by Isaac Petrov
“Uh, yes, that’s all true, but I think the Dem-Pandemic made all the difference. Cause unknown. Impossible to cure. Nobody could escape it, not even with strict isolation. The first collapse of the golden age had obvious causes: environmental destruction, geopolitical tensions, technological disruption, and so on. All human-made. With time and common sense, all curable. But not Dem.”
“Again, good point,” Miyagi says with a curt nod. “The Dem-Pandemic triggered the second collapse when we were still licking the wounds from the first, and left us crawling through the mud for centuries. But even then, they were as equally sure that they had everything under control as we are today. They built a rural utopia in environmental equilibrium spanning the inhabitable latitudes of the world. They had a stable society, based on Goah’s Gift; the first truly global empire in history, quite the achievement, I would say. It might seem strange to us now, but most people lived happy lives back then. Tragically short, true. At your age,” he points his finger at the young faces, “most of you would be reaching your last years of, yes, a fulfilled life of family and community. This was just a hundred years ago. Just a hundred years. Think about that for a moment, people.”
He pauses to let that sink in.
“But as sure of their destiny as they might have been, they were equally ignorant; just a bad turn away from kicking the bucket. And then, just as the twenty-third century is counting its last days, something very unexpected happened in a remote colony, far away from the centers of power, something that empowered a woman—a teenage girl really—to turn her narrow rural world on its head.”
Edda van Dolah! Ximena’s eagerness surfaces as a hawkish smile on her face. Edda van Dolah—Juf Edda—is Ximena’s undisputed historical hero. Ximena can’t wait to dive into the nitty-gritty details of her lifework.
“The jury is still out on the merits of her legacy,” Miyagi says, “but nobody can deny the extraordinary role that history reserved to Edda van Dolah from Lunteren.”
Ximena frowns lightly in puzzlement. Why the doubt on her achievements? She is the inspiration of every young girl on Earth, and probably on Nubaria too, isn’t she?
“We believe we are doing fine now, don’t we?” he continues. “Imagine that some brilliant new Edda van Dolah appears today. Right here, perhaps one of you.” He points a finger at his captivated audience. “And imagine that she discovers something new, unknown to the rest of us. Something that makes her realize how hopelessly doomed we humans really are.”
An uneasy silence extends across the auditorium.
“It would be tough to convince your fellow citizens, don’t you think? Especially if doing so involved a radical transformation of our way of life.”
He paces the stage slowly, the echo of his steps the only sound in the wide hemicycle.
“Now imagine that happens in a fanatically religious society, where most people spend just five years in school before joining their family business at the age of ten. Think about it, people. Life was so short that a ten-year-old was considered a fully functioning adult back then! Edda van Dolah herself, aged sixteen in 2399, was already an experienced and reputable schoolteacher. And a mother too!”
No wonder, Ximena thinks. If everybody dies at twenty-seven, they had to get busy pretty quickly.
“Try to put her existence into context,” Miyagi continues. “Think about the limited time to educate and to specialize on any trade. The world in 2399 was a sea—no, an ocean!—of ignorance. The average person was clueless about where they came from… and where they were headed. And it is in such a world that this sixteen-year-old girl leapt out of nowhere and kicked history squarely in the balls. What were the chances? Not many, I would say. And not only because, as everybody knows, history is a female.”
Many students laugh as Miyagi takes a few idle steps, his hands behind his back, a smile on his lips. Even Ximena has to chuckle at the horrendous joke.
“I want you to ponder how… improbable Edda’s impact on history really was. We are going to dive into interesting times indeed. But that’s not all.” Miyagi begins to raise his voice with expert modulation. “I’ve also got you covered with an extinction-event asteroid, first contact with an alien species, and even human radio signals from outer space!”
A roar of enthusiasm erupts, Ximena’s included. Goah, this is going to be sooo good.
