AI's Children

by Ed Hurst

  Chapter 14

  Not everyone born in that cult was crazy.

  As with any other human background, they had representatives in The Brotherhood. One defector in particular was Gregory. Shortly after passing through the ritual for coming of age, he realized the whole thing was simply not for him. His elders wrote it off as the typical juvenile rejection of authority, commonly seen when boys reached a certain age and developed the capacity for abstract logic. They thought it would pass and simply redoubled the harsh discipline on him.

  He ran away from home.

  But Gregory did not run away from the sophistication of his plutocrat upbringing. While he despised having it used on him, he also didn’t forget the lessons of cynicism and manipulation that came with his induction into the cult religion of his family. He took with him a wise selection of material goods which he parleyed for acceptance into a youth gang.

  Officially the government denied that anyone lived outside the institutional control of government. It also made forceful attempts to corral rootless children into various types of schools, reform institutions and orphanages. But the natural bureaucratic indolence made for soft restrictions that allowed some number of kids to come and go with paltry penalties for taking a few days away from the system. Gregory at first managed to avoid the system, though it meant too many times going hungry.

  In the rough and tumble of gang conflicts, Gregory was shocked one day to encounter an ostensible enemy who could pass for his double. To his chagrin, it was the face of one who had succumbed to the injuries of gang warfare. Deciding this was the moment to break from both his distant and recent discomforts, he traded ID tags with the body. When the gangs dispersed ahead of police response in force, Gregory kept moving and hiked to another city altogether.

  He turned himself in to one of the few better run youth shelters and made a decision to stay, using his new identity, which came with the name Gregory. In the process of attempting to rebuild is life on better terms, he got involved in the so-called underground fiction reading common among the nerdy boys. It was just a few years later he stumbled across the fiction and the new electronic books produced by Chandler at the coffee bar not far from where Gregory was staying.

  It was like the call from a home he never knew. With vigor he pursued connections until he met Luz while she was still in courtship with Chandler. The rest was history. Now these many years later, while Chandler was leading The Brotherhood and raising children with Luz, Gregory was one of his most active lieutenants. Some years younger than both, he had never gotten involved much in romance until he realized it was almost too late. Even with the influx of new members, the community offered few opportunities. He had just about given up. When the only daughter of his best friends suddenly took interest in him, his sense of good fortune was overwhelming.

  Gregory’s vision had always been to create a genuine family atmosphere with none of the craziness that came with his cultic birth family. It was all too easy to understand the ancient wisdom of The Brotherhood and the ground contested between the two groups. For him, the broad openness of The Brotherhood’s voluntary approach was almost a mandate to do right what his cult upbringing had done so wrong. In his drive to embrace the moral justice that drove away the dark nightmares of his soul, Gregory was zealous to see a return to more of the ancient ways that had served humanity so well for so many centuries.

  That Harp already shared this vision for her own reasons made it seem a very heaven-made union.

  As Chandler’s chief messenger, he had wide opportunities to poll the swelling ranks of The Brotherhood on the idea of a more formalized enclave, along with a more overt religious environment. The takers were few and widely scattered. Each had their own concerns and considerations, and he refused to play the head games his parents had modeled.

  Chandler advised him that the most viable way was to gather sufficient sponsorship to found a completely new enclave in some remote location and install enough portal links that members could continue their work lives with little disruption. Even if the new enclave came with a lot work, the transition had to come voluntarily with each member willing to participate. The really hard part was getting the consent of the government. Gregory and Harp were determined to keep the enclave on the same timeline as possible, so location was a major consideration. This occupied Gregory for quite some time.

  Harp was hardly idle. Her time was consumed in seeking someone suitable for a key position. Over the centuries the shape and flavor of The Brotherhood varied considerably. At times it was composed of almost a single religious group. At other times it was little more than a vaguely shared concept between a few widely scattered correspondents. However, the truth never dies so long as life occupies the human plane of existence, and around the time the Internet was born, so was a fresh renewal of interest in the ancient ways. Flight from the intellectual straightjacket and moral poverty of materialistic philosophical assumptions became genuinely viable once again.

  However, the effort of this latest incarnation of The Brotherhood was borne aloft by a careful avoidance of locking in any particular religious teaching. By the time Chandler had stumbled into a rather small network of academics, most of the membership had already seen or received enough psychic bruising from religious battles. Part of the lure of The Brotherhood was escaping that very thing, since so very much of religion had become captive to the exclusionary thinking inherent in Western Civilization.

  For this reason, actual clergymen in The Brotherhood were quite few. Those who did join were confronted by a wholly disorienting shredding of their professional assumptions. They simply were not used to the organizing principles of what constituted ancient congregations and worship. With so few ready to embrace the ancient ways, most clergymen came to The Brotherhood engaged in other areas of research. Thus, while it was often said that almost everyone had a religion, and the basic teachings undercut any serious atheism, it could be said that The Brotherhood itself had no religion. Most members tread softly around the issue to avoid losing the one treasury that had been so often nearly lost to humanity over the centuries.

  It was not that Gregory had no interest, but he knew his own background had been deeply stained by the cult. He felt he would recognize good religion when he encountered it, but was too gun-shy to attempt forming it. Harp had no religious background at all. She grew up with a father who bore all the hallmarks of a genuine moral apprehension of some higher power, but stripped of almost every identifying mark from previous human religion, to include the near absence of any symbolism from any civilization. It was a bare, naked religiosity born of technology. Harp had inherited this; it was instinctive to her. Yet her studies in history bore the unmistakable lesson that, while doctrine could vary, a common worship was almost necessary for the kind of enhanced social stability she knew was possible.

  So in the nearly constant travel with her new husband, while he drummed up support for a new enclave, she polled the membership for leads to someone who would bear the role of priest. It should have surprised no one that her focus came to rest most fully on a fellow who had been defrocked by no less than three different organizations. While discouraged enough to have left organized religion altogether, he was not bitter. This was what most qualified him in Harp’s eyes.

  After explaining the full background of her thinking on the matter, he agreed to make a test run at leading worship with a few other prospects for the new enclave. He had performed due diligence in polling them to gauge their feelings about worship. On the appointed day, he offered a very spare, yet conventional form of generic Christian worship that seemed to meet with everyone’s tentative approval. That was enough.

  All that was left was for the fellowship to form of its own accord.