Mesopotamia - The Redeemer (3 page)

They were called Truth, Flash,
Shadow and Smoke after the names of the aeons, Gnostic mythological
deities from the early Christian era. They were war orphans who
were adopted and recruited by the New Gnosis. In the crucial
initial stages of their assimilation into the Gnosis, all memory of
their previous experiences were erased, their names were replaced
by Gnostic names and they were convinced that they were the
successors of the ancient Gnostics.

Smoke was only seven years old when
he was picked up by a gang of looting pirates and sold to the
Gnostics. The enormous scuffed steel door of the fortified compound
closed behind the boy with a clang, reminiscent of the tolling of
judgment day bells. He wrung his fingers nervously and repeatedly
fondled the cool metal band of the ring he wore around his finger.
That worn and scratched strip of brass, which still bore a faint
hint of the diamond pattern that had once been engraved upon it,
was the only personal item that remained in his possession. He had
stolen it one day from the ringleader of the looters who had
captured him. He knew that, in their eyes, he was but a mere object
from their inventory of merchandise. If so, what difference did it
make if one object stole another? He had no special reason for
specifically taking this ring. The speed of his fingers did not
enable him to take anything large or more important. Deep in his
languishing heart, he secretly hoped that the merchant would catch
him in the act and kill him.

At the Gnostic compound in Uruk, he
was greeted by a dark skinned man with dark eyes, a high forehead
and full lips. Grayness had not yet crept into the brown hair of
the man who would one day become the commander of the Gnostic
forces.

“This is your new home. Your new
name is Smoke. This will be your only name from now until
eternity,” said the man who seemed like a giant to the young boy.
“I am Truth, and we have chosen you to join the Gnosis, to liberate
this world from its impure shells.”

The right side of Truth's face and
neck was dappled with blue spots. Like all the other Gnostic
warriors, he too wore a shirt and pants made from black shiny
fabric. He continued to utter words that the boy who was now Smoke
did not understand. He only understood one thing: He had been
chosen. He was now worth more than the value of the ring. Truth
began to march quickly over the red clay soil pavement, his feet
kicking up dust clouds that contributing their share to the fulvous
haze that hung heavily over the entire compound. The boy trailed
after him. He struggled not to cry. Despite the urge to seek refuge
in Truth, he was careful not to become attached to this man. The
slave merchants did not allow him to cling to them either when he
solicited their intimacy.

They stepped between the giant
plastic cubes that appeared to be buildings. “You'll stay here with
us. We will not hurt you and we will not let you get hurt. We are
your squadron.”

Smoke noticed a boy with a buzz
cut, slightly older than him, quickly traversing the intersecting
path. When the boy noticed them, he froze in place and lowered his
eyes. Truth nodded his head and the boy straightened his neck.
Truth nodded his head again. The boy unfroze and continued on his
way after Truth uttered a few words in an incomprehensible
language.

They passed between the identical
gray plastic cubes until Truth finally opened one of the doors and
went inside. Twenty rolled up mats, woven from the same black
plastic fibers as the uniforms, lay on the floor: ten on each side
of the room. In the center of the room stood a few children his
age. They were busy reinforcing the screws on some strange fixture.
It was a column decorated with pipes, cables and switches. When
Truth opened the door, they froze with lowered gazes until Truth
released them with a double nod of his head.

“This is Smoke,” Truth introduced
him. “This is your squadron. You may address me as 'The Squadron
Leader'.” Smoke could feel Truth's eyes piercing his insides, like
hooks gripping his flesh and freezing it.

“Your squadron comrades will
explain everything you need to know about this place.” He thought
he caught a faint smile from Truth. Smoke cherished this smile. It
compensated for any frigidity he .experienced. Before he turned to
exit, Truth's dour countenance returned. The fear, which had never
completely left him, gripped Smoke once more. When the door closed
behind him, Smoke retreated until his back was flush with the
closed door. The other children congregated around him in a
semicircle and examined him.

“Are you from here?” asked one
chubby boy.

“From here?” he wondered.

“From here, from Earth. Did you
come from Dust or perhaps another colony? Where are your parents?
Are they dead?” asked a second boy. It was Shadow.

