“How do you think?” I said and the entire courtroom gasped. At this point, my anxiety started up. My belly quivered, the hairs on my neck and arms stood, I had wobbly knees and my shins wouldn’t stop shaking. My body vibrated like a weird organic tuning fork but I had to go on speaking, had to use this thread of cornered courage to say what I had to say before oblivion took me. The King sat as still as a rock and listened, his gaze fixed on me and only me. If a lie so much as crossed my mind, he’d be able to catch it using his multi-layerd vision. I intended to make it hard for him to suspect me. All I had to do was tell the truth.
“Your Majesty knows that all I have ever done I have done to serve you. I am not qualified for politics, not even close. And yet I have done everything you asked, demanded, declared, ordered and stated to the best of my ability. I have worked hard, made more blunders than I can count. I have made a fool of myself, risked my career, demotion and potential banishment, all in accordance with Your Majesty’s rules of politics, made to ensure evolution, strength and power. I understand it all even though I couldn’t live up to it. I tried and I tried to do good by my office, even though nearly all my reincarnation approval sheets were denied by Your Majesty. I went back to it, wanted to do my duty to you, because no matter how harsh you can be as King you have given us suicides a home in Quadrant City. You taught me to ask and I will learn the answers to questions I didn’t even know, especially concerning my job. You taught us to be strong and humble because at the end of the day none of us in this city, most especially me, deserves mercy or all the things we have been given in this city. On an unbiased day, I’d feel we should all burn in nightmares for what we did to loved ones back in life. Even the lonelinest man left an impact, however small.
“I have been in wrong places at wrong times before, but let me make this clear to Your Majesty that though I was led into the presence of the Resistance unbeknownst to what I was getting into, I wouldn’t change a second of it. Sire, of all the accidents I have experienced in my afterlife recent events have taught me important things.”
As I kept speaking, the courtroom reacted in different ways to what I had to say but the King remained seated in exactly the same way. He didn’t move, showed no emotion, merely listened and waited. “As proof I ask at this time that whoever in the Resistance is listening to please come out of hiding, and bring the baby with you. I feel it is the right thing to do to get rid of all these lies and subterfuges and bring the child to the attention of His Majesty.” I turned away from the camera and back to the King.
“The first live birth of an infant has occurred in Quadrant City.” The court came undone with shock and fear. “Even though you have done so much for us, Your Majesty, the people at least the Resistance, are afraid to trust in your mercy and understanding when it comes to what I have to say next. There are so many secrets, in Government especially, and I feel that such secrecy has created a divide between Quadrant citizens and we who govern them. Your Majesty, it is not for—”
“Mr. Helidon!” All three hundred forty-nine courtiers were present in the room and Boremasta stood up in the front row, pointing a pudgy finger at me. “Before you say another word, pay attention to whom you speak. This is King Death’s and his Government, the last line of defence between life-forms in this city and our total extinction. Without us, there is no order, no law, no strength through unity, and definitely no civilization worth remembering in Quadrant records. We enforce the difference between civilized and animalistic, keeping races secure from returning to days of barbarism. Crimes are an example of how societal doom is all around us all the time and is unrelenting in its fight to survive. Government, just as unrelenting, fights back. You come in here accusing His Majesty of obfuscation, inveiglement and plausible deniability? I ask you, sir, doesn’t a worm of a citizen such as yourself compared to the might of His Majesty King Death have secrets of his own, stashed in a little box labeled ‘private’? How then can it be called gross negligence of duty or blatant disregard for public honor when Government maintains important life-sustaining secrets that would only end up sowing dissent, which is the fastest route to splitting the unity we’ve achieved over several centuries?”
Boremasta coughed, took a kerchief to his weird slit-mouth. “Secrets like the complete disbandment of theVelociraptor Unit are what helped His Majesty bring swift order and justice earlier today, keeping the Resistance fearful and unable to bomb further city segments with their anarchic deeds. What they didn’t know has saved us all from critical soul-medic procedures, and not a small amount of chaos. You stand here in this court, Helidon, and vouch for millions of people in Quadrant City without possibly being able to say with certainty that all the people, the public, whom you are so called defending won’t turn on you and themselves if they feel they’ve been threatened with a lie?” The court remained silent. “The innocent deserve the truth, but the price for it will be their innocence. The guilty—from rapists and murderers to molesters and thieves, to name a handful of the criminal and lower class life-form—will not hesitate to use any chaos to their temporary advantage. They will destroy our city from within, just as all mighty empires have been. Are you, Helidon, standing here and saying that you can vouch for the criminals in society and that others who are perfect at the outset do not harbor any sinister secrets that can transform them one day into the very criminals they judge on their television screens? Are you honestly telling me, Courtier Helidon, that the Government keeping secrets from the people, who themselves have secrets, all to ensure unity through stability and to prevent dissent, anarchy and chaos is a bad idea? Are you so sure that everyone will hold hands and sing Koombayah and agree to walk down a highway promising to say the truth no matter what it takes and at whatever punishment, cost or consequence? Are you certain that you yourself would take such a risk if it means revealing the secrets of your soul so the world can judge you and maybe, just maybe, accept you? Government chooses the lesser of two evils because all we see is evil in the world. A complex system as ours means we often do evil to quell evil. After all, it takes two swords to have a swordfight, two guns to have a gunfight, two evils to have a fight that would defeat the evil that aims to defeat us. Government, Mr. Helidon, loses sleep so its people can have it.”
