by Liam Card
• • •
I had been hovering over Catherine’s notepad and requested that Safia join us. She appeared, acknowledging my presence with a greeting card. A cheap one. Not decorative. The kind you might find in a dollar store.
“This is torture,” I said. “What you are putting her through.”
“She agreed to play messenger.”
“We need to talk,” I said. “I have some news for you.”
She sent me a memo asking if I was ready to officially sign up for Phase Three.
“No, it’s bigger than that.”
“There’s nothing bigger than that. And if you’re not ready to sign, don’t call me back until you are.”
And she was gone. A petulant teenager having stormed off to her room.
• • •
Catherine looked down at the message she had written for the media. Would Safia even allow her to read this to the world? Catherine imagined not. She imagined Safia electing to terminate her line of communication rather than allow her precious operation to be mocked. That she would add high treason to her list of reasons to execute someone, and that Catherine Seymour would be the first to fall victim. She imagined the message on the table taking on a life of its own. Lying flat on the antique pine table, the message prodded her into a game of truth or dare. She fully understood the dare, so she opted for truth. The message asked her how she would feel if she accepted the dare and the world saw it for what it was — nothing more than an old woman in the process of going mad?
Catherine crumpled the piece of paper, squeezing it until her arthritic joints ached.
She wouldn’t be reading it.
That was final.
However deeply she despised her current situation, being remembered for having lost her marbles was something that her dignity wouldn’t allow.
A second cup of tea was poured, and in went the magic potion.
Stir.
Stir.
Stir.
• • •
I called Rob Sutherland to the cottage in Little Bookham and shared with him the interaction I’d had with the Bookkeeper on the surface of the moon. Who he really was and his own predicament.
How he had facilitated the entire thing.
How it was all in his self-interest.
We hovered over a sleeping Catherine Seymour as she snored off that second cup of pain tea.
“Well, good on you, Luke. You sure got to the bottom of it all. But what’s the plan?” Rob sent me the image of a picturesque gravel road, heavily wooded on both sides where the century-old maples lining the ditch provided enough canopy to blot out the sun. The sign to the right of it read, “Dead End.”
“You’re likely right, but let me run this by you. Catherine’s crumpled announcement to the media got me thinking. The truth of the matter is this: she has the entire world in the palm of her hand. What if I connected with Catherine and shared with her the backstory to all of this mess? What if she was made aware of the Bookkeeper, and the manipulation of Safia for his own gain?”
“Luke, slow down. That’s not wise,” he said. I asked him why not, and he suggested that the world wasn’t fit for that kind of information — that of Bookkeepers and Messengers and the like. We disagreed on that point.
“It’s a long shot, but perhaps Catherine and I can work together to craft the right message to the world. Something that might stop Safia in her tracks or give her pause.”
“Luke, what if I told you outright to leave it alone? You wouldn’t, would you?”
“Not likely, no. Connecting with Catherine, sharing the truth, and asking for her help to craft a message is likely my best chance to derail this thing. Worst case, people get the whole story before she melts them … and not just half.”
Rob floated around the room a few times. He vibrated and the lights flickered. He was clearly wrestling with something. What I didn’t realize was that he was wrestling with my fate, his own fate, and that of the world. Rob moved close to me.
“The problem is, pal … I can’t let you do it,” he said. “The Bookkeeper reached out to me and suggested that you might try to come up with a plan to share this information or sabotage the whole thing. He offered me a deal to keep him in the know. I took it, Luke.”
I send him the image of a deadpan face.
“Luke, I’m sorry, man. I’ve been a ghost for too damn long myself, and this is a way out for me, too.” Rob grew swollen with vibration energy and uploaded my proposed plan to the Bookkeeper. I sent him a clip of the two of us dressed in eighteenth-century Apache battle attire. In the clip, I was walking away from him, and he pulled a bow and arrow to his cheek and then let the arrow fly. It made its way through my back first, and then my heart. It found a gap between some ribs and the arrowhead presented itself four inches from the meat of my chest. I looked down at it, dripping. Touched the tip of the bloodied arrowhead with my index finger to acknowledge its thorough effort. Then my face hit the cracked earth of the Arizona desert and it drank me in. Rob, in the background, lowered the bow from his cheek.
The Bookkeeper copied me on Rob’s Release Agreement, signed and dated at the bottom.
Rob signed and dated as well.
And just like that, my Mentor Spirit was off to What’s Next, officially waived of his obligation to fulfill the duration of his ghosting lease.
The Bookkeeper connected with me.
He sent me an image of handcuffs and asked me if I liked the view from space.
27
My half-baked sabotage and Rob Sutherland’s betrayal left me imprisoned on the surface of the moon. The Bookkeeper stripped my travel privileges as well as my ability to communicate and connect. No longer could I check in on loved ones and read their thoughts. No longer could I zip from place to place, taking in the best entertainment the world had to offer. No longer could I connect with and communicate with my only remaining outlet for conversation: Safia. Any attempted communications to Earth would simply burn up like a small meteor passing through the atmosphere. Not large enough to serve any purpose.
