, or in the sea. A cloud or two might drift by above, and its shadow would loom over the water, but this only happened every now in then. Before he realized it, he was asleep, and soon he had fallen over to lie on the seat. Maria and Philip just laughed.

By the time he had awoken again, they were in a very different place. The sea and the skies of blue were gone from the window; there was, instead, orange in the sky, and a procession of dark mountains blocked the view of anything beyond an immediate valley. He had never seen a place like this before, where there were black mountains and orange clouds. Philip handed him a mug of tea, which he had ordered from the trolley. The boy was trapped in a haze, not completely comprehending what was going on; nonetheless, he sipped his tea and relaxed indulgingly in his seat. His uncle grabbed the mug before it fell to the floor, and he dozed off the sleep again.

The whistle blew. It was pitch black outside, and he couldn’t see anything out the window. Philip said, “I’ll grab you bag, Jaakko – you just take my hand and stay on your feet.” For a few minutes, they shuffled along the dark corridor between the compartments, bumping into people beside them, and Jaakko felt as though he was about to fall over. It was all too much for him. And then, there were the lights.

As he watched his feet step down and out of the bustling train, he looked up and beheld a dazzling sight. There were lanterns lining a street straight ahead, and they were all yellow and golden and lighting up the night like fire. Some of them were hung from the archway leading out of the station, and they grew out of the gardens like fungus. They lined were in the balconies, in the windows, hanging off benches, and sometimes just lying around on the ground. There was music here and the smell of roasts there. Men and women, girls and boys, the old and the young alike all flurried around each other, laughing and smiling and handing out drinks. No longer did his eyes yearn for a deeper respite; they were alive.

As they descended into the deluge of the festivities, he found his eyes darting from person to person, spectacle to spectacle, trying to take in everything he could before he moved on. There was an old man strumming furiously at a guitar, sitting on a stool in front of the pub, and he played for an audience of young men and women. Strings of bare light bulbs spanned the length of the street above his head. Children yelled things at him festively as they ran by. Philip stopped them all at a table in front of the bakery for a moment, and they were all treated to the most ambrosial buttered rolls he had ever tasted. All along the brilliant corridor, they stopped occasionally to pick up another delicacy, each just as preposterously intoxicating as the last. There were wooden goblets of apple cider, tabletops teeming with pyramids of the most delectable vanilla cupcakes, butterscotch muffins, cobblers and pies, cuts of beef so juicy they were shimmering, great cauldrons of steamed vegetables, every manner of preparation for potatoes that dare discernment, and every kind of cabbage under the sun.

At last, they grew aloof from the festivities, and wandered into a quieter part of town. Philip asked the children, “What do you think?”

Jaakko was still consuming a cut of corned beef as he heaved out the words, “It’s amazing!” The two children flurried around him and shouted out their excitement at the top of their lungs, and Philip just smiled and let youth run its course. They went on about the brilliance of the lights, the fury of the string players, and the satanic ecstasy of the food on display. Jaakko rejoined in his joy, “I feel like one of those people in Technicolor films, who go to those huge parties and stuff!”

Philip replied simply, “You’re living life in Technicolor now.”

They came to a house raised upon a small mound, which was in the corner of the whole town, overlooking the wetlands. It was rather large and rather dark, but it was laden quite heavily with lanterns, not unlike the porchfronts of the rest of the town. They ascended a brief flight of steps, and then Philip stepped forth to open the door. The smell of flowers dominated, and the whole of the interior was glowing with brown and red and burgundy, and you could see from one side of the house to the other through the hallway directly through the front door, at the other end of which was the roaring hearth staring back at you. Uncle Phil placed the bags by the steps and hustled the children through the labyrinth of his warm abode, until they came upon the kitchen.

“Oh, Philip!” shouted Mrs. Makkonen at the sink, who was scrubbing away the grime of her dish for the festival. “I can’t believe you’ve made it back so fast!”

They embraced, and with a smile Philip remarked, “Well, we did ride first class, didn’t we, kids?”

“Yeah!” Jaakko exclaimed. “We sat in this really nice train, and I watched the clouds go by over the sea!”

But his enthusiasm was trifled as Mrs. Makkonen knelt down to hug the young ones, and she exulted her good-to-see-you-again’s. “Marko,” she said as she stood up, looking over at the boy at the table, “Say hello to Jaakko and Maria Juhola. They’re going to be living with us from now on!”

