Mesopotamia - The Redeemer (36 page)

“Leave me be.” Smoke put his hands
over his ears and stepped backward. The image of his mother in the
simulator kept flashing in his mind. Love, fear and anger engulfed
him in a whirlpool of emotions. Voices spoke in his head.

'Traitor!' said Truth.

'Mother!' said a young boy.

'Iamcosmosiamcosmosiamcosmosiam...'
he said to calm himself. 'I must calm down and plan my next move,'
he thought. 'I need to find out more about the processor; after
all, that was why I was sent here.' Focusing on his goal calmed his
raging emotions. 'I must continue and learn to use the simulator.'
He tried to convince himself that another encounter with his mother
would actually serve the Gnosis. 'I am tempting them into trusting
me,' he repeated in his mind.

Despite his opposition, she felt
like she was progressing in the right direction. “Take a chance on
trusting me. Up to now, you knew how to take a chance. After all,
you could not have survived had you not taken a chance and trusted.
How did you trust the Gnostics? Will you trust me and tell me?”

The desire to speak to a listening
ear engulfed him like warm, sticky honey. Even though his plans had
been revealed, he convinced himself that he should continue to
create a ruse of trust anyway. 'At Truth's command, I must continue
to drag it out. If she thinks that she is recruiting me to betray
the Gnosis, so be it. My ruse will only be more believable.' He
believed that he was tricking her when he told her his
feelings.

“The entire Gnostic training was
directed at the lofty fusion that was slated to happen one day.
From the first moment, from the day when they held our initiation
ceremony and gave us our names, they made it clear to us that we
must abandon our personal boundaries. We were told that boundaries
were an illusion, that we had been fortunate to have reached the
enlightened ones, the Gnostics, which would teach us to open our
eyes to the illusion of boundaries. In the first initiation
ceremony, they gave us all names: 'Darkness', 'Light', 'Shadow',
'Spark', 'Fire', 'Smoke', 'Flash'--entities that lack clear
boundaries. 'Smoke dissipates in all directions,' they told me when
I received my name.”

'Don't talk to them!' Truth's voice
in his head silenced him. 'They are almost caught in my net,' he
answered.

Sophia saw that Smoke was
hesitating. Something inside of him insisted on coming out. “They
used to train us with various exercises in which we would lose our
boundaries: spiral dance rituals in which we would lose our senses;
dipping us in gelatin pools in which we could not feel our own skin
for days on end, with no sense of time or the changing of light and
darkness that indicate the delineation of time. We would repeat
mantras in every free moment: 'Devotion, nullification,
nothingness, devotion, nullification, nothingness,
IamcosmosIamcosmos...”

Shards of the picture of his youth
appeared. “A few of the children cried and wanted their mothers.
Some of them were beaten with a cane, but usually the crying
episodes passed, thanks to the training. Many of them forgot
themselves and their longings, like I did, but there were children
who were uninfluenced by the various integration rituals and
beatings they received, who continued to cry for their mothers.
These children were sent away so that they would not weaken the
rest of us and tempt us to return to the world of illusion.”

“Your instructors were also
orphans. They also tried to forget what they had lost. They also
did not want to awaken within themselves a longing for something
that they had lost forever,” said Sophia. “They felt a need to
erase the painful feeling as to not feel the pain of loss. But now
you are allowed to hurt. There is something to hurt for.”

Sophia came closer to him and
looked straight into his eyes. “These are difficult words, but they
are important for you to hear at some point in your life.” She laid
a hand on his arm. “I think that they will never return to the
living and we cannot know if you will be with them when you die.
But as long as you are breathing, you must belong to the living.
But you do not have to give up the memory of your family.”

Smoke flung her off of himself and
raised his hand in rage and frustration. He considered silencing
the painful truth with force, but overcame this impulse. Something
inside of him wanted to hear more. Something inside of him wanted
to live.

“The simulator can return lost
moments of your past. It can bring you to meet the Master of
Light,” said Sophia. “It can bring you to meet with your long gone
family.”

“My family awaits me in the
nothingness,” Smoke intoned mechanically.

“Your belief in nothingness is
standing in your way and prevents you from being loyal to the
Gnosis,” said Sophia.

