Intentional Dissonance (10 page)

“As for you, the doctor would like you to join him for breakfast. Now get up and walk or we’ll drag you there like last time,” says Deformed.

Jon gets up and follows them out, casting one last look at Edward before he leaves. He will be sad if he dies. They lead Jon through the twisting corridors of the compound and finally out onto a terrace, below the white marble spires. Waiting for him is a table made of the same wood and chrome hybrid from the doctor’s office, two chairs, and plates stacked with food and a vase with a single red rose in it. The guards make Jon sit in the chair and fasten restraints around his arms.

The doctor walks in through a side door and says, “That won’t be necessary, will it Jon?”

Jon looks at him and then at the guards; he nods in agreement and the guards, after a confirming glance at the doctor, undo the restraints.

“How did you think he was going to eat?” asks the doctor. The guards shrug and slink off, leaving the two of them alone.

“You want to know about your father, don’t you, Jon?” asks the doctor.

Jon doesn’t trust his voice, so he just nods.

“We’ll get to that soon enough. First, let’s talk about what you did to one of the guards during your acquisition. He nearly went mad. We had to send men out in the middle of the night to find his sister and assure him that she wasn’t anywhere near the cell you were in,” says the doctor.

Jon chuckles to himself. It felt good to do that to the guard, even though it killed him inside to see James again. It was worth it.

“Tell me about that,” says the doctor.

“Why should I?”

“You will if you want to know what happened to your father,” says the doctor. There’s a noticeable look of pain on Jon’s face.

“I can see that got to you. If you want to know how he died, you’ll cooperate,” says the doctor. “I don’t want to be mean but I will get what I need.” The doctor loads his own plate with food.

“You were lying then, when you said I was wrong, that he didn’t die in The End,” Jon blurts out before remembering himself.

“I wasn’t lying. He didn’t die in The End. He died causing The End,” says the doctor and he says it while cutting his eggs and bacon, like he’s discussing the score from a sporting fixture, like he’s talking about a traffic jam or the weather.

Jon remains still, not touching his food, wondering if it’s as poisoned as the doctor’s words, although if they were going to kill him, they would have just done it by now.

“You don’t believe me?” asks the doctor.

Of course he’s lying but Jon figures he might as well get a free breakfast out of it. He starts to eat. He loves flapjacks and apple pie and there are ample amounts of both. Jon doesn’t respond to the doctor.

“Tell me, Jon, what do you think happened at The End?” asks the doctor.

Jon flinches for just a second. It’s illegal to talk about The End because of the emotionally unstable reaction it can cause in certain survivors. It figures the government would ignore its own law.

“We were invaded by the shadow army, a group of supernatural monsters that disappeared shortly after the attack. There were also several bombings, a nerve gas attack, some kind of chemical warfare strike against the civilian population and that all pretty much killed the entire human race,” says Jon.

“Really? Is that really what you think happened?” asks the doctor. Jon shrugs again and takes a bite of his food. He chews it slowly. The doctor reaches down behind him and takes out a paper folder.

“Read those,” says the doctor. Jon puts down his knife and fork and picks up the folder. It’s a collection of random pieces of paper. The first is an official looking military report with the word “classified” stamped across the front.

29/11

Flight patrol commenced at 16:00 hours and lasted 9 hours with pilots Patterson and Dutch from base Charlie 053. Plane nearly ran out of fuel due to pilots not being able to land safely. Pilot Dutch reports wild black river suddenly rising up out of nowhere and “attacking” civilian population. Reports from Patterson contradict reports from Dutch. Patterson indicates he witnessed packs of roving “dark” animals attacking the civilian population, hence he, without waiting for authorisation from central command, unleashed a full artillery strike on the dark creatures inflicting massive collateral damage on civilian population.

Over the course of several hours, Dutch was able to talk Patterson into landing the plane. Both Dutch and Patterson have been detained indefinitely, pending further investigation into “The End” related global incidents.

Jon puts it down and picks up the next piece of paper, a page from a diary.

29/11

Mother is dead. Father is dead. A giant black dragon appeared out of the sky and breathed fire upon our village. Father says we have been bad people for aiding the Americans. Perhaps this is why we were punished. The black dragon spat death for hour upon hour. Of our family, only me and Sister survive. We begin today to walk to the hospital. We are both weak but I believe we will make it. I hope someone finds this one day and knows what we went through. The thought makes me feel hopeful.

Jon keeps paging. There are articles and notes and reports and a hundred different accounts of the day humanity died. All mention the shadow army at one point or another but there are bits that don’t fit together, that don’t make sense.

“I don’t…I don’t understand,” says Jon. The doctor scoops another forkful of food into his mouth.

“I’m going to let you in on a little secret,” says the doctor. He chews his food.

“The End, when the shadow army invaded, as we call it here, was the worst day in most people’s lives. But what many people don’t realise, is that they had a choice in what kind of day it was. People projected what the worst possible thing that could happen was onto that day and then, in their minds, it happened. It was, in fact, a mass hallucination.”

Jon has stopped chewing and the food has turned to ash in Jon’s mouth. Jon was there. Jon saw the shadows, he can remember the hand on his leg, the bright light, the smoke, the chaos, the pain, he smelt the gas. And then he remembers Wilfred, the young boy he’d helped out of the school when it happened. Wilfred thought they were being attacked by wolves.

“It’s not possible,” says Jon. Jon whispers it. He barely breathes it.

