TOTOWR (A Sci fi short)

TEMPLE OF THE ONE WHO REMEMBERS

Zekon woke up to a dismal yellowness, as he did to the realisation of the day. The day his interstellar civilisation would proceed to make its final surrender.

“How many will go today, father?” Came a question.

The dirty-white ocular spheres on him stared into the far-flung ceiling above. They tried to adjust to the view. Zekon knew, they were the climax of very many ages of evolution, just as he knew, they were working to no end.

“As many as can”, he answered.

He did not know the answer. All would have to go, at some point, but the point had arrived too steeply, for too many. For everyone, in fact. There was hardly anything to look forward to, he thought.

Zekon lay his gaze on the child. He could not remember the last time he had been hopeful. The absence of it was the only constant he had ever known.

“This is why we exist, no?” the child asked.

A long pause followed as Zekon took in her face. One of his appendages twitched, wanting to feel it. It never went up.

“Why do you think that?”

“The priests say so.”

She didn’t get the point. It was not because the priests said it that it was true. It was so, however, because it had dawned upon everyone, some day or another in the close past, like it had upon him. One by one, clique by clique, clan by clan, the populace of the ambitious civilisation had realised, it was time to go.

“You do not remember the time when the last Ships lifted off. Do you?” he asked with a sharpness.

“I have been taught about them. I know they shall never return.”

“That’s right.”

Zekon arched up and stood on his locomotive limbs, reeling from emaciation. It caused him pain, but he began to move nonetheless.

“If you stay behind, this will be our last conversation”, Zekon said to the child.

He stooped under the tiredly open maw of the crumbling structure. Then he rose back up outside, trailed by his daughter.

“What if someone does not think it best to go? What happens to them?” she asked.

“Why would there be someone like that?” he quickly retorted. Then he lumbered forward, keeping the destination in his line of sight.

The air was clear, throbbing with the heat of the Mother. She beat down callously, heaving on her century-long death throes. Zekon's daughter was yet to fully realise what it all meant. It nettled him.

Others of his kind headed towards the same place, which was visible in the distance. Scattered across the hard surface, each covered entirely in thick, firm, white cloaks like he was, they dragged themselves forward. Some huddled together, while most were alone. Along the way, he saw some fall behind. Those who did, appeared to await the fresh, long respite of death on the arid soil.

Grand structures watched them wearily, sighing under the weight of long histories. Some flanked the horizon among the hills. Relics from a different time, somehow still holding on, guarding the echoes of an ancient people.

He spotted a familiar gait up ahead. Something fond nudged him inside, and was immediately suppressed. He did not make the effort to move faster, to catch up.

The individual turned. He stopped. No greeting was exchanged. In a few moments, Zekon went on in his trajectory.

As he started to move past the individual, they stood staring at him from under the stark white suit, unmoving. Soon, they were left behind. Ahead, the destination beckoned him hastily. He longed for the closure it promised, so he hurried up.

Not many moments passed before he felt something stop him, gently.

“Father, Uorif wants to talk”, came the voice from near the ground.

Zekon turned and beheld Uorif. He was steadily moving up to him. “Do you forget me?” he asked from a little afar.

“No”, he said. It was the same individual from before. “Why does it matter?”

Uorif was now before him. He had an excitation, a misplaced aura of purpose that Zekon found uncanny.

“The Upstream Movement,” he spoke slowly. “Yesterday, they appeared, unannounced, at the temple. Disrupted the flow of procedures. Took some to their cause. Tried to damage the Liberation Fulcrum. Tried and failed.”

Zekon stood, processing the information.

“The Upstream Movement?” he asked.

No reply came.

Zekon froze, trying to remember. Some individuals had slowed down here and there, noticing them. A few dregs of curiosity had been flamed.

“The school that rose to struggle against the temple’s perspective. Those who nurture the banal, irrational ideas of optimism. After they disappeared, for many a revolution, their whereabouts were out of general knowledge. But you cannot have forgotten them”, Uorif said.

