Chapter 17
For Indigo and D’Naia, it was not an easy decision to prepare for travel. D’Naia’s pregnancy was showing and, although still strong, Indigo was discomforted by the idea of dragging her out into the wildlands where cannibals and and other carnivores lurked. He hadn’t fully unwound the ‘unhumans are cannibals’ indoctrination despite Staley’s assurances. The prospect of danger weighed heavily on them both but they did not speak much of it throughout the day. They new it wasn’t safe to stay, either.
On the night of that most unusual Sabbath, where Staley entered the church and turned over the Chalice of Life and spilt the sacrificial blood of man, the Man Bear, as predicted, paid Indigo and D’naia a visit. They were ready for him when he came and ready to leave with him, too, so he led them into the wilderness under cover of night and cold.
Neither Indigo nor D’naia had ever ventured far out into the wildlands. For the first couple of miles, Indigo’s eyes anxiously scanned blindly in the darkness for stalking beasts and savages. His ears processed every sound, every creak of a branch, every snap of a stone, every crunch of a dried leaf trampled underfoot. D’naia stayed on his arm, shivereing as they walked, hearing the groan of phantom lions carried on every breeze.
Their guide, Joe Hannan the Man Bear, was undeterred by any fear of flesh eating critter. He kept a brisk pace moving along the faint trail by memory in the dark. Indigo and D’naia did everything they could to keep up. Soon, the exhaustion of the relentless pace became their singular focus, finally even drowning out their fears of the beasts of the night.
They didn’t speak much and walked for perhaps four hours before finally stopping for the night. Joe Hannan started a fire with flames obscured by a hastily arranged lean-to. He offered the couple roasted pine nuts and insects which skewered on a twig but Indigo and D’naia both declined. Exhausted, D’naia soon fell asleep on Indigo’s shoulder. The fire warmed her and her shivering subsided.
“How long have you been out here?” Indigo asked Joe Hannan whose teeth closed with a crackle on the husk of a char broiled grasshopper.
“I’ve been out here for thirty years as far as I can recollect,” he grunted, nearly spilling out a tiny leg as he spoke.
“Where were you before you came here?”
Joe Hannan reached into his satchel and removed a wineskin which he uncorked and squeezed releasing the contents into his mouth.
“I was with them,” he answered, as he handed Indigo the skin.
“Gaian?”
“Indeed,” he replied as he pulled the head off and impaled another insect on his stick.
“What rank were you?”
Joe Hannan chuckled. “I was a very high degree for my age… twenty first degree by twenty five.”
That’s a fine rank for a young man.”
“I was no ‘man’,” Joe cursed. “I was a boy… a boy with power. That’s a dangerous combination, you know.”
“How so,” Indigo asked as he fumbled around in the dark for a twig.
“What’s your rank?” Joe Hannan redirected. “Twelve?”
“Thirteen, actually,” Indigo answered.
“So you are just beginning to see it.”
“See it?”
Joe Hannan stared into the fire. The rippling light cast his face in gold and dark shadow. He bore the look of a wraith, thin and grim. Doom danced in the flickering hellfire reflected in his eyes. He did not look at Indigo when he spoke. “Do you remember when you were just getting in? Do you remember what a big deal it was?”
“Indeed. Confirmation is one of life’s most important moments.”
“Yes. It defines you. It rearranges ones thinking to be confirmed… to be accepted into the club… to be initiated. It meant everything to me as a thirteen year old. I remember it well. A 1st degree meant you went to the front of the line in school. Do you remember that? And then when you got a job did you remember the pay raises that came with each successive rank? Remember the added perks and the benefits, the new friends? Then you got into it for a while and the newness of being an Overman wore of. Right?”
“More or less.”
“So you needed more but you had to get a higher degree to get access to more. So you worked harder to get noticed by the higher ones. And after many late nights and prostrating yourself, you finally got promoted. You broke through to five, six, seven.”
“Yes.”
“I’m not sure when you diverged into the space man program… I imagine around sixth or seventh degree?”
“That’s right. Seventh.”
“So you were probably four years into it all. That’s about when it starts to destabilize. That’s when They begin to see what your future most likely will be. You see, Indigo, they don’t really care about the low ranking schlock who come in at the bottom. There’s millions of them. That’s their spawning pool, if you will. But the ones that want to move up into ‘middle management’, as they say, rise above the schlock right away. They can tell quickly, one to three years they know. They still make you earn it but they know pretty early.
