Moho (Part One: Rise of a Symbol)

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Moho (Part One: Rise of a Symbol) Page 7

by Persadia


  “What’s the difference?”

  “Well, for starters there are bones and muscles in my body. And I have a brain to tell them how to move.”

  “And who is telling your brain what to do?” she asks.

  “Well, I do, of course.”

  “And you are your essence,” she claims, but I’m not convinced. Her attempts at explaining the impossible don’t sound plausible to me at all. But she is persistent.

  “Moho, the only reason you are here is because Cosmo thinks you can do this. Remember the boy and the girl at the selection and how skilled they were? But they were not selected. Cosmo thinks you can do better. All you need to do is open yourself up for the possibility that it might work instead of believing in its impossibility. Nothing would move without an essence connected to it. That’s the difference between you and this stone in my hand. Simply widen your essence. Spread yourself around.”

  Big mistake on Cosmo's part. Picking one of the two contestants would have been a much wiser decision.

  Maya is barely recognizable in her role as tutor. She is unpleasantly clear in what she wants, she isn’t impacted by my skepticism at all and yet there is still something alluring in the way she dictates to me what to do. I don’t want to disappoint her and she is obviously not going to give up, so I simply try again. She holds up the stone and I begin staring at it. We stand there for a while in complete silence before she suddenly ends the silence.

  “Very good, Moho. You see, it is possible,” she says. “Try to grab the stone but don’t move your feet.”

  She has pulled back her arm that was holding the stone, leaving the stone dangling in midair. It really looks like it is floating. I reach out my hand and try to grab it but it is too far away to reach it without stepping forward.

  “That’s the first time you are controlling something that is out of your reach," Maya comments correctly. "It’ll change everything, you’ll see.”

  I’m sitting in the soft, long grass under a tree nearby the temple on Center Island. The sun is slowly setting, revealing the first stars in the sky, and the temperature is sinking to a more comfortable level. I can hear the waves of the ocean hitting the shore in the distance and the wind blowing through the treetops all around me.

  All of the sudden, a fruit falls to the ground and bursts next to me which reminds of the Thoughttrees in CEBOS. And Pax. I wonder what happened to her. I don’t want to talk to Maya about what went down in CEBOS because I’m afraid she saw the content of the Memorybubble I gave to her in MNOP. Considering her often inaccessibly professional demeanor, it appears unlikely that she looked at the Memorybubble. But even if she did, I prefer not to know it. Maybe she will simply never mention it. I hope it can be one of those things between us we somehow don’t talk about. Like that stunt I pulled with Pax. After that she can’t seriously still be in the dark about me. She must suspect that I’m up to something and yet she didn’t make any remarks about it all day long. It’s like yesterday didn’t happen.

  After she opened me up to the possibility of essence-matter connectivity, we spent the entire morning wandering around Element Islands and trained with different materials. Maya is seriously skilled in this area. As it turns out, she is an assistant at Element Islands and people kept coming up to her asking her for advice, and she loved giving it. We had a lot of fun. But now I’m exhausted. And sore, in a sense. It doesn’t feel like a muscle that was used too much - which I didn’t. But I do feel some sort of tension in and around my head.

  While I’m sitting in the grass, waiting for Maya, I start to wonder why she left me after lunch. We had agreed to begin our date by the temple at sunset but that wasn’t terribly precise.

  More and more people return to Center Island for dinner after a long day of training at the different departments and the atmosphere changes from daytime-busy to nighttime-lazy. The Springtreegrove offers the most eclectic selection of fruits but there are all kinds of plants with eatable fruits scattered around Center Island. Some fruits are just eaten cold while others are warmed up on Glowing Stones. Maya had explained to me that the Glowing Stones have different names depending on their color, temperature, and luminosity. The dark, barely glowing, comfortably soft and slightly warm ones in the dorm that we sleep on are called ‘Nightstone’. The dark red, very hot and intensely glowing ones we use to heat up fruits are called, also quite fittingly, ‘Hotstones’.