“I like what I hear,” Miyagi says, nodding at the red-faced students. “All right, let’s get the show rolling. Literally, because I have a little surprise for you today.” Miyagi’s smile widens. “To make this seminar more interesting, I’ll make use of some scenes from a new documentary I’m working on about the time—”
A renewed burst of enthusiastic claps and cheers drowns his words. Ximena is jumping on her feet and clapping her hands into stumps. She has to stop herself from hugging Mark, who is yelling his lungs out next to her. Ximena knows that Professor Miyagi is of course referring to The Rise and Fall of The Juf. Rumors about his new sensorial are all over the media—another historical masterpiece by Kenji Miyagi!
“Thank you. Yes, yes, you’ve guessed it. Prepare to literally immerse yourselves in the world as it was in the zenith of Goah’s Imperia. Please,” he raises a hand, “I must insist on your discretion outside these walls—this is still very much a work in progress, merely a draft. I’m just bringing these scenes into the seminar in the faint hope of saving some of you from certain boredom.”
Three
Faith and Dem
“Dem.” Professor Miyagi seems to enjoy the focused attention of his hundred odd students. “The Dem-Pandemic. The final obsession of the powerful nation-states and scientists of the golden age, all investigating compulsively even as society kept crumbling around them in the early twenty-second century.”
He takes a few silent steps on stage, hands on his back. The seminar begins! Ximena thinks as excitement creeps up her guts.
“They all ultimately failed,” he says somberly, “and billions died. Forward two hundred years, and history crashes against a sixteen-year-old schoolteacher who is convinced she finally figured it out. She is the one that shall crack open Dem for all to see. Is she a one-in-a-millennia genius? Or is that the natural arrogance of youth?”
Ximena leans back at the words. They ring harsh, almost heretical.
“Prepare to meet the true Edda van Dolah, people. Not the myth, mind you. We do history in this,” he waves his hand around the structure, “auditorium. Not religion.”
It almost feels to Ximena as if he were directing his words at his fellow GIA students, the way he glimpses in their general direction. But no, he was just pulling his hair off his face.
“If you must only learn one thing in this seminar,” Miyagi speaks slower and with greater emphasis, “let it be this, people: Edda was only human, nothing more, living her regular colonial life at the edge of the Hanseatic Imperium a hundred years ago. She was, like we all are—yes, me included, I grudgingly confess—just a limited and flawed mensa of her time.”
Ximena scoffs, and recites to herself, “A bullet is just a piece of metal, until it kills an emperor.”
“Very poetic!” The redheaded Neanderthal sitting to her right is smiling at her with appreciation. Ximena blushes at the unsolicited attention and keeps her eyes firmly locked on the stage below.
“And yet,” Miyagi continues, “there was undeniably something extraordinary about this girl. What she brought upon the worlds is not the product of the common man.”
“She had the Walking talent of a goddess!” the Neanderthal next to Ximena whispers. She involuntarily turns her head to him, and meets his large, blue eyes. His prominent Neanderthal brow ridge enhances the intensity of his gaze to an almost hypnotic level. His white smile broadens. “Name’s Mark,” he says, extending his hand.
Ximena blushes intensely. She is not used to masculine attention, and most definitely not Neanderthal. Luckily her manners go on autopilot and she shakes his hand blandly. First time she touches a
Neanderthal, she thinks with apprehension. No, second! There was also Ank before. The Global Program is churning surprises faster than her provincial mind can cope with.
“Didn’t catch your name.” Mark’s eyes pierce hers.
“Uh, Ximena.”
“Ximena,” Mark pronounces slowly, like he is savoring it. “Beautiful name. And exotic.”
She cannot blush further. Her dark skin is hopefully hiding it, but she doubts it; dream permascapes are treasonous that way. She mutters something resembling a non-committal word of thanks and hastily turns her eyes back to Professor Miyagi.
He is pacing in silence along the rim of the stage, leisurely, squinting at the sun that bathes the amphitheater. Ximena can even feel its balmy warmth on her face. Miyagi approaches Ank, who is sitting with her stunning female elegance next to a wudai machine in the shape of a small round table. From her bench, Ximena can see the actual wudai in the device: green tendrils of ivy-like vegetation slowly withering around and inside copper-colored metallic components. Wudai are, at their core, highly psychically-reactive creatures, not quite plants, nor animals, but something else entirely—the true wonder at the heart of the dreamtech revolution.
