Agent of Equilibrium

by N. J. Mercer

  Whoever Boyd was, Johnny knew they owed him a lot. He was the reason they were still alive. His faith in the new man was enough to put any doubts in Sascha’s mind to rest; over the years, Sascha had learned to trust his friend’s instincts and judgement. The pair spent the next half an hour speculating on Boyd’s identity, suggesting every possibility from a fellow Agent of the Equilibrium all the way through to a demonic entity sent to lure them to some hellish end. Their stream of increasingly improbable ideas was halted by a groan from Baccharus. Sascha unfastened his belt and tended to the sick familiar, dribbling some water into his mouth from a glass. Baccharus was able to swallow and even managed to moan for some more of the fluid; he was recovering well. Sascha returned to his seat and informed Johnny of his familiar’s progress, it was welcome news. Johnny understood that Baccharus would return to health quickly and more completely than any earthly life-form, durability was an important element of the familiar fabrication process. With this thought in mind, Johnny drove on, ignoring the tiredness that was setting in.

  “You know what’s been troubling me all this time?” Sascha asked a few minutes later. “How did they know?”

  Johnny had been unsuccessfully trying to work out the answer to this one himself. How could the Disciples of Disorder have even known of their existence, let alone have found them?

  “I don’t know. I was hoping you might be able to work it out,” was all he could offer.

  This prompted them both to discuss the matter at length. They couldn’t reach a convincing conclusion and their suggestions were progressively making less and less sense.

  “You know what? I can’t even think straight right now. Just stick some tunes on and we’ll find a place to stop soon,” said Johnny eventually. They agreed to let the matter lie … for now.

  Johnny drove for another half an hour with heavy metal blaring out of the speakers; the energy of the music kept him fired up. It was almost three a.m. The motorway was largely devoid of cars, and the motorhome slipped quickly between the overnight haulage lorries that dominated the tarmac at this hour; it had been a long, taxing day. Johnny remained vigilant at the steering wheel. He frequently looked into the mirrors to check on Boyd before casting his eye cautiously beyond the man on the motorbike to search the road for any hostile vehicles that might be following them, always grateful when none were apparent. Much to Johnny’s envy, Sascha had fallen asleep. He wondered how Boyd managed to maintain his concentration as he rode. Here in the motorhome, loud music and having Sascha for company (when he was awake) kept him going – Boyd was riding alone without the benefit of either.

  By the time Johnny considered stopping for the night, the group had crossed the border into Scotland and left the motorway. Travel was now along A-roads and dual carriageways. Parking bays and lay-bys mainly used by hauliers lined their route. Johnny started to look for one in which they could camp discreetly for the rest of the night. He used his mobile phone to call Boyd on his earpiece to warn him they would be stopping soon. Eventually, the route ran through a section of heavy woodland, and it was here that Johnny rolled down the window and gestured that he would be turning off the road; they were about thirty miles away from Glasgow. He followed one of the large, blue parking signs to a lay-by, the far end of which was sheltered by overhanging trees that provided cover from prying eyes; Johnny hoped Boyd’s amulet would protect them from psychic detection, just as he had assured them it would.

  The motorbike had been travelling close to the motorhome throughout the journey and parked beside it. As Boyd stepped off his machine and stretched his legs, Sascha, awake again, opened the side door of the larger vehicle and invited the biker in for the night, apologising for the lack of space. Boyd told him not to worry and explained how his past life had taken him to the extremes of hardship in different war zones; he was used to roughing it, so being offered a bed for the night was actually a welcome luxury. He entered with the luggage from his motorbike and stretched to loosen joints stiffened through hours of riding. Sascha familiarised Boyd with the vehicle’s interior while Johnny ensured Baccharus was comfortable. There was an entry and exit wound in the familiar’s shoulder, indicating that there was no bullet lodged inside the body; Johnny was grateful as he didn’t relish the prospect of digging around for it, especially at this hour. The cherub’s accelerated metabolism had already shrunk the wound to less than half its original size. Johnny left the little creature on the seat, wrapped in a blanket, his attention moved back to his two other companions, one old, one new. Boyd had spotted the homemade electronic devices on the dashboard; soon, he and Sascha were chatting animatedly about the function and design of the gadgets, covering esoteric subjects such as Presarium lore and psychokinesis. Johnny noted once again the ease and familiarity with which Boyd was able to talk about matters psychic, matters the average person would have been ignorant of or, at best, sceptical about.

  Before retiring, they all sat around the dining table to sip cold drinks; tiredness had given them pale and drawn faces. Johnny knew that it would be impossible for them to rest for the night without knowing something about who the other was and why they were here. An anticipatory silence had fallen around the table. Johnny spoke first.

  “Thanks for saving our skins back there, Boyd; we all owe you one. Not many people, in fact absolutely nobody I know, would have been able to deal with those two back there.”

  “Yeah, what was that stone?” Sascha asked, curious as ever, referring to the projectile Boyd had used earlier.

