Veracity

by Mark Lavorato

  "Good. Then come, have a seat with me," he said, eyeing the only other chair at the table. Both of his hands were wrapped around a cup of steaming liquid, which smelled of pepper leaf tea, and one of his legs was casually draped over the other. He brought the cup to his mouth and sent a few swirls of steam eddying into the air before sipping from it.

  Dana was a thin man, whose movements were always slow, his gestures methodical, deliberate. He had long curly hair that was aging and stranded in rusted colours, ranging from brown to grey. His beard, which shared the same varying colour, was longer and much more unkempt than Harek's. As the light material for our clothes was produced from the fibres of certain plants on the island, the cloth was naturally beige, but Dana took to privately dying his shirts with a kind of berry, which produced a pale maroon colour. I once speculated that this might be a way of separating himself from the rest of the Elders, though, really, it might also just have been his taste.

  I walked over and sat on the other side of the wooden table, both of us angling toward the courtyard where a few small songbirds, hidden from view, were singing away. I was happy to have the chance to speak with him. Out of all the Elders, I held him in the highest regard, hung on his words, and pondered them carefully. For my part, we seemed to get along quite well together, or at least seemed to feel at ease in each other's company.

  "I've come by to see how you're coping with things, and also to begin answering some of the questions that I'm sure have begun to spring up." He said this last sentence while turning his head in my direction, opening his eyes as the last words were spoken. This was one of his peculiarities. Often when speaking with him, he would look away for quite some time, and would keep his eyes closed when turning back to face you, and then open them when he imagined they would be aiming at your face. It was a touch odd.

  "Well," I mumbled, picking a tiny dead leaf off the table between us and throwing it to the ground, "I think I'm doing alright. We're not the greatest creatures, but there's something we can do about it, right?"

  Dana looked at me as if I'd just spat onto the table between us. He lowered his eyebrows, focusing on my face. "Is that what you got out of the conversation with Harek yesterday?"

  I shifted in my seat. "Well, yeah - basically."

  It took him a few uncomfortable seconds to react to this. He was dumbfounded, almost lost for words. His mouth formed several different vowels before he finally decided on what to say. "Harek... told you about denial, didn't he?"

  My voice was soft, "Yes." I knew what was meant by it.

  "Because I can't imagine him ever saying the words: 'we're not the greatest creatures, but there's something we can do about it', as that's completely inaccurate. Firstly, there is nothing we can do about what we are. And secondly, what we are is the darkest, most evil animal the fossil record has ever seen, and we had hoped you were on your way to at least understanding a little bit of that."

  "Oh," I said. I put my hands on the table and started fiddling with them. This wasn't easy. Because I might be able to admit to the fact that we had it in us to do some appalling things, but to blanket everyone with a description such as 'atrocious' or 'vile' seemed a little simplistic to me. As far as I was concerned, there were a few people on the island who I would have a hard time stamping with such words, and I wondered what Dana would have to say about that. Could he really point at Thalia or Mitra and sincerely brand them with the description of 'vile'? "But... I mean - there must be some piece of us that isn't so horrible."

  "Possibly, yes. But as a whole, at the most basic, fundamental layer, which is obviously where it matters most, we are essentially that: horrible."

  I tapped a fingernail on the table before speaking. "But how can you know that for certain?"

  Dana grinned, "How I know what we are isn't nearly as interesting as how you don't. I haven't pulled my ideas from the air, haven't rehearsed them from a book; I've formed them from observing our every action, and I would suggest that you begin to do the same.

  "The easiest place to start is to think of children, as they are acting almost directly from that dark, fundamental layer that I'm speaking of. I know that you don't have a lot of experience with younger children, and that we don't have any on the island to draw examples from, but try and think about Anu or Siri as far back as you can remember. As soon as they'd learned how to talk they were exhibiting their innate behaviour: hitting each other, stealing and hoarding things to themselves, deriding one another. There has often been a misconception that we are born pure, but that notion couldn't be more mistaken. Babies aren't born innocent only to be later corrupted by society; they are born corrupt, and if they aren't effectively deprogrammed, then it is they who spread their malignancy throughout society."

  "Did you say 'deprogrammed'?"

  "Yes. Deprogrammed. Adults don't 'teach' children to be non-violent, caring, kind individuals; in fact, in a person's formative years, there isn't any 'teaching' that's done at all - it's only constant dissuasion, deterring, and discouragement that keep children from doing what they naturally want to do. Though of course, this must also be done while encouraging them to do the opposite, all with the aim of eventually coercing them to act in a way that isn't nearly as inborn. In its most basic sense, the raising of a child is but an attempt to rewire a rogue brain. It's a conscious unshaping, which is done in the hopes that the child might come to act as far away from their instinctive tendencies as possible.