“Why do I ought to know this?” Zekon quietly questioned.

“You used to belong with them”, Uorif stated plainly. “Not anymore, as I have known.”

He read the unease on Zekon.

“The Fulcrum begins to serve its purpose today. You would know, that you are going towards it”, Uorif said. He took a few moments to pause, and let a fresh gravity settle.

“Look at the City behind you. It rose once, now see it wearing down. It was all for nothing.”

After he said they would meet again, abruptly, he left Zekon to his thoughts. There was a time when he used to consciously acknowledge him as a friend. While the civilisation was corroding away to its last members, with silent simultaneity, so was the familiarity between them. He could not remember how and when it began, and lamented his memory.

“What does the Movement want, father?” his daughter asked.

“They are confused”, he said. He watched Uorif move further and further away, until he was just another white mote. “They do not know what they want, either.”

*****

Near the temple, bionic creatures of the civilisation’s make scanned the periphery. Their motion was smooth as they glided over the metal-plated ground. Some lighted down and delicately crawled around with their five appendages, reflecting their makers’ image, which they were built in. Dozens of White-Cloaks entered the premises under their vigil.

Zekon’s had been a long way to here. “What are those walls for?” the child asked.

“Those are not walls”, Zekon replied.

White-Cloaks gathered around him. He had not seen so many of his people, all at once, before. He could also sense her dissatisfaction with the answer.

“Protrusions from a Ship’s hull. A carcass of one that never left,” he clarified.

The Liberation Fulcrum spun overhead as a huge, black oval, vertically oriented. The equipment that arched all the way from the far ends of the temple, holding it suspended in space, jerked up frequently, from the sheer rapidness of the spin. Meanwhile, the priest revealed itself. It was one of the creatures.

“All songs have been sung. All stories, told”, the priest’s voice declared, immaculately mimicking one of their own.

Zekon saw, on his right and on his left, others like him. More arrived from the different entrances, into the huge, central space. No one had an offspring with them, he realised; none that had not reached maturity, at least.

“The One Who Remembers shall do their job”, Zekon said, perhaps to his daughter, perhaps to himself.

“From scattered clouds of self-duplicating particles,” the priest continued, “to intricate clusters of them that struggle against the inevitability of the One Who Remembers, your kind has come. Your kind spread across planetary systems, to come to terms with your eternal purpose, which gathers before you in its inexorable nothingness. All new experience will cease. The Mother signals the coming of your time.”

The priest pointed upward with the end of its dull-black limb, towards the bloated star’s glare that leaked through the canopy of civilisational engineering. The low rumble of the Liberation Fulcrum continued to emanate from above.

Zekon wondered what the purpose of the address was. No one needed to be reminded why they were there.

Figures moved far ahead, near the main altar. The histories played out in three-dimensional space, of forefathers venturing out into the Endless Black on swarms of little crafts, of them building cities on faraway worlds—terrestrial on one, orbital around another. Crafts coming together to morph into a massive Ship could be made out, now and then. They would be embraced and swallowed by a distorted circle, appearing among the starry background. Every successive scene showed a different event.

Once, Zekon had doubted the reality of the race’s achievements. Now, he was less convinced of what an achievement was.

“It has been a hundred and more revolutions, since your Ships left. Nothing stands to show a plausible way out of your painful demise, except, perhaps, do to nullify the pain. The temple will give you solace as you return to being inconspicuous parts of the universe, as there is no greater goal, the way it has ever been. By chance--”

With a loud CLANG the priest’s huge head swung to the side. Shoved off balance, its body reeled and toppled. It made sonorous rings as it crashed onto the floor. The next moment, on top of it, emerged a White-Cloak from behind.

Zekon stood unmoving. A commotion was building up in the temple. Even in the dryness of despair, primal curiosities were tickled.

“Hope is precious. It is delicate.” The new voice came from the one who stood in the place of the fallen priest. The crowd’s attention had been drawn.

