WIPE (A Post-Apocalyptic Story) (35 page)

            “They tell you, if I know it correctly, that God created everything—that he is all powerful, all-knowing,” Wrist says in a rising tone.

            “Yes,” I reply.

            “You know I speak, though my skin is dyed red forever and can’t be shaken off now, as one who recognizes one dogma as much as nonsense as the other—that the Fatherhood and the Nefandus are equally false. But still, I’ll convey to you the thrust of our teaching, as one who still believed it would tell it…”

            I wait and listen, blindly and endless placing one foot in front of the other, releasing my sweaty fingers from Maze’s. And then, as if his explanation had been firmly crafted, Wrist says that the Wipe was a result of God’s never-ending caprice and manner of avoiding boredom.

            “The Wipe was no different than the great wars that came before it, or any of the great extinctions in history.”

            “What great extinctions?” Maze asks immediately, sparked to life by the hint that Wrist has revealed at last that he knows more than he should—of history, and probably the tower and the tunnel we’re walking through. But Wrist just ignores her and continues to talk.

            “According to our doctrine, the Wipe was the last straw in a long line of horrible atrocities committed by God. It was the final bottom that was good only in that it gave rise to an active resistance, realized in the Nefandus. A military resistance to the adherents of God. And where your Fathers tell you the Wipe was God’s way of reminding humans to put nothing before him, and to atone for your sins of technology, the Nefandus know that that is a lie—another misdirection to continue his unending game. God’s game. And Satan was the first to revolt. And should we tap into his power, we can crush the last Earthly ties to God’s self-serving morality.”

            Something comes into Wrist, and his words slow down but come with more force—as if for a moment he’s believing again what he was taught as a child. He speaks in a strange tongue, forgetting or purposefully, I can’t tell, that we do not understand him. Then he corrects himself.

            “But—of course—it’s all bullshit. And to me—as it seems it’s become to you—all is clear. There was science, a skeptical assessment of truth.”

            “A probability of truth, and nothing presumed as certain as the dogmas are,” I say, joining his anger toward the stupidity of all the world.

            “Extinctions—how do you know about that?” Maze says again, not the least bit derailed from prying deeper into his reference to the past.

            “Earlier you mentioned that you thought there was an Ark. You were right,” Wrist says quickly.

            “How do you know?” Maze says. When Wrist pauses, like he wants to produce another calculated response, limit the amount of information he sheds, Maze answers for herself. “The computer. It’s all in there, isn’t it?”

            “Wrist?” I say, after I hear his footsteps slow and then stop.

            “It stops,” he says. “I can’t get to everything. That’s why I need you.”

            “What do you mean it stops?”

            “Do you remember the diagram? Some of the systems lit, the others not?”

            “Yes.”

            “It’s the ones up there—that must be at the top of this tower, preserved there, that I can’t access. But I’ve witnessed enough to know a lot.”

            “What did you learn?” she asks. And then, we’re all stopped. I don’t feel the wall or Maze’s hands, and I only know that we all must be standing in a circle, staring at each other. But there’s just the noise of some quiet motor, and the sounds of water.

            “It’s all preserved. A record. A real record of history. What humanity became, and all of life on this planet—its entire genetic record, its social and historical and philosophical evolutions and dyings and reincarnations. The ebb and flow, the objective ebb and flow, of this planet. All of it recorded—in writing but more—in pictures and moving pictures and sounds and in—
in memories.
”

            “They’ve recorded memories?”

            “Everything—there was some time when the entire material structure of living organisms was understood, as simply as basic arithmetic. And the ability to extend life, to preserve its aspects, once abstractly understood as phenomenon of the brain, was commonplace.”

            “You’ve learned about it all? You know?” Maze says. The blackness answers and I reach out for her. But there’s nothing there. And I can’t help but picture her, pressing in closely toward Wrist. Part of me thinks he’ll kill her—that he’ll suspect her purity, her ties to the Fatherhood a possible contaminant still—and that he’ll have to thwart her unending line of questioning now that he’s revealed his knowledge. The one thing Maze has sought for all this time, in someone else already, right in front of us somewhere. I move in and bump into someone, feeling the apprehension thickly, and when I stumble back, things are calm again.

            “Wills? Are you okay?” she says.

            “I will tell you what I know. But as I said, I don’t know it all. There are large black spaces. We have to keep walking. I don’t know how many miles it is to the next elevator,” he says.

            “The next elevator?” I ask.

            “The first black space. The first dark computer—the one that will bring us up—back out of the sea and into the sky—to whatever is at the top of the tower.”

            And as if in eager compliance, just to begin to hear what Wrist has learned, Maze reaches out for me, grabs my arm and slides down to my hand, and begins to walk again, and then, there are three sets of footsteps again, probing forward once more through the metal tomb beneath the sea.

It comes out of Wrist carefully—not calculated to deceive us—but as if to articulate best what he’s learned. And as it comes, piece by piece, fitting more than shocking what I’d already suspected about the world and the past, it seems more and more certain to me that he is not here to draw us down into watery graves. That he is—by some outstanding measure of coincidence—just like us. From the opposite pole of the same baseness in the world’s modern view of things, striking out, though nurtured from a different position, toward the same end: to discover what happened to our species. What led us to the place where we recognize our sharpest intellects so blunted by fraudulent palliatives like the scriptures.