Formally and earnestly did the boy, who was a couple years older than them, turn and wave “Hello.” The two did the same as the adults took to the countertop and went about their mysterious business there, rearranging things and slapping things around. Philip took to his usual routine of unloading the absurd number of pockets on his corduroy jacket in the corner of the kitchen, which were all stitched on long after its initial production. He had a pocket watch, loose change, an army knife, a notepad, a jubilee of extravagant pens, a small leather-bound book, folded-up pieces of paper, a watch that he meant to have fixed, a small bag of coffee grounds and, at last, his passport.

“How was your trip, dear?” Mrs. Makkonen asked.

“Oh, swift and smooth as ever,” he replied. “The city’s alright, and the taxation’s taken a short recess. I think this is the best it’s ever been, since there were people killing each other.”

“Well, good, I suppose,” she said. “And what else have you heard from there?”

“There’ve been protests,” the man replied, as he began blasting white tea mugs with cold water from the sink until they were pristine. “There were people walking down the street shaking, probably because they lived through some riot control gas. It’s really inhumane, the way they treat their own citizens. There was a man at the tavern who said they’d been tossing corpses in the river, of all places. I know there are a lot of angry leaders around here who want it to stop. There’s a cold war coming, on the radio I heard.”

“Darling,” the woman remarked, “it’s a violent world.”

The boy sitting at the table had black hair, and wore a dark button shirt and dark pants. It was not that he appeared obtrusive in any way, but rather, that he was easily distinguishable. The book over which he pored was almost as wide as the table it sat on. There was a candle next to it, flickering the breeze that wafted through the windows of the bright kitchen. The two new missionaries from the metropolis sat beside him on the floor, prudently waiting for something fun to happen. Jaakko asked the boy at last,

“What’s your name?”

“Marko,” the boy at the table replied, looking down.

“My name is Jaakko,” Jaakko replied. “Some people called me ‘Jacko,’ but it’s pronounced ‘Yahko.’”

“I see,” said Marko.

“Are you Uncle Phil’s son?” Maria asked.

“Yes,” Marko replied.

“You look a lot like him!” Jaakko shouted.

“I think you’re right,” said Marko.

“You don’t sound very excited,” Jaakko said. “Why’s that?”

“I don’t know,” Marko replied.

“That festival out there is amazing,” Maria said. “They don’t even have Independence Day parties like that in the city.”

“People have things to do in the city,” Marko remarked. “Here, we just eat and drink.”

The boy’s parents laughed at what he had said. “Good point,” his father said, before leaving to hang his coat up at last. He yelled from the next room, “You’ll find Marko to be a very dry sort of jokester.”

“What’s that?” Jaakko asked.

“It’s complicated,” Phil told him, entering the kitchen again. “You probably won’t have to worry about it.”

Jaakko’s mind was idle for a moment, then he looked at Marko and said, “Today I figured out what a watch is.”

“Oh, really?” Marko said, introspectively. “What is it?”

“It’s a way to watch time!” he shouted, following immediately after with a hearty round of laughter.

Mom, dad, and Maria all joined in with him. But Marko was rather perplexed by this; he was never really one to laugh. As he looked back over at the book on the table, he seemed to disconnect from the present circumstances. He was lost in a discourse on the obsoleteness of hegemony as a whole. Later on, he heard his father say, “Oh, he’s in his own world now. No use in trying to tear him away from that book. He doesn’t like to be torn away from his studies, no matter what.”

The party wound down, and eventually they all set out upon the festivities in town. Philip and Jillian reconvened with their friends from the neighborhood, and Philip spoke of his journey to the city; Marko reconvened with his friends from school, and told them of his opinion on the necessity of political deprecation on grounds of merely making them feel bad; Jaakko and Maria convened with new faces, and learned of the local social politics. Pork, beef, whole chickens and turkeys circumnavigated the table regularly. There was always someone asking for a roll, or the pepper or salt, and everyone wanted to get their hands on the gravy. They had steamed vegetables hinted in wisps of butter, a veritable library of different preparations for cabbage, as with potatoes, and whole baskets of bread were depleted in a matter of moments. All the while there were minstrels playing songs of the marshes, or of love, or of the city lights. They were all men who had seen better and worse, but mostly worse. You could tell in the wrinkles in their faces, the fervor with which they strummed their guitars, and the sensations in their voices, that they had a reason to play whatever it was they were playing.

There was a dining table at the foot of every storefront in the main marketplace, and they were all packed to the brim with divine delectability. Quite literally everyone and their relatives were there; some traveled from different parts of the country, and a few came from the other side of the world. Just about everyone had everything to say to everyone else, whether they knew them or not, whether on the subject of personal endeavors or the deliciousness of the bread. Those eating had just as hard a time as those playing music or serving food, because it was truly a laborious task to consume such a vast quantity of food in such a small amount of time. Most of the diners wagered that such a bounty of food would take years to consume; to their amazement, they managed to do it in a matter of a few hours.

