The Cupel Recruits (19 page)

“Chandra, there are three levels of our beings in The Cupel, and then the people that are first born there. We have people who have returned to reset, who usually have a higher task and purpose, though it is not known to them because they don’t have overt memory from here, then we have the order of the Janae, who may visit in pure soul form and actually weave and shape outcomes there. From here we can only influence, not actually weave. Lastly, we have the order of Kajika.” Saraceni explained.

“Walks without sound,” Enam translated the phrase. Saraceni turned toward him.

“Yes. The Kajika are given human bodies and live lives among the people in The Cupel, but they are not there for resetting and they retain their full memory. They help guide in a more overt way, as friends, coworkers, messengers,” Saraceni continued.

“So George wasn’t one of those Kajika because he didn’t remember who he was, what his assignment was?” Chandra sought to clarify.

“Yes. George was there to be reset. After a certain number of lives here, we are required to complete one cycle in The Cupel. It serves to cleanse our souls of certain buildups and reset our ability to upload the collected information at the end of a cycle here,” Saraceni explained.

“So every so often we have to go there and not know who we really are in order to keep our souls functioning properly.” Kyle added.

“Shouldn’t our souls work in a way that they don’t need to be forcibly reset?” Juliet said skeptically.

“And so they did,” Ruth clarified, “before The Cupel, but introducing that quantum subsystem introduced some additional complexities here, and that’s one of them. It is worth the tradeoff, I assure you.” Juliet said nothing further, but she wasn’t so sure. The Cupel sounded like a huge compromise to this world, the real Earth, and as far as she could see, the arguments against it were as strong as those for it.

“So these Kajika, if they know they are there for a reason, do we ever know it or are they always in stealth mode?” Jack asked.

“They are often quiet, unobtrusive individuals who go unnoticed. Occasionally their assignment is to directly teach,” Saraceni answered.

“For example?” Gabriel prodded.

“For example, Ghandi, Kant, DaVinci,” Kyle relayed proudly. Saraceni provided a slight warning look to proceed no further. Though accurate, these were not the examples he would have chosen.

“And the reset ones, they have missions and don’t know it, how do they ever succeed?” Jane asked.

“Each person’s soul guides them. We are preprogrammed. We don’t need a lot of guidance and cajoling to reach our destiny, just a clear path. If a soul has a particular talent, it will materialize over and over again, out of their very DNA. We help steer with our monitoring and influencing techniques, or the occasional assignment of a Kajika or Janae in very critical times, as you saw today, but you are speaking of less than one hundredth of one percent of all forward motion.” Saraceni answered.

“Like who, give me an example of that kind.” Juliet pressed.

“Galileo and Tesla, same person-reset through different lifetimes,” Gabriel turned to Stone.

“I thought you said that dark shadow after Phoebe was called a Janae? If Janae are people’s souls without bodies from here, why was it trying to harm her?” Saraceni jumped in, resuming his finesses for teaching which far outweighed the explanations Kyle and Stone had been trying to distribute.

“There are Dark Janae and Light Janae,” Saraceni began, “ The Light Janae are from our teams, for the most part, except for a few we see occasionally that seem to have no known origin.”

“They’re just there, but no one knows why?” Gabriel pursued

“Yes, but they are always helpful, so we do not mind or question their presence, but welcome it.” Saraceni responded.

“And the dark? Who sent them? And why didn’t they just go into Phoebe’s room to get her?” David Running Wolf had an eerie feeling even just asking the question. He had seen things like the shadow on the monitor in his dream-state and with his grandfather, a Shaman, as a boy. He once walked into a room where a baby had died and knew that it had just been there. Just seeing it again made the hair on his neck and arms stand up.

“We had protected that residence-they could not enter directly, so manipulated the men to achieve their end. As to who controls them, some are independent, so to speak. As you’ve seen from your soul maps, each soul is born with certain proclivities. Well, souls with a disproportionate amount of dark matter DNA are, by their very nature, driven to deconstruct rather than construct. Some of them don’t even know why they do it. Those are exactly the sort who became disruptive thinkers in our world and brought us to the edge of destruction.” Saraceni paused, taking a sip of water. He noticed how tired the group looked. They would need to begin mission training very soon and he had a fleeting thought of failure in looking at them before he continued. “Most of them, however, are aligned with a group with no name. We call their group collectively the Duister, and they are led by a man named Valswak. They have the same levels of operators as us-their Dark Janae operating without bodies, agents on the ground with memory and bodies, and then agents in bodies with no memory, but missions to destroy. They intercede into the system, marrying others only to destroy the family, starting unnecessary wars, leading others astray, committing abuses on children. Some are afflicted to a lesser extent and merely seek to undo what we have done, but they don’t hurt others proactively. They just lack any faith, or drive to serve the greater good, which is present in most people. They operate solely for themselves.”

“Their leader, why does he do it?” Juliet asked.

“Some would argue because he must, but I don’t believe that. I believe his choices led him to where he is now,” Saraceni responded.

“You know him,” Gabriel surmised. This was not a question.

“Yes. He was one of us, our friend and comrade,” Saraceni reported.

“What happened?” Gabriel asked.

“He never really agreed with The Cupel in the first place. He argued against it, but in the vote he lost, so he participated in the project teams on the original creation. He is a brilliant scientist and programmer. When we started having problem with The Cupel and realized we each had to do a cycle there to reset, he was furious. He said we were playing with fire and he knew we never should have built The Cupel.”

Juliet looked at the floor, exactly what she’d been thinking.

“But we had to go. The consequences here are dire if we don’t so he went. The problem was, when it was time for him to return here, he did not pass the minimum standards test to return, so he was brought to this holding area and advised he would have to do another cycle in The Cupel in order to return. He became furious and refused to go,” Saraceni continued.

