"Why are you doing that?" someone asked.
I just looked at him. How could he not understand? And kept on sweeping.
"That's not your job," the man insisted. He was a big, burly looking fellow.
"Yes it is," I said. "I'm not a guest any more. I'm the host."
"Oh?" he asked. "You're taking over the training? Foreman died and appointed you God?"
The right answer was yes, but he wouldn't have understood it. "I'm taking responsibility for my part of the training," I said. "Would you move please? I want to sweep where you're standing."
He moved. He frowned; he was unhappy-he knew there was something he wasn't understanding-but he moved.
I wasn't worried. He'd get it. He'd figure it out soon enough. We all would.
Somebody else came up to me then. A woman with a worried expression. "You know what's going on, don't you?"
"Actually, I don't."
"But, you're sweeping."
"That's right. I'm sweeping."
"Because it has to be done," I said.
She made a face. She shook her head and walked away. I suppose she thought I was being rude for not explaining, but if she had to have it explained to her, then she wouldn't understand it. After a while, people left me alone.
It took a while to sweep the whole room, even with four of us doing it. We became an unspoken partnership. We understood without discussing it, what we were doing.
While I swept, while I had something to do, I didn't have to think. I could be the job. I could concentrate on having this floor be the cleanest floor possible.
I really didn't know what was going on, but I did know that this dirty floor was in the way. I had to clean the floor first before I could know what the next part was. That much I was sure of. It seemed to me though . . .
. . . I didn't quite have the words yet. I had the feeling, but I couldn't explain it. If I tried to put the experience into words, I would probably diminish it. So, for the moment, I let myself just feel it and I would worry about communicating it later. Foreman said that worrying about the communication becomes rehearsal for a performance, and communication isn't about performance, it's about transmission of information and experience.
But the one thing I was sure of was that this was part of the Training.
We hadn't been abandoned.
Every day the room had been set up differently, and there was a purpose for that. Foreman didn't do anything without there being a purpose behind it. Therefore, the room had been set up differently every day for us to become accustomed to a daily alteration in the environment. We had been learning/experiencing a paradigm about the room.
The fact that today the room was not set up at all was not a sign that the Training had broken down-no, it was the next part of the Training.
This was another way to set up the room for the trainees: having it not set up at all!
Why?
I felt like I was almost there. We were almost through with the sweeping.
So we could set it up ourselves.
I emptied the last bit of dirt and dust into the trash and stashed the broom and dustpan back in the closet where I found them. I looked up at the others. There were seven of us here.
We were all grinning. We all knew.
We started pulling chairs out of the closet--
"Wait a minute." That was the short wiry fellow with black curly hair. He looked Pakistani. "How are we going to set them up?"
Good question. We stopped to consider.
"We're inventing this ourselves," I said. "We should invent something that represents our taking responsibility for our own training."
"Good," said the blond woman. "That makes sense."
"There shouldn't be a front and a back. Everyone should have a good view."
"Right," said the guy from Hawaii; his name was Rand. "Everybody should be equal. At least, all the chairs should be equal."
"A circle," said the woman. "A big circle."
"That sounds good," said Parent. "What do you think?" They all turned expectantly to me.
"Uh . . ." I realized something. "Why are you asking me?"
"You started the sweeping-that makes you the leader."
"Uh-uh," I said. "We're all in this together. I don't think we should have a leader. Having a leader is one of the ways we give up individual responsibility. No, this is something that has to represent all of us."
"That's why you're such a good leader," said the blond woman. I started to snap at her-then I saw her grin and realized she was joking. We laughed together.
"Okay," I said. "I like a circle. What does everyone else want?"
We all agreed. A circle. It felt right.
It didn't take that long to set up the chairs. Not with twenty of us working. And as we worked, others began to join us.
I hadn't realized how big the room really was, but it was big enough to hold a circle of nearly 500 chairs, and still have room left over.
That made me think about The Mode Training again. They knew.
They had to know.
They had to have all this space because they knew we were going to need it. They expected this.
In fact, this was very probably exactly the result they desired.
That meant they had to be watching us.
I looked up att the corneres of the room. The cameras were still in place. In fact, one of them was focused on me right now. I had no way of knowing if it was active or not, but I'd bet good money that it was. I waved at the camera and grinned.
"You do know something, don't you?" It was the worried looking woman again.
I couldn't help myself, I was still grinning. I knew she wouldn't believe me. I said, "I honestly don't know any more than you do. I'm just enjoying the joke. Okay?"
"What joke? This isn't funny!"
"Yes, it is. The whole thing is. Everything is. It's all a joke. Life's a big joke that we've played on ourselves-and we're just getting the punch line today."
She shook her head. "You're weird." And walked away.