Near the end of the nightly events, the whole of the crowd began to disperse. Gaggles of kids would help store the tables away in the grand facility storage at the end of the street. Workers from the city meticulously collected the silverware, plates, napkins and goblets so as to neatly organize them upon a cart that was kept in the basement of Mr. Einio’s house, the man who took it upon himself to organize such festivities, which he did on scraps of paper in his spare time. The Makkonens and the Juholas stumbled back home, practically drunk in the fervor of the feast, clearly content with themselves and ready to go to bed. As they entered through the front door, Mr. Makkonen took the two new members of the house to their rooms upstairs, and Marko grabbed his immense textbook from off the kitchen table. He said good night to his mother and lugged the daunting text up to his bedroom.

But as he lay in bed, he heard a commotion from downstairs. Jaakko and Maria were up and stirring, sometime later in the night. As he walked down the steps, he saw them talking to each other around the ottoman by the divan. He asked them from the hallway,

“What are you guys doing up?”

“We’re just talking,” Maria replied.

“You should keep it down a little,” Marko advised. “My parents are good at hearing this kind of stuff.”

“Okay, we will,” Jaakko said, surprisingly rather quietly. “Hey, Marko?”

“Yes?”

“Where’s the bathroom?”

“It’s on the other side of the steps,” Marko replied, “in the alcove between the library and the living room.”

“Okay, thank you,” he said as he awkwardly jumped to his feet and hurried off.

Marko was slightly perturbed about something. He sat down in the divan and asked Maria, “Is there something wrong with Jaakko?”

“He’s kind of stupid,” Maria told him. “He was born with a problem in his brain.”

“I see,” said Marko.

“You seem like the opposite of him,” Maria told him. “I really don’t know how you’re tolerating him!”

“No, I’m fine,” Marko told her, but the emotions showed themselves inside him. He admitted that, during the course of the night, he had become slightly annoyed by his cousin. He asked, “Why did you guys have to move here?”

Maria did not respond immediately. She looked around at the floor and formulated something to say. “Phil said our parents had to leave, but they’re dead.”

Marko was hesitant to respond, slightly horrified. “I’m really sorry,” he said. “Aren’t you sad?”

“Yes,” she replied. “But we’ll be alright. Phil just told us we shouldn’t cry unless we really need to.”

But before long, she was crying, and Marko had knelt down to embrace her. She tried very hard to retain the noise, but some emotions couldn’t help but come out. Marko looked up and saw Jaakko standing in the doorway. For the first time in his life, he wore a sullen face. His feet took him to Maria, and he joined in trying to calm her down. At last, the dark haired boy had the presence of mind to beseech of them, “Please, forgive me for bringing this up. I had no idea.”

Jaakko said, “It’s okay. We’re not going to cry again after this.”

After some reckoning, the children conceded to go back to bed. But Marko did not drift off immediately; he could do little but stare at his ceiling and revel in what he had done. He didn’t quite know how to treat it. His last thought before falling asleep was, “Begin at Book II, Hegemonic Democracies.”

Postcards

The folds in his downy bedcover were gone; Marko had entrenched himself utterly into the fjords of his bed, and was completely neglecting of the outside world. Mornings like these made him very self-centered in the first few minutes of his day, as he would indulge relentlessly on the few moments of twilight after waking up. His heart was warm, his joints were at ease, and he was at the behest of no worldly inhibition, dazed into no delusion. At last, he opened his eyes, and saw the grey sunshine that so often touched down upon the countryside there. The things on his desk – his pen rack, his textbook, and his stacks of papers – seemed at ease in genuine despair, but at the same time, in hope of a brilliant light. So lavishing was the idea of staying in bed. After all, he had nothing to do, and it was such a perfect day.

He heard piano. It was not the kind of piano that father would play on the record player, or the kind of piano his mother would play to practice, but something much more sacred. He felt something stirring in the rungs of his heart as the pianist played his song. Somewhere within him, a dirge played in the streets, and the horns blew from deep within the kingdoms of his consciousness; the revolution began. Eagerly did his bones twitch awake beneath the oppression of the heavy blankets. He heaved his limbs out from under its immense wake and hit the soles of his feet upon the hardwood floors of his bedroom.

His hands grabbed at a pair of bed pants, a button shirt, and some socks from out of his dresser. He sloppily assumed the casual apparel and rushed out of his bedroom, down the corridor, and down the stairs. His feet took him into the living room, but his ears brought him to the storage room beneath the stairs. He came to an abrupt stop as he saw his brother sitting there on the piano, and his parents were standing aside, watching him play a beautiful song. Karl stopped playing, and he ran at his brother, who wore a furious joy on his face, and they embraced for the first time in years.

