Nemecene: The Epoch of Redress (26 page)

I could hear another student fumbling in the dark, so I returned to the room in time to avoid any raised eyebrows and activated the bioluminescent frames. Then it dawned on me. What if the sudden plunge was a manifestation of someone's intentional design and the scampering in the hallway was not caused by one of the neighbors. As the footsteps neared, I was catapulted backwards to the night of the sweep when Eli and I were cornered and I was silently calling to you to somehow protect us from what lurked outside. But this time I am scribbling in the dark, recording my thoughts as they appear, a voyeur into my own consciousness.

The lift is opening and there is a chase, and some… what? I must be acoustically challenged. It actually sounds like…I'll finish up later.

Boy, did I feel brainless. A short episode with fake zombies and I fell right into a state of paranoia. When I finally heard her voice calling me, I realized that the lobby guard must have escorted her up the lift, which was running on emergency power. To my surprise however, when I finally opened the door, she was carrying a goose. A big white goose, still honking. Trying as I did to act as if she had just interrupted an intense journaling session, she saw right through my charade and exploded with laughter. I will never live this one down.

With the waddler on her lap, she proceeded to recount the main highlights of her encounter with Dr. Tenille, minus the ocean-faring sailor analogies he is fondly known for, of course. His nickname is Captain Hook for precisely that reason. Since he has been lecturing, coincidentally shortly after your accident, he has been obsessed with creating a 16th century galleon to explore the uncharted waters of our glorious planet, as he puts it. No one has dared to inform him that all the waters are accounted for, and that the mighty vessel would never survive the seas, virulent as they have become. So it is with this incidental information that we had to evaluate the sanity of what he chose to divulge to Eli concerning your own state of mind under his care. She did succeed, by the way, in securing an envious assignment as part of his courageous crew, code name Tinkerbell. Utterly fitting.

At first, he simply recognized her as an industrious freshman, but upon presenting him with your charmed ribbon, his demeanor changed. The frown on his face, as he scoured his internal flashes for an image to match the sudden emotion he was attempting to conceal, took a more serious turn. His eyes grew wide, his shoulders rounded, and his voice weakened, searching for the right words. The girl sitting across from him in his cabin, I mean office, was none other than the twin child of his most psychotic patient and represented evidence of a past he had vowed to forget. Perceiving his apprehension, Eli opened the discussion with a heartfelt thanks for his compassion for you and the family during your last three years, and kept the conversation light and playful, reminiscing about a few joyful visits we had experienced. Once his fear had subsided, she broached the subject of your death and explained to him that all she wanted was to know what really happened so that she could attain closure. With her genuine intent succinctly articulated, he agreed to comply as best as he could recall.

As I write these words, comforted by my loyal foot warmer, I wish you could send me a sign, to either confirm or deny the verity of his statements. Even though Odwin, our trustworthy Gadlin contact, had produced a slip distinctly showing Dr. Tenille's signature on your release permissions, he staunchly denied having ever entertained the idea of discharging you, especially after finding his colleague Dr. Yarkovsky dead in your cell. Following the incident, you were promptly declared exceptionally dangerous and slapped with level three restraints for the remainder of your days at the hospital. There was talk that the Ministry's Inner Council had ordered the GMU to assemble a contingent of operatives to sedate and move you into a level three lockdown facility just outside Ministburg, but the transfer never materialized. The day after the murder, you vanished, taking Eli and me with you, and none of us was ever seen or heard of again, until now.

You see, Dr. Tenille had presumed that we, like many children our age at the time, had fallen prey to a rash of serial killings which inexplicably ended with your disappearance, but how can that be true? Stitch and I pulled every existing news article from the archives and found nothing about twin sibling victims, and if we were indeed kidnapped, there was no historical record of that either. Obviously, there was a veil of deception obscuring the facts, and Dr. Tenille was either wittingly or not involved.

When prompted about the specific nature of your illness, he described frequent hallucinations as of yet foreign to Eli's mix of symptoms, according to her confessions; however, as she has been known to downplay the severity of her syndrome in the past, I will closely monitor her lucidity in light of this development. His tone became resolute as he attempted to steer the conversation towards Eli's internship application. For reasons he had no access to, you were secretly protected from the surgical treatments his other mentally disturbed patients were routinely subjected to, which implies, from his assessment, that someone influential within the Unification wanted your brain intact. He warned Eli that she must actively protect her identity and promised to do the same while she remains under his tutelage.

The suggestion that Eli was in danger from not only herself as her affliction worsened but also from some faction in the Unification was no surprise. She sat there overwhelmed. The soothing effect Squiggles had had on her grief as a teenager was evident as the poor goose squirmed to break free, apparently annoyed by the tears coming from above. I must admit to strong feelings of my own, although they were more akin to anger than sadness. How dare he insinuate that you were in some way connected to these horrid crimes? I refuse to believe it.

As we struggled with the ramifications Dr. Tenille's testimony implied, a puzzled Stitch appeared at the door, markedly distressed by Eli's emotional state while at the same time quietly amused by the honker waddling around the room. He had logically assumed that the doctor had decided against adding her to his crew and was further befuddled when she showed him the official pirate eye patch. Captain Hook does enjoy living up to his student's expectations.