“Is Bob ready?” Miyagi asks, pointing at the machine.
Ank nods. Ximena knows that that machine is just the dream avatar of a real machine, with real wudai, running in some goahforsaken data center in the wake.
“Great, then let’s watch Edda in action, shall we? Determined to solve once and for all the largest mystery humankind has ever faced. Okay then…” Miyagi turns slowly to the wudai machine, almost hesitantly, “Bob, can you, er, turn on?”
“Acknowledged,” the machine—Bob—replies with a distinctively artificial female voice that Ximena hears directly inside her mind. “Do state archive.”
“Uh,” he speaks slower and louder, “yes, er, please grab the latest draft of Rise and Fall of the Juf?”
“Acknowledged. Do state index of reproduction.”
“Index of…?” Miyagi turns to Ank with a frown of frustration. “What—?”
“Let me,” Ank says with a firm shake of her head. “Bob, load tag 6th December 2399.”
“Acknowledged. Do state perimeter of rendition.”
Ank speaks like she is taking notes on a recorder. “Expand rendition to permascape globalprog dot historydep dot lundev dot edu.”
Bob vibrates for a few moments. “Detected one hundred twenty minds in one million cubic feet of permascape. Do confirm.”
“Confirmed,” Ank says. “Render from index zero, camera tag Edda at Joyousday House, Lunteren.”
“Acknowledged. Rendition begins at index zero.”
As the machine speaks, the spring sun and blue sky over the amphitheater vanish in an instant, surrounding the dumbfounded students in humid darkness. Many gasp at the sudden drop of temperature and Ximena shrinks into herself with an involuntary shudder.
“Oh, sorry, let me…” Ank says, and she must do something in the darkness, because the cold detaches at once from Ximena’s mind. Oh, the relief. The cool winter air is still there, around her, thick and humid on her senses, but not uncomfortable now, like her skin is watching instead of feeling. Other students sigh as well.
“Bob, increase natural light,” Ank says. “Point one lux.”
“Acknowledged.”
Ximena’s eyes—still trying to adapt to the darkness—are grateful for the extra radiance. The contour of the students sitting nearby appear like ghosts. She turns to see Mark’s white smile as he stares intently at something above the stage of the amphitheater. She follows his gaze. Yes, there, she can see it as well.
A house floating in the air.
An elongated one-story house, surrounded by a carefully tended garden—flowers and lawn barely hinted at in the winter night. It is raining too, and as Ximena engages her senses, she begins to feel the drops of freezing water on her head and arms in full immersive experience—blissfully detached from her mind. The ultrarealistic impact of dream sensorials never fails to amaze her, and the quality of this one is… wow! She knows she is sitting on the amphitheater bench—she can see Mark’s comforting shape beside her—and yet she feels like she is right there in that garden, silently approaching the back of the house, sneaking behind a bush and getting her sandaled feet wet on the soaked grass.
Her mind reacts to that. She is not wearing sandals!
“Meet Edda van Dolah, people.” Miyagi’s voice unexpectedly rises from under the floating scene. And it’s as if his voice reveals the perspective Ximena was becoming lost in. Her mind snaps back into place as she realizes that it is not herself who is tiptoeing in the darkness along the geometric reliefs carved across the house walls. Dreamsensos engage you like that—psych-links, they are called. They make you lose yourself in the characters, make you live the dream drama as if they were your own.
Ximena is not a frequent consumer of commercial dreamsensos, so she must make a conscious effort to see with her own eyes what her mind is psych-linked to: a teenage girl, wearing a dark tunic that makes her virtually invisible. Her dark skin and short, wild hair melt seamlessly with the night. She moves with determination towards a window covered with exquisite stained-glass motifs.
The girl smashes the glass with a rock, and stays put, looking around for a few seconds, until silence returns.
“Don’t worry,” Miyagi says. “Edda’s accomplice is faking a wound to distract and lure the guard away. Edda has a few minutes for herself.”