You and I, Indigo, we did something to get noticed early on and so They brought us up. And when you get to the next rank, eight, nine, twelve, it becomes about more than just the next raise or the next benefit allotment. It gets deeper than that. You know what I mean?”
“Yes. You want to impress them. It becomes about the rank, itself.”
“Yes. You know, when you are single digits you are still low enough to reconcile the things you are asked to do with your own morality. You can square seemingly contradictory things and compartmentalize what you see and not be too troubled by your status. ‘You’re just following orders’, you tell yourself and so you trust the higher ones giving them. ‘Why would They have you do something wrong?’, you ask yourself.
But you didn’t get as far as I did, Indigo. You got detoured. They put you on that mission to Mars and that rocket ship steered you right off the track.”
“What do you mean?”
“When I was ranked eighteen I had done quite well, better than any I had known along the way. But I started to have doubts. Why was I being asked to do the things I did? Why are my errors always forgiven? I had access to people, connections and such that I did nothing to earn by merit. I never had to fear so long as I followed instructions to the best of my ability. But those instructions were becoming increasingly difficult to rationalize. It is all about loyalty at that middle ranks but the lower people I destroyed in order to please the higher ones were beginning to haunt me.
That didn’t mean that I had a special conscience or anything… they used to try to educate morality clean out of children’s minds at school but it never worked the way they wanted it too. Too many still grew up with a conscience. So they just accepted human nature as it is. Every Gaian goes through the moral struggle, Indigo. Everyone… unless they’re a sociopath,” Joe Hannan laughed. “They groom the sociopaths for the Sunstein Agent program. They give the afflicted ones like you and me money and prestige and the fear of losing it and that motivates you to stay in the status quo, to follow orders. But for those who want to go still higher, that lure is done with something else entirely.”
“How?” Indigo asked as he reached for one of Joe Hannan’s insects.
“Like I said, in the middle ranks, they pull you along with prestige. In the latter ranks it’s about ‘knowledge’. Let me explain it to you this way. When you get to twentieth degree, everyone ranked below you will hang on your every command. That’s prestige. I could talk gibberish for an hour and still hold an audience of schlock clinging to my every meaningless word as if it were the chords of the most fantastic musical performance they’ve ever experienced. They called it ethos in the ancient days. It’s alluring. It’s compelling.
But it’s not enough to get you into the high degrees, Indigo. Only knowledge and fear can do that. Knowledge is the bait and fear is the prod. You want more knowledge than the tidbits they feed you when you’re middle management. So they begin to show you things in exchange for you doing things. Things that had been rumored, spectacular things, terrible things, mind-altering gnosis is revealed.”
“Like what?” Indigo asked as he pushed a grasshopper onto his stick point and extended it into the fire.
“Like the doctrine. Like the expectations. Like the grand master plan. They feed it to you slowly so your conscience can adjust and they have you do vile things in order to earn your next morsel.”
“Like what?”
“Vile, vile things, Indigo. I can’t talk about it. You are made to degrade yourself in the process of advancing. That’s how they prod you along. It’s a trap. If you hesitate, you will be made the victim next time, you will be exposed, so you just go along. Everything becomes rational. Your old morality is finally burned off. Ceremonies of torture, rape, murder. You’ll do all of it and soon you believe that it’s righteous to do it. I was quickly evolving at that stage. You have to or you’ll be destroyed.
Your mid can no longer rationalize the contradictions at the upper levels. You can no longer reconcile to any morality. It is a new morality that is taught. It is the opposite of everything they teach to the low degrees and the undermen. The only way to reconcile it is to accept that you are different. You must accept that you are now the elite and that the rules you ascribe to the low ranking schlock and the undermen savages and the animals that live in the dehumanized zones do not apply to you. The rules are for them, not for you. You come to understand that it is all necessary for you to do this, that you are not a hypocrite for believing it, that you were chosen to be revealed this knowledge.”
Indigo pulled out his grasshopper from the fire to inspect its charred shell. It wasn’t quite done.
“They show you what they call the Gaian Paradigm, but not before they think you already believe it… that you’ve already come to the same conclusion in your own mind. Then you see the Paradigm laid out before you and it’s like you knew it all along. You accept it entirely because you think that you’ve already known it. At that point, you have arrived. You are a true Overman. You are the elite.”
