‘Put that away,’ Zero rejected the proffered contact glove; he actually did feel a bit sick, not from touching someone else’s skin but from the awful feeling that on his own forehead, if he touched it, he would feel exactly the same scar.
‘Who did this to you?’ the Wise One asked, grasping Healer’s hot face in his hands.
‘Did what?’ Healer frowned in disgust and broke free from Zero’s arms.
‘The operation. The scar.’
‘What, a scar?’ Healer absent-mindedly touched his forehead with his fingers. ‘I hadn’t even noticed… When I was a kid probably, I had a bad fall…’
‘Uh-huh, you fell.’ For some reason the assistant was overjoyed and whispered, tripping over his words, into the Wise One’s ear: ‘They say they do it in the clinics at Psychological Assistance… An experimental technique… Personally I’ve never come across it before in first layer, but I read, I read that… hang on I’ll find it in my bookmarks… Aha, right. An operation to streamline the socio slot and partially erase pathological memory clusters, in conjunction with the pinpointed superimposition of false memories, can give fantastic results in the case of severe dementia, manic depressive psychoses and schiz…’
‘Gopz!’ Zero interrupted him halfway through the word. ‘You can both gopz! In my show… there won’t be…’
you are a troll too wise one
He wanted to say something else, maybe about trolling, which was unacceptable, about talking puppets which he would not tolerate on his show, but a wave of nausea rolled up to his throat, gluing all his words into a bitter, stinking lump. The Wise One tore the microphone off with wooden fingers and rushed out of the studio.
‘No death,’ Healer said politely to his back. ‘I’m glad that you invited me here. I hope the viewers will like the show…’
Zero groaned and bent over the bath again in a dry, pointless spasm. There was nothing in him, not even foamy yellow bile, and he dry-heaved. When it had passed, the Wise One splashed his face with cold water. Then he pushed his whole head under the stream of water and started using his nails to scratch his inflamed skin, which was covered in painful goosebumps – but carefully, only on the top of his head and behind his ears, so the larvae wouldn’t be washed off from the inside of his elbows… He tensed up again and it was as if his tongue had swollen up in his throat, but this time the urge was not as strong. The Wise One gave a deep sigh. Now it’s going to get much better. It’s going to pass any minute now, I’ve taken a good dose… Three white ones on the left and three black ones on the right, a triple BW… It really was getting better. Not straightening up, feeling about with his hand, he ripped the towel from the hook. He rinsed his hair and wound the towel around his forehead right down by his eyebrows. He looked at himself in the mirror, which was smeared with cloudy splashes.
‘Hi, you nobody, no death!’ he said to his reflection. ‘Well, go on, what have you got there, show us. Let’s have a look at what you’ve got there under that towel?’
‘No, don’t look…’
we will be you are a troll and i am a troll and our kids will be trolls
So what? It would all be so simple, yes, it would explain everything. A tiny little scar on the forehead – it would explain the last year. It would explain all the ready-made phrases rolling off his tongue on Who Still Does Not Agree, it would explain
the letters of happiness – are dissident plots.
how dare you attribute those words to me?
It would explain
do you, rosa, mother of mark, admit that you are a dissident
It would explain
in the name of the living i sentence you to a pause of shame…
It would explain
see you after the break! this is the wise one and you’re watching
That little pink worm would explain the Wise One’s childlike smile.
The wisdom of the Wise One.
The intransigence of the Wise One.
The cruelty of the Wise One.
It would explain the Wise One’s success as a showman.
It would explain how they made the Wise One into a puppet. Into a miraculous troll, swinging in a murky, forgetful mirage on his carousel…
All it takes is an operation to streamline the socio slot… hang on a minute… hang on a minute! But I’m not connected…! really? ‘Is that what you think?’ – his double swayed drunkenly there in the mirror – ‘But maybe you just don’t remember? Because, you know, trolls often don’t remember important things… Partially erase pathological memory clusters plus false memories… Think, is it really possible that the Wise One would not be connected?’