As we were on the verge of disclosing this morning's loss, Stitch crooked his neck and exclaimed: "The Jewel of Airmid!" At last, in plain view, he was able to see what I had been guarding so closely. Less than a week ago, I would have been shocked that he even knew what a jewel was, but now, I almost expect him to know what color underwear I wore five days ago. He was stupefied, however, when we admitted the burglary, and went on to say that it was a piece of folklore his grandfather learned from his grandfather who learned it from his grandfather and so on, but that he never thought it was actually real. Judging by his tone, or more specifically his hair's reaction, he could have been telling the truth, but my inclination was to continue keeping your history private until this nagging knot in my gut dissipates, so we passed on the lie Father fed us and withheld Dr. Tenille's significance in your life.

Eli was showing signs of fading, so I collected the museum's property and lead Stitch towards the exit, almost relinquishing my own personal chronicles. I grabbed the goose just in the nick of time as he was beaking his way through my journal, which was lying victim on the floor in the corner. Eli giggled and made some snide remark about the dangers of him spreading all my secrets around the whole flock. When I told her he could be a goosebot, she just rolled her eyes and pointed to the fresh gift our illustrious Mr. Goose had left on the shag, which was clearly repulsed. Yes. Definitely getting paranoid.

Thanks to Stitch's offer to change the scanner records and consequently remove the out-of-bounds tag on the shelf slot, I was able to sneak the folder into the stacks without creating an exception and thereby avert an uncomfortable discussion with Madame Beaudoin. When I reached my quarters, however, I found several of my effects out of their assigned places. Annoyed, I automatically concluded that Eli's haphazard filing skills were responsible, but something about the manner in which they were tossed struck me as intentional, almost as if they were pointing to something. My gaze followed what I gathered was their alignment and ultimately rested on the niche in the back wall. A challenge had been delivered.

As I advanced towards the object of focus, picking up the bread crumbs along the way, I noticed Sparky trembling in his blanket. The room was cooler than normal, although not enough to induce hypothermia; however, the poor puppy was indeed suffering from an unusually penetrating chill. I cradled him inside my shirt and consoled him, massaging his quivering shoulders. Eli was right about his being combat challenged, though I wouldn't admit that to her, since based on results or lack thereof, he has yet to exhibit the territorial behavior I was assured was innate, as evidenced by the current breach.

Peeping from the gameboard's drawer, there was a second message beautiful penned on an old piece of parchment, and the alabaster pieces were placed in perfect formation for a sleight of hand. One final throw could either end the game or change its course. The next move was mine to make.

Day 32: Early Afternoon

T
he city is brimming with wary travelers from diverse regions of the Earth, some risking a treacherous voyage across the waters for the coveted opportunity to share ground with him. Seldom does the Pramam speak in a public forum, generally preferring to communicate the Ministry message from the safety of Inner Council chambers via scheduled daily meditations broadcast to the local sajadums that are strategically interconnected within each municipality. She expects that his advisor will have reported the recent disturbances on the campus oval and anticipates an animated exchange at Rubrique Court tomorrow when he addresses the student assembly. With her newly acquired persona as Odwin in the maze, she is in direct contact with the subculture loyal to her Gadlin predecessor, and, thanks to his unsuspecting protégé, Zafarian, able to covertly navigate the encrypted layers of the Unification. Her influence is the knife that shall peel their vile onion of deceit.

The strife resumed approximately a century ago, during a period known as the Second Great Water Wars. Due to the tremendous success of the cooling stations, the rampant plague of global misery had shifted from environmental to psychological. The impending threat of cataclysmic annihilation had united all cultures in their mission to rescue themselves from certain extinction and had given rise to the Great Age of the Gadlins, but as the atmospheric climate slowly recovered, the ego resurfaced and plotted to divide once again. An insidious affliction, called scarcity thinking, spawned by the diminishing supply of land and potable water, had gripped the inattentive minds of the complacent masses. People were packed into the cities, as governments expropriated more and more terrain for agricultural rehabilitation and processing plants. A tsunami of lies and treachery, solely rivaled in its destructive capacity by the Great Ocean Swell, brought with it insurrection and disease, as the wealthy few, who controlled and apportioned the livelihood, reverted to their hoarding habits. The populace grew increasingly malcontent and organized itself into violent mobs. One by one, the unsanctioned captains of each territory were assassinated.

From the anarchy, arose a multi-faith federation of religious leaders that championed a grassroots movement, bringing peace and stability to the remnants of the crumbled houses. They elected a charismatic politician, who consolidated what was left of the population under a single planetary government. Anabelle, the Pramam's mother, as a respected spiritual being and chair of the coalition, was instrumental in mediating disputes on behalf of the various doctrines and in maintaining a healthy separation between church and state. Sadly, eighteen years after the birth of her only child, humanity mourned when the whole fellowship perished in an explosion that destroyed the greater part of the holy retreat where they held their quarterly summit. A unanimous urge for her son to extend his mother's legacy ensued, and that movement became the seed for the current dictatorial system.

That fateful day, forty-five years prior, the cherished luminary who had marched the globe wearing the armor of love and wisdom, shed her broken shell and bequeathed her enterprises to the misguided ambitions of her progeny. Abusing the trust she had spent a lifetime nurturing, he sanctimoniously dismissed the supreme director as superfluous. He then concocted a divine book negating all previous ecclesiastical teachings with his supposedly anointed, incontestable, and exclusive trinity of Jesus, Mohammed, and Abraham, and appointed himself Pramam, the lord over every living thing. The Unification, as it exists today, is the result of an individual man's prophecy or sanity, depending on whose perspective prevails, the melding of clerical and secular responsibilities, and the corruptive power that they breed.