“It’s entirely possible, Jon,” says the doctor. “I know because I was there at the epicentre, as was your father.” He puts down his fork and begins to stare intently at Jon.

“And let me ask you this, Jon. Does that kind of hallucination sound familiar to you? The kind of hallucination that the viewer creates themselves? That they project? It should. It’s a gift both you and you father shared. He tapped into the noosphere, the global collective consciousness, just like you tap into people’s minds. He did it to the entire human race, but as is always the case with your and your father’s talent, it was different, for different people. People found their own horror,” says the doctor.

“Your father ended the world as you know it, Jon.”

Jon’s mind is swimming.

“Let me elaborate. You know the shadow army, the invading force that destroyed everything? That was us. It was always us. Half the human race looked like shadows to the other half and we killed each other. We were fighting, killing ourselves. We were our own enemy and officially, we’ve never discovered where the shadow army went after the attack because, well, they never went anywhere. We were them all along.”

“Then what about the war afterwards? Who the hell was I bombing? Who the hell have we been at war with for the past ten years?”

“Ourselves. Always ourselves. It’s a tragedy but there’s only so many people left in the world capable of farming, of being doctors, of leading, of being of actual use to society and there were too many refugees to take care of.”

“So you had us kill each other?”

The doctor sighed and took off his glasses before continuing.

“History is a series of difficult choices. The only reason there’s anything left of the human race, the only reason we’re still here is because men like me made those difficult choices.”

Jon starts to laugh and he does not know where the laughter comes from.

“Look around you, old man. Does it look like we’re ‘still here’ to you?”

“We needed to do what was done. We needed to unite the world and do away with the tribalism and infighting and horror that’s been the hallmark of mankind for the last five thousand years.” The doctor rubbed his temple, then carried on. “The plan was, there would be a brief attack by an unknown force, the entire global consciousness would fall into a state of despair, a state hopelessness, then it would be followed by a sense of purpose, a sense unification, a sense that the human race could do anything if it stuck together. Your father died in the process. It was too much for him and the machine we used killed him before he could create the sense of purpose in the noosphere. The sense of hope. A destiny, for all mankind. Hence, the world is in a global state of depression and why we must keep feeding the population anti-depressants in the water supply. Otherwise, there’s every chance that the world would, within a day or two, kill itself.”

“I honestly can’t believe that you’re trying to justify this slaughter, that you’ve convinced yourself that what you did, what you are doing, was the right thing. Mankind would’ve got there eventually.”

“Eventually? Can you imagine what aliens from another planet would say if they saw us back then? Step out of your narrow mind for a second and see just how horrible we were as a species: people separated by bits of cloth stuck to sticks with the colours of their country sewn onto them, by national anthems, fighting over patches of dirt that we could only lay claim to because we flopped out of our mothers onto them.”

Jon fell silent.

“Do you know how much we managed to do because of The End, even considering we failed to finish the project? We invented teleportation in a matter of months. That technology wasn’t predicted to become a reality for another 100 years. People had a common threat Jon, even if they didn’t know what it was or how it worked. They had something to fear, and scientists and doctors like me, we were finally able to do what we needed to do for the sake of science. Do you have any idea how much modern medicine owes to the Nazis? There are times when the weight of morality is lighter than the weight of survival,” says the doctor.

“You’re an insane coward. People live in a hell of your design and to stop them from finding out what’s really going on, people have technology rations and a disabled Internet,” says Jon. “You control what’s left of the undernet with an iron fist so people can’t talk to each other. And you made it illegal to talk about The End and you’ve kept everything so vague and everyone so drugged up that even when people do find out, they’re not believed,” says Jon.

“Do you think we could trust what’s left of mankind with the truth? Really, Jon?”

Jon can’t believe it. Jon doesn’t want to believe it. But something is hardening inside him because all of this feels like truth. The doctor throws a picture in front of Jon; it’s the doctor and his father, arm in arm, in front of a giant machine. Smiling.

“My father ended the world,” whispers Jon.

“He only ended a bad world, Jon. In the greater scheme of history, it was a small price to pay for all we’ve managed to accomplish. And in ten days’ time, on the ten year anniversary of The End, we’re going to accomplish even more,” says the doctor. He folds his hands and looks at Jon like a piece on a chessboard.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean we’re going to have another cataclysm and you’re going to cause it. But we’re going to do it right this time, not like the one your father ruined. Your father wasn’t completely in control of his powers but we know so much more these days, Jon. We can take your parlour tricks that you’ve been turning and give you real power. We can help shape the world into a truly better place. Unfortunately, because your father died during the process, we couldn’t create new, better ideas within the noosphere. Of uniting society, of coming together as one whole, for the greater good of mankind.” The doctor shakes his fist. “Instead, we just had that one final illusion. Catastrophe. Terror. Depression. An apocalypse. Your father’s parting gift to the world. The one he died making. Don’t you want to make up for it, Jon? Don’t you want to fix the world?” asks the doctor.

Jon’s brain ticks over the things he’s being told like a machine. He feels like he’s outside his body, watching someone else do his talking for him.

“You’re saying you could amplify my illusions like you did his, and I can create new ones?” asks Jon.

“Not just new, Jon, better. Better for all of us. You were meant for this, born for this even. I know life has not been fair to you but sometimes, we are nothing more than a ball thrown by a child. You can no more change direction or slow down life than the ball can.”

“You are both right and wrong.”

“How so?”

“We cannot slow down time. But we can always change direction.”

The doctor laughs, stands up and puts his hand on Jon’s shoulder.