Totems
Part 1- Alexandria
Alexandria reared back into the stirrups and silently slid an ace out of the quiver strapped to her back. She leaned forward in the saddle and levered herself against the copper footholds. Her bow reached out over Rusher's muzzle and held steady. The trees around her were silent and when a slight breeze ruffled her hair only her eyes glanced to her left, her dexterous archer's pose still on Rusher's statuesque frame.
Moving two fingers on her right hand, Alex snapped the bow and an instant later heard a rustle of leaves and a thud. She immediately broke form and dismounted, walking towards a clump of bushes about 50 yards from where Rusher stood obediently. Alex slung her bow over her shoulder and rested her right hand casually on the twisted ivory handle of a hunting knife tucked neatly into her belt. The icy long-grass crunched underneath her boots. She came to the bushes and cautiously pushed the vegetation away to reveal a cat-like animal about 2 feet in length, but with large powerful muscles in its legs, a thick strong neck, and huge paws. Alex's ace had gone through the creature's midsection just above its hind legs.
"Ooh, a Felynx," Alex brushed the hair out of her eyes and silently crept closer. "Playing dead is your specialty, you do it almost too well," she pulled the hunting knife out of her belt with her right hand, and slowly, steadily reached her left hand towards the Felynx's large round head. "You should try playing dead with your eyes open." In one swift motion Alex grabbed the fur on the back of the creatures neck, it's eyes and mouth flew open letting out a banshee scream through its disproportionably long and sharp fangs. Alex's right hand was lightning quick as she slashed the knife through the animal's neck, opening a gash of blood, which poured out and steamed on the snowy ground below. The Felynx's scream died down from a high-pitched ear-splitting wail to a blood muffled choking gasp. Alex dropped the mortal being to the ground where it continued to bleed to death, twitching limply. Its jagged claws slowly retracting back into its giant paws.
Snapping branches caught Alex's attention behind her. She turned, grabbing for a different knife in the left side of her belt. This knife had a narrower handle and a sleeker blade, a throwing knife. The snapping branches became louder and louder, and she sensed something large and fast coming closer and closer.
"Alexandria! Alexandria!" A voice called out. Louis stumbled into the clearing. "I heard a scream, are you o--"
Alex flipped the knife with her right hand, and Louis, too slow and too stupid to react just stood there and listened to the knife whistle past his left ear and enter the tree directly behind him with a loud thunk. Louis stood there, petrified. Alex came towards him.
"Don't you ever rush up on me like that again, you're lucky I noticed it was you in time, or I'd be cleaning your brains off this thing." She reached up behind his head and grabbed the knife, which had penetrated the tree all the way up to the knife's handle. One sharp tug, and she yanked it out; she held the knife in front of Louis' face. "How would you like that?"
Louis just shook his head. He looked down at the other knife in Alex's left hand, blood was pouring off it. "Did you get something, did you?"
"Check this out," she turned and walked towards the bush, wiping the blade with her bare hand and flicking the blood onto the ground. Louis followed with a look of disgust on his face. Alex pushed the bush away, and revealed the dead creature, it's shiny silver fur now polluted with its own fresh blood. Louis immediately looked away, Alex took this with pride, and as Louis slowly turned back to look he pointed to the ace sticking out of the Felynx.
"Good shot."
"Not good enough," she said, wiping the rest of the blood off her knife on the Felynx's fur. "An idiot like you would have rushed up on it, thinking it was dead, and you'd have one less hand to pat yourself on the back with, for your so-called nice shot." Alex towered over Louis as she held the point of her hunting knife just underneath his nose. She reached down, and grabbed the Felynx by the back of the neck and pulled out the ace. Louis turned away as Felynx guts followed the ace out of its body. Alex mounted her horse.
"Hey, Alex...can I have a ride?" Louis mumbled. Alex had already disappeared into the forest.
-----
Alex trotted Rusher back into town. Snow started falling on her dark brown duster, as Rusher's hoofs crunched the frosty grass. A full head taller than all the boys in her studies, when on her horse, Alex appeared absolutely majestic. For anyone, let alone a girl who was 3 weeks from her 17th birthday. The dead Felynx hung limply to Rusher's side. Alex rode tall and proud, but as always, hid her face under her large hat. The sun had just passed the horizon, and the town was awash with dark blue twilight.
Fires glowed weak in the huts of the village. The silversmith, who had provided Alex with the tips to her aces, nodded her way as he fastened down the shutters on his hut. Alex's response was nearly unnoticeable, but it was there, a slow and short nod.
And as the final dinner fires exhausted themselves, the town slept.
-----
"Katok! Alexandria! Katok!" a man in a dark brown robe shouted into the class full of teenagers.