As the psych-link strengthens, Ximena feels a surge of adrenaline and a simple thought—hurry!—that isn’t her own.
The girl—Edda—climbs through the ruined window. It’s dark, and there is an unpleasant smell in the air, like too many perspiring people without ventilation. She fetches a bulky, metallic flashlight from within her tunic’s folds. It feels heavy in her hand, as she turns it on and slides the weak light beam across the room: a mix between a laboratory and a morgue.
I’m in! The thought flashes through Ximena’s mind as intimately as a lover’s whisper. She lets the stream of thoughts drown her own. She is finally in the forbidden backroom of the Joyousday House! The proof has to be here, somewhere! Goah, she has but a minute, perhaps two if Aline is really convincing with her bogus injury. But better hurry—Aline’s such a terrible liar.
Edda waves the beam of light across the four bed-sized platforms that take up the better part of the room, the light reflecting off their shiny metallic surface. They look like dissecting platforms, Ximena thinks—a thought of her own. As Edda inspects the last platform, the light beam reveals a body.
A breathing body. A naked man in his mid-twenties. Eyes open. Silent.
Ximena jumps from fright. Edda doesn’t. She just stares at the man for a long moment, waiting for a reaction that never comes.
“Hello?” she finally says. The words rumble in the silence.
No reaction.
She approaches the man, who keeps staring at the ceiling like she wasn’t there. Then she recognizes him.
“Elder Meerman! Are you okay?” Edda waves a hand across his line of sight.
No reaction.
“This is Edda. Your evening-school Juf two years ago?”
Nothing.
Edda inspects the platform which seems inhumanly cold under the exposed body. There are traces of feces around his buttocks. Somebody is taking care of him, but not thoroughly enough.
Edda waves the beam of light at his green eyes. The irises dutifully contract.
What have they done to you? Edda gulps and gathers her thoughts. She was there, like most in the colony, to bid Elder Meerman farewell in his Joyousday. That was, er, ten days ago? Two weeks max? And he was the happiest and liveliest man in the party. Look at you now.
Ximena can feel Edda’s pity and anger rising up her own guts.
There’s only one explanation, Edda thinks.
Poison.
So simple.
She knew it all along,
and by Goah she is going to uncover the truth. Dem is not a disease. Dem doesn’t really exist. Never did. Just a myth, drilled down for generations by Quaestors and the rest of the hierarchy of aws Head. Just a lie to keep people compliant. Yes, good old hunger for power. It is so simple, isn’t it? Administer dumb-making poison to every adult when reaching twenty-seven years of age. Adorn with an involved ritual—the Joyousday—to give it a shell of religious legitimacy. And the result? A compliant population, forever young and, crucially, too ignorant to ask the hard questions. Well, she sure as Dem is going to ask them! But she needs evidence. She needs—
“Who’s there?!”
Edda—and Ximena—jump at the sudden shout. There is a man behind the only door to the room. The guard. Fuck, Aline. Too early!
“I know you’re there,” the guard says. His steps are closing in. “Don’t move!”
Quick, she needs proof, or it will all be for nothing. Goah’s Mercy, where would they keep the…? She frantically turns the beam of light towards the other platforms. Nothing, they are empty.
The guard pushes the door, but it doesn’t budge. Thank Goah, it’s locked. The guard begins to fumble with a set of keys. No time!
Edda turns her flashlight to the white laboratory cupboards lining the walls. Are those…? She runs toward the nearest shelves, where a neat line of transparent vials hold some sort of thick-looking liquid.
The door blasts open. The guard stands there, panting, dumbfounded, staring at her flashlight not five meters away.
No, no, no. She must have the evidence!
“Freeze! Who are you?!”
With a swift, almost instinctive move, Edda aims the beam of light squarely at the guard’s eyes.
“What?!” He flinches his head away.
It’s just an instant. That’s all she needs. Edda reaches to the shelf, precise and quick like a reflex. Before her conscious mind even realizes it, she is pulling a vial into the inner folds of her tunic.
