Veracity

by Mark Lavorato

I was on the third or fourth day of suffering through chemical theory - which, I was assured, would be an essential basis for learning how to create sterilization mixtures later on - when I'd finally had enough. I slid my chair back (as silently as I could, so as not to trigger any of the Elders to come and check on what I was doing), and folded my arms across my chest, sprawling my legs out lazily in front of me. I was nauseated with chemistry, and began to look around the room for something to distract me, anything, maybe another book, which would have to be thin enough to hide under the one in front of me, should the need arise. I scanned the few shelves of books on my right. Nothing. But as I moved my inspection from one side of the room to the other, something caught my eye. It was on the floor in front of my feet, directly underneath the table, and I was sitting at just the right angle for the light, which was coming from a window opposite me, to reveal it as plain as day. It was a handprint.

  Odd. Why exactly would there be a handprint directly underneath of a large table in the disclosed wing of the Great Hall, one might ask? I couldn't begin to guess. I tried to remember a time that I'd ever seen an Elder crawling along the ground, let alone on a library floor, but couldn't bring one to mind. I squinted at it again and could see that it wasn't a negative imprint, but a positive one, meaning: it wasn't a handprint missing out of a film of dust, but a handprint of natural oils left behind on a spotless floor. And this lead me to wonder just how moist a hand would have to be to leave such an accurate profile behind. I ventured to guess quite moist, as if the person who was crawling under the table were nervous. I smiled. Finally, something interesting.

  First, I listened for any movement in the next room. None. Then, I memorized where the handprint was on the floor, stepped out of my chair, walked around to the side of the table, and knelt down. I put my hand exactly on top of the print, ducked under the table, and there it was, right in front of my face.

  A lip of wood followed the perimeter of the table and was grooved deeply enough to hide small objects on, and, realizing this, the person who'd left behind the handprint, had also left behind a tiny piece of metal. I reached out and plucked it from its place. It was incredibly thin, rectangular, tapered on both sides, and had a strange geometric shape missing from its centre. It looked like it was sharp, and to test if it really was, I ran my thumb against one of its edges. A fine line of skin parted into a bloodless gap. I held it for only a moment more before putting it back in exactly the place I'd found it, and returned to my seat.

  Thinking of it now, it's a wonder that such a wafer of an object could, in terms of action to reaction - to overreaction - nudge every one of us in a specific direction, begin us all plodding toward that horrible day. It was, after all, just one tiny piece of sharp metal. But, as it turned out, that was enough.

  It was clear to me why this blade was hidden in that part of the library, and also why the person who hid it was nervous when they did so - they had a lot to be nervous about: they were smuggling forbidden information out of the Great Hall. But exactly what information they were smuggling, or to whom, or for what purpose, I couldn't know. And so I was quick to brush it off as just another one of the mysterious things that the Elders were involved in, yet another particular that I would never learn more about. Instead, what was much more pressing in my mind was the egocentric question: what could I do with this blade? What information was worth trying to smuggle to people in my life? I perused the titles of the books for all of three seconds before it occurred to me. Kara.

  I thought about some of the paintings that I'd seen in the book of art. Granted, to me, most of them only looked like blotchy illustrations that weren't as good as photos, but I remembered that they did something to Dana. He was moved by them, saw some kind of message or significance buried inside those smears of mottled colours. And it occurred to me that maybe he was right, maybe he could see something that I couldn't, something vague and indistinct that was hidden inside the pictures, like illicit information was hidden between the lines of history books. If that were the case, then I really wanted to show some of the paintings to Kara, and maybe find out what they meant. Because if anybody could see life in something where others couldn't, it was her.