"Katok," Alex responded and rose to her feet. She stood a full foot taller than her instructor, Braaron. They circled each other on the soft dirt; eyes focus on each other. In a blink she threw a spereu, with an open right hand to the chest of Braaron, and followed with a parata, sweeping her left leg at his hip. Miraculously, and even faster, Braaron, leapt the kick, and followed with a knoggriff, grabbing Alex's left leg, which was still in motion from her parata, and sweeping her right leg out from under her. Alex fell hard to the ground.
"Katok!" Braaron shouted, "is reaction. You act fast, but you react faster. Katok is reaction. Katok is reaction. Reaction." Some giggles broke out in the back of the class.
"What is funny?" Braaron asked, calm but strong. There was no response, he repeated, and a sloppy short fat kid stood up, still giggling. Alex sat up, and saw that it was Louis; she shook her head in disgust.
"Well, it's just that if Katok really was just reaction, then how would a fight ever get started, opponents would just circle each other forever." Louis said arrogantly, his two friends Reggie and Stuben laughed with him.
"Katok is reaction. Reaction. Reaction to the eyes, and the thoughts, not necessarily the body." Braaron spoke with calm intensity.
"But under that logic," Louis continued, "if two opponents were truly perfect, then they would never have anything to react to." He looked over at Alex; she nodded back to him. Louis was a fat slob idiot, she thought, but occasionally he had a point.
"No human has the potential to be perfect, only the gods have that potential, and only two of the gods, Oxis and Renf, are perfect, and our existence is based on their Katok match, good vs. evil, neither opponent acting, just waiting to react. That match began long before any of our ancestors walked on this world, and continues still today. Once a blow is thrown, no not even a blow, something even as slight as a wink, a look away, a single bead of sweat, a distracting thought disrupting the balance of one of the competitors would destroy the entire universe instantly because the other will seize that opportunity in less time than it takes a fly to flap a wing." Braaron's voice remained calm, but his manner was the same, serious and direct.
"Our lives fill the balance, we Katok between each other but also within each individual. Our Katok is insignificant on an individual level, but the combined Katok of all things in the universe balance all there is from the smallest speck of sand to the largest beast in the seas of the furthest planets." Braaron lowered his head, and raised his hands his voice lowered and become solemn, "...to the ends of totems."
"To the ends of totems," every individual in the class responded obediently.
"But that is ridiculous!" Louis reacted.
"Louis, Katok! " Braaron shouted.
"But..."
"KATOK!"
Louis stood up slowly, his less than impressive frame waddling towards the inner circle. "The idea that good can only exist with an equal balance of evil is absurd. There is only free will, free will of good or of evil, if that balances on a universal scale, then that is just coincidence."
"There is no coincidence, only Katok, if there is no balance then there is no existence, one will prevail, destroying the other and itself," Braaron threw a zylogne, a soft left to Louis' throat which immediately dropped him to his knees.
"Then what is good and what is evil?" Louis asked softly.
Braaron responded with a look of contempt, "you have no right to ask that question, you have not earned it." Braaron turned on his heals and exited the circle. Louis crawled back to his place among the rest of the students.
Braaron turned on his heels and addressed the rest of the class, "Rights are not given, they are not inherent in your birth or life, they are earned. You may not think until you have proven worthy of the thought you then have. Ideas without credibility are weightless, and incorrect."
-----
Alex stood in front of the 4th totem, and stared silently as twelve blackened faces reached upwards to the glistening ivory thirteenth face on top. She ran her hand across the tarred over face that was even with hers. A gargoyle face carved a dozen generations before. Thirteen totems circled the village. All exactly the same, all of them with the bottom twelve faces tarred over and a single thirteenth face on top still in its original form of pure white ivory.
"They'll be tarring that one very soon," a voice came from behind, Alex turned, her hand dropping instinctively to the knife at her side. She shrugged and rolled her eyes at the sight of Louis. "That is going to be a good night."
"I hope you drop dead before that day ever comes, or you may get a very unique wedding present," in a flash Alex wielded her blade and thrust it a couple inches below Louis' groin.
Louis flinched, but tried to give the impression of invulnerability. "You can't argue with tradition," he cracked a wicked adolescent smile and looked Alex up and down.
"We'll see," Alex turned from Louis and walked away, taking a glance over her shoulder at the totem rising out of the earth. The sun glinted off the white ivory on top and was swallowed by the thick blackness below. She felt the stone eyes of the dark faces burrowing into her back. She shuddered and tried to look back again, but couldn't.
-----
"Alexandria, child, there is no questioning of the tradition, it has been as it was and will be...to the..."