“Goodness gracious,” Karl said, looking his brother over. “You’ve grown like hell. You look like you’re as old as mom and dad.”

“And you sure don’t look like that bum who left home six years ago,” Marko remarked.

Indeed, Karl had changed. Then, he had scraggly hair and worn clothes, but was a survivor and a genius by heart. Now, he had clean-cut hair, a suit of fatigues, black boots and a mannerism about the way he did everything that seemed unreal. As Marko sat down beside him on the piano and he watched his brother play, he noticed in his hands that there was a magical carefulness for the way he performed, such that he seemed to show respectable regard for things even as simple as the piano keys. The way his fingers hit the keys was careful, but sure; the force which he would strike them was gentle but efficacious; he could manipulate the sound of the keys like they were within his hands, rather than beneath his fingers, and he moved like a machine. As well, he hadn’t played anything that beautiful in a very long time. Karl played the low octaves, and Marko played the high. The ivory was illuminated in the grey sunshine. This was a special day for Marko.

“Where’ve the kids gone to?” Mrs. Makkonen asked her husband.

“I think they’re out playing,” he replied. “I told them not to wander off.”

“I’ll go round them up.”

Philip remained there in the storage room and watched his sons play piano. They operated calculatingly, and quietly, and never really faced each other to communicate the rhythm. The song ended, and Philip commenced to a bout of clapping.

“Wonderful,” he said. “Now get dressed, Marko. We’ve got to attend a gala this evening.”

They took the train to Poppyfields. Jaakko looked out at the honey-fields again, only to find they had become rather faded with grey. As well, the see was grey, and the sky was white. For a few hours, Jaakko watched the world go by, Maria was half asleep, and Marko was deeply enthralled by a book about the life of Alexander the Great. Some people flustered in the hallway. The train clacked mathematically along the tracks. Phil, Jillian, and Karl were in the next compartment, talking about the lodge where the gala would take place, a conversation that diverged into the subject of a famous writer.

The train stopped in the city, and some people got on, as others got off. Jaakko looked at all the clocks and smiled, bewildered that there would be so many in one place. He looked at all the people in suits, and

The train picked up again, after the ringing of the second bell, and they found themselves in a different terrain. Here, there were lots of hills. They were continually snaking in and out of tunnels, around bends, and through the woods. Sometimes, branches scraped across the window and carried on down the train. Marko could glimpse that they were coming upon a marsh of some kind. It kept getting warmer, as they drew further south, and they moved so fast that it was becoming noticeable. Having completed the book in his lap, he closed it, and dozed off.

The bell rang at the next station, and everyone popped awake. The children scrambled for their bags and reconstituted themselves as Philip knocked on their door. After a few minutes of filing through the corridor, they found themselves in a very strange place. There were plants everywhere; there was life growing out of the benches, through the cracks in the walkway, hanging from the awning, crawling up the walls, and snaking in vines up the pillars. And every inch of the train station was vibrant and vivid, exploding with the diversity of the visible spectrum. There were immense, violet and yellow buds glowing in the light of the fluorescent bulbs that were strung about, like at the festival. The lot of them shuffled through a narrow hallway leading out of the station before finding themselves in what appeared to be the middle of nowhere, although Philip and Jillian knew the way by heart. They walked through a brush that was as high as their knees and on paths that had long since grown over, all through a dark and misty corridor in the woods, as sounds of the marsh resonated here and there. Lights twinkled in the distance, and they grew ever closer.

At last, the family came to the town. There wasn’t much going on; few people were in the street, and many were in the taverns. It was a generally average night. But the family pressed on until they came upon the neighborhood of houses. The houses there seemed to be one with the environment; everything, like the train station, was overgrown with a vibrant display of complex flora. Everything was lit up, as well; there was music coming from some houses, and laughter emanating from all around. “A whole town of drunks,” Philip said. “I wonder why he loves living here so much.”

At last, they came upon the house of Philip’s oldest friend, Anthony Uronen. It was a grand masterpiece of minimalist design, as though something out of a magazine from the city. It was very dark, as it was constructed of old oak, and it was rather noticeably square. It hung over the marsh, but there were no railings on the porches, because the designer found railings would duly detract from the house aesthetically. A short man with long hair, who was dressed in the most bourgeois finery, met the family at the door. This was Anthony. Alive, enthusiastic, and animated he was. And his house was, to say the least, enigmatically clean. The interior was pristinely white, and its effects were all profoundly geometric. Most of the furniture was primarily quadrilateral, such as how the armchairs were essentially cubes with places to sit cut out of them. It also doubled as a lodge, because this was one of many houses he owned, and so he would occasionally rent it out to organizations. In this case, he accepted to host a gala for the graduates of the metropolitan military academy division.