“When the Fulcrum stops, we, what we are certain to remain of the People, die. It will be quick. It will happen once and for all, and all at once. This has been advertised as the best end to the civilisation. When did we lose all hope?” she cried out from close ahead.

“When the Mother dies, the People does. That is our fate sealed,” Uorif’s voice sounded from amidst the crowd. Zekon had barely guessed he was four individuals away. 

“The biosphere teeters on its last leg", Uorif said. "Generational technology cannot keep all alive for long. When we are gone, none will look back and ponder upon it. None will have been alive and done anything more meaningful than a rock tumbling down a chasm.” He revealed himself from the homogeneous gathering, and moved towards the front. “All those ages of hopping from one planet to another, from one system to the next, amounts to nothing at the drawing of our hour.”

Over the tireless sound of the Fulcrum, he went on, challenging the speaker, “The Upstream Movement. Is that wrong? You have to oppose the truth. No idea is immune from facing conflict. Impossible, for one that attacks the basest of evolutionary drives, the impulse to keep surviving, disregarding all else. But, the difference between you,” he pointed at the White-Cloak, “and the enlightened, is the time that was taken to stop postponing the unavoidable.”

There was a pause. Zekon’s thoughts raced. When he looked at his daughter, something warm spread inside him. “You don’t know that, Uorif”, he blurted out. Suddenly, the duo in the centre of all attention snapped their vision towards him. He hesitated, but went on, “The race shall live, scattered among the little islands in the Endless Black. You know they thrive. Somewhere out there.” There was doubt in his voice.

“Alas, your instincts still rage against your intellect”, Uorif said coldly. Still unsure of what he was doing, Zekon could not answer the jeering tone.

“Father, I do not want to go”, spoke the little voice to him. He glanced down. An unwelcome feeling of helplessness was wafting up in the air. “You cannot say that”, he said. It was all he could say.

“The race is a fleeting, mortal concept. A brittle, amorphous state of perception, like everything else we collectively know, or ever will”, Uorif’s voice said to him. “It exists for as long as the People does. The future does not exist anymore. Your daughter does not exist anymore, Zekon”, Uorif suddenly said.

Zekon felt a searing gust of wind hit him. He had not anticipated such a claim. He looked down at where he thought his daughter was. To his shock, he found dull metal, lining the ground. He looked frantically around him. White-Cloaks silently stood by, staring from under the hoods, indifferent.

It was like she had never been there with him.

“Not as the proponent of a movement,” the White-Cloak answered, “but as a rational member of the civilisation, I question your strange trust on the temple. The One Who Remembers is a force of nature, which pushes the universe to devolve into chaos. It is as much a force as the one that pushes beings to struggle, to prove it wrong.”

Zekon grappled with his cruel realisation. What became of the child? Did she never leave the shelter? He was sure of her following him, talking to him all through the journey. Was she a piece of hallucination? A leftover stain clinging on to his mind from a full, buried memory? Or the deepest residing, instinctively curious psyche of his own self?

“No amount of tugging will budge the enlightened. A reality has been cognised”, Uorif said calmly. He turned towards the sentries that had come into the Hall of Liberation. The bionic creatures stood tensed, waiting to spring into action, as if waiting for no more than a gesture of a command.

“Let the People be libe--”

With a swift swipe of an appendage, the White-Cloak seized the voice box of Uorif. It quickly tightened, and a brief SQUELCH was heard. These happened in rapid succession, and Zekon had almost missed them.

“Uorif?” He meekly squeaked.

Uorif had crumpled as a pile on the floor, begging with his silent face. The wet sound had indicated his muteness permanently setting in. Many White-Cloaks stepped forward towards the one in the front. They were, moments prior, part of the assembly around Zekon.