He sat down to a round of applause from the courtier balcony. Some of the people in the room clapped but others sat still and assessed.
“If the rightfully honorable Courtier Boremasta understood my words, he’d have caught on to the fact that I am not debunking the value and survival potential of secrets that absolutely need to be kept from the public by the government that rules them. They don’t need to know how smelly my armpits get on a bad day,” laughter in the courtroom, “and they don’t need to know secrets that government uses to keep them safe. What I’m talking about, in all specificity, is the political corruption and powerplay that has been government’s forte and tradition I should say for the past several centuries. Your Majesty, in your attempts to create healthy competition, the life-form instincts in all of us that code for ‘survival of the fittest’ ended up corrupting that ideal. I have finally understood what you intended when you gave us orders on how to run government. You wanted us to work together or fail together. Because by working against each other, we still face a chance at demotion, could still fail in our duties, and are at each other’s throat almost all day everyday because of the fear such a system invokes. A system that benefits all, irrespective of rank or responsibility, will have endured the unity Boremasta mentioned and the other courtiers applauded him for just now. We are all barking up the wrong tree. Today—and Boremasta, I’m not finished, you’d better sit your fat butt down before I make a complete fool out of you in the presence of His Majesty.” He plomped back into his seat looking like a child denied his candy quota. “Today, Your Majesty, I have found myself serving you hand and foot only to be deviated into discovering the Resistance. However guilty I may seem it doesn’t change the fact that—” The courtroom doors
opened and the woman I remembered seeing down in the sewer came forward accompanied by Molina and some others. In her arms was the baby. “–That, sire. Please bring the baby forward so the King can better assess the state of things.” I had a hand raised to guide the mother through the throng of bodies.
For the first time since I began to speak, the King’s eyes flickered and shifted to take in the baby. He studied it calmly like it was a murder weapon brought to the fore as evidence. “A fleshified soul birthing a flesh-bodied being with a soul already inside... Interesting.” Though he spoke softly the whole court could hear and the cameras captured his deadpan reaction to the fact that my claims of this baby being the first live birth in the city were true. He reached his hand out and Molina offered the King a sheaf of papers. I guessed it was all the experimental data the Resistance had on birthing attempts and failures. Nevermind that the whole thing was illegal, King Death took to it like he would a curious turn of events. He read the details and if I’m not mistaken seemed amused. “Silence,” he said and the agitated courtroom obeyed. “Continue.”
After a while I thought he meant me. “People are desperate for one freedom and one alone, sire, and I believe that unless we address this need Government will be at a loss, we’ll have lost the love of the people. As Reincarnator,” I raised a hand and closed my eyes when I saw Boremasta stand up again. He sat back down. “As Reincarnator, the fresh information that I have been given has led me to understand that I cannot—even within reason—follow the duties and responsibilities of my office until this situation is resolved. My guess is that the Resistance bombing in the Elega Lane earlier this morning was a distraction intended to smuggle me to the Liranova Quadrant. I think that in more normal circumstances, Your Majesty’s spy network might have reported suspicious activity if I were to go missing for a period of time.”
“You mentioned a situation,” said the King. There was pin drop silence in the courtroom.
“It is my sincere belief, if not a one hundred percent guarantee, that Quadrant City and all its life-forms do not wish to be reincarnated.” Disaster. Everyone spoke out loud, the courtiers added to the vocal melee, the people stood and shouted. I had just put the whole city on trial. King Death’s eyes roved across the masses who thought that just because they spoke the opposite of what they felt he wouldn’t see the truth they tried so hard to hide. In case I was going to be punished for such shamefaced boldness they didn’t want to be dragged down with me. Maybe if they pretended, all will be well. Who were they kidding?
King Death raised a hand and the court fell quiet. “Seems to me that the citizens offered proof even without being asked for it. I see each one in this room, even the courtiers, is secretly in agreement with the claim you made, Helidon.” He didn’t take his molten-gold eyes off me. This was the moment of reckoning. Everyone’s afterlives hung over the precipice. We were all of us helpless. Something told me he wanted me to go on.
“In my time here, Your Majesty, I have met not all of them but enough life-forms to understand where we’re all coming from. I have spoken with people who took their lives because an accident made them blind. Here in Quadrant City, they can see. I have conversed with people who were lame, had debilitating diseases or worse, which is why they ended it. Here in Quadrant City, they are whole again. With immortality on their side and a chance to work and achieve things unlike when they were bogged down in life, whatever their home planet, people seek permanence. One of the Resistance members told me that by being here where they cannot die, the risk of suicide is nonexistent. How can you kill something that can’t be killed? And, as you have learned in those data sheets, Your Majesty, after twenty years of risk and failure the first child has been born, an actual soul that came from somewhere in the Universe and landed inside a foetus here in the City of Suicides. The impossible has happened and it warrants a change in attitude. Sire, how can I do my job when the people I’m supposed to reincarnate do not wish to be reincarnated? And if the role of Reincarnator is thus rendered moot, all that remains is a merciful change in governance by you, our King.”