The pianist in the corner of the lodge played music that sounded like the rain, a swift melody in the higher octaves reverberating with the lower, more powerful chords. For a long time, the family spent time wandering around, reconciling with old friends; the kids had taken to the corner of the main hall by the fireplace, where they puzzled over a massive book they had taken off the shelf.

“The Normans invaded England in 1066,” said Marko. “You should remember that. They saw the people who lived in England, and really didn’t like them; however, a lot of the soldiers liked the British women, and pleaded to stay there to live with them. But the French courts would absolutely not allow their beautiful language to be harnessed by people like the English, who were very dirty, and spoke a terrible language, and so the soldiers would have a hard time talking to their English wives. All they were allowed to do was talk to their wives normally, until they kind of understood each other. That’s how English came to be; it’s some kind of German mixed with French.”

“So am I speaking French right now?” Jaakko asked.

“No,” Marko replied. “Those were all German words. A French word would be repertoire, or interrogate, or hemorrhage.”

“How do you know all this?” Jaakko asked.

“I read a lot of books,” Marko replied. “It’s taken me a very long time.”

Maria had become presently interested in something else; she brought her hand into the group and said, “Look at this,” indicating that one of her fingers had been evidently covered in wax. Marko looked over at the great candle on the coffee table.

“Oh yeah,” he said. “Melted wax does that. Be careful, though.”

For the next few minutes, the children were enthralled by the idea of a perfectly adjusting material formulating around their minor appendages. They made webs in it, stuck fingers together, and drew faces with them in their palms. Curiously, Marko grabbed a pawn from off the nearby marble chess set and dipped it in to see how well the wax formed around the grooves.

“Hey, don’t do that!” Maria objected. “That’s probably expensive.”

“I can peel it off,” Marko said, which he did.

“But how do you think the chess piece feels about it?” Maria asked, sarcastically.

“It’s just a pawn.”

Dinner ensued, but the Makkonens and the Juholas ate modestly, because of how full they still were from the night before. They all sat at long tables in the grand dining hall, and there was a stage at the end of the room, where military officials gave speeches. The entire far wall was glass, about forty feet high and fifty feet across. The kids paid no attention; Maria was bored, Jaakko was darting his attention around the room, and Marko was busy staring out the window beside him, at the algae accumulated in the bog. Again, he found himself lost in thought. There was something much more fascinating about the science of the swamp. They’re very diverse and densely populated places; perhaps the swamps have politics like the real world. For a moment, he lapsed back into the present, but found it to be much less interesting. He soon came to contemplate why it was that Maria asked him how the pawn felt about being dipped in wax. It was just a pawn.

Later on, the speeches concluded, and the gala grew casual again. He was walking around the porch that hung over the marsh. The lights outside showed him images of the branches on the trees in the darkness. They hung over the porch longingly, as if the house itself was a cruelty on nature. Some birds fluttered around out in the night. He took another sip of the cola he had taken from the ice bowl as footsteps approached him, and he could tell they belonged to Jaakko.

“Is this called a bog, a marsh, or a swamp?” the blond haired boy asked.

“They’re all the same thing,” he replied.

“Why are there so many names?” Jaakko asked.

“They’re in many places around the world,” Marko replied. “Different kinds of people call them different things. In fact, the people in North Country call it a ‘moor.’”

“Why are there so many different people?” Jaakko asked.

“They used to be in one place,” Marko replied. “But they moved out, then their numbers grew, and they kept moving.”

“How do they get to be so different?” Jaakko asked.

Marko faltered. He looked through the windows in the side of the house and formulated an answer. He responded, “Do you see how everyone in that room is in a different place?”

“Yeah,” Jaakko said.

“The people standing by the fireplace,” Marko explained, “are very used to being near the fireplace. They know that they can’t get too close to the fire, that it’s a comfortable place to be around, and that they’re in a warmer climate. The people by the punch bowl, however, are in a different state. They’re used to having lots of food and drink. The people by the fire are different than the people by the punch bowl because they react to their environment differently; they have different things, and have grown used to them, so they enjoy different things.”

Jaakko took a moment for it all to process. Then the idea began to manifest itself, and he understood. “I get it,” he said. “So we’re out here…so we’re near the moor…and we can hear those bugs chirping.”