  “I have several, they’re blessed artefacts, granite sculpted from sacred tools and charged with psychic energy. They’re a little like hand grenades; when thrown in the correct manner the energy from them is released explosively at the point of impact. They were gifted to me by—”

  “Your teachers from the Order of the Earthly Eye,” Johnny completed the sentence.

  “Hey! You’re already getting to know me,” smiled Boyd. “Actually, I have an idea about who you folks might be. I’ve heard of agents employed by powerful alien races to promote their agenda. I think that’s who you are, one of their agents.”

  Johnny wasn’t surprised by the new man’s knowledge; in fact, tonight there wasn’t much that could surprise him. He did, nevertheless, object to the tone Boyd was taking regarding his activities.

  “My friends and I are not promoting a selfish agenda,” clarified Johnny. “We help preserve the equilibrium between the stifling rule of Order and the chaos of Disorder. It’s partly through our intervention that we on Earth are not dominated by a psychic minority like so many other worlds out there.”

  “That’s what they tell you, right, the Council of Seven and others? Don’t get me wrong, I don’t dislike them, or you, as their agent. Your goals are actually similar to mine, but the way I see it, here on Earth we have our own way of dealing with these matters. We don’t need interference from any alien groups and organisations, no matter how sincere their intentions to do good. We humans can look after ourselves – outside influences will only subjugate our minds in the long run. Relying on non-humans will be to the detriment of our belief in ourselves as a species. We have our own ancient traditions for maintaining the equilibrium and controlling psychic activity.”

  “Traditions you follow?” asked Sascha.

  “Oh, yes.”

  “What else do you think you know about our agency then?” asked Johnny, genuinely inquisitive.

  “Not much, I confess, though there are references to your organisation in the Grimoires. It has been many, many years since I met an actual agent. Maybe spending time with you will dispense with some of my suspicions,” Boyd said, maintaining good humour despite the sensitive subject.

  “No need to be suspicious, Boyd. There are aliens out there who aren’t just about dominating us or any other species. We can all work together, help each other, learn from each other,” responded Johnny with some passion. “Look, the way I see it, in groups like the Disciples we have a common enemy so w
hy not join forces?”

  “Mind if I smoke?” Boyd asked.

  “Go ahead,” said Johnny.

  A disgruntled Sascha hurriedly opened a small vent window while Johnny took one of the offered cigarettes and lit it over Boyd’s steel Zippo. He would try quitting again after this smoke.

  “How did you find yourself working for an alien agency then?” asked Boyd. “I hope you don’t mind me prying, I guess it’s the obvious question.”

  “No, it’s fine, I’ll tell you. It’s why we’re all still sitting up tonight isn’t it? To learn a bit more about each other?”

  “I’m all ears.”

  “Then I’ll begin.”

  Puffing away, Johnny gathered his thoughts for a few moments before starting to speak.

  “I started to develop psychic ability as a teenager. The Council of Seven are always screening the universe with their collective minds for potential agents. They are sensitive to the birth of new psychics and this was how they detected me. I must have been about seventeen when they made their first contact. By this time, Sascha and I were well aware of my gift, or curse, whichever way you wish to look at it.

  “One night in my family home, my parents and sister were out. I was just taking it easy, watching TV or something like that, when there was a strange tingling atmosphere in the living room, and Baccharus just materialised out of thin air. I was terrified; I tried to get away from him. I started to run, but you can’t escape from something that hovers around like Baccharus. He was speaking to me and seemed to know me very well; he knew everything about me. You see, that’s how familiars are manufactured, to know their keeper intimately, total devotion. The Council must have secretly got hold of a DNA sample from me to construct Baccharus. When I eventually stopped freaking out, Baccharus asked me to invite Sascha over; it was the only way to convince me that I wasn’t seeing things. So I called him on my mobile and told him it was an emergency. He came quickly and, as you can guess, he was flabbergasted. When we had convinced ourselves that this hovering cherub in our midst was real, Baccharus introduced himself and explained his extraterrestrial origins. He insisted that he was our friend and that we would be seeing more of him. We all arranged another meeting and he disappeared. I think Baccharus felt it was wise to explain his existence to us gradually.

  “The second encounter took place at Sascha’s old house. It was a lot quieter there, and his parents never interfered with anything we did so it was a far better place for a discreet meeting. Just as before, Baccharus materialised out of thin air. We were still amazed by his presence, although there wasn’t the shock we felt in that first meeting. Sascha even set up cameras to record what he saw as a momentous event: conclusive evidence of extraterrestrial life. Baccharus was having none of it and secretly wiped the recording with his will. It was in this second meeting that he told us everything. He told us about the Council, the Institution for the Maintenance of the Universal Equilibrium, the Trinity and who he was.”

  Johnny spent the next thirty minutes as if he were giving a lecture, explaining to Boyd all that he had learned about the forces that governed the universe, conclusions he had reached through his association with psychic extraterrestrials and his own personal earthly experiences.

  **

  To understand why the Institution existed one had to go back in time many millennia to ages pre-dating even the planet Earth, for sentient life existed long before Earth did. The earliest living beings inhabited a distant segment of the universe, far away. One of the simplest concepts they recognised was the duality of existence. For light there was dark, for hot there was cold, for matter there was antimatter, this was the eternal and defining pattern.