  "So, as to your question, is there a piece of us that isn't so horrible? Well, let's take a look. Let's imagine that there is a well-mannered, compassionate individual standing inside of this courtyard with us. And as they are such, we can only assume that the deprogramming stage of his or her life had gone over flawlessly. I ask you, is this a 'good' person? Does it really matter if they say please and thank you when they should, that they share, treat others respectfully, stifle their violent thoughts? Is the essence of a being measured by its shell, by how well they balance on the wobbly pillar that juts out of the mountain of things that they've 'unlearned', or is the essence of a being measured by its core, by what's beneath it when it falls?"

  "By its core."

  "Of course it is. In fact, the image of someone standing with one leg on a pillar is perfect, because I like to think of anything that we do or make (societies and cultures for example), as a kind of construction, as building blocks. And of course, the only way to find out what a structure is really made of is to grab hold of the bottom of it and shake, and see how it holds out when it has to fall back on its most rudimentary foundation. What do you think history has continually shown us, what do you think happens when we shake the wobbly pillar of the commended lady or gentleman that we imagined? Where do they land when it collapses? I'll tell you: suddenly, they find themselves remembering everything that they'd been raised to forget; they become precisely what they always were, yet had been striving their entire lives not to be.

  "And as I said, we can be certain of this because it has been woven into every page of history that has ever been written. The dates change, as do the traditions and costumes, but the story has always been the same. The moment there was some kind of pressure, whether a group of people overpopulated an area, or was excessive for far too long and allowed their food stores to become depleted, or another group of their very own species marched across some of the imaginary borders that they created to separate one ideology from another, greed, fear, or arrogance bringing them there with weapons in hand, whenever things became difficult and something shook the very structure of what we are composed of, we have consistently crumbled to the ground into an ugly heap, and masses upon masses of people have suffered and died in unspeakable ways.

  "And because we are outside of the system of evolution, things could never improve; even though it would seem reasonable that, as the centuries progressed, humanity might learn from its past mistakes, or at the very least from the banal repetition of them, in reality we never did. Instead, every passing age
found new ways to create even more destruction, more suffering, more pain. And this can only be explained by the fact that what we are underneath of our 'not so horrible' shell, the very essence of our being, the foundation that all of the greatest societies have unsteadily balanced upon and have eventually collapsed into, is truthfully and irreversibly hideous." Dana finished, and, closing his eyes first, he turned his head to look back into the garden.

  With each sentence that he spoke, I continued to wilt in my chair, until finally, I was sitting with my head bowed, looking like a child who had just been reprimanded. I was beginning to get a feeling as to what Coming of Age was all about. I wasn't there to make my mind up about anything, wasn't going to spend any time discussing things. Someone else had already done the thinking for me, and I was expected to ingest it. That was all.

  Before that day, I'd always considered Dana to be a calm man. He was opinionated, yes, but always gentle. Yet suddenly, and just like Harek the day before, he was managing to come across as cold, almost confrontational, lashing out at my every thought as if they'd offended him in the deepest way. It occurred to me that they might be doing this intentionally, hoping to set a precedent of some kind, creating an environment where I'd be forced to choose my words with the greatest of caution. If so, they'd already succeeded. I was afraid to open my mouth.

  Yet I had to, because there was something that wasn't making sense. I was sure that I'd come close to directly quoting Harek when I said there was something we could do to right the wrongs of our species. But if Dana was correct, and we were 'truthfully and irreversibly hideous', what kind of solution lay in sight? It obviously wasn't a new government or system; from what he'd said, they all ended in the same way. So what did Harek mean by 'a way to restore what we've ruined', 'a way to mend the damage we've caused'? The truth was, I was already sick of hearing how dead-ended we were - I wanted to hear how we planned to move forward in spite of it. I pressed him further. "Dana, maybe Harek wasn't supposed to tell me, and maybe I can't remember his exact words, but I'm positive he mentioned there was a way for us to fix things. Was I wrong about that?"

  He took in a deep breath and eyed the ground in front of his feet, "No. You weren't." After raising a hand to his face and grooming his beard for a few seconds, he continued, "And to be honest with you, that is the sole reason I've been asked to see you this morning: to tell you the story of what happened to the world, and where we, the island, fit into it all."

  I promptly sat up straight and folded my hands together on the table, trying not to look as impatient as I was. Seeing this, he turned just enough to look at me. "But before you get too excited, you should know that it's not going to be an easy story for you to hear. Because after hearing it, the way that you see your world - our life here, the island, and all of us on it - will never be the same again."

  I remember that my face numbed with this last sentence, that there was something in its tone that made a liquid weight settle into the bottom of my stomach. I realized, at the last possible second, after having swum too close to the centre of the whirlpool to return to safety, that I'd completely underestimated the depth and magnitude of what I was about to be drawn into. Yet there was no turning back, no way to swim against the currents. The only thing I could do was listen, be pulled under.

  I watched Dana face the garden again, hesitating for only a moment before he began.

  * * *

  7

  "This story began with one man. He was a charismatic man - well spoken, compelling - but most importantly he was standing behind some fascinating ideas. Basically, just as Harek told you yesterday, he'd determined that humanity was nature's one fatal flaw, that we were the most deviant mutation, the greatest cancer, the final parasite. He recognized that we had found a way to shirk the governing systems of nature, and as a result were undoing everything in our wake, and would only shamelessly continue to do so.