“That’s right,” said Marko. “The other people inside can’t hear them as well as we can.”

“And it’s really hot out here,” Jaakko went on. “And I don’t have anything to drink. So that’s why I want something to drink more than anyone else in there.”

“There might be a couple people in there who have a reason,” Marko explained. “But besides that, yeah.”

“Why would there be a couple people?” Jaakko asked.

“It’s just safe to be uncertain,” Marko replied.

“Uncertain?”

“It means,” Marko explained, “you shouldn’t act like you know everything completely. No one actually knows anything. People do some bad stuff when they think they know things.”

“What do you mean they don’t know things?” Jaakko asked. “I know a lot of things. Like, I know it’s hot out.”

“You know, sure,” Marko said. “But only in a way you can tell. Maybe it’s not all that warm out. And even then, what does warm mean? It just means we’re colder. The people inside, by the fire, will come outside and probably hardly notice a difference. The people by the punch bowl will find it to be warmer. What does it really mean?”

Jaakko was fascinated. He had never heard such a discourse in his life. He began to wonder more and more, but didn’t know what to ask. But at last he felt inclined to ask, “Why do people do bad things when they think they know things?”

“Because,” Marko replied, “they think they know other things based on what they know right now. If someone thinks it’s warm in one part of the room, they might say it’s warm in the other parts of the room. That would be wrong, because it’s not as warm by the ice bowl or the punch bowl. But that’s very harmless. What if someone is born in a very bad part of the world, and it’s very hard to live peacefully, and they think the whole world is like that? Will they kill themselves? Or will they try to make it better?”

But as Marko looked over, he found that Jaakko had wandered off aimlessly and knelt over the edge of the porch to paw something in the water. It was a lotus.

“That’s a lotus,” Marko informed. “It’s an Egyptian lotus.”

The gala faded away into the night. Because it was so late, and the Makkonens lived so far away, Anthony insisted that they stay the night. In the morning, they were greeted with a grand breakfast in the main hall, prepared by the lodge servers, whom he was paying overtime that morning. Marko got up the earliest, and walked downstairs to find a bright and bountiful feast on a long table, a very familiar sight to him now, as Anthony played a song on the piano in the background.

“Good morning,” he called over. The man’s hair was everywhere, and he was wearing a robe.

“Good morning,” Marko said. “Did you do this all for us?”

“My girls in the kitchen did,” he replied. “Please, sit down, enjoy.”

“You’re extremely gracious,” Marko commented.

“Not at all,” the man objected; “I’ve just got a lot of money and I just buy stuff. It gets really boring buying stuff for no one but yourself after a while.”

Marko poured himself a cup of coffee from the silver kettle and added a careful dash of cream. Having tasted it, he discerned that it was the best coffee he’d ever had. The trees through the windows were alive with vibrant sunshine; the sunlight poured in colonnades through the panes, which fell in dark crosses on the floor. Anthony played a song like the sound of rain, as his fingers fluttered on the higher octaves. Marko reckoned it was a good day. He sat down and fashioned onto his plate a banana, an orange, an apple, some sausage, and a cut of buttered toast. For a few moments, he sat back, and beheld the beauty of the food on his plate. Then, he took the banana and peeled its flesh, laying waste to whatever was inside. He left the peel on the edge of his plate, practically falling into the gutter below. It was the most symbolic breakfast he ever had.

As he ate, the rest of his family joined him, one by one. He finished long before anyone else, though, and spent a majority of the breakfast staring out the window, listening to Anthony, who was shouting sarcastic things here and there as he played his beautiful music.

“Oh yeah,” he’d say. “My wife just doesn’t care. I’d come home at three in the morning drunk, and she’d come up to me all angry and tell me that she was banging someone else. I mean, at least we’re on the same level.”

After breakfast, the family reformed themselves, and was off for the train station. It was, surprisingly, a very bright and wonderful day. There were, it appeared, flowers and plants of all kinds coming out of the woodwork of the little town, and there was always someone watering something. Taverns at night became cafes in the day. Most of the inhabitants of the town were outside, sitting on the patios and porches, watching the day play out, talking of unserious matters. The Makkonens found their way to the train station and boarded as soon as they arrived, nearly missing the train.

Again, the kids had their own compartment. Maria and Jaakko ended up sitting together as they commenced to discuss things off the top of their heads, whereas Marko preferred to sit by the window and stare. His eyes met with the sky, which was very wide and blue that day. But he saw the clouds of his home country looming in the distance, and prepared for a gloomier resolve. For the moment, he wanted nothing more than to admire the day as it was then.