‘I am connected but through an external socio slot and only in second layer…’
‘Yes, of course, through the Crystal. But what if that is self-deception…?’
False memories and false perception…
‘…Where are you getting this idea from that the Crystal is not inside, but outside…?’
Nonsense, nonsense… That’s all just the venom, the bakugan haze, too big a hit…
‘What’s that, Wise One, you have to love the bakugans, the bakugans are our friends! Look how they are swaying you right now, taking pity on you, keeping you warm…’
The walls suddenly shifted, the BW cradle started rocking.
‘Let’s fly, troll.’ His pale double held out his hands to him. ‘Let’s you and I take a breather, die, suffocate… A triple dose! I’ve never flown like this before…!’
In the emptiness a sort of shadow hurried towards him. It crept up close, gave him a sniff and said:
‘No death, my friend.’
‘No death,’ Zero replied. ‘What, have I temporarily ceased?’
‘Why do you think that?’
‘Because I can see you.’
‘No, neither of us has ceased yet… Although you, it seems, are really trying.’ Cracker shook his fluffy yellow head in disapproval.
Actually, Cracker didn’t look exactly like Cracker. He had too many limbs, mouths and an extra eye on the back of his head. But the Wise One knew somehow that it was definitely him…
‘What is this place?’ Zero asked.
‘Let’s put it this way,’ the Cracker-like being scratched its big round belly thoughtfully. ‘It’s my personal inviz.’
‘Are you not going to be born anymore?’ Zero asked. ‘Are you not going to come back to me in first layer?’
‘Sorry,’ his friend said. ‘Maybe someday. But not right now.’
‘Why?’
‘You see, having a separate body only gets in my way. All that crap just takes up too much energy: digestion, respiration, excretion… A parasitic embryonic body is much more convenient, but even that is a burden at the end of the day: a heartbeat, this and that… But this stalled mode lets you preserve energy for action in socio. You can’t even imagine what I am capable of, now I don’t have a physical… By the way I broke into Isoptera today in luxury. Screwed the queen ten times in a row, without queuing… And at the same time I found out who she is in first layer. Do you want to know?’
‘Not particularly,’ the Wise One said honestly. ‘I saw the advert. I think it’s horrible.’
‘Well you’re right. What do you need with the queen, when you’ve got a wife like that… By the way, talking of horrible – you should be a bit more careful with those creatures. Six larvae at once – that could be a pausal dose! Though I’m glad you overdosed today. Otherwise we wouldn’t have met. But still, you can’t carry on like this…’
‘Tell me, Cracker,’ the Wise One touched the wet towel, which was still clinging to his forehead. ‘Tell me honestly: am I a troll?’
Cracker doubled over and started shaking slightly, covering his little round mouths with his many-fingered hands.
‘In a certain sense you are a troll,’ he said, once he had finished laughing. ‘Not in the sense you think, but in a technical sense… By the way, I can tell you as a specialist: a technical troll is no
t even capable of understanding or even having the idea that he is a troll. By default he has no doubt function.’
‘So I wasn’t given an operation?’
‘You weren’t my friend. And you don’t have an internal socio slot…’
‘Then why do I feel like a puppet?’
‘Because you are a puppet?’ his friend suggested and tittered into his hands again. ‘Alright, alright, don’t get annoyed. I will help you expose these puppet-masters. And fight the Monster…’
‘The Living is not a Monster. I don’t want to fight Him.’
‘Am I asking the puppet what it wants?’ the Cracker-like thing said in surprise. ‘Go back right now, take off that stupid towel and turn on your Crystal. And, you know what, I want you to pray.’
‘I don’t know how to pray!’
‘Give it a try, Wise One.’
The System
…Regaining consciousness was sore and difficult, as if he was flying and then fell. But this time it was from a much greater height than usual… He was lying curled up on his side, on the wet floor, shivering from cold. Bakugans were crawling over his face and back, dragging their hard, sharp wings across his skin, while one, the fattest, had slumped lazily on the floor beside him. Flipped over on its back, in a foul-smelling yellow puddle.