“This individual no longer has the unique ability to make the Fulcrum stop. It will not stop. The People lives to hope for another day.” The leader of the Upstream Movement announced, the one who had crushed Uorif’s voice. “The temple toyed with your fragile sense of purpose, and was nearly successful at shattering it. Every time, the near success was snatched from them by rational minds who let life’s precious will be done”, she said to the rest of them who stayed behind.

The child was dead. Zekon would not have felt a certain urgency, a certain sense of restlessness, for the pathetic pile on the floor, if not for his memories which had started to flood back in, with the breaking of his illusion. Yes, the child had been dead for rather long. Dead like all the young, defenceless children, the last generation to be born, and the first to not grow and bear any of their own. Killed by the wrath of the dying Mother, of the resources that had been exhausted, of the false hope that even those who were left behind, had a chance.

“You must remember Xibek. Zekon?”

It was a question from the Movement’s leader. For the first time, Zekon had been directly spoken to by her, there. He thought he knew better to not entertain the question.

“The Fulcrum is purposeless if you are hopeful for the future. You do not realise that, do you? The temple sustained you with energy and nutrients distributed all across its vast network of channels, all the while seeding your mind and body with minute particles that stifle the survivor’s drive. The less you struggle at the wake of the Fulcrum’s stoppage, the quicker it will be”, she said. The vast crowd around him listened. At length, some more diffused away into the Movement’s side. “How much are you, really, prepared to give in?” She asked.

He gave no answer.

“Zekon, you have been part of the Upstream Movement. Out of you emanates a sense of vitality, even now, and it is telling”, Xibek enticed him.

“I was wrong. You are wrong.”

Xibek was not one to falter at the response. “Our purpose did not end with our children, Zekon. The People can survive. It can live underground. It can rebuild Ships, lift off, jump across worlds and build the civilisation anew, like our ancestors have. There is still time. The One Who Remembers shall remember either way. The One Who Drives will drive, only if you let it.”

Zekon knew to whose commands the bionic creatures were liable. Uorif was severely indisposed, so he wondered if they would listen to him instead, or to anyone, for that matter. He stole a quick glance at them, and then the Fulcrum. The creatures seemed, very subtly, to be awakened by the unintentional gesture. He had only one chance to find out.

Xibek started to move, very slowly, towards him.

“A reality has been cognised, Xibek,” he said. “Everything is a crease or a fold, big or small, on the limitless cosmic sheet, being evened out by the One Who Remembers, slowly, steadily and surely, and there is nothing else.” Zekon found himself sounding like Uorif. He remembered him saying it at some point in the past. Perhaps when he had lost his daughter, and his mate.

“The Fulcrum will stop. Today or tomorrow, day after or a revolution later, it will lose power and pant and fall asleep,” Zekon said. He wished it was now. He wished it was over.

Zekon looked at the pile on the floor that was Uorif. Novice believers of the Upstream Movement followed Xibek in closing in on him.

“There could be other civilisations out there”, Xibek said. “Different races with different philosophies about their existence, myriad cultures with different stories to tell, with different ways of life and so many varied perspectives.” The crowd was rather sparse around Zekon now. They stood by as Xibek and her Upstream Movement edged nearer and nearer.

“Sometime in the revolutions to come, nearby or far into the future, they would chance upon our world. They would behold the ruins born from reluctance. They would think how strange our race was, to wilfully bring the end upon themselves. Every waking moment, a new experience is born, which can never be replaced by a different one. We are the living cosmos, the most precious, the most fragile emergent property in it. Zekon, do not deny the cosmos its life.”

In a few more steps, they would be within Zekon’s reach. “The Movement does not intend to cause the death of any lifeform. Do not do this, Zekon”, she warned.

“Your perspective is as shallow as from before the Realisation”, Zekon finally said. “You are merely a means for causes to leave their effects. Eternal One, remember us in chaos.”

Desperate, Xibek rushed towards him. The others on her side of the Movement followed. Before they could touch him, for the last time, Zekon expressed his thoughts.

“Let the People be liberated.”

x