A few days after returning home, Karl had to leave again. However, this time, he was to serve real time for the military. He was stationed in the more riotous parts of the nearest city, and would be fighting to keep the peace starting on day one. Marko and his parents worried at all times of the day. Before he left, Philip had embraced him for a long time, and told him of how proud he was of his sons. He was growing older, and there wasn’t much he asked for, although the things for which he did ask were very fragile. Marko often found himself playing the piano in his spare time. In particular, he played the song his brother had written for school when he was younger, which made some of the teachers cry as he presented it in the talent show. Sometimes, Philip would ask him to stop, because it would simply make him too sad to carry on through the day. Karl said it was a song about going to war, a song about sending postcards back home. Philip and Jillian’s worries were eased, however, whenever Marko played this song; for they knew, when they heard him play, that their sons were gifted, and that Karl would always remember them, and work hard.

As it was summer, Marko spent most of his time during the day playing outside with Jaakko and Maria. The sky cleared into holes occasionally, and let through a few bars of light, which would pass over momentarily, and illuminate small spaces here and there. There were always taverns bustling, and there were always people laughing in the streets. You could hear them from the fields, where the children spent most of their time. They ran through the tall grass and fell down and took naps out there, because there were no insects in that part of the country, and so there were no ticks. When it would rain, they would sit inside in the warmth of the living room, and Philip would tell them stories, or Marko would tell them about the world.

At last, an envelope from the city came in the mail. It was a postcard and a letter from Karl. Everyone was truly relieved. He spoke of how peaceful it’s becoming there, and how the riots are beginning to become less frequent. He really hates the riots, he says, because he always has to beat people or throw gas at them. But he’s learned to exert force appropriately, and must use it sometimes, especially when there are people being obtrusively offensive, albeit to authorities. At night, in his bunk, he dreams about being at home again, and he remembers his mom’s pot roasts. He makes tea for his barracks every night, and headquarters endorses it. The best operations, he says, are escorting officers through the massive, fancy government buildings. He once spent two hours with the Harold Elsila, the Prime Minister, in the garden, just as a bodyguard. Mr. Elsila told him of the crushes he had as a teenager, his favorite books, and his favorite music. Karl told him he played piano, and Mr. Elsila said he’d love to hear him play sometime.

Having reviewed the postcard, Philip set it on the kitchen table and sat down in the living room, where he tried in vain to choke back his tears. “I’m so happy,” he said. “I’m very relieved to know that my boy is doing just fine.” Marko wouldn’t play piano then; his father simply wouldn’t be able to handle it. Instead, he would go up to his room and read, or he would go outside and tell Jaakko and Maria about things. But he never could watch his father cry, because it made him feel capable of doing just as much.

The weeks went on, and there was no other postcard. There were bills from the city utility suppliers, advertisements, and mail from relatives catching up on this and that. Philip and Jillian always put on a happy face in public, or in their letters, because they knew there was no reason being sad about things around other people, or else they’d just become sad as well. Occasionally, while the kids were playing out in the field, a plane would fly by overhead, and Jaakko would act like he was shooting it down with an invisible rifle. He’d turn to Marko and say something like, “That’s just like that war, the one with the gas and the trenches. They had planes then, right?”

Maria was never completely involved in the politics of the Makkonen household. She was central to Jaakko, or to herself, and did most things with him. She didn’t look anything like him, though, despite being his sister by blood; their mother was from far away, and their father was born and raised in the country in which they stood. Never was there a moment of difficulty in explaining why they were so different. They could always grasp that their parents were just very different from each other. And then, they would usually grasp that their parents were gone. That’s when they’d stop thinking about it. Fortunately, Jaakko suffered no long-term emotional distress.

Another postcard came in the mail the next month. Marko had begun school again, and didn’t see it until he got home that day. Karl went on about how he had been promoted to officer, and that the violence was truly beginning to let up. He spoke of how he rejoiced when he heard of the repeal on superfluous taxation in the slums, which indicated definite relief to the authorities. But then he would speak of the violence he had seen, and of the things he’s had to do. There have been apartments in the slums where whole families had starved to death, robbed to the bone of all they’re worth. Every day, they compiled a barrow of dead infants, and buried them in shallow graves out in the fields with a short prayer. The bodies of the adults, and the children, were taken away hastily, and brought to a brand new graveyard outside the city. There, he says, the soil is completely dark, because it is so fertile, and the coffins and corpses will be decomposed quickly. He hopes this is all done soon.