“Yes, I am from Earth. My parents
are dead.”

“My parents are also dead,” said
the chubby boy.

“All of our parents are dead,”
added Shadow.

“Not true!” blurted out one of the
smaller boys. “My parents didn't die. My father is on the way over
here right now and he's coming to take me to my mother.” The child
burst out in tears.

“Not true!” exclaimed the chubby
boy irritably.

“Is true!” sobbed the boy.

“Not true, not true! Liar! No one
here has a mother or a father and you don't have a mother or a
father either.”

An older boy, who up until this
point had been silent, opened the door and the small child scurried
out, sobbing. “He's not a Gnostic yet. He still cries,” explained
Flash, who was the leader of the room by virtue of being the oldest
of the group.

“Are you a Gnostic?” the chubby boy
asked Smoke.

“Yes,” he replied in voice choked
by the weight in his throat. It didn't take him long to understand
the front he must put up in order to survive in this place.

“Let's see if you truly are a
Gnostic,” said Shadow, removing a sharpened nail from his
pocket.

“Leave him alone, he's not a
Gnostic yet,” said Flash.

“I am too a Gnostic!” Smoke was
garnering courage.

“Gnostic! Gnostic!” chanted the
children as they linked hands and surrounded him.

“We'll see,” said Shadow as he
placed the nail into Smoke's hand.

“Gnostic! Gnostic! Gnostic!” The
boys circled him with increasing speed, gesturing with their hands
in a sort of stabbing motion. Only Flash glanced sideways at them
indifferently. Smoke understood. Never before had he injured
himself on purpose, but he now understood that this was to be his
acceptance test. He forcefully drove the nail into his arm until
blood spurted out as he shouted at the top of his lungs, “I am
Gnostic!”

They grabbed his hands and pulled
him into the circle.

“Gnostic! Gnostic!” they repeated
as they whirled with him. Pain and elation mingled in his
tears.

Despite the initial euphoria of
belonging, in the days that followed, Smoke ran away and hid during
roll call inside the ditches that he discovered underneath the
residential cubes. The ditches stretched along the length and
breadth of the compound and were paneled with metal sheets that
gleamed faintly in the light that penetrated through the slits. He
did not know if he was more afraid of being discovered or of the
possibility that they would not even notice his absence. Finally,
when he concluded that he had been forgotten, he sank into despair;
he had no choice but to disappear. In the end, Truth found him and
punished him severely. After his flogging punishment had ended,
Truth instructed Smoke to sit in the rigid metal chair in his
office, even though his back and behind were slashed and bleeding.
Smoke sat up straight and could feel the cool metal through the
blood-soaked fabric of his shirt.

“You are forbidden to go back down
to the tunnels,” scolded Truth. “They are an impure place, remnants
of the old Gnostic compound that was destroyed by the Gods. The
next time you go down there, we will seal the door behind you and
let the Gods destroy you as well. Understood?”

Smoke stretched even further
upright. “Of course, Sir!” he answered, though in his heart he
craved to return to the tunnels and call out to the Gods to unleash
their wrath upon him. But as time went on and he finally did return
to the tunnels in an attempt to enter, he found that the entrance
had been sealed.

When he was ten, he went up for the
first time to the roof of the fourth floor of the central cube, the
plastic cube of the Gnostic Command Center, with the intention of
jumping. Truth managed to reach the edge of the abyss and pull him
back, but Smoke was already gone. He felt nothing when Truth
embraced his thin torso. He was furious that his plunge had been
interrupted. When he dropped his shoe down, he said to himself, 'I
wish it would fall forever.' Even after he agreed to live, or at
least to postpone his death for a while, he continued to sink into
oblivion, to lose himself in the void by repeating soothing
monotonous motions as if he were a rocking chair. He used to spin
on one leg until he was overcome with vertigo and became addicted
to the trance of silence.