  Speaking of hot, I suddenly spot a petite figure making her way through the crowd. She moves carefully and yet decisively but what’s most distinct about her is her outfit which, well… is missing. She isn’t exactly naked and yet she isn’t wearing any clothes either. Instead, she is covered in a thin layer of what looks like orange-beige sand that shimmers wherever it’s hit by the sun. She doesn’t leave much to the imagination and I kind of like it, I think. What I definitely don’t like is the fact that she is walking straight towards me and waves at me like she knows me. This has happened several times since the Springday celebration. Vijay introduced me to so many people and they all remember me when I walk around the Islands but I can barely remember any of them. So I usually just greet them and walk past them. This time, however, it’s too late.

  “Good afternoon, Moho. You look… ordinary?” she remarks correctly. And to my surprise, ‘she’ is Maya! What?

  “You don’t… I must say I’m… surprised,” I mumble, alternating between adolescent embarrassment and adult elation.

  “Good. That was the intent. I went on KNOP and did more research about important elements of a date and an extraordinary outfit was one of them. I assumed this here qualified as such,” she explains. I now understand that she is unaware of the impression this outfit, or lack thereof, gives— other than just looking bizarre.

  “Yeah… I mean, it certainly is outside the ordinary,” I agree, still deeply confused and slightly disturbed by the amount of anatomic information her outfit conveys. When I open my arms to give her a hug, she hesitates.

  “What are you doing?” Maya asks.

  “Research,” I answer. Then I pull her closer to me and put my arms around her body. I can barely distinguish the bones in her back from her tightly flexed muscles. I feel her heart beating against my chest. But it is not beating fast. She doesn’t seem nervous. It’s more like she doesn’t know what I’m doing this for. Wow… She really has no idea what she is getting herself into.

  Then she carefully puts her arms around me and I’m suddenly reminded of Victor and that this is my first real hug after I said goodbye to him — at least, if I don’t count Pax, which was more out of pity.

  She lets go first.

  “Since this exercise was performed on the Red Island, should we go there?” I ask.

  “That may not be appropriate. I’ve always wanted to explore it but the Red Island is closed,” she says.

  “Then let us explore it now,” I suggest.

  “I don’t do anything dubious like that. Plus, I’m a nominee. Disrespecting the rules may hurt my chances of getting summoned.”

  “All the more reason to do it tonight. You may not get another chance if you'll get summoned,” I argue.

  She doesn’t agree but I simply start walking towards the Red Island and she doesn’t hesitate to follow. That’s what I thought.

  “In the name of research,” she sighs when I look at her.

  “Of course,” I chuckle.

  The Red Island lies east of Maze Island and south of Center Island. It is not a long walk to the Red Island and there is a land bridge connecting it with both Center Island and Maze Island which makes it hard to believe no one was ever curious enough to check it out.

  When we reach the land bridge, Maya stops. I lay my hand on her back and encourage her to move on. She does.

  The Red Island is strikingly different from all the other islands. It’s basically a jungle that is overflowing with vegetation. Once, there clearly were paths through the thicket but moos and scrubs are now growing on those paths. What’s most u
nusual about the Red Island is that, well, everything is red. There is not a single green leaf, fruit or blade of grass on this island. There are some brown trunks and a beige type of grass that grows in some places, but most vegetation is some shade of red. Even the ground is dark red.

  There are Hotstones scattered throughout the jungle that dip even the scarce, humid air between the plants into deep red. And not the slightest breeze makes it through the deep wall of trees that separates us from the ocean. It is unbearably hot. I feel more and more sweat running down my back as we make our way deeper and deeper into the jungle. Maya notices my suffering.

  “You can have some of my outfit. I am wearing too much anyway.”