  I remember meeting her in the forest once, after scuttling away from the people we'd 'gone for a walk' with. We'd crouched into the underbrush as we usually did, and I had leaned in and begun my well-thought-out speech - but soon stopped, my words trailing off into a senseless mumble. She wasn't paying attention. In fact, she wasn't even looking at me. She was staring at a massive leaf that was arching between us, fixated on it, mesmerized by it. I asked her what she was looking at, and she smiled and said she was looking at the sky, which of course only confused me. And then I leaned in closer and noticed all of the plump globules of water resting on the leaf. I focused, leaning in even closer, until, exactly as she'd said, I could see the sky reflected inside every one of the beads of water, tiny clouds passing by, a net of miniature leaves framing them. But that wasn't enough. She urged me to look even closer; and once I did, inside of the largest droplet, I could make out the bulbous shapes of both our heads, which were, in turn, busy looking inside the drop at the clouds and trees that meshed the sky above us. Then I distinctly saw the bottom part of the lump that was my head smile. Needless to say, I knew it would be worth smuggling a couple of paintings from the art book to her.

  I waited until after Chalmon came to check on me, which he usually did every half hour or so. Once I'd heard him walk back into the other room and settle down to his work again, I snuck out of the chair and took the art book down from the shelf. I chose the two pictures I wanted before I took the blade from under the table, and then I cut them out, running the thin metal edge right along the crease. The loudest part of the whole thing was folding the pages, my body tight with concentration as I was doing it, every movement slow and calculated, ears perked for sounds from the other room. But eventually, I'd folded them small enough to shove down the front of my pants. I was safe. I returned the art book, sat down, and became suddenly riveted with chemical theory, a smug grin on my face for the rest of the afternoon.

  I didn't feel guilty. If anything, I felt delightfully mischievous. I mean - what was there to feel bad about? It wasn't as if cutting a few pages out of a book was going to kill anyone.

  * * *

  12

  Mikkel and I were the first two people inside that 'select group' who did their training in the disclosed wing. But as much as I was looking forward to spending more time with him, we didn't really get to see a lot of each other. First, he was given a separate room to study in, and second, because he was a bit ahead of me in the subject matter, we couldn't have classes together (as the Elders wouldn't have been able to lead productive discussions between us). So the only time we really had a chance to speak was when one of us was getting a book from the other's respective corner of the library, where we would exchange a few brief words in passing. After a while, this small talk became quite a habit between us, and I wonder now if Mikkel had made a conscious point of this; so that, when the moment he'd been waiting for finally presented itself, the Elders wouldn't be leaning out of their chairs in the other rooms and straining to listen to our every word, that they would have long since disregarded our mumblings as routine chat, as trivial niceties.

  "Hey," he greeted, sauntering into the room that day. He walked over to one of the bookshelves and ran his finger along the spines, searching for a title.

  "Hey," I answered, and returned to my reading. I was studying the history of torture, and there were graphic pictures that sucked my attention away from everything else around me, including the text of the book for that matter. I distractedly heard Mikkel pull a book from the shelf and then begin to walk back out of the room. But he didn't. Instead, he stopped at the table I was sitting at and looked down at me, silent, waiting until I looked up.

  "Don't - uh... don't we have our exercise hour at the same time today?" he asked.

  I shrugged
my shoulders, "Don't know."

  Mikkel glanced out of the open doorway, cocked his head to listen for a second, and then turned his attention back to me, his expression having grown serious. "Yeah, I think we do. Actually, I'm sure we do."

  "Oh."

  He moved closer, lowering his voice a bit, though careful to keep the same tone that he'd just been using, "But - I'm going to cut out in the middle of it, and go to the vantage point." Then he winked, straightened up, and walked out.

  I sunk back into my chair, staring forward, suddenly leaden. I hadn't forgotten about our little plan to meet in secret, but I think a part of me was hoping that Mikkel had. After I'd Come of Age and understood exactly what had been weighing on his mind for that month, as he sat there after the evening meal, staring down at his empty plate, listless, I thought a lot about what he'd said during our mysterious conversation in the forest. Though I hadn't mulled over his words nearly as much as I had his voice. There was an unsettling urgency in it, something frantic, reckless, and I'd recognized it even then. But as much as I wasn't exactly overjoyed with the prospect of talking to him in private, I also didn't have much of a choice in the matter. A promise, after all, was a promise.