            “I will start backwards,” he begins. “Where the computers go dark and tell me nothing beyond. It is at the very height of what the computer calls
The Last Conflict.
The Last Conflict, from what I gather, was a world war, and which resulted in the catastrophic event—The Wipe. The thing that put us where we are—blind servants to reductionist fairytales. Myths so powerful that they provide the lasting reluctance to pursue inner skepticism of anything beyond their teachings such as will prevent ever again a global war. There came to be, it is true, an almost complete lack of dogma in the most powerful societies of the world. Science, instead, was the one and true doctrine. And following from that, an age of peace persisted by fits and starts, but ultimately, and insidiously, long enough that there came to be only several world powers whose morality eventually agreed and served to enforce upon the rest of the world their views. The human body’s ailments were cured. Not only was disease eradicated, but death as it occurs from aging. It was only through murder, suicide, or accident that death came about. In the last war, it wasn’t as you saw in the videos—there were no drones. That is a line that fits well with the Fatherhood’s agenda, but in fact is wrong—at least from the data—the last of the drone warfare occurred before the universal alignment of the most powerful countries. In the end, there was peace.”

            “But why then? Why the Wipe?” Maze asks.

            “It came down to—from what I can gather—a lack of genetic engineering in the rulers of the world. Yes—it was true—that genetic engineering had proved capable of altering the behavior of what were seen as the
less morally evolved
cultures of the world, and so it was known to all that engineering itself could remove any trace of unwanted characteristic. This was how the last of the rebellions and uprisings were quelled—the last mismatchings and contrasts of values between the marginal cultures and the dominant ones were resolved through—if not underhandedly so—surreptitious genetic modulations. And generationally, the world morality was universal. And after this was achieved, there was one and only one purpose to collectively drive humanity: It was, before the Wipe, and for ages and ages stemming back to the earliest brain-evolved sentient humans, the greatest dream of people: to reach higher truth, and lastly, truth that could only be obtained by reaching deeply into space. And when that came to be the ultimate goal, and all the resources of civilization were bent upon it—and technology, the cardinal sin of your Fathers, became the primary vehicle by which to achieve that goal—it was discovered that the limit of human capacity to solve problems was at last reached.”

            “What do you mean reached?” Maze presses.

            “There was the belief—never eradicated genetically through engineering, that humans could achieve whatever end their collective genius pointed to, and it always pointed to the increasing of total knowledge. A genetic hubris, retained even after dogma stripped an exalted view of our own race as being the spawn of divinity. And it was in space—precisely the unfathomable enormity of space—that humanity could no longer manipulate things toward this end. From its initial opposable thumbs gripping first tools through to the most powerful computer, it became clear that human matter and its created counterparts, artificial intelligence, would never be advanced enough to go any further than understanding and controlling the local worlds. The problem became quickly apparent—and the magnitude of the universe, though abstractly understood, had never been known as the revelator of our limitation, not until humanity was placed in a position to attempt, at its very strongest effort, the proposition of overcoming it. At first, computer intelligence was thought to be the solution—that through a combination of computer intelligence, computer intelligence working in harmony with the best of man’s brain power, the obstacles could be overcome. But they could not be. It was learned that computers were in fact also limited by their creators’ capacities, and so no computer could transcend its makers upper limits in creating the computers. It turned out that the computers were in fact mirrors of human cognition. And wherein their processing speed could be improved, and time reduced in calculating complexities far beyond the abilities of any group of human minds alone, the cognition itself could not be improved. The very thing itself—cognition—was limited in computers in the same way it was limited in humans: By the stage of its evolution in ripening to what it was. So tests were done—tests in what came to be known as
evolution speeding
. Hurrying the process of brain evolution, so that what the human brain might evolve to cogitate after a million years could be reached in a matter of years—months even. But all such experiments were met with failure in attempting to do what they sought, produce a mind—artificial or not, for the two were known at this point in regards to their cognition to be the same—that could overcome the impossible distances of space. And the defeat was too simple—that it could be simply size, sheer size—that prevented humans from ever attaining to the ultimate goal that they aspired to. The choice then came—to eliminate the desire genetically—the desire to explore and conquer new knowledge. To eliminate the very desire for progression of truth. And it was shown—controversially enough—that it could be done. And that it would be the only solution that would provide real happiness, other than a more heavy-handed return to the old dogmatic softenings of the human intellect. But as I told you at the start, though the marginal masses were assimilated, and easily enough without their knowledge or consent, into adhering to the world morality of peace, there were the leaders who resisted manipulating their own genes. Who, though without hesitation in taking of all the elixirs such as immortality and immunity to disease, to in fact attaining every desire possible albeit through artificial means, refused to taint the very thing that they believed made them human. Those few, the wisest and most powerful leaders of the world, would not relinquish their last dogma. Something tethered in their minds to their actual essence. And so they did not. Of course they lied, obeyed public sentiment in proclaiming that they too had undergone the removal of the obsession for new knowledge. And it was for a while believed that humanity had at last settled to accept its still rather grand position as masters of their own solar system and nothing more.”

            “Solar system?” I ask.

            “Of course the solar system was what whet the appetite most strongly. But space’s completeness was not felt, and the limits of human ingenuity realized, until the conquest of the solar system was complete, and moving outside of the solar system was attempted.”

            “Humans existed on other worlds?” Maze says.

            “Of course—you see, the Wipe was a solar system event. Not an Earth event.”

            “So then—what happened?”

            “It was discovered that secret research was still occurring. Engine systems, matter manipulation devices, all of them simply repeat attempts at what were known to be failures a thousand times over.  Resource wasting reminders of the hand that evolution had dealt our race. It happened to be noticed by the missing resources, and at last, it was realized that the leaders had lied. That they had retained their defective
human
aspect, and that it had them more obsessed than ever before—so much so that the resources  being drawn into the failed projects that had been tried countless times before were resulting in a separation of classes.”

            “So there
was
another war?”