There was a prolonged period of silence after which His Majesty got up and left the room. Pencils and pens clicking or falling, some seat shuffling and furniture movement, heavy breathing, a few coughs, a couple of sneezes, and one yawn.
“All rise for His Majesty the King.” The court stood as Death made his eventual reentry and remained standing before his chair. He looked at the masses inside the courtroom. “In the spirit with which this trial seems to be progressing, I’d like to reveal a truth myself. Life-forms of Quadrant City, my people. You might remember the closing events of Moo-Day. You might also recall what I said then, that the Pure Efflesia Bank will have your souls and tap the energy-flow you give off. While that is true for all other life-forms in the event that they cannot be reincarnated, it isn’t true for suicides.” Hisses of gossip rose and fell. “Self-murder is the term applied for what each being in Quadrant City has done. It is therefore the most heinous and unpardonable of crimes against one’s soul. Sadly, it is also the reason why the Elders refused to include you in the banking process. What I’m saying, people of Quadrant City, is that you have nowhere in the Universe to go. You became orphans when you took your lives and only reincarnation can give you another chance. It’s either that or complete oblivion. I have the ability to destroy each one of you any way I see fit.” He waited for the fear to sink in. Was this our end? Was this how we were going to dissipate after all that we’ve done and seen? I knew I was terrified, I just didn’t feel it yet.
“Your lives and what you did in them do not interest me,” said His Majesty. “It is your afterlives that hold import in my book. For beings who have nobody and nowhere to go, you have shown remarkable stupidity. I can understand it coming from Helidon, who is unmatched in that category, but a whole city?” He tsk-tsked. The hair-raising sound sat uncomfortably with my humiliation. “But...” This is it. Adios, arrivederci, aufwiedersehn, toodles and goodbye. This is it, thank you for coming just in time for the end. Our hearts beat fast enough to prove it. Our limbs gripped objects tight enough to cement the imminent end. We were going, going, gone. “...To stand so boldly in my presence and demand freedom and justice despite what you have all done and to risk everything in the process with nothing but complete soul annihilation through punishment or a million other dreadful scenarios, I must confess that I am surprised it took the people of Quadrant City ten centuries to demand this.
“Generation after generation passed through this dimension. Many were reincarnated, many Reincarnators too. Government grew and changed, everything grew and changed, and here we all stand in the most unexpected situation of them all. Reincarnator Helidon,” he pointed to the blackthorn desk to his right and pillars of papers appeared out of thin air. “These are Elder-made bond papers. Anything signed on them is everlasting and unbreakable. I need to have something to show the Elders when I take this case to their courts. I am in no way subject to them but the future of your existence is. I only tolerate your afterlives but whether or not to cease your passing into living realms is not for me to decide. I will sail to the Elder Realm once I have the signatures of every citizen in Quadrant City on those bond papers. You, Helidon, will personally carry out this task. After all, you are the Reincarnator. You will leave this courtroom immediately, carry these papers with you and when you run out you will return to this very courtroom in government building alpha to collect more. You will have no help and you will be provided no car or carriage. You will walk to each quadrant, into each household, apartment and estate. You will gather the signatures of every citizen from inside their homes and scribbling from those who do not know how to sign; the paper will discern and remember.
“I thereby declare complete cessation of government, and a total stop to all business and pleasure in Quadrant City. Everyone is to stay in their homes. Those inside the courtroom should leave now. Get up, who do you think I’m talking to?” he said to the courtiers
and the rest of the people in the room. “Everyone goes home and stays there until I say otherwise.” The court slowly emptied and Death’s voice carried. The cameras kept rolling until everyone left, then the Press themselves started to pack. “Leave your equipment, get out.” They left the machines running. “The Velociraptor Unit will deliver rations to each home for the duration of this citywide stasis. I will use my powers to maintain a census board on the south facing wall of your office, Helidon. You will leave the completed signatures on your desk, leave the window open and exit the office. Based on the papers you’ve completed, I will cross out relevant locations. You will make your way to this courtroom where that wall will reflect new entries I made in your office. The next direction of your journey will also be mentioned. You will replenish your stock of bond paper, collect a printout of your map from that device there and use the itinerary to get more signatures. This is how you will proceed. If even one person in Quadrant City refuses, I will deny this hogwash altogether and move to another plan of my choosing. If you want me to take this matter seriously, I suggest all of you invest a signature to prove compliance. Elder bond paper won’t register lies. Your mark won’t even leave a spot of ink on this parchment if your heart isn’t telling the truth. Get out of my presence, Helidon. You have many miles to go before you sleep. After all is said and done, you and I need to speak.”
Long Live Death: Welcome To The Afterlife Page 19