"...Ends of the totems?" Alex finished the Elder James' sentence for him. He spun quickly for an old man and stared at her through a wrinkled brow and nearly useless eyes.
"Yes," he said softly, "to the ends of the totems."
"Why? What of this tradition that we are forced to believe, yet we have no access to the text."
"I am an Elder," the Elder James said, "and as you've been taught, the teachings of the text are taught to you in school, and at the time of The Mating, when you achieve full acceptance into the generational order, then you will be allowed full access to the texts as all Adult members of our society are."
Alex pouted and ran her bow in slow figure eights on the dirt floor, "but The Mating?"
"Ah yes," the Elder James smiled and sat down on the floor next to Alex, "the Mating, the most important ritual in the 18 year cycle of our society. It is coming soon, in just three weeks when your generation turns 17 years old. It is a most exciting time, I only wish I was of your generation, and could experience it for the first time again." The Elder James smiled with a few teeth and winked rather creepily at Alex. She stood up grabbing her bow.
"I'm unhappy with my Mating partner. I am not at all excited about The Mating, and I would like to not participate, with your permission of course." Alex stood tall, even after the Elder James stood; she was over a foot taller than him.
"Ha!" he exclaimed and raised his cane near her face. His face grew grave and he spoke with a deep angry voice, "your Mating partner was decided before you were even born, and this...this participation as you so cavalierly put it, is not and has never been an option. It is our lifeblood, this is the society in which you exist, this is as much your being as your heart, your soul, your arms, and legs," he jabbed her with his cane in the chest, then the shoulder then the leg. "You do not choose to participate in having legs, do you? I am sixth generation, the only one left from my mating, when you turn 17 in three months, I turn 107, 5 generations plus the 17 years you have been taken care of, raised, fed, and nurtured by the society you seem so quick to question. Has Braaron not taught you Katok has he not instilled in you the ways of the totems? And what of your parents, do I have to bring an investigation to the council? Would you like to drag them into that?" He spat with emphasis through an uneven, untrimmed beard, his face reddening; his hair whitening. "Oh curious girl. Curious young girl, I am the Elder, the only one of my generation remaining, and I will not have you speaking of participation in my home, denying everything that flows in my blood, that flows in the veins of our entire society. You have been taught, but never learned respect and you will leave my home immediately. And, curious girl, know that you are now marked, you will be watched."
The Elder James turned and left the room. Alex stood motionless and stared at the closed door, she considered following him, but left into the night.
-----
A warm snow fell in full moonlight, no breeze, only the sharp crystal of night. Visibility was endless and Alex could hear the howls of the felynx and their larger, more dangerous siblings the yrtazt miles away from the safe borders of town. The borders being a complete circle punctuated by the 13 totems around the village. The totems that protected; the totems that imprisoned, their lumpy black gargoyle faces starring down with a crooked nose grin. And atop each totem, a sterling white ivory face, standing proud above the tarred souls of lost generations.
Each face represented a generation past, in a society whose generations equal its cycle of time. Every 18 years the mating occurs, a three-month period where all members of 'the young generation' paired off at birth, mate. All members of the same generation have the same birthday, and each generation is exactly 18 years older than the generation before it, with no ages in between. To signify the newest mating cycle, another face is tarred over on the totems. For the three months of The Mating, all mating partners are sequestered into their homes and are waited on hand and foot. They do not leave from there until the three months are past. At the end of The Mating, all males are sterilized.
6 months later The Birthing begins, with babies being born to the mating couples, and for the next three months more and more children trickle in. At the end of The Birthing, at the beginning of the calendar year and, more importantly, the beginning of the newest generational cycle, the town celebrates, Birthday. On this day, all members of the town raise a generational level, and add a year to their age. Any Mating couples who have not conceived a child are appointed to servitude to the families who have.
That specifically is what bothered Alexandria as she and Rusher walked along the outskirts of town. In twenty-one days her generation's Mating would begin. Louis, her mating partner from birth, disgusted her. But there was something graver in her mind. The credo, 'To the ends of the totems,' had been engrained in every child's head from the earliest schooling.
"What does that mean?" she inadvertently said aloud, and looked around, foolishly realizing that no one in the town would be this near the edge of town this late at night. "Cowards," she said aloud again. "To the ends of the totems, but there is only one face left on the totems, are we at the ends? Is this the last generational cycle? Then what? And what does this have to do with Katok?" Her head ached. If only she could have access to the texts. No children were allowed access to the texts until they became first generation, and that would only happen after The Birthing. Alex also realized that if she did not conceive and have a child she would never make first generation, but instead would be forced into the servant class, along with Louis, and then she would never be allowed access to the texts. Even if she went through The Mating and The Birthing and then finally read the texts, what if it would be too late. She felt woozy and had to lean against Rusher to support herself. She held her midsection where the cramps were beginning again, which signaled the bleeding soon to follow.