  "Of course, such an idea wasn't exactly novel - every culture that has ever lived has had its tiny population of truth-seekers - but what makes this story different is that this man finally had a clear and realistic plan to do something about it. He proposed a simple remedy: end our destructive reign altogether; rid the world of our species and give nature the chance to heal, to renew itself, to create something better.

  "Yet, how does one go about such a thing, especially considering that the very stem of our brain, the nucleus from which all our actions are based, is solely responsible for keeping our species alive at all cost? Well, he knew that there were two ways a person could override this powerful, intrinsic urge: either through complete desperation, or through the highest form of intellectual reasoning and belief. Obviously, he focused on the latter. Because if there is one thing that sets us apart from the common parasite, it is that we have the capacity to be self-aware; and if that awareness is exceptional, if our self-understanding is thorough enough, we can overrule even our deepest instincts.

  "And so that man set out to look for people who might possess such a high level of understanding - and he found them. Everywhere. Quickly and quietly he gained support among the scientific and academically elite, and received funding from a few wealthy individuals, who, he'd discovered, happened to be radical idealists behind closed doors. He then set up a system of almost complete anonymity, so that if one person were caught, or even wavered, the whole organization would continue to function. And perhaps because each person's identity was so veiled, people felt more comfortable to offer whatever service they could, and soon the anonymous messages, which were being secretly relayed through tight social rings, were flowing.

  "Within a short period of time this man's organization, which never once adopted a name, had become a silent, compact union, consisting of only the most crucial and strategic members at its centre, and which then fanned out into a grid of resources all over the world; regular men and women who were employed in every facet of intelligent society, including research, communications, and military.

  "That organization formed a three phase plan called 'The Goal'. The first phase was clearly the most significant. As strange as this may sound to you right now, traditionally, an enormous amount of time, energy, and money has been put into developing more effective ways to kill each other. And as such, there were laboratories all over the world that were busy cultivating diseases to be used as weapons. Some of the scientists in those laboratories appeared to be working for their governments, but were really working for the society. Collectively, they developed five separate strains of an exceptional virus - five to account for possible individuals or pockets of population that might prove naturally immune to one of the forms, as sometimes happens in nature - it was a virus that slowly affected the nervous system and ended in paralysis and death. These infectious agents were amazingly hardy, but also had a long incubation period, making them virtually impossible to detect for about five years. Yet during that time the person carrying the disease seemed healthy and continued travelling around, unknowingly spreading it on a global scale.

  "As you might be able to imagine, the first phase... well, it worked - to say the least. Suddenly, almost overnight, it was discovered that there was a global pandemic of a terminal disease. Panic set in. First, everyone scattered to find a cure, but they quickly realized that it was too late - which was when things became unbearably ugly. Different groups of people, organized into skin colour, languages, and thoughts on God, began blaming one another, pointing fingers, and eventually even dropping some very potent weapons in a few places. They did what every human culture throughout history did when faced with the need to hold together: they fell apart.

  "The second phase involved secret secluded shelters that were built by the military of several different countries to withstand huge environmental changes, which might be brought on by those same potent weapons that I just mentioned. Obviously, it was the rich and powerful that had the connections and resources to make it to these safe havens, but they also had at least one society member among them. Th
at society member then poisoned the elite, secured the shelter from the inside, and admitted other members, who, incidentally, had been living nearby and in quarantine for years.

  "Once everyone was safe inside, they hunkered down to watch and wait. They could monitor what was happening in the world from instruments deep inside the bunkers, which communicated with devices that circle the earth (in fact, some of the moving stars that we see crossing the sky at night are those very instruments). They carefully recorded both the movement and concentration of people as the population diminished throughout the decades.

  "After many, many years, there were only a few tiny pockets of survivors left outside the shelters, which had either created strongholds and had managed to keep the viral contamination out, or had outlived any of the potential carriers. It was at the end of the second phase that groups of specially trained soldiers (who had obviously been sterilized before setting out) were dispatched from the shelters around the world to destroy these last clusters of people. Once they'd succeeded, they fanned out to spend the rest of their lives to search for, and then wipe out, any smaller groups that the instruments in the sky might have missed.

  "Which brings us to the third and last phase of The Goal. The third phase involves another group of specially trained young men that will be sent out from the shelters. These expeditions will be acting as a kind of sweep, a last check for undetected pockets of human life. And if any of these expeditions should find people, they will have been trained to infiltrate the group, and then to chemically sterilize them. In this last phase, violence should never enter into the equation, as there are too few people, and too much land to cover, than to risk any loss of life to the expedition members."

  Dana stopped for a moment and scratched the back of his head, then, in that odd way of his, turned to face me with his eyes closed, opening them just as he began to speak. "As I'm sure you've been able to pick up along the way, our island is one of those safe havens. And you, and all of the younger people on the island, were born and have been raised as a pool of individuals with varying talents, so that we might select the best suited of you to run or support one of the third phase expeditions." He paused, clearing his throat.