The Living (33 page)

…Regaining consciousness was sore and difficult, as if he was flying and then fell. But this time it was from a much greater height than usual… He was lying curled up on his side, on the wet floor, shivering from cold. Bakugans were crawling over his face and back, dragging their hard, sharp wings across his skin, while one, the fattest, had slumped lazily on the floor beside him. Flipped over on its back, in a foul-smelling yellow puddle.

Gripping on to the side of the bath, the Wise One pulled himself up onto his feet. He shook the towel from his head – it fell on the beetle like a white shroud. He looked in the mirror. A clear forehead, with no scars on it. Where did he get the idea from that there should be a scar? After six larvae, anyway, he could have all sorts of hallucinations…

Swaying from lack of strength, he took a shower, drove the sluggish winged beetles off with the jet of water and drowned them in the bath. He crushed the one under the towel through the material with his foot and chucked it in the bin. A
brownish-red
stain was left on the towel.

His head was empty – but not in the same way as usual after a BW. The emptiness this time was not that soft, cosy ball of inviz which carousel would windup inside him, but a
melancholy
feeling that he had found out something important but forgotten it…

He put on what he had been wearing before – his presenter’s ‘feeling lucky’ gear, which reeked of sweat – and walked out of the bathroom. Cleo was in the living room. She was lying on the floor, staring intently at the ceiling – she was probably watching a show or writing something in her Living Journal. Scattered all around her were crumpled food wrappers, an open pack of tranqvitamins, an unliving squashed bakugan – half-transparent, halfway through a metamorphosis – and
an empty bottle of vitacomplex… He could never cure her of this stupid habit of throwing rubbish on the floor and then going to sleep in the exact same place. ‘So what? Everyone does it.’ ‘So let’s just have
everyone
do whatever they want then!’ the Wise One said angrily. She didn’t even bother to
understand
why he was so annoyed by this lack of respect for first layer. For his layer.

Everyone might as well just do whatever they want. There, outside, beyond the Residence and the Wise One’s apartments. Let them lounge about on the soft, shaggy floors in their boring little first-layer boxes with their rounded edges, surrounded by sticky, springy, safety furniture, let them get fat and sleep, let them not wash for days, immersed in
socio
… That’s not how it is at the Wise One’s place. Here things are interesting. Here it’s all like it was in ancient times –
hard
wooden furniture and a
hard
parquet floor. He has little multi-coloured poufs to sit on. He has pictures on the walls – real ones, with congealed encrustations of oil paint which he’d commissioned: three landscapes (a wood, the sea and some mountains, the beauty of first layer), depictions of wild animals… He has a pianola – you can make sounds on it in first layer. He has a library – seven real paper books, which smell of decay and mould… But she didn’t care. She would go to sleep wherever she needed to on the hard floor or would move on to one of the poufs, if he reminded her. She never touched the pianola (why? I’ve got ‘
Wonder-Composer
’ installed), she didn’t look at the pictures, she never opened any of the paper books. She didn’t like the oak furniture – too many dangerous hard corners that gave her bruises (‘Look where you’re going, sweetheart!’ – ‘What, the whole time?!’)… In first layer she was only interested in the lab. Those termites of hers. It still wasn’t working with people, but the termites were giving amazing results – up to twelve
immersions
…

‘What are you doing?’ he asked, knowing full well that this question irritated her.
Socio
is private. Asking someone that question is no different from requesting the password to their inbox. But now her irritation suited him too – anything would. Anything that might somehow be able to silence this melancholic feeling that he had
forgotten something
.

‘I’m watching the Shameful Pauses,’ Cleo replied
grudgingly
. ‘That woman just ceased, Rosa…’

‘Let’s watch it together,’ he took the Crystal off sleep.

‘No, gopz!’ She squatted and gripped her knees with her arms. ‘It’s enough that you are here. And are you aware that watching the broadcasts of these pauses is now compulsory? Every day, for fifteen minutes, I have to see how they di…’

‘Cleo!’

‘How they die! What, don’t you like that word?’ Her voice broke into a shout. ‘It’s forbidden? But it fits very well. They are dying, suffocating, being killed in glass bell-jars! You don’t know what it feels like when they cease – that gopzing Crystal of yours only shows the pictures! But I’m there!’ She put her hands over her ears, as if she didn’t want to hear her own shouting. ‘Every day for fifteen minutes, with them! And I couldn’t care less about “good progress”!’

‘Stop shouting at me!’

She fell silent. She was sitting on her heels, rocking from side to side, her eyes closed and her hands pressed to her ears.

‘Sorry,’ Cleo said flatly. ‘Sorry that I lost it. It’s all the noise, it’s driving me crazy.’