Alex struck out at the heavy leather saddle on Rusher who barely moved, but turned his head in her direction, she struck the saddle again harder, and this time grunted in disgust. She followed with another blow and then another, her anger increasing with each swing. She screamed and flailed her arms harder until Rusher finally did move out of the way. At the height of her rage she grabbed her bow out of the holder on Rusher's side and slid an ace into the bow letting it fly while expelling as near a primal scream as a girl just shy of 17 years old is capable of.
She watched in horror as the ace flew through the air in a direct line towards the top head of a totem 100 yards from her. "There's no way," she said to herself as the ace stayed true to its course. Through her fear of desecrating one of the thirteen totems, she half admired what would be the best shot of her already well-established shooting career. The ace continued its direct line, and sunk deep into the soft ivory. Alex cracked a wicked smile and then was corrected by her fear of the consequence. The totems were worshipped and feared with immeasurable zeal, and although she doubted the actual power of the totems, she wisely did not underestimate the power of the peoples' belief in them.
Rusher responded as soon as Alex mounted, and he took off like a shot towards the totem. The full moon blanketed them in soft blue light as Rusher's hooves kicked up the powder of fresh snow. Alex's long duster spread like wings behind her and her hat came off her head allowing her hair to bounce and flow in the wind. Rusher's nostrils flared and his breath crackled in the cold air. Alex didn't even have to pull the reigns; Rusher knew were he was going, and stopped next to the totem. Alex stood on her saddle, holding onto the totem for support. Rusher stayed perfectly still. She extended every inch of her tall frame towards the top of the totem, but could not reach it. She put a boot on one of the tarred gargoyle noses, and proceeded to climb her way to the top of the totem. A fragile foothold and her tight grip around the totem is what kept her from plummeting the nearly 20 feet to the ground below. She chuckled to herself as she realized what would happen to her if anyone would happen to come by at that moment: Punishment/Torture, Banishment, Execution.
Alex reached up and grabbed hold of the ace that was buried into the ivory. She tried to pull it out but soon realized that it would be impossible to remove. She could not get any leverage without compromising her grip on the totem pole.
"Plan B," she whispered to herself, knowing that if anyone was in earshot she would have already been caught by now. She let out a bit of nervous laughter at the absurdity of the image of her clinging to the top of the totem. She grabbed hold of the ace and yanked down on it hard. The ace broke and splintered. She reached up with her knife and cut away the splinters. People would notice it, but not right away, and what she needed most was time.
Part 2- The Winter City
The first thing that I saw when I stepped out of my apartment building was a girl with pink spiked hair buying heroin from a man with dreadlocks and a nail through his bottom lip.
"Nostalgics," I muttered as I pulled my nanocycle out of my backpack.
"Square," she sneered back, not knowing what she meant.
I put my bike in gear and headed through the fairly empty streets towards the closest supply depot. I always tried to get up to around a hundred and fifty miles per hour within the city limits, just for kicks, but the hassle of being carted into a rebuilding station would have thrown my schedule off. Another reason why I'm occasionally referred to as a, "square," I'm probably one of the only people around who still keeps a schedule. If I don't, I get bored.
The supply depot had plenty of stalls open when I arrived, and I punched up some fruit and a hamburger, shoving the items into my backpack. Just as I was hoping back on my nanocycle a message came through my goggles.
"Your mother wants to wish you a happy birthday," my personal assistant, Denise, said.
"I could have been riding, that could have been dangerous," I said.
"You know as well as I that there is no danger, you old square," she chuckled, "should I put her through."
"Go ahead."
My mother came through to my goggles, she was in the process of putting an apple cobbler into the oven, "Good morning dear, I'm sorry to bother you, but I just wanted to wish you a happy birthday."
"Thanks mom, I had forgotten it was my birthday."
"You look great son, keep up all of your good work, your father and I are so proud of you."
"Thanks mom, can you send me some of that cobbler when it's finished?"
"Of course, will you be sharing it with somebody special?"
"Uh· no mom, sorry."
"A mother can always hope. Well, have a good day son. Goodbye."
"Bye mom."
She flickered out, and Denise came back on. "I'll share the cobbler with you if you'd like."
"Mind your own business, and don't bother me any more today," as usual I felt bad for being rude, even though she was just an AI.
Denise disappeared from view and I took off towards the city limits.