“How dare you doubt my loyalty to
the Gnosis!” Smoke's arm rose again in Sophia's direction. She
remained in place without flinching.

From his lookout at the screen,
Enosh wanted to intervene but held himself back. 'I cannot be a
part of this process.'

“Listen to me!” said Sophia. “You
do not have to agree with me. Your loyalty is important, but only
you can define what your belief means to you. I am interested in
convincing you about the righteousness of my worldview regarding
the significance of loyalty, but it is clear to me that if you
adopt this view, you cannot operate according to it.”

He was silent and went back to
repeating his mantra to himself in an attempt to stop himself from
thinking, but what he really wanted to do was to meet his mother
again in the simulator.

His silence encouraged her. “I
believe that if you are loyal to the Gnosis, you must do everything
in your power to uphold their existence and prevent them from
destroying themselves.”

Smoke looked at her in confusion,
though no longer in anger.

She took the chance that now would
be a good time to leave Smoke alone with his thoughts.

He wondered if there was any point
in reporting to Truth. Perhaps it would ease his confusion. On
second thought, he understood that it would only serve to
exacerbate his misery. He would try to mumble something without any
new information because he was unable to express the truth—that he
really wanted to return to the simulator. Did Truth still trust
him? Did he still matter in his eyes? Would he have still saved him
from the abyss, against all Gnostic tenets? Or, even worse, did he
himself believe anymore that he was deserving of such trust?

He understood that Truth, as well
as Sophia, could not help him. Only he could redeem himself from
this confusion. It became obvious to him what he must do to clarify
his thoughts.

After participating in his first
massacre, he had felt lost. He isolated himself and became
withdrawn. Even then, he debated continuing on the Gnostic path.
The internal searching led him to continue to cling to the Gnostic
faith. The Master of Light appeared to him and removed any doubts.
He hoped that he would receive an answer now too.

He repeated the words 'devotion,
nullification, nothingness' over and over again in order to empty
his mind of thoughts. At the beginning, he let his thoughts pass
over him like birds across his field of vision. Instead of sinking
into the usual nullification trance, he began to daydream about a
single word that was caught in his head: 'arbitrariness'.

'I am here in Samos, so far from
the place I called home. The squadron, Uruk, Earth.
Arbitrariness... I escaped the marks of getting hit by my maneuvers
due to arbitrariness. The Gnostic faith is arbitrary... the Gnosis
that found me, adopted me, it could all be something else. No! The
only thing that could have happened certainly did happen. Even now,
connecting the module to the processor, learning about the
simulator, these are the only things that can happen and they are
happening. Destroy Samos. Truth forbade me from harming the
processor. He permitted me to destroy myself. He permitted it only
if it was absolutely necessary. Death. Peace... the ability to
forget... to blur...'

Smoke came to his senses after some
time—he could not tell if it had been a long time or a short time.
Seconds, maybe minutes. He sank once more into a daydream
'Arbitrariness... Truth adopted me. How can I betray him? My mother
in the simulator. How can I abandon her? Loyalty... mission...
purpose. Randomness... coincidence... haphazardness. Arbitrariness?
Truth is the way he is because he is also a refugee adopted by the
Gnosis. The Gnosis is the way it is because Adamas argued with
Orpheus about the formula of the creational constant. The Gnosis is
what it is. The Pythagoreans are what they are. Adamas and Orpheus
failed to cooperate because their natures and their fates were
different. They did not choose their natures. Arbitrariness... the
believers of primitive cultures had no choice but to reach mutual
destruction. Where is my father, who does not even exist in my
memory? A bomb fell specifically on him before I was even cognizant
of my existence. The bomb did not choose him, nor he it. The
targeting computer and the spirits of the heavens did not choose to
drop that bomb specifically on him. He died out of arbitrariness.'
He felt the difficulty of clinging to any sort of meaning. He was
caught in the dilemma of lack of meaning. Why? Because!
Randomness... anxiety... discomfort... horror!

He did not make the daily report to
Truth.

T
hey were
all impatiently waiting for the battle. The soldiers repeatedly
checked their equipment and weapons. Each detail was important, but
the commander's honor came first. They dropped their things, stood
at attention and lowered their heads when he passed. Truth was not
lax about the hierarchal ritual, even at the last moments before
the invasion. He only stopped long enough to give the order of “At
ease!” because he knew that by looking at his soldiers, he inflamed
their enthusiasm for battle. He loved them, in the limited manner
that the Gnostic culture allowed him to feel love.