  No one can seriously claim that she is wearing a grain of sand too much but there is no need to ponder that offer. I take of my clothes and feel better immediately. Then I witness how the orange-beige sand on her neck, arms and legs flies from her body onto mine. She tells me to connect my essence to the sand on my body, like she taught me to this morning. I do and the sand sticks to my body.

  “That is much better,” I say.

  Then we continue walking further into the jungle. I’m studying all the exotic red plants and so does Maya. Barely two of them look the same. They come in all kind of shapes and sizes. Some of them react when I touch them. Some of them even make sounds.

  “It’s stunning,” I say. “I don’t understand why no one is supposed to set foot on it.”

  “There are rumors that Cosmo decided to shut down the Department of Inter-Body Connectivity in the aftermath of the Mass Darkening that ended The Second Dark Time. All the mentors and learners on the Red Island left Cosmo’s Islands,” she explains.

  When we reach a clearing with large red rocks, we see the first sign of former navee habitation of the island. Like all caves on Cosmo’s Islands, the rocks look natural from the outside but the perfectly polished walls of the empty tunnels and rooms inside indicate that someone shaped them.

  After the first wave of amazement ebbs, we sit down in the clearing. The temperature is much more bearable here than it is directly in the jungle.

  “What did people study here?” I ask Maya.

  “I’ve heard rumors that they explored physical contact between navees and how those connections impact one’s essence. Some say the hongi was invented here. It’s curious… Your ‘hand shake’ could have been invented here as well. Or this interesting greeting you used earlier today.”

  “Hug.” I say. “That greeting is called a hug.”

  “In a way it’s logical that they closed this department. Mental contact is a far superior way to connect to another navee. Plus, there is no need to be in the same location.”

  “But how would you mentally connect to another navee?”

  “There are several options. Most people use TNOP, the Thought Network of Persadia. But there is also INOP, the Imagination Network of Persadia. I prefer to use the two simultaneously and use TNOP to transfer my thoughts and INOP to transfer my corresponding mental images. The combination of the two makes for a much richer experience.”

  “I’m not sure that I understand this.”

  “Lean your head against mine and close your eyes,” she says with the demanding confidence of her tutor persona I got to know earlier today. So I follow her instructions.

  “What now?” I think.

  “It’s most interesting if we think about something abstract,” she thinks. I can hear her voice in my ear but she isn’t talking. This method of conversation is somehow very intimate, like someone else is talking to you but from inside of you.

  “Then let us think about the question I asked you earlier today,” I think. “Is a navee’s essence incomplete by itself?”

  “Sometimes, when I’m awake at night, it’s exactly this thought that rattles my mind. I feel this unsettling incompleteness of my essence. I don’t know… Maybe my essence never was complete or maybe it isn’t complete any more. But I do know that this feeling never arises when I am mentally connecting to another navee. Every time the connection stops, I can feel the incompleteness in my mind again. Who knows, maybe I can constantly feel complete if I’m constantly connected to another essence,” Maya thinks.

  While she is having those thoughts, the black in front of my closed eyes disappears and I see her mental images. Some images are blurry, some images are only visible for a split-second and some images are actually moving images, like short memories. She lets me see a starry night sky, her lying on her bed and staring at the dark ceiling, the back of a young boy and an almost equally large bird, a woman I don’t know, The Spring, Ravi, and a small Glowing Stone. It’s all quite confusing and I can’t really make a connection between her thoughts and her mental images. But in a way the experience is like being Maya for that one moment. Maybe if I really knew her, I would understand the connections between her thoughts and her mental images.

  “Even two connected essences are two essences, not one," I think. "There will always be moments, even if those are short and infrequent, when you aren’t connected to another navee. And if you are depending on another navee to make you whole, those small moments of incompleteness will feel all the more intense. Also, people change over time. Someone who was a presumably perfect match at one point may feel like a misfit later on. So building up the expectation that a single navee can complete you for eternity will inevitably result in disappointment. Finding different navees for different phases seems like an approach more likely to succeed.”