It was my birthday, not that anybody celebrated that sort of thing any more. I had forgotten when they stopped mattering. I personally stopped caring about them after I had turned 21, and that was over five hundred years ago. My mother never stopped bugging me about having someone to share it with, but then again she wasn't really my mother. It was one of the city's many programs to help people of my generation deal with the death of their parents. Those of us who were young enough to receive nano-therapy when it became available would have to deal with the unique situation of being immortal, yet have to watch our parents die if the nano-therapy wouldn't take. The city's AI created full neural maps of my parents and they come around now and then to wish me a happy birthday, or have Christmas dinner in QUASI. And my mom's apple cobbler was great. I don't remember tasting it in reality, but they got it right whenever she made it in QUASI. There was no real food anymore anyway, only nano-food and food in QUASI. The nano-food was based on the programs written for QUASI so there was no difference between my mother's apple cobbler in QUASI or if I got it from one of the supply depots. I always thought it might be interesting to make my own apple cobbler and see what it would actually taste like, but there were no more apples, and organic food would not react well with my nano-engineered system.
I looked at my reflection in the rear-view mirror. I was 52 when I received full nano-engineering and I chose my body from when I was 27 to live with. They got it perfect, they did everything perfect, right down to the chip in my front tooth that I got from a bottle of Budweiser in a bar fight back in college. A lot of people got augmentation, larger breasts, hands, height, ridiculous hair, but I always wanted to keep it simple, real.
I was at the city gates. They opened up and I hit the highway. No one used it anymore. No one lived outside of the cities. Once the supply depots opened everyone eventually moved into the cities, to get upgrades to their nano-engineering or just to get supplies. There were highways connecting all of the major cities but over the years they were never used, travel becoming irrelevant as meetings or sight seeing could take place much more efficiently in QUASI than in reality. I hit three hundred miles per hour immediately and enjoyed the speed of the ride as I turned up my music implant. Behind me a billion nano-bots scurried onto the road, repairing the minute damage I may have caused.
Alexandria rode out of the village and into the unknown. She had her bow, knife, and exceptional abilities, but was outside the safety of the village for the first time. As far as she knew she was the first person ever to leave the circle of totems that protected the village from the great unknown. There were stories of an individual, Artkan, who left the village and was never heard from again, banished, falling victim to the creatures that exist in the wastelands beyond the village, a story to convince curious children to never venture beyond the circle of totems. The snow fell, but Alexandria was warm, alive. She rode to a stream that she never knew existed and camped. Up in the hills she heard a yrtatz scream, louder than within her home. A home she no longer has, a home that would banish her to the realm of the unconceivable even if she returned.
Sleep was limited. In the morning light Alexandria rode into the mountains. They were west, and that was the only thing she could think of, a residual memory from nowhere about that direction. All day she rode, at a low trot so that Strider could continue throughout the day. The jerky she kept in her pack was all that she needed, for now, but she realized that she was unprepared for a journey of this sort.
By nightfall she was well into the mountains. Snow fell all around her. There were caves throughout the mountains and she was drawn to one in particular that glowed with flickering light as she approached.
I must have died. That's the only explanation the protoplasmic sack of gore that I was looking upon at that moment. A bloody bubble of guts trying to rebuild itself with the help of microscopic bots that ran by the billions up and around my newly formed torso.
To many this sight would be normal, standard, those who live in completely in QUASI who have forsaken their bodies and only keep their internal organs functional with the nanobots, enough to feed the brain the required blood and oxygen to function. This would be normal to them; to me I wish consciousness had delayed.
What must have happened, which I only know from my couple of experiences over the past 500 years, is that my last upload reconstituted a body upon the information of my demise, probably the result of my inability to return home by the midnight hour. One such incident I chose not to remember after a night of drinking sake till dawn with friends, back when I had friends, and came home to a reconstituted self who claimed full authority over my existence. I don't know who won, like I said, I chose not to remember, but I've kinkily replayed this encounter a few times in QUASI. Every time I've won, what really happened, well, like I said, I don't know, I erased it, but it wouldn't matter, I would have won, seeing as how I was fighting myself, and if I had lost, I wouldn't know.
So, what actually happened this time? I don't know. I jacked in when I got to the research station, which automatically uploaded my morning and my ride out of the city. While I was online I did some work, checked my research, and had lunch with my mom in QUASI. Then I decided to do some fieldwork. I didn't remember anything else. The new day would have some answers.
She stood over her bow with affection. This was the first time she had killed a man, and she wasn't exactly sure how to feel. In some ways it hadn't felt real, the man who lay at her feet didn't bleed right, so in some ways it wasn't as real as the blood that flowed from the felynx's throat. That was real, that was something she could taste, something she could carry back to the village, but there was no more village, and here she was, alone in a cave, knowing she couldn't go back but not knowing where to go from here. The unnatural lights blinking at her within the cave held the secrets to her future, and to some extent her past, so she rejected her impulse to destroy them.