  He had done his research. That day I was told to spend my exercise hour hiking to the top of a massive rise in the forest, and then to check back in with an Elder who was waiting for me at one of the garden plots below. A blunt ridge connected my hill with the vantage point, and, provided I moved quickly, and Mikkel's route was about the same distance as mine, we would have enough time to chat and return without raising the slightest bit of suspicion. I arrived first, and sat down to take in the panorama while I waited.

  I was told that the vantage point served as a lookout for the island at one time, giving the people that once lived there fair warning when their fellow man was en route to rape, plunder, and slay. It was quite high and we kept the trees cut back, so the view was spectacular. Kara told me that she thought she'd once observed the curvature of the earth from there; like the edges of a map, she'd explained, curling over with an immeasurable weight into the distance. But that particular day it was hazy, and I doubted I could see a few nautical miles, let alone the ocean arcing away into the universe.

  I heard Mikkel's thudding footsteps coming over the rise just before he came into sight. "Hey," he greeted in his usual way, panting to catch his breath. He walked over and sat down beside me, looking out at the view until he'd recovered a bit. However, once he did, neither of us said anything, and there was a bit of an uncomfortable silence while he looked for a tactful way to begin. In the end, he didn't really find one. "So... you uh... you probably know why I asked you to come here, no?"

  "Um... not really, no." But, listening to the way he'd asked that question, I did. I knew exactly why. Mikkel wanted to talk to me about The Goal, about how crazy it all sounded to him, how he wasn't convinced it was the right thing, and how he had some outstanding questions that maybe - just maybe - I could help in answering. And I could only sit there, my stomach rising into my throat, hoping that I was wrong, watching his mouth as it formed the beginning of his next sentence, wishing with all of my being that he wouldn't say those forbidden words, whispering in my mind, 'Don't say The Goal; don't say The Goal; don't say The Goal...'

  "It's about The Goal, Joshua."

  I sighed, deflated. "Mikkel, you know perfectly well that we're not supposed to talk about this alone. If they caught us, do you know what kind of trouble we'd be in?"

  "Why?"

  I straightened up, "What do you mean 'why'?"

  "I mean: why would we be in such serious trouble? Why do you think it's so 'dangerous' for us to talk about things without strict supervision? What do you think they're afraid of?"

  I shook my head at him, "Wow. I don't think you were listening too well when you Came of Age. What they're afraid of is our acting on the primitive part of our brains, of our fear taking over the higher processes of our intellect. I mean - we're reading the same books so this shouldn't be new to you, but, wherever you find a few fear-ridden people throughout history, you also find a pile of dead and mutilated at their side. The Elders, understandably, would like to avoid that from happening on our island."

  Mikkel's nod was exaggerative, "Thank you. That was a perfectly verbatim answer." And then he lowered his voice, "But I don't need you to regurgitate the bullshit you've heard - I need you to think.

  "I mean - let's just take a step back here and look at what we're proposing to do." He was squeezing his thumb and his pointer finger together, bobbing them in the air between us to help make his point. "We're talking about killing ourselves, Joshua. That's what we're doing - we're killing ourselves. Do you understand that?"

  "Of course I do. And... while instinctually that might seem a little crazy, you know as well as I do that - in terms of bearing a profound responsibility and owning what we are, what we've done - it's the only thing that really makes sense."

  "Makes sense?" He looked around, as if to see if anyone else had heard what just came out of my mouth. "Makes sense? ...Okay," he paused for a second to compose himself, "let me run a few things by you, and you can tell me if they 'make sense'.

  "You're right, we've been shown, over and over again, that we are horrible creatures. And maybe we are - if those history books are right, then we really did continuously kill each other in the masses for thousands of years. Terrible, I agree. So, what do we do about it? To prevent these horrific genocides from ever being committed again, we come up with the great idea to commit the most comprehensive genocide imaginable? Because we've historically set out to annihilate one another, we've decided to 'fix' the problem by annihilating the annihilators? That doesn't sound absurd to you? And this contradiction goes on and on! I mean - out of a desire to stop all of the needless suffering in the world they created a long, drawn out, debilitating disease and unleashed it onto billions - I can't even understand that number - billions of people? Is that the perfect cure for our lack of compassion: inflicting the most pain and suffering that human history has ever seen? Does that really 'make sense' to you?"