The halls of the ship were similar
to the Gnostic compound in Uruk on Earth, covered in black opaque
boards that covered the delicate metal components, the nervous
system of the space ship. The larger cables and pipes were dark
gray and black, which blended in with the shades of light gray on
the body of the ship. Truth turned left and ascended to the upper
level. He approached his chair in the command station. His
substitute, Flash, stood up quickly and positioned himself tensely
beside him.

Years earlier, Truth had entered
the squadron room under his leadership in order to arrange the
formation for the members of the squadron. He could already note at
the first glance the extreme cleanliness of the room, with its
rolled up fastened plastic mats leaning against the wall.
Everything was satisfactory. He approached the door of the great
closet attached to the plastic wall to examine the folded uniforms
of the squadron members. When he stood by the closet, Truth noticed
a rustling sound coming from inside. He swung the door open and
found Flash inside. Copious blood flowed from Flash's temples onto
his face, dripping onto his clothes and the floor of the closet.
His hand clutched a sharpened metal point. The expression of horror
mixed with relief that came over the boy's face before he fainted
from blood loss never left Truth's memory. He took the point out of
his hand, wiped it on his uniform pants and lifted the bleeding,
unconscious boy in his arms.

Truth was different from most of
the other Gnostic commanders: He felt pity for the orphans in his
command. Any other commander would have glanced at the bleeding
boy, close the closet door and marked a grade of “fail” to the
members of that squadron. The Gnostic leaders preferred clean
suicides whenever possible. The odds that hundreds of thousands of
war orphans would succeed were not very high. Many orphans
proceeded to wander about on the streets, dressed in rags, starving
and diseased, until they died. Only those lucky enough were
gathered in by pillaging pirates to be sold to the Gnosis. Many of
them did not withstand the military strictness that was forced upon
them. Incidences of suicides were common. The chain of command
mostly ignored what was classified as “accidents”. The Gnostics
placed great trust in their filtering system. They preferred the
unyielding quality of those few who managed to balance their
suicidal tendencies with their murderous tendencies, who could tie
their fate to the cosmic loss in the Gnostic fashion. The Gnostics
searched out and encouraged those who were prepared to murder and
commit suicide only on command.

Even as a child, Truth had been
different from most of the Gnostics, and this difference gave him a
survival advantage. In addition to his immense physical strength
and his high endurance, he excelled in his ability to see the
bigger picture. This analytical skill allowed him to find creative
solutions to problems. When he set a goal for himself, he focused
on it until he achieved it, whatever the cost may be. He knew in no
uncertain terms that there was no turning back, and was not
distracted by longing for his past. Since he had been taken in by
the Gnostics at a relatively advanced age, he was more independent
and did not expect his Gnostic commanders to fill the role of his
parents. He did not compete with the other orphans, who tried to
win over the hearts of the commanders. The sadness that always
accompanied him was seen by the others as charismatic aloofness. He
effortlessly received his position as a natural leader, lying
outside the hierarchal order.

During Truth's youth, when he
became the Squadron leader in Uruk, and finally became the
commander of the ship, Truth's sadness had two facets. On the one
hand, he was more sensitive to the suffering of the young orphans,
sometimes going easy on them during the cruel endurance tests. On
the other hand, he tried to ward off the sadness by developing
indifference and numbness toward himself; when that numbness became
second nature, he succeeded in freeing himself from it only in
situations of extreme physical effort or pain. This was the source
of his addiction to pain, which he consumed in increasing
quantities. Like many other children, he picked at his scabs in
order to prevent or delay their coagulation. This way, he
accumulated many scars that stood out on his dark skin, which lent
him a hardened appearance. While other Gnostic children sufficed
with the ceremonial tattooed spot behind their right earlobe, Truth
covered his face and other parts of his body with tattooed spots.
Even if there had been a connection between his broken heart and
the tattoos on his chest, between his desire to close his eyes to
the suffering of the orphans and the tattoos on his eyelids, he was
not aware of it. The most important thing to him was that each
additional spot granted him another day of pain, to momentarily rid
himself of the deadening numbness.