The surface of moon was my jail cell, my solitary confinement, and it was promised by the Bookkeeper that I would be held there for the remainder of my spirit lease, or until I agreed to help Safia with Phase Three of Operation Stopgap.
Should I happen to revise my position on the subject, I was to reach out to the Bookkeeper to inform him as such. And if released under the promise to assist Safia, I would be forced to remain under her supervision at all times — this to ensure I wouldn’t go off and cook up another derailment.
• • •
The first days were spent getting to know my new surroundings. I explored every peak and valley the surface of the moon had to offer. I hovered over the infamous site where Neil Armstrong took his giant leap for mankind and wondered what Armstrong might think of what was going on in the world right now. It didn’t matter much what he thought. Not really. I just wondered.
And that was just it.
I had nothing but time and opportunity to wonder.
Wondering became my profession.
I replayed my story with Safia a few hundred thousand times over and over in my head, wondering what I could have said to calm her. Wondering what I could have done to defuse her rage and Operation Stopgap alike. I imagined the scene in Diana’s bedroom playing out differently.
One time I let her die.
One time I refused to participate in Operation Stopgap, and Calvin opened fire on everyone, including the baby.
What if I had let Diana die? I kept imagining.
Moreover, would Diana have been willing to die if she knew the full scope of what would befall the world based on her salvation? Would she have demanded that I let her die?
Was I a coward or hero?
Would it have all gone down anyway without my help?
I’d never kno
w.
I hovered on the surface of the moon and watched a massive tropical storm inch toward the Gulf Coast of the United States. Had I the means to travel, I would have instantly visited the houses of locals, preparing for the storm.
The planning.
The boarding up and battening down.
The sense of urgency.
The energy of it all.
Part of me wondered if the best thing for humanity would be for that tropical storm to engulf the entire planet and drop an ocean’s worth of precipitation on the continents. Would it be better for them to die by the hand of Mother Nature or a bloodthirsty ghost policing their every thought? Looking to pick them off, one by one, like a sniper from the clouds, until there was no one left? Yes, in my imagination, not a single soul would survive Phase Three.
Stop.
Perhaps I was wrong about humanity.
Perhaps Safia was right, and there were indeed a significant number of individuals on Earth who would successfully change their thought composition going forward in perpetuity. A handful of pure thinkers who would band together, form a community, and push out screaming newborn pure thinkers. If this were the case, many world issues would be solved.
That of overpopulation.
That of pollution.
That of food shortages.
That of fresh water shortages.
That of violent crime.
I imagined this post-apocalyptic world, where the goal of each and every day was to search out and gather pure-thinking survivors. Then breed them.
Search out and gather food for survival.
Share the findings.
Nothing wrapped in cellophane, sitting on a refrigerated shelf with an expiration date slapped on it. Back to the days of having to hunt and kill and leave no waste behind. Back to the days of being grateful for a meal and relishing the gift that is fuelling your young.
Something resembling the animal kingdom once again.
The idea didn’t seem like such a bad thing given the state of world before Safia’s interference. I wondered if my solitary confinement was getting the better of me, making me negative on the matter, so I moved to the ridge of a different crater that gave me a unnoticeably different perspective on the world. It seemed the only noticeable perspective that was changing was the one in my head.
So I fought it.
As much as I longed to travel the world, I fought it. Somewhere in my spiritual composition, a thread of me knew that the murder of innocents was the wrong choice. Somewhere on the planet, a young boy or girl would be wiped out by a fleeting thought — a young boy or girl who might go on to do great things and solve the problems of the world a different way.
A peaceful way.
I resolved myself to stay strong for that unnamed little girl or boy.
And locked into place my faith in humanity rather than in a gimmick.
28
Many months had passed since I had been jailed and stripped of every ghostly right. For many weeks straight, I hovered above the Sea of Tranquility, where Safia had first brought me, and replayed old stories from the Line. By this point, I had accepted my fate, and my vibration pattern was nothing to speak of.
A frail version of my former self.
Long before, when I stood in front of the Bookkeeper at the end of the Line, he told me there was no such thing as Hell, but my current situation challenged that. When the reruns from the Line grew dull, I turned to watching the digital clock of my spirit lease count down, second by second. I did this for ten weeks straight.
Until Safia showed up.
29
She came to me during the brilliance of a lunar eclipse. From the Sea of Tranquility, she hovered beside me as the burning ring around the Earth exploded out into the darkness.
“The northern lights of space,” she said.
I was unable to respond, but thought it looked more like the fires of Hell.
“The Bookkeeper allowed me a visit,” she said. “It can’t be long.”
I wondered why the Bookkeeper would do such a thing. Was it out of pity or a further act of torture — teasing me with interaction for the first time in months? Either way, my fate was sealed. I wished her to go away and never to return. What a wonderful afterlife I had been experiencing before she came into the picture. Before she got ideas in her head and killed a few million people. And then ratcheted it up from there.