  At its most basic level, existence could be defined as the battle to maintain the form and organised complexity that was life against the destruction, decay and dispersal of that order as brought about by death; Order versus Disorder.

  Some of these early alien life-forms, through observation of the universe and meditation on this duality, concluded that life could not continue to exist in either extreme. With Order, there was no change, no development, none of the random breakthroughs that illuminated the path to progress so existence became stifled until it ceased altogether. The path of Disorder reached the same tragic result through a different route: the chaos and discord it promoted resulted only in a series of random occurrences, a sensational sea of experience, no worthwhile growth; a route that also led to ultimate self-destruction. So they created a third way, one that could see the flaws in each of these alignments. They made it their purpose to maintain the equilibrium between these two extremes so that life could continue to flourish in the universe.

  This philosophy was not accepted by all sentient beings. Its conclusions were crystal clear to those that promoted its ideology, and they failed to see why it should be rejected by so many others. They spent much time pondering this until further observation and meditation revealed to them a painful truth: that both Order and Disorder also existed within the ‘essence’ of all living entities, within their very souls. Some individuals would always have a tendency to Order while others would always be inclined to Disorder; existence in line with these extremes was their natural state. Disorder, Equilibrium and Order were a continuous spectrum, and there would never be any unification of the three conditions of being. Eternal antagonism between the three sides was the condition of reality, and this struggle was what actually sustained reality. Within the early universe, the scale of this antagonism often reached the point of all-out conflict. Aeons passed in this battle and the dominance of each of these three parties was in a state of constant flux. This was the war of ‘the Trinity’, a term that came to describe collectively the three states of existence.

  As the universe moved on from its primordial form and life continued its evolution, there came the knowledge of Presarium and the psychic gift. In the great war of the Trinity, it became clear that the preservation of each state of existence was increasingly being championed by a new breed of life-form, the psychic, so much more capable than its fellow non-psychics. Amongst the most potent psychic entities in the universe was an ancient and highly progressed species that had evolved into pure energy. Seven of them took it upon themselves to aid the work of those that fought to maintain the third way, the Equilibrium. They were able to not only manipulate and detect Presarium but also shift their energy state and become one with it. Their essence had been manifested at the very dawning of life in the universe and would last until its end, and they would dedicate their existence to securing the equilibrium between Order and Disorder. The Council of Seven was thus born, endeavouring to maintain the presence of sentient life in the universe. The Council was immediately mistrusted and despised by the forces of both Order and Disorder, who counted entities just as powerful as the Seven amongst their own number. The eternal battle lines were drawn once again, and spheres of influence in the universe fluctuated between the three groups. Whole galaxy clusters shifted from one side to the other and back. In the process, some galactic ecosystems died, some lived, while others were reborn many times over. Earth itself, an infant planet, its native life-forms primitive, was not exempt from this conflict; however, it was never considered worthy of direct intervention. It was only the gradual emergence of psychic-man that drew any attention to Earth from the rest of the universe. Whether this planet and its highest sentient species continued to exist or not was less than a footnote in the struggle of the Trinity – to humankind it was everything. Some of the higher entities, such as the Council of Seven, saw potential in this infant world.

  Despite occupying the centre of the universe, the Council had a perceptual world that extended to its very border; they sensed and monitored psychic activity throughout the whole of existence. When Johnny was born, they became aware of a potential new agent and they watched him carefully as he grew older along with a billion other potentials throughout the universe. The gift, even though present from birth, died so easily in the fragile
minds of humans. Johnny, however, progressed and grew in strength and the decision to recruit him was made. Baccharus was constructed and dispatched. And so from the age of seventeen, Johnny’s psychic development was nurtured and guided by the Council through the familiar. There were others like him, assigned to different geographical locations on the planet; in fact, there were psychics recruited by the Council of Seven on Earth long before Johnny was even born. It was through these loyal agents and their familiars that the difficult, thankless task of maintaining the equilibrium on planet Earth was continued and the human species flourished.

  **

  Boyd had listened quietly to all of this. “So you became an agent when you were seventeen?”

  “Yup.”

  “Been on many assignments?”

  “A few.”

  “Battled rogue psychics?”

  “A few.”

  “Never been tempted yourself then?”

  “To do what?”

  “To go rogue, dominate your fellow man with your ability.”

  “Nope.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know, just not my way I guess.”

  “What do you get out of it? Working for the Council of Seven?”

  “They look after my basic needs; I’m clothed, fed.”

  “How do they do that? They come and dress you?”

  “I don’t know, it’s what they told me. I really don’t know how, I think they can manipulate events, it’s very indirect. They say they look after me, but that’s not why I stick with them.”

  “Then why?”

  “I think Sascha can put it better than I can.”

  Sascha had also been listening quietly; it was time for him to speak up. “When your eyes have been opened to what is really out there, you can’t just turn back. When you have been awakened to the struggle of the Trinity and what is at stake, your life takes on a newer, more complete meaning which you cannot just turn away from,” he said.