I thought about that. She was right. I am weird. I grinned at another camera that was pointed at me and waved; then I started looking around for a seat.
Most of the seats were starting to fill up now. As we'd finished the circle, people had started to sit down. Force of habit? Peer group pressure? Herding behavior?
Or were they starting to get the joke? I didn't know.
What I did know was that we were going to have to take this one step at a time.
It was all a carefully planned process-only a process that we were inventing ourselves as we went along.
But we were supposed to invent it ourselves. That was the point.
The last few people sat down. They looked confused and uncertain, but clearly something was happening, so they sat down and waited with us.
What was happening was the last day of the Training. Only we were making it up now, because that's what we were supposed to do.
See....
Foreman had said, "You exist in modes. You shift from mode to mode to mode as you go through life. You have a parent mode, you have a child mode, you have a sexual mode, you have an aggressive mode. Each of these modes exist because at some point in your life, you discovered that you needed that mode to survive. Your personality is a collection of operating behaviors. Right now, some of you are in skeptical student mode-"
Foreman had said, "What this course is about is the transcendence of all those little modes. We're leaping out to the larger context in which those modes are created. Call it source. I know this is starting to sound like jargon; bear with me. What we're working toward here is teaching the computer to program itself.
"Your goal is to be able to create your own modes, as necessary and as appropriate. So what we're working for is a mode of no-modes, out of which you will create new modes as you need them, or want them."
Foreman had said, "What do you do when you have nothing? You create something."
Foreman had
said, "Here's the point. Up till now, all your modes have been created from need. You created them because you thought they weKe linked to survival. From this moment on, you can now begin to create modes that have nothing to do With survival. You can create them because you want to create them. You choose to create them."
And now, we were choosing to create the last day of the Training. For no reason at all. There was no survival involved. Nobody had to be right. We were making it up as we went. We were making up our own training now.
That was the joke.
This is the way we lived our lives. We didn't know we could make it up the way we wanted. Instead we went through life doing what we thought we had to do-and hating ourselves for being trapped. And that was a choice too, just like this was a choice. But this was a much better choice.
Sitting in a room with 500 people who used to be strangers, grinning at each other and giggling.
We must have looked like idiots.
An outsider would have thought we were crazy. It was loony day at the asylum. Let's all sit in a circle and giggle and laugh and make faces at each other.
The laughter started to build, started to roll around the room in waves. We were all getting the joke now. We sat and looked at each other and felt good about ourselves and what we had all gone through. We were family.
We were the human family.
There weren't any outsiders any more.
It was a remarkable sensation, to finally belong to something; and that something was everything.
After the laughter died down, there was a brief period of uncomfortableness. We all looked at each other.
Okay. What happens next?
A woman stood up. She spoke with embarrassment, but her face was glowing. "I just wanted to say thank you to everybody. You're all wonderful."
We applauded.
A man on the other side of the circle stood up and he began to thank people too. And after him, another man. And then another woman. There was no order to it it wasn't necessary. You spoke when you were ready. We'd trained ourselves to function this way, with respect for each other's communications. Nobody interrupted anybody. We listened to each person and applauded, and even though it seemed to go on for a terribly long time, we stayed in our seats until everybody had had a chance to say what they had to say.
The process was called completing your communications. Foreman had told us, "Most of you go through life saying, 'Here's what I should have said.' You walk around with a bag load of unfinished conversations and you wonder why you hear voices in your head. Worse-the first chance you get to complete one of those conversations, you go for the throat. You unload all that anger or grief or fear on the first poor dumb schmuck who gets in the way instead of delivering it to the person it's really intended for. And then you wonder why your relationships are so screwed up. You're walking around delivering all your communications to the wrong people. Try it sometime. Try saying what you have to say to the person who needs to hear it. Like, 'Thank you' and 'I'm sorry' and 'I love you' and see what happens-"
I hadn't expected to speak. I didn't think I had anything to say to these people. But there was a lull and people were looking at me and I guess it must have showed on my face, because I stood up and looked around and flushed embarrassedly.
"Thank you," I said. "I'm sorry," I added. "I love you."
But-we had all said this, and after a while it was all just words. It was silly to pile more words on top of words.
There was something deeper that I was feeling; an emotion of such kinship and joy and connectedness that the word for it hadn't been invented yet. The sensation was extraordinary. I didn't know how to say it to these people-so I began to applaud them.
I turned around slowly, looking from one to the next, meeting their eyes and applauding them for being so human; such a silly thing, such a pitiful thing, such a proud and courageous thingpoor little naked pink monkeys challenging the universe.
We're not worm food! We're gods!
They began to applaud with me. We all applauded. The room swelled with applause. They stood up with me. We cheered and yelled and applauded together.
