Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-25383866-20151230091935

I posted an abridged version of this story earlier in the month. I'd like for somebody to read this new version and tell me if it feels finished, because I'm not sure I have anything more to say on it. Thanks guys.

“Are you going to kill me?”

The words echoed through the cell, white walls under white lights reverberating with the question as it was spoken. The room was one of hundreds in the Tower of Reconciliation, the tallest structure in the city; a vast, pale monolith that appeared as one massive slab of white marble. On each of the building’s six faces, carved in thirty meter long letters, was a quote from the Book of All Things.

The Confessor of the Church of the Indelible Self smiled patiently behind the bone-white of his Slate, as one would at a stupid child. “We don’t kill,” he said passionately. “We admonish. As you well know, crime against the Holy Self is a crime against the Ascendant Whole. And your crime is the most grievous of all- attempted suicide.” He smoothed the wintry gray fabric of his cassock, then steepled his fingers. “When you were apprehended, we had to tear the eating implement you had sharpened into a weapon from your hands before you opened a vein with it.”

Brian wished he could curl those hands into fists, but they were zippered to the tops of his thighs in the Tranquility suit. “I’m sick. I hurt. I want to be done with it,” he muttered without looking up. “I committed no crime.”

The Confessor was nodding slowly, exerting an oily aura of false sympathy. “ ‘God sacrificed his body that the Earth and its life would go on,’ “ he quoted. “ ‘Therefore, each man and each creature of the Burgeoning Earth carries God within his heart, and if one harms oneself, one harms God. Glory to the Holy Self.’ “ He looked back at Brian, as though expecting the scripture to have had a transformative effect on the heathen.

“Glory to the Holy Self, indeed,” Brian said derisively, slowly raising his head to face the Confessor. “My Holy Self has cancer. It’s rotting from the inside out-”

The Confessor interrupted him. “Why did you stop taking the Narc? You wouldn’t be here, you wouldn’t be in pain. Your cancer would’ve been as a winter cold- an annoyance, passing swiftly with patience and strength of will.” He sat back in his folding chair, resting his hands on his thighs. He appeared to be considering his next words; divining his angle of attack. “Your records include an application for a breeding license,” he ventured. “Why did you want a child, Brian? So that you could withhold the Narc from it as well and damn it to an abortive lifetime of sickness and pain before unnatural death?”

Fury took Brian then, replacing the hollow ache in his limbs with a red fire of animal desire- he wanted to hurt this man, to tear the porcelain mask from his gloating, ignorant face and beat him with it until the features were bloody oatmeal. He strained forward, fighting the Tranquility suit, and said sharply, “Better to die a real man than to live forever as a slave!”

“The Grove is full of real men. Just like you.” The Confessor paused, watching Brian closely.

Brian’s heart skipped a beat, the hot, righteous anger fleeing in the face of the other man’s thinly veiled threat. The Grove of Martyrs. God help me. There were very few who knew the true purpose of the place- scripture-legal execution, mind-death for enemies of the Church.

He had seen it once, and then only on the Feed, the world’s one source of entertainment- mostly, people just watched each other, 24/7 access to one another’s lives granted via the screens mounted in each home. Brian had still been on the Narc then, injecting himself daily with the stuff.

He was at work when the trumpeting call rang out from the loudspeakers in the warehouse-like shop. “Glory to the Holy Self,” the familiar female voice spoke, and from every mouth in the city, including Brian’s, came the response:

“Glory to the Ascendant Whole.”

The voice continued over the PA system. “All citizens are to lay down their duties and direct themselves to the Feed.” As one, the workers turned toward the large screen that dominated the far end of the room. The logo of the Feed Network, a blue F over the round caricature of a staring, colorless eye, flashed for a moment before being replaced by the church’s symbol- a golden cog wreathed in ivy, the Halsym, sign of the Holy Self.

The image cut to a panning shot of a huge, white room, walls and ceiling fading away into blank distance. Filling the room were hundreds of glass tanks full of a translucent gray liquid- and floating within it, other things, red, fleshy things. Beside each was a placard with a name and number on it. “Behold the Grove of Martyrs,” the voice said. “Behold the most faithful.”

The camera slowly tightened its focus, settling finally on a tank in the foreground. Inside floated the fibrous, red web of complete human nervous and cardiovascular systems, including a strongly beating heart and a small, gray mass of brain tissue. Staring from their mooring at the front of the brain were two large, bloodshot eyes, drifting on their umbilici of nerve and tendon.

“Simon Endric,” the voice said. “His transgression was of the most insidious nature- he denied the Narc, and thus denied the God in the Heart. Having chosen the Martyr’s Fate willingly after a time of solitary repentance, he will ascend to the hearts of all men as Martyr.”

