Behold a Dark Mirror (39 page)

Destroying ConSEnt will live with me,
his reason asserted.  Fighting a compulsion to visit Valhalla with as many assassins as possible, Nero disappeared.

CHAPTER 46

Nero entered the lab with a slow gait.  Terry and Rebecca stopped talking.  Nero was pale and sported dark rings around his eyes.  He took a chair and sat at the table where Jenus and Primus had once toiled and succeeded.

"How are you?"  Rebecca said.

He ignored her.  "We've been looking at this from the wrong angle," Nero whispered.  "We've tried to beat ConSEnt at its own game;  how could we hope to succeed?  What good is it to suffer all the pain, when ConSEnt doesn't even flinch?"

"The issue is power, Nero.  Freedom.  Not our pain," Rebecca said.

"I'm flesh and bones, not a robot," Nero said, "and so was Kebe."  He slammed his fists on the table.  "Pain matters!"

"We're losing—we've lost," Rebecca said.

"Nero—are we giving up?"  Terry said.

"We're about to win," Nero smiled wickedly.  "Life is exponentially complex, and we can control the root of complexity."

"What?"  Terry said.

"Are you sure you want to hear it?  It’s ugly."

"Try me—us," Rebecca said.

"When you solve a problem, the solution creates side effects."  Nero paused, looking at nothing.  "We attack ConSEnt, and people die."

Terry drew his eyelids to a slit.  Rebecca crossed her arms and laid her elbows on the table.

"We've been attacking the problem directly.  We failed because we're puny.  We're a blood fly on the back of an elephant.  We'll blow up sucking its blood, and it won't even know we tried to kill it:  we're on the wrong side of complexity—we're downstream of our problem.  We're reacting to ConSEnt.  Our ripples, the effects of our actions, move with the flow away from our target."

"You're speaking in riddles, Nero," said Rebecca.

"Life is exponentially complex."  He said again with a manic look.  "Life is made of simple interactions of many simple things, and the interactions of those interactions, and so on.  Instead of being the victims of complexity, we must take advantage of it.  If we hit upstream of ConSEnt, complexity will work for us and wipe ConSEnt away.  The side effects will work for us.  Primus just told me that."

"You're delirious," Terry said, "Primus is dead!"

"No, he’s not!"  Nero stood up.  "I'm hurting, I'm sleepless, my heart is broken, but I can see now what we need to do.  Look at what we've accomplished so far:  nothing!  Nothing but pain!"  He sat down, sobbing.

Rebecca dried a tear streaking down her cheek.

When Nero's sobs ended he dried his eyes.  "ConSEnt is unbeatable.  It'll be a millennial empire if we don't stop it now.  We can't beat ConSEnt at its own game, but I know how we
can
beat it.  We must make it so that ConSEnt will be in the way of something so important...  We must create something more frightening than fighting ConSEnt.  Then, people will destroy ConSEnt for us."  A cherubic expression appeared on his face.  "We must hit at the root of complexity."

"What can be more frightening than fighting ConSEnt?" Terry said.

"Fear... Perpetual fear of a guaranteed painful death."

"What?"  Rebecca said.

"We've had the solution under our nose for a long time, but we've never been willing to see it."  Nero paused.

"What do you plan to do?  Nero, this is no time for games," Terry said.

"This will be the end of ConSEnt—the dream lives," said Nero.  He laid his forearms on the table, dropping his head on the crook of his elbow.  He continued speaking, his words muffled:  "I can't do it by myself, but we have the weapons."  He raised his head, staring straight into Rebecca's eyes:  "Primus has them."

Rebecca fidgeted.  "What do you mean?"

Nero stood up:  "We'll take the Ghosts to Earth."

Terry gasped;  Rebecca covered her mouth with both her hand.

"And then, if necessary, to all the colonies.  Are you with me, Rebecca?"

She stood silent for a long while, playing with the cuffs of her sleeves and the buttons of her sweater, her eyes looking at the floor, then at the ceiling. 

"This is what you mean," she said, looking at her fingers, which she was twisting together.  "ConSEnt will stand between each man, woman and child and their catjuice—their hope of survival.  Many will die of the foams, more will die taking catjuice, and even more under the guns of ConSEnt.  There'll be a revolution."  Rebecca shook her head.  "My God." she said.  "My God;  but what else?"

"Wait a minute!"  Terry said.  "This is genocide."

"No, Terry," Rebecca answered.  "Our purpose is not to exterminate a race.  Our purpose is to remove a millennial dynasty of tyrants."

"But the cost!"

Rebecca said,  "There’s a terrible price to pay in war."

"I don't think I can..."

"Pretend we don't do it," Rebecca said.  "Pretend ConSEnt reigns.  What do you imagine they'll do?  There won't be a challenge to ConSEnt for centuries.  ConSEnt will enforce a police rule like mankind has never seen, Terry. "

Terry dropped his head on the table.  Nero looked down.

"You're right, Rebecca.  But I can’t bear this responsibility," Terry said.