  I let her see Victor breaking the Springstone, me seeing the crowded Springtreegrove for the first time, Maya and Ravi talking, a lot of nothing and some very blurry images from people I don’t recognize.

  “But the two essences will assimilate over time. Investing all one’s effort into the assimilation of two different essences has to lead to the constant feeling of completeness eventually. Spending all one’s effort on one essence is the only way to know that one has given it all,” Maya thinks.

  “I don’t think two navees can become the same over time. Navees are individual by definition, right? So two navees becoming the same is contradictory to navee nature. And even if you find a navee that is a perfect match, it's almost insignificant because you two may develop into opposite directions. And maybe we don’t have control over our personal development. I actually don’t even feel incomplete. What I feel at night is uncertainty. Literally everything is uncertain. The benefit of connecting to another navee is having certainty about at least one thing. You can’t know if one navee is the right one but you can decide that that navee is the right one. You have to make the commitment to stay with another navee forever. And then stick to that commitment, even if it’s hard. But the benefit of knowing that this other person will be there forever makes the difficult phases worth it. It's a commitment and it won’t be successful just because one makes the promise once. It needs constant work,” I think and pause for a moment before I add, “but isn’t it all irrelevant to you anyway? You will be gone soon,”

  Maya doesn’t respond for a while. I don't hear any of her thoughts and I don’t see any of her mental images. Then she thinks, “No, maybe I should not.”

  I open my eyes and look at her. She looks sad. I probably shouldn’t have thought that and try to change topic.

  “So, I’m still wondering what being summoned by The Spring really means,” I admit. She opens her eyes and looks at me.

  “Everyone wonders that. What we do know is that all navees and animals come out of The Spring and only navees who can mentally control all elements are summoned. Therefore I assume that the summoned nominees create navees and animals in The Spring. I think they become a Creator,” she explains.

  “And why would you want that?”

  “Becoming a Creator is the highest reachable aim imaginable. What else could one want?” Maya asks.

  I don’t know the answer to that but disappearing into the same place where I first came from makes the journey in between a bit pointless. We s
it there in silence. I lower my head and stare at the ground. Suddenly I realize that a thin layer of orange sand covers the ground around us. How odd… The sand looks exactly like the sand we are wearing. Then I realize that we aren't wearing the sand any more! Or anything else for that matter. We are completely naked! I gasp and she immediately realizes our predicament herself. We got so lost in our mental connection to each other that we completely forgot about our physical connections to our bodies. So we both cover ourselves again and we both start blushing. It's an awkwardly intimate moment none of us saw coming.

  Then she stands up wand walks over to an apple tree that is standing in the clearing all by itself. I follow her.

  “I am curious. What do you think of TNOP and INOP?” she asks.

  “Well, it certainly was a memorable experience. And there is no way one could communicate mental images any other way that precisely. But I did miss seeing your facial expressions, looking into your eyes, hearing your voice in my ears," I say. "The fact that navees studied inter-body connectivity here makes more sense to me now, too. I mean, the circumstance that navees are divided into separate bodies makes physical contact necessary and possible in the first place. So when you're right and one navee by herself is incomplete, then physical contact is crucial to get as close as possible to another navee. In a way, physical contact reduces the incompleteness of an individual,” I explain.

  "Physical contact seems so useless to me. I do not see how shaking hands and hugging helps my essence be more closely connected to another essence. Somehow, bodies are useless."

  "Physical contact feels good. A foreigner feels less foreign when you shake that foreigner's hand. Every hug gives you safety while you're buried in someone else's arms. But touching isn't only about connection. It's also about self-awareness. You feel yourself when you feel someone else. It reassures you that you are real," I argue.

  The conversation stops again and we stare into the treetop above us. I spot a snake in the apple tree which feels so arbitrary considering that I haven’t seen a single animal in the entire jungle. The snake winds itself around a branch full of apples until one falls to the ground. I pick it up and offer it to Maya.

 

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