Brian and the others around him intoned, “May he meet the God in his Heart.” A thought pressed in from outside the sweet fog of the Narc then- a rebellious thought, a dangerous thought.

To refuse the Narc…

The floating eyes screamed soundlessly out of the swirling, milky concentrate that bathed the captive nerves and veins with life. Cursed, unceasing life.

The image cut back to the symbol of the Feed Network, and the voice directed the supplicant populace back to work. Brian quietly hummed a monotonous tune, the seditious thought forgotten for the time being.

Next to him, a small, square-featured man named Thaddeus Miller worked on assembling the battery casings for the blasrifles employed by the military arm of the Church. He nudged Brian with an elbow, not looking up from his station. “Can you imagine?” he asked quietly, tones of reverence coloring his voice.

“What?” Brian said, also intent on his work.

“To choose the Martyr’s Fate… His faith must be strong.”

“Indeed,” Brian mumbled, made strangely uncomfortable by this line of conversation. He edged slightly away from Thaddeus, trying to get closer to his own bench. Thaddeus wasn’t deterred.

“It must be glorious,” he said with an exaggerated sigh of longing. “To come so close to the God in the Heart…”

“Mmm,” Brian said.

“Glorious!” Thaddeus said once more before returning to his work.

Brian shuddered now at the memory of his own complacency as he looked into the blank stare of the Confessor’s Slate, a fetid stew of dark emotions bubbling in his chest. “I couldn’t keep taking the Narc,” he said. “It’s poison, dammit! Your anticognizant toxin!” He began coughing sharply as the last word left his mouth, his body jerking painfully with each motion. The Tranquility suit tightened in response to his sudden stressful movements, and he became still.

“The Disciplinary Doctors will make sure you can never harm yourself or anyone else again,” the Confessor interjected, adjusting his Slate with a quivering, white-gloved hand. “You will be placed in the Grove with the other noble Martyrs. You will be sustained by the Narc. What the Bureau of Information will say is that after a time of necessary solitude, you realized the error of your ways and asked, quite nobly, for the Martyr’s Fate. Your interment will serve a dual purpose- as glorious public atonement to the people, and as an example to the rest of those who’ve stopped taking the Narc. ”

Brian’s face must have betrayed his shock. “Yes, we know there are others,” the Confessor said dismissively. “You’re surprised. You shouldn’t be.”

The Confessor leaned forward suddenly, thrusting his masked face right up to Brian’s, the veneer of good will slipping for this outburst. “We will take everything but your eyes and teeth,” he hissed. “You’ll be a sack of useless organs and vital tissue. You will never die. You are done living. Heretic!” He spat this last as though it were poison sucked from a festered wound. He stood, again straightened his cassock and Slate.

“You will be planted in the Grove,” the Confessor said. “The Doctors will send for you at dawn.” With that, he left, opening the padded door of the cell with a wave of his hand. It slid closed behind him, leaving Brian in the dark with his sickness and his fate.

There was some vain and useless part of him that still clung to the hope of rescue from his soft prison. He reviled the notion into his subconscious where it continued to throb like an undrained cyst. It was a weak thought. He knew he was damned, there was no point in deluding himself. He thought back on his strong words- die as a man! They wouldn’t let him die. He shook his head; cynicism, ever the last redoubt of the condemned. Another fit of coughing racked his body, the Tranquility suit painfully constricting his ribs.

He wondered briefly why they hadn’t forcibly administered the Narc while he was incapacitated. Remembering the poisonous hate of the Confessor’s parting words, he supposed it was a fear tactic. They wanted him conscious, they wanted him to think, alone, in the dark, imagining the events of the next twenty-four hours over and over in countless different variations until he couldn’t think anymore, his mind swallowed up in panic.

He smiled to himself in the black, resting against the wall behind him. What marvelous hypocrisy. At the very least he wouldn’t hurt anymore. The tumors crowding against his guts would be excised and tossed into a thin red biohazard bag, burned in a furnace along with the rest of his heretical flesh, while he would go on, so much string on a broken spindle.

He wondered if he would be conscious. At that, he wondered if, being conscious, he would sleep, and if he slept, would he dream?

Simon Endric’s floating, bloodshot eyes stared out at him from within the far gray reaches of his memory, leering like an omen.

For now, sleep. For the morning- fear.

09:19, December 30, 2015 (UTC)

Thaddeus Miller awoke at six A.M. to the sweet trill of the morning alarm that sounded from the screen in his one-room apartment. His eyes opened slowly, squinting into wakefulness. He sat up, stretched, and said, “Good morning, Fran.”