“I’m begging that you change your mind, Luke. It was quite harsh when I countered with only one immunity. If you like, I can give you a couple more. If it makes a difference. It was cruel, but you see how passionate I am about this operation. You see how important this work is to me. Now look at you. This is no place for my Colonel. My Colonel is to be by my side,” she said and sent me the image of the two gold stars I had been awarded, properly hung in a vacuum-sealed presentation case.
“I am begging you,” she said. “Contact the Bookkeeper and join me in the final phase of Stopgap,” she said, and hovered beside me until the eclipse had passed.
“Luke, the Bookkeeper has just informed me you haven’t sent him anything, so I suppose this is goodbye,” she said and vibrated so hard the moon felt as if it might split in half. “So you know, your act of defiance is entirely in vain. I have figured out a way to monitor the Thought Crimes and carry out the executions myself. It’s not as slick as our operation would be, nor will it be as fun, but I wanted you to know that I can get it done just the same. More than anything, I just miss you terribly.”
Had I the power and ability, I would have vibrated fiercely and sent her back the image of a wall covered with portraits of the greatest villains of all time. An all-star lineup of the most ruthless dictators. The most merciless leaders. On this wall, I had her smiling between Vlad the Impaler and Adolf Hitler.
I just hovered alongside her and enjoyed the image by myself.
“Goodbye, Luke,” she said.
Then it was I who missed her terribly.
• • •
Hours later, I concluded that Safia’s visit, her one final chance to change my mind or say goodbye, benefited everyone else but me. For the Bookkeeper, especially. He saw me suffer one degree more than I ever thought was possible. For Safia, she got to say goodbye.
Broken spirit that I was, I returned to the comfort of the two digital clocks I had been given. One from the Bookkeeper counting down my spirit lease. The other counting down the commencement of Phase Three.
The seconds, moving like minutes.
The minutes moving like hours.
Months passed. With only two of them remaining before the commencement of Phase Three, the world was facing a purge that would shape the history books until the end of time, if anyone was left to read what had transpired.
What does history matter when we don’t learn from it anyway?
Nothing, I concluded.
And nothing was what I could do about the whole thing, trapped on the surface of the moon, slowly drowning in my own guilt and regret.
I recalled the greatest novels I had ever read, the ones that got me through high school. All of the moments wherein there was no way out for the hero; no hope for a battle victory or salvation of the world, the rescuing of a princess, king, or queen. What did these moments have in common? Charts were made in an attempt to batch and analyze the efforts of my fictional heroes, but no concrete data presented itself.
The time for last-ditch efforts and Hail Marys was upon me, but I was lacking two very important ingredients: energy and creativity. The letter I had crafted for the Bookkeeper to deliver to What’s Next was read and read a hundred times. Was this letter akin to Catherine Seymour’s speech that she had written for the media — for nothing more than the purpose of self-help and to be crumpled into a little paper ball?
Something that Bob the Bully might soak in his mouth for sixty seconds and
then fire into the hair of a nearby classmate.
And then it hit me like a bag of light bulbs.
If my attempts to communicate with Earth were to burn up in the atmosphere, perhaps I would focus my energy the other direction: out into the darkness, where a hundred billion brilliant VVS diamonds sparkled in the distance.
The direction of the Messenger.
He was surely out there somewhere making the rounds.
What if I hit him?
So I made a hundred million copies of my thought letter and turned them into a hundred million paper thought airplanes. I fashioned a clip system so that I could quickly load the copies and engineered a mental semi-automatic launcher to speed the process of delivery. The paper thought airplane Gatling gun was then tuned to propel the paper thought airplanes at a speed of a billion times the speed of light.
With every amount of focus, intent, and energy I could muster, these paper thought airplanes ripped out into the universe. Each airplane was given the same intention: to hit the Messenger square in the spiritual composition and to be read.
After the first hour of heavy shooting, my first thought was this: What if Bob the Bully helped save the world?
My second thought was this: What if, like Catherine Seymour, I’m going completely mad?
30
When Safia’s clock approached ten minutes to spare, I broke from the dizzying digital numbers and made my way over to the best vantage point on the moon. Looking down toward the Earth, I wondering how many families had been racked with fear for the last several weeks as the one-year mark approached. Parents doing their best to calm loved ones. Doing their best to pretend everyone in their particular family unit was going to be just fine, as long as they kept their minds clear of Thought Crimes. I imagined two little girls asking their daddy what might happen if they slipped up and thought of violent things. Will the lady ghost give us a second chance? they wondered. I had the daddy in my particular fantasy assure them that not a violent thought would ever cross their mind. Why would it? No one could hurt them. There was nothing to be scared of since there were no more monsters roaming the Earth. Then the daddy moved on to a lecture regarding jealousy, and how that was the greatest poison of the day. “For it is only jealousy, envy, and anger that can breed Thought Crimes,” the daddy would say. “Which is why we must always be happy with what we have, because what we have is each other, and life.”