“Wait, I thought for those of you here originally, you had screened for disruptive thinkers in the first place. How was he let in originally and then not back through?” Jack wondered.

“His choices. He made some questionable choices in his lifetime in the Cupel and tested at a level of morality below acceptable here by a small fraction. He barely passed the disruptive thinker test initially, but he did. And we all knew his level of brilliance came with a bit of eccentricity. He was our friend, so barely passing was still passing as far as we were concerned and we thought nothing further of it.”

Ruth interrupted, “In retrospect, had we been more advanced then, we would have put him on restricted duty and area assignment until he further proved himself, until we were sure.”

“Like quarantine,” Jack absorbed.

“Yes, that is why new recruits are separated for a time. Privileges must be earned, not freely given, plus you do need time to calibrate,” she responded.

“So, he refused to go back, then what?” Enam prompted, eager to get back to the story.

“After about a week here, he began to degrade physically without recalibration. Our council met and decided we would put his soul back into The Cupel, but provide him his own team of Kajika to guide him, and 24 hour a day monitoring. No one else had ever not been cleared to return,” Saraceni added.

Kyle interrupted, “or has since.”

“Or has since,” Saraceni agreed, “So, we knew we had to do all in our power to make sure to bring him home again. So, we reinserted him.”

“Little did we know, while he was here, he used the equipment and freed himself from all monitoring or guidance while in The Cupel, and made himself retain his memory, as if Kajika, when he was really a reset. So after he returned, we were unable to help him. He thought he could complete it himself, but he couldn’t. He viewed our reinserting him as a betrayal, as if we were not his friends. He thought the fact he only missed the test by a small margin that friends should allow a small margin of error.”

“Was he above the level of Chandra, or Jack, or Phoebe?” Juliet asked .

“ What?” Saraceni stepped back, off guard by the bluntness of her question.

“Was his test less than theirs? You’ve made exceptions in emergent times for some people to come here before they were really ready. Could you have done the same for him?” she asked. Everyone looked at her as if she were arguing pro-Hitler and she reacted.

“I’m not saying I agree with the guy, I just want to know if he had a point. You can’t fight an enemy you don’t understand,” she clarified.

“No,” Saraceni answered slowly, “his test was not less than theirs. By today’s standards for emergency situations only, he would have passed.”

“Those standards didn’t exist at the time,” Kyle defended, “we only relaxed them when it became a matter of life and death for everyone in both systems.”

“Right. When it was important to you, you made an exception, but when it was important to him, you did not,” Juliet concluded.

“It’s not so easy, Juliet,” Ruth leaned in, sitting right next to the woman, “The test picked up proclivities in him that are dangerous here. We will loosen standards on ability, or insight, but not on morality, that one is not flexible, and for good reason.”

“Which did play out; He came close the first few times, but with each cycle he became more and more bitter and farther and farther from passing. Now he is so opposite of what he once was. He decided if he couldn’t be here, he would prove all the errors in The Cupel that he claimed from the beginning: Ding all the chinks in the armor, pull at all the loose threads, just to prove he was right. He dedicates his time solely to being destructive, destroying the environment and recruiting others to do the same.”

“But you made him like that! You had someone who was basically good, but a little conflicted, and instead of helping him, you kicked him aside and let him slide into being wholly evil and self-loathing,” Juliet accused.

“We didn’t! We were going to help him! He just cut all ties to our help and then chastised us for his decision.”

“Because he didn’t think he could trust you. I wouldn’t go in there with ties on me in that situation,” Juliet added.

“Juliet-” Gabriel gently grabbed her arm in brotherly fashion, “If you were going to die unless you reentered The Cupel, you’re saying you wouldn’t trust us to monitor and guide you, if that’s what was needed?” He motioned to the rest of Molior.

“Or me?” Wood added, bolstering the argument. Juliet stood in pensive contemplation, on the edge of her answers. Ruth made a note on a chart and knitted her brow slightly.

“Well, if it was you guys,” Juliet peeled back each word one at a time, “but, I haven’t had a reason to mistrust you guys. If you had ignored me, or not listened to me, or if it were them instead,” she motioned to Stone and Saraceni, “I can’t say for sure.”

“Hindsight is perfect, “Saraceni concluded, “and I personally will wonder until the end of time if I had handled it differently if things might have been different, but it is moot now. He is so far beyond redemption there is no hope for him now.”

Chandra was vexed by this, “Aren’t we all allowed redemption? Isn’t there always a chance-no matter what?” she asked.

“Alexander!” Saraceni prompted, jolting Alexander Aquila to attention from the intent listener he had been, “Does energy always have potential?” Alexander thought for a moment.

“Well, conservation of energy says it is always preserved, but that doesn’t mean it is potential energy in every case.”

“Right,” Saraceni was a bit more forceful than usual, “and when dark energy becomes too destructive, where its destructive potential is hundreds of times greater than any constructive use, that dark energy is just cast out into the universe, with no potential to be born. It just is.”

“So, if people go through so many cycles and don’t progress, you cut them loose?” Juliet pressed.

“Not if they are not destructive,” Ruth added quickly. “ If they just fail to progress, then they won’t be born here, but can continue to exist in The Cupel quite comfortably, just as organic, just as real, just no upper-level soul development.” Juliet stared at Ruth coolly, expecting her next sentence.

“If, however, they are actively destructive for multiple cycles and can’t progress, then their energy is relegated outside of an organic body and their destructive influence not empowered any more than it has under its own existence. Regular dark matter is required to maintain balance. They are necessary.”

“The Dark Janae?” Gabriel asked.