As he spoke, the screen lightened and the calming blue of the Feed Network logo filled the room with an easy light. Thaddeus smiled. The alarm ceased, and the female voice answered, “Good morning, Thaddeus. How did you sleep?”

Thaddeus answered, “Quite well, thanks. I had the strangest dream about dolphins. There was a whole group of them floating up in the air. They looked at me in the water and laughed. I knew they were speaking english. I wanted to yell at them, but when I tried to speak, I just made long, loud squeaks.”

“That’s very interesting, Thaddeus. Would you like to share that on the Feed?”

Thaddeus giggled. “Okay!” he said. “I’m sure all my friends would like that.”

“Yes. Thank you for sharing, Thaddeus. You are a good man.”

Thaddeus got out of bed, and said pridefully, “I am a good man,” as he wriggled out of his pajamas and into his work uniform.

“Remember to take your morning dose of God’s love,” Fran said shrewishly, and Thaddeus replied with an air of spousal banter, “I know, Francine.”

He shook his head in a “Lord, what am I to do?” fashion as he pulled the small purse full of hypodermic needles from his bedside table. Emblazoned on the soft brown of the faux leather was a golden cog wreathed in ivy, the Halsym of the Church.

He fingered it like a rosary, eyes closed, as he muttered the Prayer of Preservation in front of the screen. He sank to his knees on the little plastic pad.

“Once I was finite, a shimmer of heat in the last rays of the day’s dying sun. Once I was cold, as the blackened embers of a flame never kindled. Once I was barren, my Heart as a field salted and burned in a War of Faith.”

He removed a needle from the purse.

“I wandered in darkness for a time, until the moon rose, and I saw the pale desert before me. I sought warmth in the vast night plain, fertile ground of ripe constitution.”

He pressed the needle to his skin, the grayish serum within shifting sluggishly.

“Now I am eternal, a stone face onto which the story of my life is weathered. Now I am warm, blazing with a heat of salvation. Now, I am fecund with the Water of Life, as a green crop tended by my Faith.”

He inserted the needle point into the flesh of his forearm, the skin there pockmarked in a random, colorless tattoo.

“Glory to the Holy Self,” he intoned as he depressed the plunger. The Narc concentrate flooded his veins, setting a cool course through his body. He sighed.

“Glory to the Ascendent Whole,” Fran responded.

Thaddeus hesitated a moment, prostrate in front of the screen. “By way of the Narc, I am one with the God in the Heart,” he said, savoring the final ritual words. He rose, limbs feeling light and airy, mind much the same. He slipped the little purse into the chest pocket of his uniform.

“Goodbye, Fran,” Thaddeus said.

“Goodbye, Thaddeus. Enjoy your work, for your work is all you are.”

A slow, empty smile spread on the vapid landscape of Thaddeus’ face. “My work is important, huh, Fran?”

“Yes it is, Thaddeus. Have a good day.”

Thaddeus left the apartment as the screen went dark. He walked to the magbus depot, toolbox in one hand, a hot cup of Coffene in the other. It was a good day, he decided. The sun was just rising, bringing the heavy iron grays of the city night into the watery sepias of morning. The white pinnacle of the six-sided Tower of Reconciliation was already aglow, the marbled surface gleaming like the light of a cosmic love.

He smiled to himself again as he rode out to the factory warehouse, the toolbox held securely on his lap with both hands. The bus slid into the warren like tunnel system of the factory depot, deep in the bowels of the building. It came to rest at the stop just below his floor, and he got off. He ambled slowly to the elevator, enjoying the short walk.

The car zoomed straight up to the fifth floor, where he disembarked and walked slowly to his bench. Yes, it was a good day.

The trumpeting call came blaring from the loudspeakers some time before the afternoon Narc injection. Thaddeus turned with his fellows toward the large screen, and he realized that the bench to his left was unoccupied. That’s strange, he thought. Perhaps he’s using the rest room.

“Glory to the Holy Self,” said Fran, the voice of the Feed Network.

Glory to the Ascendant Whole,” came the response.

The image on the screen cut to a panning shot of an immense white room filled hundreds of clear glass tanks, the camera slowly coming to rest on one in the foreground.

“Brian Gilready,” Fran intoned. “His transgression was of the most insidious nature- he denied the Narc, and thus denied the God in the Heart. Having chosen the Martyr’s Fate willingly after a time of solitary repentance, he will ascend to the hearts of all men as Martyr.”

Brian Gilready. The name was familiar to Thaddeus. “May he find the God in his Heart,” he said.

Brian Gilready…

A thought surfaced in the calm waters of Thaddeus’ mind. A dangerous thought. A rebellious thought. 