Gripping on to the side of the bath, the Wise One pulled himself up onto his feet. He shook the towel from his head – it fell on the beetle like a white shroud. He looked in the mirror. A clear forehead, with no scars on it. Where did he get the idea from that there should be a scar? After six larvae, anyway, he could have all sorts of hallucinations…
Swaying from lack of strength, he took a shower, drove the sluggish winged beetles off with the jet of water and drowned them in the bath. He crushed the one under the towel through the material with his foot and chucked it in the bin. A brownish-red stain was left on the towel.
His head was empty – but not in the same way as usual after a BW. The emptiness this time was not that soft, cosy ball of inviz which carousel would windup inside him, but a melancholy feeling that he had found out something important but forgotten it…
He put on what he had been wearing before – his presenter’s ‘feeling lucky’ gear, which reeked of sweat – and walked out of the bathroom. Cleo was in the living room. She was lying on the floor, staring intently at the ceiling – she was probably watching a show or writing something in her Living Journal. Scattered all around her were crumpled food wrappers, an open pack of tranqvitamins, an unliving squashed bakugan – half-transparent, halfway through a metamorphosis – and an empty bottle of vitacomplex… He could never cure her of this stupid habit of throwing rubbish on the floor and then going to sleep in the exact same place. ‘So what? Everyone does it.’ ‘So let’s just have everyone do whatever they want then!’ the Wise One said angrily. She didn’t even bother to understand why he was so annoyed by this lack of respect for first layer. For his layer.
Everyone might as well just do whatever they want. There, outside, beyond the Residence and the Wise One’s apartments. Let them lounge about on the soft, shaggy floors in their boring little first-layer boxes with their rounded edges, surrounded by sticky, springy, safety furniture, let them get fat and sleep, let them not wash for days, immersed in socio… That’s not how it is at the Wise One’s place. Here things are interesting. Here it’s all like it was in ancient times – hard wooden furniture and a hard parquet floor. He has little multi-coloured poufs to sit on. He has pictures on the walls – real ones, with congealed encrustations of oil paint which he’d commissioned: three landscapes (a wood, the sea and some mountains, the beauty of first layer), depictions of wild animals… He has a pianola – you can make sounds on it in first layer. He has a library – seven real paper books, which smell of decay and mould… But she didn’t care. She would go to sleep wherever she needed to on the hard floor or would move on to one of the poufs, if he reminded her. She never touched the pianola (why? I’ve got ‘Wonder-Composer’ installed), she didn’t look at the pictures, she never opened any of the paper books. She didn’t like the oak furniture – too many dangerous hard corners that gave her bruises (‘Look where you’re going, sweetheart!’ – ‘What, the whole time?!’)… In first layer she was only interested in the lab. Those termites of hers. It still wasn’t working with people, but the termites were giving amazing results – up to twelve immersions…
‘What are you doing?’ he asked, knowing full well that this question irritated her. Socio is private. Asking someone that question is no different from requesting the password to their inbox. But now her irritation suited him too – anything would. Anything that might somehow be able to silence this melancholic feeling that he had forgotten something.
‘I’m watching the Shameful Pauses,’ Cleo replied grudgingly. ‘That woman just ceased, Rosa…’
‘Let’s watch it together,’ he took the Crystal off sleep.
‘No, gopz!’ She squatted and gripped her knees with her arms. ‘It’s enough that you are here. And are you aware that watching the broadcasts of these pauses is now compulsory? Every day, for fifteen minutes, I have to see how they di…’
‘Cleo!’
‘How they die! What, don’t you like that word?’ Her voice broke into a shout. ‘It’s forbidden? But it fits very well. They are dying, suffocating, being killed in glass bell-jars! You don’t know what it feels like when they cease – that gopzing Crystal of yours only shows the pictures! But I’m there!’ She put her hands over her ears, as if she didn’t want to hear her own shouting. ‘Every day for fifteen minutes, with them! And I couldn’t care less about “good progress”!’