‘What noise?’

‘Those beetles of yours, they’ve got this horrible
low-frequency
hum… Or that redecorating you’ve decided to have done for our non-existent Darling… Or… Don’t you hear it?’

He listened carefully.

‘Cleo, it’s quiet in this room. I always destroy the beetles after I… well, you know. And there is no redecorating
happening yet. You just want to have something to blame me for.’

He turned away and sat at his Crystal, with his back to Cleo. He opened the System. His hands were shaking. His lips were shaking. She is being unfair. He is doing everything properly, wisely. He is doing his duty. He is helping the Living. He feels sorry for those Dissidents, but they are too dangerous to pardon. Only by harsh measures can they achieve good progress in the Living’s recovery from illness… Only by harsh measures…

He is doing everything properly.

Because that is how it must be. He stared at the System: the good progress was evident. Three or four scraps, one of which, in the middle, was his stalled friend… He was hit with a wave of melancholy. He had to remember something important, something really important…

….A humble, primordial, ancient desire suddenly arose – the desire to pray to someone about something. Not the Living, but someone else – someone who could protect them both, someone who had ruled this world long ago, before the Nativity.

‘Tremble for he cometh,’ the Wise One mumbled; he did not know any pre-Nativity prayers, only the snatches he had
accidentally
overheard from the madman Matthew. ‘Heavenly Three-headed God, thy will be done, thine twine swine…’

‘…I am wandering in the darkness, I do not know who I am or where I came from…’

…and forgive me my sins, for I am as a child…

‘…Guide me, show me the way, for thine twine…’

‘…Tremble for he cometh, for thine twine swine…’

‘Fofs!’ Cleo sobbed, as she looked at the screen, at the crazed, swollen ‘little man’. ‘Fofs! What, is he – dying?’

But Zero did not reply. Because he could no longer hear her. Because the System had broken through the border of the screen
and appeared to him. And it had let him in, like an ancient, pre-nativity temple would let in sinners and wandering holy fools.

Share this document
with everyone.

My friends, we have been lied to. But today the time for truth has come. I have seen the System… Grieve with me! I am telling you in all honesty: I have seen the Darkness drawing near. The number of the Living has changed and continues to change day after day. Not all incodes are being reproduced in time, and some are not being reproduced at all. During reproduction others are doubled or even trebled…

From now on the System will reveal itself only to me. But I am telling you in all honesty: every day I will share it
with everyone.

I can see the System… And I want you to see it too. You can read my New Commandments in the attachment.

Letter to Self
17th September 479 A.V.

I haven’t written a letter to self in a long time. A really long time. I thought there was no point – seeing as disaster has befallen the Living. But I changed my mind. There probably is a point – at the least, there will be if I do what I now believe to be right.

If I do what I have decided to do, reading this will prove useful to you, my friend.

And for me too: maybe it’ll help me get my thoughts together somehow…

Today you could hear the rumble of explosions not far from the Residence, right from morning, and we had to spend all day in the bunker while a clean-up operation was carried out; the dog was going crazy. She’s always been terrified of explosions or any loud noise. She is terrified of everything and everyone, apart from me. I have, of course, created a separate room for her in the bunker. I spent a bit of time with her, and I could feel how the air went rigid with the thick, acerbic, unbearable smell of her fear, and then I left and locked her in there on her own.

She’s afraid of being alone too. Cleo and the Son and I were sitting at the opposite end of the bunker, but even from there we could hear her whimpering and thrashing about in there. The dog gets so distressed living here with us that sometimes I think it would be better if she ceased… I shouldn’t have listened to Cleo and taken her from the Farm. Cleo hoped that we might be able to tame her.

Back then, immediately after the Revelation, lots of people hoped they would be able to tame farm animals. They thought that since the Living had died or was at least sick and weak,
animals would stop being afraid… But the Great Taming was a failure. All the animals that had been brought from the Farms to be domesticated died in the first few days. Most ceased to exist from heart attacks – that is, from sheer terror… Others were shot because they behaved aggressively. The pigs, cows, chickens and rabbits were, I suppose, killed for their meat…

Our dog is probably the only animal which still
lives in a house.
Because I am here. When I am with her, she almost stops being afraid…

Perhaps she is the only animal from the Farm to have
survived
at all. Now that no one looks after the Farms…

Once a week I upload photographs onto
socio
: the Wise One and his faithful hound. Very optimistic. It gives people hope.

They don’t hear, the people, how she whimpers, pines and thrashes about when I leave her. They don’t hear how she
overflows
with yelping and barking when other people come up to her. My Son or Cleo. Or Layla. Or the General.