So I went back on the road. Cruising again at a few hundred miles per hour on my 5-pound nanocycle. Thinking about what had happened should have frightened me, in the classical sense, but I was more interested than ever, knowing fully that what I would find would begin with my dead body.
And there it was, I stood over it with a sense of pride, I'm not sure why. A girl tall, with purpose, and beauty steadied her bow against me.
"You can put that down, I will not hurt you, and by now you should know that nothing you could do would hurt me."
"You must be a god," she said and lowered her bow.
"Closer than you should think," I kicked aside the already decaying corpse beside me. "Not a god as you would think, but instead a god of your gods, not that I'm all that proud of the fact." I sat down in my chair at the terminal that held the secrets of this girl's world. I knew who she was of course; I'd been studying her civilization for over 200 years.
"I don't understand this place," she said and sat beside me, in a manner that seemed only natural, in a chair that hadn't been occupied in over a hundred years, since the last of my colleagues left for more interesting studies.
"Katok," I said, for effect only, and immediately regretted the obviously manipulative reason why I said it. A sense of power, I felt I needed, based solely on the fact that I was dealing with someone who had recently murdered me.
"You know of the ways of the Great Ones?"
"I wrote them," again, manipulative, I felt bad for that, but I had to make sure she didn't kill me again, that would have been inconvenient.
"I don't understand."
"Of course not, one thing that we had been studying is the effects of a primitive society on a brain that for all intents and purposes is the same as the brains that we have in our heads," I tapped my newly regenerated noggin for effect. "What we discovered very early on is that a primitive society without the benefits of technology or science will fall into the basic patterns of primitive religion, no matter how impractical or irrational the ideas of that religion are. The fact that the generational patterns of your society stuck with the idea that only one generation every 17 years is the way of the Great Ones, that turned out to be stroke of luck for us. Previous experiments had to be terminated after a few generations because the groups grew too big too fast, and we can't have all sorts of new indigenous people all over the place."
"All of this is strange to me," Alexandria twirled her brown hair around the blade of her knife, "I understand what an experiment is, but I don't know why the Great Ones would convince us to conceive as we do."
"There are no Great Ones, Alexandria; your Great Book, was written by me and my colleagues over 200 hundred years ago, back when your totems were clean of tar, in fact I helped put them there myself. Your village is nothing but an experiment carried out to study what it was my society had lost, its primitiveness, its mortality, and its innocence. The experiment was a success, although disappointing that no culture arose out of it. Only the remnants of a dogma that was written down, for the most part on a cocktail napkin, but nothing original, just blind devotion to something that came from my fairly non-creative mind."
" What of Katok? Its discipline and focus has made me who I am. It is I and I am it. I am nothing without it."
"Nothing but an allegory I came up with which came out of an unfortunate incident in my life. I had to kill myself once, I don't really like to talk about it though."
"What will happen at the ends of the totems?"
Her question gave me pause; that was the last great mystery of the experiment, what would happen when they tarred the last totem? What would happen when the generational cycle reached it's conclusion. I had my theories, but wasn't sure how it would all pan out.
"I don't know."
"Why have you told me all of this?" She seemed unaffected by the experience of meeting her maker. She was only the second person who had left the village, obviously a woman of strength and curiosity.
"I don't know that either, I suppose to help you understand what is going on, and I guess I just assumed that since you left, you won't be going back. You've now learned the secret of your origin, something that my people have never been able to find. In a way I'm providing you with the enlightenment that my people have been searching for all our existence. What you do with it is up to you. You can come with me and I can show you the real world."
"Do I have a choice?"
"It seems that in leaving your society you were looking for something. I presume that you found it."
-Part 3 The Neighbors
I unpacked my nano-cycle, initiated a couple of mods and stood back. Instantly a million nano-bots went to work, altering the shape and size of my bike into my jet-black miracle. It took the shape of a 1978 Camaro, with all the extras. With the dawn of nanotech in the early 21st century all work was done to make things better, and little was done to create things new. Creativity lost to science, and artistry lost to process. In a way I always took comfort in this, and to some extent so did the rest of mankind. On our road to immortality we did become nostalgic, and created a world for ourselves not much different than the world we left behind.
"Get in," I said, and started the engine, 8 cylinders of Detroit's finest ever creation. A 5.7-liter engine, with my mods, capable of 350 miles per hour, 0-60 in 2.7 seconds, like I said, we now excelled on improvements. And the whole thing weighed 17 pounds. Alexandria wasn't impressed; I'm not sure why I thought she would be. Yet again, a holdover of an age long lost, or just a result of too many fantasy trips with women with big hair and airbrushed jean jackets in QUASI.