‘Stop shouting at me!’
She fell silent. She was sitting on her heels, rocking from side to side, her eyes closed and her hands pressed to her ears.
‘Sorry,’ Cleo said flatly. ‘Sorry that I lost it. It’s all the noise, it’s driving me crazy.’
‘What noise?’
‘Those beetles of yours, they’ve got this horrible low-frequency hum… Or that redecorating you’ve decided to have done for our non-existent Darling… Or… Don’t you hear it?’
He listened carefully.
‘Cleo, it’s quiet in this room. I always destroy the beetles after I… well, you know. And there is no redecorating happening yet. You just want to have something to blame me for.’
He turned away and sat at his Crystal, with his back to Cleo. He opened the System. His hands were shaking. His lips were shaking. She is being unfair. He is doing everything properly, wisely. He is doing his duty. He is helping the Living. He feels sorry for those Dissidents, but they are too dangerous to pardon. Only by harsh measures can they achieve good progress in the Living’s recovery from illness… Only by harsh measures…
but once he had known: the Living does not have enough love
He is doing everything properly.
because he is a puppet. Because he is a coward
Because that is how it must be. He stared at the System: the good progress was evident. Three or four scraps, one of which, in the middle, was his stalled friend… He was hit with a wave of melancholy. He had to remember something important, something really important…
….A humble, primordial, ancient desire suddenly arose – the desire to pray to someone about something. Not the Living, but someone else – someone who could protect them both, someone who had ruled this world long ago, before the Nativity.
‘Tremble for he cometh,’ the Wise One mumbled; he did not know any pre-Nativity prayers, only the snatches he had accidentally overheard from the madman Matthew. ‘Heavenly Three-headed God, thy will be done, thine twine swine…’
…CAUTION! SOMETHING IS ENDANGERING THE SYSTEM…
‘…I am wandering in the darkness, I do not know who I am or where I came from…’
…SYSTEM MALFUNCTION no. 2 IS LOADING IN VIEWING MODE…
…and forgive me my sins, for I am as a child…
…analys
ing data…
CURRENT NUMBER OF DOUBLE-INCODES: 567 TRIPLE-INCODES: 253
‘…Guide me, show me the way, for thine twine…’
…THE SYSTEM IS DETECTING UNCONTROLLED PROLIFERATION OF THE LIVING. THE METHOD OF ARTIFICIAL DESTRUCTION OF DOUBLES USING THE SERVICE FOR PLANETARY ORDER, WHICH WAS SUCCESSFULLY ADOPTED IN PREVIOUS CASES OF PROLIFERATION (40% 2nd c. AV, 70% 3rd c. AV, 20–30% 4th c. AV.), IS NOW INEFFECTIVE…
‘…Tremble for he cometh, for thine twine swine…’
…THE SYSTEM IS DETECTING A SERIOUS THREAT TO THE TRANQUILlITY, STABILITY AND INTEGRITY OF THE LIVING…
‘Fofs!’ Cleo sobbed, as she looked at the screen, at the crazed, swollen ‘little man’. ‘Fofs! What, is he – dying?’
But Zero did not reply. Because he could no longer hear her. Because the System had broken through the border of the screen and appeared to him. And it had let him in, like an ancient, pre-nativity temple would let in sinners and wandering holy fools.
The Revelation of the Wise One
in the Available Garden
Share this document with everyone.
My friends, we have been lied to. But today the time for truth has come. I have seen the System… Grieve with me! I am telling you in all honesty: I have seen the Darkness drawing near. The number of the Living has changed and continues to change day after day. Not all incodes are being reproduced in time, and some are not being reproduced at all. During reproduction others are doubled or even trebled…
From now on the System will reveal itself only to me. But I am telling you in all honesty: every day I will share it with everyone.
I can see the System… And I want you to see it too. You can read my New Commandments in the attachment.
1.
Henceforth the System is public property. Henceforth the System will be transparent for all.
The Living Page 30