“What is the Gaian Paradigm?’
“They… They are the Paradigm. What They believe is the Paradigm. How They live. What They think about humanity. What They plan for the future. It’s Their plan. Their goals. It is the mind of man stripped of all the pretense and insecurities and anxieties of the animal. To them, it is the reformed mind rising above the animal brain.
They acknowledge there is but one goal of man: immortality. But to them, there is no God. God is a myth. God is a tool, invented by kings to get his serfs to police themselves, to toil their lives away for a pittance and then die of starvation or on some battlefield fighting some poor serf of the rival king. To them, an external God is a lie. To them, God is within.
It’s all a lie. They show you the history of the world going back, way, way back, two hundred thousand years. Before the Greeks. Before the Egyptians. Before the Sumerians. Way, way back. Through the Ice Age. Through cataclysms of flood and fire. They said this history was burned up in the library of Alexandria but it survived. They burned the library so they could possess the knowledge themselves. They show you the theme of God, the same theme, replayed. The earthly and the ethereal. Heaven and hell. Sin and redemption. Death and resurrection. The divine mother. Al of it. Over and over, replayed throughout time. Different religions in name only.
They say there is no God, Indigo, only the immortal man and man makes his own God. Man, immortal yet in the flesh. Not a virtual immortality in the ether but a flesh and blood forever-life. This is what they showed me, Indigo.”
“How are they immortal but in the flesh?”
“That’s the question that was answered to me when I had my moment of doubt. I wanted it, Indigo. I wanted immortality of the flesh. I thought I was ready for it. But I wasn’t. I fooled them into thinking my conscience and underman morality had been completely burned off— that I was a clean slate. But I was lying. I fooled them and they showed me too soon. I took fruit from the tree of knowledge of life and death, Indigo. I wanted to be them, to know the complete truth. They practically handed it to me but I was not ready to digest it.”
“What did you see?” Indigo asked as he pulled the grasshopper out of the fire and slid it off the stick.
“I saw how immortality in the flesh was achieved! I saw it with my own eyes.”
“How?” Indigo asked as he raised the insect to his lips.
“They believe the mind is the soul. The mind resides in the synaptic network and folds of the brain. Your brain is just a piece of hardware, Indigo. You know that. You’ve seen them download consciousness. You’ve downloaded yours. You’ve spoken to virtual beings. But virtual beings are not human. Humans are flesh and bone. Humans are a physical experience. And so They need bodies, Indigo. They need replacement bodies to continue as immortals.”
“Why can’t they just use genetic engineering or something to live forever?”
“It’s a chaotic system. You’re fighting exponential math when you attack the problem at the molecular level. No matter how hard you try, you cannot stay ahead of the compounding array of broken genes. It’s iompossible.”
“What do they do?”
“They take new bodies, Indigo. They take a candidate and they wipe their brain and then they rewire it with the consciousness of a dying Overman. They live forever, Indigo. They even have backups in case they meet some accidental fate.”
Indigo’s teeth crushed through the charred exoskeleton of the insect.
“They can’t use babies or even children. Puberty and hormones throw too many variables into the equation. They don’t want to morph into something different. They want to hold on to their understanding of life. They like hearty people between thirty and forty years old. They take their bodies, wipe their brains, and inject their consciousness directly in to them. It’s just an upload routine. A brain is just hardware. Once they figured out how to control synaptic growth, it all became an exercise in nano-engineering.”
“And so this is why you left? You were horrified by it?”
“Sort of. It was a combination of my morality not being able to reconcile erasing another’s mind so that I might take over his body. I could not see it as anything but murder. I could not reconcile it. But it’s worse than that. I killed before for them. So it was more than just that. It was the realization that they’re Paradigm is a lie. Indigo, your locket is not ticket to the afterlife. Yes, they can download your brain. They can store your memories and loves and hatreds and desires and fears and they can upload them into a virtual heaven when you die. But it’s not you, Indigo. That’s the realization. It’s not your soul. What is resurrected in the afterlife is not you. It’s only a computer algorithm that remembers being you, that’s all. Your dead. Only a facsimile of you lives on. So they harvest men and women, Indigo, as if they were cattle. They harvest them and they murder them and they implant a facsimile of themselves into them. It’s mass psychosis. They’re killing for nothing other than vanity. They’re spiritless. They are the dead. And that’s why Staley sent me to get you.”