The Training was over! We had won! We were taking responsibility for the destiny of our whole species-and whoever didn't want to join us in this task could stay behind and get eaten by the worms. The rest of us were going to kick some hairy purple asses! I felt terrific.
But when the applause finally died away, we were still alone in the room.
We sat down and waited.
Clearly, whoever was watching us should have recognized that we were complete. The Training was over.
Whatever we were waiting for could happen now. We waited.
After a bit, it began to sink in.
Okay, we had the spirit, but the process wasn't complete. There was something else that had to happen.
We looked around at each other. We were pleased with ourselves; we had done all the right things. We had cleaned up the room, taken out the chairs, created our own Training, completed all the incomplete communications, celebrated ourselves--
-what wasn't complete?
I remembered what Foreman had told me so many years before; at least it seemed like years: "The Training is a game, Jim, but you don't play it to win. You play it to play. And you use what you learn in this game-where there are no penalties for losing-to support you in the games you play where you can't afford to lose. The trick is, in any game, to find out what the point of the game is; then you can play for that result."
The point of this game . . .
. . . was to reinvent the future of humanity. And I realized what was incomplete.
So far, everything we'd done in here had been about ourselves. Even the way we'd set up the chairs.
We were all facing inward, facing each other, shutting out the outside world.
But this thing, this Training, was about breaking paradigms, about letting go of what was so we could invent what wasn't; it was about preparing us to meet the rest of the universe.
That was what was wrong. We were pointed in the wrong direction.
I stood up and turned my chair around. I pointed it outward. Instead of having my back to the outside world, I could turn my face to it. I could face the entire universe because I trusted the people behind me to guard my backside.
Behind me, I heard a gasp. Somebody else got it. It was the woman who'd had the worried expression. She looked delighted with herself. She stood up and turned her chair around too.
Then I began to hear the sounds of other chairs scraping and being moved. And pretty soon everybody was turning their chairs around, grinning and laughing and giggling as they did so. It was all a joke now.
We sat this way for a while, all facing outward, all ready to meet the universe.
And still nothing happened.
It still wasn't complete.
Damn! What was I missing?
Oh, my God.
Oh, shit!
Jason Delandro.
He'd said it.
This was his revenge.
At the moment I most needed to figure something out, it was his words that were the trigger.
Before I could complete The Mode Training, I would have to acknowledge that Jason Delandro had been right about something.
How much had he been right about?
I'd have a lot of time to think about that. I'd have to sort it out. I'd have to take it apart, piece by piece, and see what had really happened.
I stood up.
I said, "I know what has to happen next."
They all looked at me.
I said, "Listen. When we start out life; we're in one mode: we're waiting for Santa Claus. We're waiting for the next wonderful thing to happen. But one day, we realize there ain't no Santa Claus. Most of us are smart enough to figure that out before we get out of high school. He ain't coming. So we stop waiting for him, and that's when we shift into the second mode: waiting for rigor mortis."
A few people laughed.<
br />
"There's a third place to be," I said, ignoring the chuckles. "But to get there, we have to give up waiting."
They started to applaud-I held up my hand. "No. The time for applause is over." I was very sure of myself and I could hear the clarity in my voice. "The Training is over." They looked at each other, they looked at me-and they burst into grins! We all started cheering! We pounded each other on the back. We hugged and we kissed-and we headed for the doors, pushing them open with a bang
Foreman and all the assistants were waiting for us on the other side.
And that's when the party really started.
We roared and hollered and stamped and whistled and cheered, all of us together.
We challenged the universe.
The meek may inherit the earth, but the rest of us are going to the stars!
We could have gone on like that forever, but in the middle of it, Lizard slipped up behind me and tapped me on the shoulder. I turned to grab her and kiss her, but instead she handed me my orders.
I fumbled them open and started to read. I looked up, halfway through, and stared at her, confused and questioning.
She was unhappy about it too, but all she said was, "The chopper's waiting in the parking lot. Come on, it's time to go." It took me only a moment. I let go of the past. I let go of the confusion. This was the job now.
I understood exactly. The universe was roaring back. "Right," I said. "Let's go to work."
A king who was mad at the time,
decreed limerick writing a crime;
but late in the night
all the poets would write
verses without any rhyme or meter.
About the Author
David Gerrold made his television writing debut with the nowclassic "The Trouble With Tribbles" episode of the original Star Trek TV series. Since 1967, he has story-edited three TV series, edited five anthologies, and written two non-fiction books about television production (both of which have been used as textbooks), and over a dozen novels, three of which have been nominated for the prestigious Hugo and Nebula Awards.
His television credits include multiple episodes of Star Trek, Tales From the Darkside, Twilight Zone, The Real Ghostbusters, Logan's Run, and Land of the Lost.
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