Rebecca bit her lip, as if searching her soul to answer Terry's plea for help.  Nero was silent—his well had dried up.

"The liberty of mankind can't rest on somebody's idea of condescension, Terry," Rebecca said.  "Striking a pact with the Devil is the wrong way to look for freedom, because your own destiny does not belong to you anymore.  Life is left hanging from the strings of a puppeteer:  only condescension remains.  Your freedom will be to do what the Devil allows you to.  Before you know it, others will be making choices on your behalf that they should never make.  They'll teach as good to you and to your children what
they
think is good.  They'll force themselves into your life, and..."

Rebecca gazed up into the void underneath the ceiling, taking an interminable pause.  She swallowed.  "When, and if, you find happiness you won't be able to keep it.  That, Terry, is a hell that's not worth living:  when you are compelled to let others make your decisions, or to put your agency up in exchange for a convenient lie or a promise of security.  My burden will be lighter if I know I've worked towards a better future, even if I have to live with the guilt of...  The cost may be my life, or my soul, but I'll pay."  Rebecca stared at Terry.  "No one can truly live, Terry, fearing death more than anything.  Death, mine or others', is the ransom of our future.  We can choose either way tonight, Terry.  Innocent people will die regardless of our choice.  We're only choosing why they will die;  this is the responsibility that we face:  to make their death meaningful or useless."

Nero looked at Rebecca, drew her hands and rested his head on her fingers.  Rebecca felt his wet cheek on her knuckles.

"I'll help," Terry said.

"Primus will help, too,"  Nero murmured.

EPILOGUE

United News Agency

Syndicated Pearls

Dark Future, Bright Hopes

By UNA Earth Staff

This generation has witnessed the demise of Power Sharing, an empire rising, the advent of a plague of proportions unprecedented since perhaps the Black Death, the bloodiest revolution in the history of mankind, and the birth of a genetically enhanced mutation of man with powers believed impossible.

Some mourn the loss of Power Sharing, wretched as the Tower's embodiment of its principles may have been.  Few cry for the fate of ConSEnt, poised in its arrogance to become the millennial kingdom and now disbanded, its officers lynched or living in hiding.  All of us lament and grieve the loss of relatives and friends to the plague or to the carnage of the uprising.  The survivors are now coping with autogenic teleportation—which leaves us with a difficult question:  What are we to do with it?

Understanding ATP will take decades, generations.  There's no telling what the society of mankind will look like once the dust settles.  ATP is giving us a clean slate to start writing a future where many of the rules of past centuries no longer apply.

These are momentous times.

Here at UNA, we expect that chaos will reign for a while.  Nobody dares guess what the future will look like afterward, not even in the broadest perspective.  Will society even exist?  Will it be horror, utopia or—more likely—something in between?  On one thing, though, we agree:  Whatever happens won't be worse than an empire of ConSEnt.

White speckles crested the waters of the Great Northern Lake of Virgil.  Wavelets lapped beach pebbles, retreated, sloshed.  In the distance, snow-dusted peaks towered above vast forests filled with strange trees.  A chilly wind swept the water—the weak warmth of sunlight did not break its shivering embrace at this latitude.  Nero closed his eyes.  The lullaby of the waves evoked memories of an earth long gone.

He reopened his eyes, filling them with the grandeur of Virgil's northern latitudes.  Nero looked toward his own cottage on the shore of the lake.  Smoke was rising from the chimney out into the blue sky.  Sitting at a coarse wooden table, he continued writing:

"The understanding of death has become real to me;  the imminence of afterlife shadows my awareness.  Like a giant vacuum, the thought of death catches my secular concerns in a whirlwind and hurls them away, leaving behind a naked man staring at a naked life.  Anguish before the void comes of that emptiness, filled by my lost and regained natural affections, and by faith.

Not gold, not glory, but love of man and God can challenge the chasm between here and there:  I've  found Margo's golden book.  Death is not the oblivion from pain I desired long ago.  I realize now Death is transcendence.

Engaging my enemy revealed my enemy;  understanding transcendence is revelation.  The mind is lost against an immeasurable barrier when the impact of reason rams through an open door.  The heart sorrows indulging in emotions, it feels about feelings and is caught so that recovery—understanding—must be supernatural.

Margo taught me to love.  Kebe taught me to pray.  I pray to defeat the vanity of a naked life.  Fighting darkness in the darkness hides the truth.  Fighting darkness with love hides the pain.  But light is not in darkness, except when revealed.

Margo, I've vindicated you—you've given me another life, another death, like you'd have if I'd allowed you to live. Kebe, your dream has become reality."

In the distance, a woman appeared at the door of the log cottage, banging a spoon on the bottom of a large pan.  "Dinner is ready!"  She cried.

"Rebecca is pregnant.  It's a baby girl.  She'll be called Hope, and we'll tell her this story.  She'll never be afraid, like I was, to look in a dark mirror."

Nero closed the book and walked home.

The End