We drove into the city, I was expecting her to be impressed, as I made the roof transparent so she could get a good look. Thousands of high-rise buildings passed in silence.
"Where are all the people?" she asked, and her question seemed odd to me.
"They're inside."
"Why? It's a beautiful day, right?"
"Is it?"
We got to my building, and I parked on the side of the road, switching off the mods to my nano-Camaro and causing it to fold back up into my backpack. Still no people, I was hoping some of the Nostalgics would be out, but they weren't. The streets were dead, it was something I hadn't noticed before, but they were always like this.
"People live in all of these buildings?" Alexandria looked up and pointed, the towers stretched for miles, made of indestructible nanotubes, these buildings would stand forever.
"Yes," I said, "all of humanity, everyone who lives, lives in one of these buildings."
"This is the only city?"
"No, there are others, but they are backups. On the off chance that something may happen here, we are redundant in other cities."
"Do they live also?"
I hadn't thought of that before. "I doubt it," I said, "they are there only if our backup system here fails. I don't see why they should live."
"I don't see why they shouldn't," she said.
"Would you like a tour of the city?" We walked, and I showed her what sites there where, which it turned out weren't many. It had been centuries since I'd walked these streets, and it turned out, there wasn't much to see, on a block-by-block basis. This would have been a whole lot easier to show in QUASI, but I didn't want to submit Alexandria to implantation surgery until I was sure that she would stay. We passed no one.
"I still don't understand where all of the people are."
"People don't need to leave their apartments. They are connected to the entire world in QUASI, and all of their functions are taken care of by nanobots."
"They don't need to eat?"
"Well, no. They can, for hedonistic pleasures, eat. Last week I had lunch my father, we had BLTs and French fries and vanilla milk shakes, but none of that was necessary for survival, I'm like the Nostalgics in that way, I do still like to eat, even though my eschatological systems are taken care of by nanobots."
"I don't understand what these nanobots are, and your city amazes me, but I still don't understand where all the people are. Can I meet some of the people of your city?"
We went inside my building, door after door, numbers rose, and we went inside my apartment. A 15-foot by 15 foot box, with no window, no furniture except for my CHAIR. Again we saw no one on our way through the building.
"Are you friends with your neighbors?"
"Actually, I don't know any of my neighbors, I've never met any of them."
"How long have you lived here."
"I moved into this apartment about 350 years ago."
"I want to meet your neighbors," she sulked around my apartment touching various artifacts, like books and a candle.
"Well, let's see if they're·home."
We walked over to the next-door neighbor's apartment; I knocked at the door knowing there would be no answer. I followed that action by turning the knob on the door, which clicked, open. I felt an odd feeling, a holdover from the days when you didn't cross the threshold of another person's house without their permission.
She immediately saw the bloody sack of gore and brain that was connected cyborganically to the deck.
"What is that?"
"That's my neighbor," I went and poked the sack for effect, or maybe because I had always wanted to.
"But that's·disgusting," Alexandria was unable to comprehend the purpose.
"Wetware," I said, a little grossed out myself, "the human experience and all data from our lives can be uploaded into the mainframe in order to maintain our being, but in order to process the integration of humanity into QUASI you need the wetware. For all of our technology we could never create a processor as complex and effective as the human brain. The limit of the processor was reached by the effect of electron tunneling in the circuits, Moore's Law died, and we realized that the brain defied the limit of electron tunneling. So nanobots maintain the wetware in order to process the individual's upload into QUASI. Maintaining the environment is easy, it's not nearly as complex as defining the human experience." I was losing her, I knew it, but I didn't know what else to say at that point.
The speed at which she reached to her side to throw her knife at the bubbling sack of flesh that was my neighbor was only surpassed by the speed at which I grabbed her arm, the knife fluttering off into the corner. She attempted to flip me with a parata, but I countered, and dropped her on her back.
"How do you know katok?" she was stunned, but I grabbed her by the back of the neck and stood her up.
"I invented it, actually I wrote the program into QUASI way back in grad school. It was a big hit among the first QUASI-gamers. Pretty much anyone you would come across will know the basics, of course, you'd have to go into QUASI to find a sparring partner," I poked my neighbor again, the life squirming beneath the organic meniscus creeped me out. "We'd better leave him alone." I led Alexandria out of the room; she held her wrist.
"How did you do that? I'm the best in my class. No one but Braaron can take me down."
"Now I can, let it go. Don't you get what is going on here?"