“Why?”
“Because you are not going according to their plan so they intend to bring the old you back. They need their heroes, Indigo. They want their national hero back because he is useful to them.”
“They’re going to reset me?”
“Of course. They probably have a download of you from just after your landing. You’ve been faithful downloading with your locket, Indigo, yes?”
“Yes, of course.”
“The reset version of you will, of course, never be allowed to come near here.”
“And what of D’naia?”
“She’s an excellent candidate for reconditioning. Her mind will be wiped and an Overman’s will be uploaded if she is caught.”
“And our child?”
“You’re both of good stock. D’Naia is a high achiever. They were never going to let her make it at Harvard. That was impossible. But she impressed them. She’s smart and beautiful and you are a spaceman so your progeny is acceptable. Your child will be raised in a crèche, given comforts, developed physically, protected from disease, but kept in a state of mental insulation. Then one night, while she sleeps, she will be put under, her mind will be wiped clean and she too will be reconditioned, uploaded with the consciousness of a dying Overman.”
“We have to go back! I need to tell others! We need to fight this!”
“Staley is already there for them. There are very few who will listen, but he has warned them.”
“But we need to get weapons and fight them!”
The Man Bear laughed. “There is no fighting them… at least not in that way. They are too powerful. I suppose you could take a handful of them out with a suicide bomb but that would do nothing other than end your life prematurely. Hell, they’re collectivists, they invented the ultimate scam of dying for a cause. They’d probably be honored by your sacrifice, misguided though it was. It would just motivate them to execute a ruthless reprisal on your community.”
“Then what can we do?”
“We withdraw.”
“What do you mean?”
“We withdraw from their world. We nullify them. They are the secular so we must become the spiritual. They deny the divine. The refute God so we embrace Him. They defend the collective thus we defend the individual. They live by coercion thus we live by virtue. They control the cities thus we control the wildlands. We live without need of them. And slowly more will find us and come to us and withdraw their consent from Them. As our numbers grow, their prestige and power will diminish.”
“So how do we win?”
“It’s a progression, Indigo. When they resort to violence we will know we are close to victory.” Joe Hannan uncorked his wineskin and took another drink. He didn’t have anything else to say.
As Joe Hannan neared inebriated slumber, Indigo moved D’naia’s head off his shoulder and made his way into the woods a short distance to relieve himself. Being in the wilderness at night reminded him of the mission to Mars. He contemplated the infinite as he stood there. How similar it was… he on the edge of the arc of campfire light, the cocoon of humanity, the heat a shield against whatever beasts lurked just beyond the edge of darkness, stalking, coming in to examine the peculiar humans who had invaded their world. Indigo sensed them out there. There world is a screaming terror, he imagined. Every instant was a battle for survival, killing without morality. Survival meant only becoming acutely skilled at surviving. They Overmen had adopted that ideal, he thought.
The beasts lurked in the darkness, all right. They were probably both helplessly curious yet mortally terrified of humans with all their racket and their blazing light and their death dealing weapons and foul smells. The beast doesn’t waste his life making racket and giving light and their only weapons are in their mouths or their claws. How curious and terrifying humans must be to them.
There are no beasts in space a hundred million miles from earth— not ones curious of humans, anyway. Still it struck him. The edge of the firelight was like the skin of his capsule and beyond it lay the terror of annihilation. Micro-meteors and gamma rays and the vacuum of space lurked just beyond the titanium hull of the Astarte. Humanity was irrelevant to meteors and gamma rays. They had no drive for survival, either. They just were— energies and particles travelling by predictable physics but unpredictably intersecting with the Birkelund plasma enveloping Indigo’s space can.
The terror was the same. Whether one is brained by the claws of a grizzly bear or one has their brains blasted apart by a grain of sand travelling three hundred thousand miles per hour, the result, at least from the standpoint of the human experience, is the same.
Still, Indigo had an urge to run out into the darkness and join the creatures of the night. Perhaps this circuit in his brain that encouraged him to do this was the same circuit that encouraged him to accept the invitation to become an astronaut. He didn’t know for sure. But he felt a desire to sense primal fear.