These were the very symptoms that
Truth had sought when he asked the looters about their merchandise.
Truth looked for these types of orphans who had tasted nothingness
and now hungered for it. Truth's job was to provide these
empty-shelled children with an outlet through which they could
channel their suicidal impulses: Gnosticism. The children were
fascinated by the stories of Gnostic mythology that he recounted to
them. He described the pure and perfect world of the heavenly
pleroma, where the mighty aeons reigned. He told them about the
ancient myth of Ishtar, daughter of the Supreme God of Light,
mother of the boy Yaldabaoth. Ishtar forbade Yaldabaoth from
creating the world, but he disobeyed his mother and created the
earth, heavens and all that lies between them in six days.

Yaldabaoth continued to disobey her
words when he secretly breathed the spirit of life into man and
created him in his image, fashioning the woman from his rib. Ishtar
opposed the creation of man on grounds of man's desires and
creativity. Indeed, the Gnostics viewed mankind as something made
by a boy for the purpose of annoying his mother—defective. But just
as vestiges of holy Ishtar exist within her rebellious son
Yaldabaoth, so too the sacred sparks of the supreme cosmos are
hidden inside the shells of the universe. The Gnostic's mission was
to redeem the sacred spirit that was trapped within the material
world. The Gnostics longed to leave this contaminated world,
destroy the impurity, extricate the remnants of the Supreme
Godliness and return it to its source, the pure spiritual
dimension.

Truth told them about the genius
Adamas, who revived the ancient Gnosis, established the New Gnostic
Order and taught his disciples to believe that their mission was to
release the void, the spirit, from its material prison shell. When
Truth taught Smoke that the world he was living in was inherently
evil, filled with endless suffering and in need of being put out of
its own misery, Smoke finally felt as if someone had articulated
what he had already known for so long.

Smoke delved into the teachings of
Adamas. He thirstily drank in Truth's stories about the aftermath
of the Human Gods' Wars. When Adamas established the Gnostic
compound in Uruk in the year 2195 It was a closed community that
attracted anarchists, charismatic despots and communities of
witches that dabbled in magic throughout planet Earth. Adamas
revived ancient Gnostic practices such as the tattooing of the back
of the right earlobe as well as inventing new rituals to express
the void, such as the Walk Along the Abyss. Thus, it became clear
to Smoke that his failed suicide attempt on the roof of the command
center was, in fact, a fulfillment of Adamas' teachings, and had
constituted his first step toward becoming a true Gnostic. Smoke
believed in Adamas' prediction that in the end of days, a redeemer
would appear, a materialization of the Supreme God on Earth. The
Gnostics referred to him as 'Pure Spirituality', 'The Silence',
'The Non-Existence', 'The Prime Father' and 'The Unknown'. When the
redeemer would arrive, the loop of time would be closed, past and
present would become one, cause and effect would be inseparable and
the reality of nothingness would be released from its material
prison.

Most of Shadow's defensive forces
were marked as destroyed as Smoke's pilots sat on Flash's pilots'
tails. With his unpredictable high speed maneuvers, Smoke left a
sizable gap between his aircraft and those of his pursuers. Smoke
loved vanishing and relished the arbitrariness of his escape
tactics, easily and fluidly executing his maneuvers with relaxed
muscles. Just as he thought that victory was imminent and that he
would soon become a Gnostic leader, the ship's computer
malfunctioned and the engines went out.

In a matter of a split second, he
tightened his muscles and directed the vessel toward the distant
Earth in hope of harnessing the gravitational force and using it to
stabilize himself. Flash's virtual missiles came increasingly
closer to Smoke's aircraft. He continued to navigate the plane's
spiraling descent with his right hand, while pushing switches and
checking his indicators with his left hand in order to locate the
source of the problem and set it back in working order. He reviewed
the emergency procedures by heart but realized that he had never
encountered a similar problem before. Beads of sweat ran down his
forehead, blurring his vision, while his blood thundered in his
ears. His mouth went dry and his knees trembled, but he did not
give up. The implications of the malfunction went far beyond this
ceremonial training exercise. He could accept a dignified loss, but
this failure would end in certain death. If he did not escape or
recover in a matter of seconds, he would spin out of control and
the intensifying gravitational force would accelerate his speed
until he will be incinerated in the Earth's atmosphere. He had
resolved to die a martyr's death, but if he did not exercise
everything in his power to prevent it, this death would not be
martyrdom.