And he played piano for the Prime Minister. Mr. Elsila asked him personally to attend the royal ambassador’s gala two weeks ago, and play piano for them. He attended, he said, and they all watched him play for upwards of an hour, while he played the best songs he knew, and even the song he made when he was younger. This was what got him the promotion, he says. Since then, he has had little to do other than deskwork, and he is extremely grateful. He works hard, for he doesn’t want to go back to being a street worker and he wants the violence to stop, but there are some who aren’t even happy with what the department of civility is doing. And in thirteen months, he says, he’ll be back home, and he’ll make tea for them.

Philip didn’t cry this time, but was, instead, very clearly happy. When he finished the letter, he hugged Jillian like they were teenagers again, and Marko smiled. That was a good day; there were holes in the clouds again outside, and the children were constantly buzzing with things to keep them occupied when they weren’t at school. Jaakko, of course, stayed at home, and eventually started working at an apple orchard on the other side of town, which was owned by Mr. Aaltonen. Every day the boy woke up ecstatic for the day to come, and was still ecstatic by the time he got back. Marko was less enthused at school, but that was just Marko. Maria seemed to be getting along just fine with her classmates.

One day, Philip was taking a stroll through town, when he saw a commotion in the street. There was a crowd of people gathered around a single radio, which had been cranked up as high as it would go, and they were listening to a report about the political health of the city. He rushed over, eager to hear the news, and was granted a front row seat on account of his son being stationed there. “The civil landscape of Domania,” the radio said, “is presently undergoing what may be considered in the least a peaceful recess, and the daily riots that once plagued the streets have died out in the last week. The last seven days have been completely peaceful, and leaders of old political mobs are coming forth to hand themselves in.”

The man practically screamed with joy. He ran home immediately and shared the news with everyone. He was in a veritable euphoria that day, relieved endlessly at the prospect of one day seeing his boy again. And, as well, they received another letter from Karl the following month. It was nothing short of the most reassuring of letters he had since sent out. He said that there have been parties in the streets celebrating the ensuing peace, and there hasn’t been any inappropriate outbreak in almost ten weeks, apart from the obligatory crime of the city. The mortality rate in the city per month has drastically decreased, and they’re beginning to regret founding the new graveyard. Since his promotion, he says, he’s been living a very peaceful life.

His father did not react with energy this time; he sat peacefully in his armchair by the fire and sipped his morning tea, illustrating in his mind the day when Karl will come home again next. He was duly at ease for the first time in many months, finally in relief of a long period of desperate anxiety. There was little that truly plagued him after that letter; he walked in a very peaceful and complacent air, never worked up about anything, and never really worrying about the day to come. In the earlier months, he would usually sit in the living room after breakfast and worry. After the letter, he went directly to his study, and took to writing papers without hesitation. On Saturdays, he would take the papers to the mail to be shipped off to his secretary at a university in the next province, and he’d ask if he’d gotten any mail from Domania. But he never did.

It was November when they were sitting in the kitchen, listening to the radio, and Marko delivered to them a very interesting letter he had found in the mail. It was very plain, very moderate, and it was stamped with the royal seal; the Prime Minister himself must have sent it. Jillian opened it, and inside she found a letter in a similar color to the envelope, written in very bold, black ink. But as she reviewed it, she eventually slammed it upon the table, and ran from the room. Philip was frozen. He stared at the letter sitting on the table. A very sick, uneasy feeling pervade over him, and he didn’t quite know what to think. The radio was relaying something about civil unrest resuming in the city, of a recent raid of the department of civility. Philip picked up the letter and read it.

The man on the radio rejoined, “Three days ago, the Department of Civility was raided by an organized group of rebels on a suicide mission to execute as many officials as possible before the day was out. All of them were dead before the next morning, and twenty-six government officers had been killed.”

There were no feelings that Philip could express. He did not cry, he did not falter, and he did not shake. The emotions within him spun too fast to be comprehended or expressed adequately. Marko was sitting in the living room. He saw his father, and the joy was soon wrested from him. Very slowly and mechanically, Philip rose from his seat and lumbered gradually into the next room. He sat in his chair and stared into nothing. Marko had since entered the kitchen and picked up the letter. Karl was dead. The radio lost its signal momentarily.

“Marko,” his father said from the other room, “I want you to go into the cupboard beneath the stairs and play the piano. I want you to play Karl’s song. You know which one that is. I want to be sure that there will be one child of mine who shall go on to do beautiful things.”

Without a hesitation or a second thought, lost in a deluge of dark contemplation, Marko followed his orders, and entered the closet beneath the stairs. He pulled the bench up to the piano and stared down, blinking, trying to feel it inside of him. His fingers hovered over the keys, and he could feel Karl playing this song, for he could see his fingers moving gracefully along the ivory. He played his song, of postcards, of war, and of the persistence of life thereafter.