  "No - yeah... I mean - in a way, it does. I know it sounds hypocritical, but everything that human beings do is hypocritical, which, to me, only supports the idea of The Goal. The only way to finally rid the world of that endless hypocrisy that you're pointing out is to pull it from its roots. And the sole way of doing that is by getting rid of ourselves. It's the only option."

  "Is it? You sound so sure of yourself, but really, how can you be? First of all, have you ever let yourself explore any different options; and secondly, even if you have, what about the other options that might exist outside of the ones you thought of? Because - let's be honest- you and I have no idea what we're dealing with here. Do we know what the world looked like before? Do we know what people were doing to each other between those awful events in the history books? No. We can't. We don't know anything firsthand. Think of it, we're standing firm behind a solution to a problem that we've never even seen." Mikkel broke off to look at the ground in front of us for a moment, and chortled before continuing,

  "It's interesting - right now I'm studying these waves of people who crusaded into other lands, not to slaughter, but to force their beliefs onto other cultures. Obviously whenever this happened there was violence and strife, and countless people died, but that's not the point. The point is that these people who were crusading were acting on what they saw as their moral obligation; to them, everything they did was ethically sound, it was perfectly rationalized - just like the Elders. Only now, the history books don't exactly view what those people did as 'prudent'. No, now that we look back at it, we can see how deluded it was. The Elders said these exploits stemmed from 'pompous arrogance'. But if you think about it, aren't we doing exactly the same thing: forcing the world to live with our belief system and the consequences of it? Isn't it the same kind of 'pompous arrogance' to decide for all of humanity that they don't deserve to live?"

 
; "Hmm. I'm not sure. Isn't it pompous arrogance to assume that we do deserve to live, that we automatically take precedence over all of the nature that we exploit and obliterate around us? I mean - how can we intrinsically hold the right to live, if we don't intrinsically hold the responsibility that goes with that right?" I had to hold back a clever smirk that was pulling at the edges of my mouth. I was quite happy with my response, even if I hadn't thought of it myself. Dana and I had had a similar discussion only a few days before that, and I was citing him almost word for word. But still, I thought it was a legitimate point. Whereas Mikkel, on the other hand, didn't seem too impressed by it.

  He had turned to look out at the sea, shaking his head, and then plucked a few blades of grass from his side and threw them into the air in front of us, both of us watching the twirling needles until they'd settled onto the ground. "You know - I don't remember you being so opinionated, but that's what you've become. And the funny thing is, they're not even your opinions. I mean - look at you; you are one perfectly programmed student."

  This insult made me sink back a bit. Let alone was it coming from Mikkel, he'd also used a word that I'd heard before - one that troubled me. "Wait. What do you mean by that?"

  "By what - 'programmed'?"

  "Yeah."

  "Well, basically, it means exactly what it sounds like. A while ago, they had me studying psychological phenomena, wanting to show me how easily the masses could be moved to act out with violence (moved to do anything really), and I came across it in one of the books. They were working with me closely at the time, and I only had about a minute to skim a section that I wasn't assigned, but that was enough. The section was about exactly that: programming people.

  "Simply put, if you want to change someone's beliefs, especially if those beliefs are against the opinions a person has already formed - or against their logic, or nature - then there's only one way to do it; you have to isolate them for a period of time, away from any kind of outside influences. Then, once the person is inside this 'mental vacuum', they're simply shown over and over again that the failure to comply with the new way of thinking results in negative consequences (like being ostracized for the rest of their days), while the changing of their thoughts to match the new belief system, results in positive outcomes (like the chance for a life of freedom and a grand adventure). Any of that sound familiar to you?" he asked, dryly.