For most of the day, while the clean-up was going on around the Residence, me, Cleo and the Son played ‘Gurners’. I invented this game myself – I wanted to create something personal and homemade which would unite the whole family in first layer… The game’s not complicated – perhaps I’ll tell you about it, maybe it’ll be of some use to you. If my plans work out and quieter times do come, you can share the rules with everyone – I’d like that. So one person, the Gurner, has to act out a word or a whole phrase. By miming, gesturing or moving his body somehow (which, by the way, is good for developing children’s coordination in first layer). And the others have to guess what he’s trying to say. Really simple, right? And it’s all fair, there’s no
socio
to help you find the answer: you need to think for
yourselves
, with your own head, it’s the only way… Cleo tried it once, as an experiment – she ran a clip of the Son’s ‘gurning’ through an analysis program. The result was pretty funny: ‘This
person is frightened and/or aggressive. All indicators suggest that he requires the assistance of the Psychological Service.’ But my son was only trying to get us to guess the word ‘dog’… Cleo and I had a real laugh then, and even the Son groaned quietly along with us, his lips shut tight – that’s how he laughs…

He was groaning like that today too, although it wasn’t funny at all. The Son clearly went too far today. When it was his turn to be the ‘gurner’, he lay down on the stone floor, and grinning horribly, crossed his eyes and froze in that position.

‘A pupa in metamorphosis?’ Cleo asked wearily, looking off to one side.

The Son shook his head to say no.

‘An unliving animal?’ I suggested. Wrong again.

‘We give in,’ Cleo said. ‘What is it?’

He said something to her in
socio
. She shuddered as if from a nearby explosion, and finally looked at the Son. With distaste and something like disgust, perhaps. And she said, ‘Don’t you dare.’

She rarely looks the Son in the eye. She rarely looks at him at all – normally she looks slightly to one side of him. When I ask her, she always denies it, but I think it’s because she has never been able to learn to love him. The Son frightens her.

Because he can’t pull his lips into a smile. Because he does not laugh, but groans.

Because he is not our Darling, but adopted.

Because he can’t fall asleep without bright light.

Because he was a correctee.

Because when we took him out of the House and brought him to the Residence and he first saw my Crystal W, he poked the screen with his finger and started muttering, ‘Sitem. Sitem. Sitem.’ ‘How does he know?’ Cleo had asked then, calmly and evenly, and looked at him in that way for the first time. The System actually was open on the monitor. The Son was three years old. He couldn’t have known yet.

He was three when we took him. Now he is ten.

Now he is lying still on the floor, grinning and goggling his eyes.

And I say, ‘OK, go on then, spit it out, what were you thinking of?’ He peers tentatively at Cleo, he doesn’t know what to do. Because mummy has just said ‘Don’t you dare.’ She looks away in silence.

He replies, ‘I was doing “the Living”. The unloving monster.’

Cleo says in a whisper, ‘I’m calling Layla. Layla can take him off…’

Layla comes. Layla loves our Son. She loves everyone. She says, ‘Alive or dead, the Living is full of love, and every part of him loves every other.’ She is very placid, Layla. For a long time now, ever since she returned from the clinic, she has loved everyone. And her scar is absolutely tiny, and so neat…

She doesn’t miss her own Darlings at all, she doesn’t even remember them. Whereas I, paradoxical as this may seem, sometimes regret sending them away. They would have run around the Residence and they would have
laughed
, they would have played with the Son. And the Son, perhaps, would have learned to do what they do…

But back then I was afraid that the children of Second and Layla would start making claims – they might even have disputed the transfer of
wisdom
to my Son when I ceased… None of that matters now. The Son won’t be the Wise One, you will be. But here, in the Residence, there is no sound of
children’s
laughter. They have, probably, already ceased, Layla’s Darlings. There’s all sorts going on out there. I shouldn’t have sent them away…

‘Come with me, Butcher’s Son,’ Layla coos, leading him by the hand. ‘Let’s go to the temple. Let’s pray to Threeheads for the Reduction to end and for the Living to rise again…’

We have a temple right here in the bunker – small, but cosy…

‘He’s still alive,’ Cleo says to me, when we are left alone, and her eyes are absolutely crazy again, this has been happening a lot with her recently. ‘The Living is still alive… But he’s not well. I can hear him howling sadly…’

‘That’s the dog howling,’ I reply.

‘The dog is howling too, but quieter. You just can’t hear it. You are the only one who can’t hear these terrible noises!’

‘Our Son doesn’t hear them either.’

‘No, he hears them. He just likes them…’

…Then my General comes. He says that the clean-up is over and we can go back up top. And that he has just sent me a dispatch from the front. With
bad
news.