I could tell by the look in her face that the strong warrior woman-child was cracking. Her reality had crumbled beneath her, a world that she begged to leave; it's constraints and rules imprisoning the desire and imagination scorching inside her. Now it called her back, my world didn't fit into her reality, or her dreams for a better reality. The only question it seemed was, what would become of the world she had left behind? A question that I had waited five hundred years to see answered.
"It doesn't matter. What's here doesn't matter to you now. We have to go back."
"Where?"
"Your village. The research station, we have to go back."
"I can't go back. I· I· desecrated a totem. I shot an arrow through it, and that's why I left. I'm sure they've found it by now, and they certainly know that I've left. Anyone who leaves is not welcome back, that is stated in Great Book."
"To hell with your Great Book, I wrote it, and I know you haven't read it."
"But I was to read it, at the time of Conception. When I became an adult, if I were to take my husband and we were to conceive, then I would be allowed to read the Great Book."
"It's nothing, I wrote most of it when I was drunk; pseudo-philosophical babble that basically created a guideline so that no one would leave the village, to maintain the integrity of the experiment. The Time of Breeding, and seventeen years between generations was only there to curb the overpopulation that marred previous experiments, to prevent the unfortunate ethical decision that inevitably came when the experiment was ultimately terminated."
The concept of her existence as experiment didn't sink in; she withdrew and leaned up against the hallway wall. A wave of shock, or relaxation came over her, and she even allowed me to hold her arm and lead her down the hall.
When we got outside and I pulled my nanocycle out of my backpack, she turned and looked at me, vacant and alone, "I never cared about the Great Book, I knew it wouldn't matter. That's why I wanted to leave, but not for this, this city is dead, there is no one here. You say you've lived for over 500 years, but for what? I don't want to go back to those people, they're ignorant and misguided, but I don't want to stay here. My purpose in life was to marry and conceive and I don't want that, but now I don't know what to do. I don't want to go back, but tomorrow they paint the last Totem, and I've always wondered what our creed, 'to the ends of the Totems," meant. Is this the last generation? What will become of my village?"
"I don't know," I didn't, I had never expected the experiment to make it this long. "That's why we have to go back."
-Part 4 Return
We saw the smoke coming over the ridge, Alexandria in the sidecar that grew out of my nanocycle. When we reached the top of the hill it was easy to see the destruction, the village ablaze. We dismounted and entered the village, the smell of canvas burning; we couldn't get close enough to any of the huts to see who was inside. Did they all perish in their homes, victims of a religious delusion that I created?
We went around to the totem poles; all of them had the thirteenth totem coated in slick black tar. We heard a sound in the background but even Alexandria didn't react, a flinch, maybe. A chubby kid came out from the outside of a burning hut.
"Louis?" Alexandria dropped her bow and ran up to him, apparently contemplating a hug but thought better of it.
"Alex, everyone's dead."
"Louis? What happened?
"At the end of the mating they painted the last totem, and, they all went away, they went home and started the fires."
"Why didn't you?"
"I didn't have a mate. You were supposed to be- they banished me. I left and came back, but everyone was gone. Who is he? What are you doing here?"
"Louis, the world is not what you think it is. The village, it isn't the world as we were taught it was." I saw what she was thinking, this boy, she pitied but didn't care so much about.
"I don't know what you're talking about, I don't know what happened, I left, and when I came back, everyone was gone."
The knife was in his throat quicker than I could have even thought of a reason. Alexandria pulled it across his throat and flesh dropped at my feet. It was the only time that I had seen death in reality, I had seen it a million times in QUASI, but it was different this way, the color off, the smell, not even close, the way the dirt steamed.
"What did you do?"
"I don't want him to know what I know."
"But you killed him."
"You killed all of them," she turned to me knife drawn, still dripping with Louis' blood.
"What are you doing?"
"Katok."
"You're not serious."
"Want to find out?"
We squared off, and circled each other for what seemed like eternity. I didn't dare make a move, and then a heard a sound, her horse and she didn't even react, she just moved to her left and hopped on the horse.
"The thing I learned is that nothing can come from Katok but death. I know there are others and I will find them."
She rode off, and I returned to my city. Vacant, alone, but it was my home. I loaded up the apple cobbler program and enjoyed a dinner with my mom. After dinner I contemplated what happened at the village and I had a strange sensation that I didn't quite recognize, regret, guilt? Those words came to mind but I was unable to understand their meaning. I worked on my final report on the experiment, and filed it for other researchers to look at, but it had been so long since any of my original colleagues had been interested in the experiment that I wasn't sure if anyone would ever read it.
As time went on I thought about Alexandria and wondered if I would ever run into her sometime, but then again, I don't go out much anymore.
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