Week 42, 2019
El was born into a family of plebians, free citizens, but
in reality they were servants of the Empire, as every citizen was, he was born in
full-bondage to the Continuum.
They relied on the Continuum for everything, down to
their food and water; every grain,
every drop, every fiber of protein.
El seemed to be an ordinary person, one among trillions
whose lives were nothing special, not of note, they worked, went to school,
worshipped and raised families.
He was a natural born empath, a capacity that had been
engineered into his genetic line covertly by Jim’s agents that were spread
throughout the Empire, and he was the first in his line to manifest the
ability.
El was a mutant, but his mutation was so subtle that it
went unregistered. Until the Continuum discovered it when it examined his
genetic profile in advance of his planned resurrection.
El could not tolerate injustice.
He felt the suffering of everyone around him, it hung on
his neck like a stone.
He wanted nothing more than to give hope to the hopeless
and to free the despairing from despair.
Even as a child El found ways to rebel, to question the
teachings of the Imperial Cult, the indoctrination
of the Imperial Schools, the entire structure of the social order.
As an adult, he took up arms against the Empire, he
fought the enemy wherever he could.
He became an outcast, a criminal. His entire family was
destroyed, and for his gallantry the Continuum made him a star.
Then he was co-opted by it, executed and returned to
life.
It was a miracle for the masses.
When he returned to life he entered service as a
bureaucrat, he served as a soldier, and finally as a priest.
He made his vows, and he entered the holy orders.
Of all the transitions he had made in his long sojourn,
this was the first one that he questioned.
It did not feel natural or honest, the priestly class
lived in a state of being that he never imagined when he was a child, where he and
his family lived lives of dismal-drudgery, as his family had done for countless
generations, without any sense of safety
or security.
Even the lowest order of priestly professions, in the
lowest ranking priestly houses, lived exalted lives. The technologies available
to them were like magic.
Nevertheless, he had a duty to perform.
He ignored his reservations, and he immersed himself in
the priesthood
He studied, He absorbed the dogmas.
He memorized everything, which was not difficult for him.
His knowledge expanded, exponentially. The history of the
Empire was exposed through the holy texts, as much of the real history as was
possible.
He absorbed all of the sacred tracts, all the way back to
the first contact that the Empire had with the Continuum.
It fascinated him, and it struck him cold.
The Continuum appeared to be less than divine, and more
like an alien civilization.
The entire Empire was enslaved to it, sending vast tributes
in minerals and technology to the Central System, which he learned was the
physical location of the Continuum.
It brought him back to the sentiments he had as a youth,
in the rebellion.
The people thought of the planets of the Central System
as the heavenly worlds, but they were not, they had a location in time and
space.
Deep feelings were stirring inside him. Feelings he had
not experienced since he had been resurrected.
He became aware of the reality of the Collective, as a
force of consciousness behind the Continuum, and that truth set him free.
In his heart he was always a rebel.
He took all of the rituals seriously, as he did
everything during his career. Though he often felt as he was performing them,
another present alongside his, hiding in the ganglia of his consciousness,
something predatory.
El carried out the rituals perfectly even though his
studies revealed that the rites were
merely tools of control and division.
He fulfilled them with grace and a studied presence that
gave no indication of the fact that he knew the rituals and rites were empty
gestures, and meaningless incantations.
The comfort that he had with his body, developed through
his long years of martial discipline, gave his performances a nuance that his
peers were unable to match.
Once again he stood out from those around him, not only
because of the attention that was focused on him, but for what he brought to
each moment.
While El no longer believed in the mysteries as they had
been taught to him, he understood that the cohesion of the Empire, the peace of
a million worlds, there sense of belonging
to a greater whole, relied on them for everything.
While the imperial families, the royal powers, the
priestly caste and the war machine cared nothing at all for justice,
intrinsically viewing any person below them in rank as a thing to be used, a
device or a tool; justice, if it was to be had, had to be distributed from the
top.
He performed the rites with that in mind. He bound people
to the commitments expressed in them in ways that had never been seen before.
When members of the Imperial family came to the table,
drawn by his fame, he extracted promises from them in the sacred space, which
they could not then refuse fulfill.
In the place where his life was most regimented, he found
the freedom to return to his old self.
Like every other strata of Imperial society, the priestly
caste was organized according to rank. The major divisions in the priestly
caste were between the ruling houses and the minor officiants, between the
parish priests and the holy orders.
This differentiation was not unlike the differentiation
between managers and staff in the bureaucracy, or between the rank and file and
the command in the military.
The unseen difference, a difference unknown outside the
select circle, was the society of Observers, those members of the Continuum who
had opted to live out a period of their lives in time and space, observing the
day to day realities of the Empire, on behalf of the Collective and its Continuum.
The Observers were scattered throughout the Empire,
holding posts in every strata of society, most Observers preferred to carry out
their mission from the vantage of the priestly caste and from the comfort of the
royal houses. Nothing was hidden from them, because they knew the full truth
concerning the origins of the Empire, of the Continuum, of its promises and its
lies.
Many of the Observers were eager to interact with the
hero/priest the guardian of the faithful, they wanted to be part of the great
narrative that had gripped the imagination of the Collective. It was a great
sense of esteem for them.
He was indoctrinated into the deepest mysteries of the Imperium. The
Observers shared things with him that were forbidden.
He discovered the mechanism of salvation, the translation
of consciousness into the quantum field of the HomeWorld, which brought membership
in the Collective and eternal life in the Continuum.
He learned that the Imperial rites meant nothing, they
were based on lies, merely minor dramas perpetuated as a means of controlling
the people; controlling them through hope, and fear, through love and hate, the
most powerful emotions which were the only meaningful controls, they were controls
which never failed, controls that surpassed even thirst and hunger and pain.
His life was filled with contradictions, he had never
before been so conflicted, or filled with doubt.
He spent his days promoting the beliefs and traditions and the rituals of the Imperial Cult. He was
the most eloquent spokesperson the masses had ever witnessed.
He reached them, and they loved it for him.
He spoke with power and confidence, elegantly
articulating the complex narratives that glued the Imperial society together,
while at the same time providing the rationale and justification for each
citizen to remain in their caste, in their class, in their state of bondage.
He was a living exemplar of the faith, perfectly
demonstrating to every citizen, even to the outcast, the possibility of
elevating themselves from their station, through fidelity, duty, and adherence
to the law.
He taught as he had been instructed to teach, that this
was the path to transcendence.
He knew it for a lie, there was no transcendence.
El learned that the promises concerning reincarnation and
the Continuum, all of those promises that had been made to the people were
built on lies, the most pernicious kind of lies, a vast complex of falsehoods,
predicated on the narrowest sliver of truth.
He did his duty.
He perpetuated the lies anyway.
The powers that held him in check did not do so with the
threat of coercion. Everyone he had ever known or loved while he was an
ordinary man, they were long since dead and buried.
His family had been erased.
They did not have that leverage over him.
They held him in check with the power of love, the
promise of fulfilling his desires, the mystery of beauty and the touch of a
woman.
He learned to differentiate between the articles of faith
he was expected to promote, to present as his own belief in the orthodoxy of the Imperial Cult, and the
convictions he held in heart, the things he knew were true.
He dreamt of waging war against the gods.
He exercised the greatest care concerning the manner in
which he expressed himself. There was no privacy, he knew that he was under
observation at all times, even in the inner most sanctum of his private
dwelling.
El felt as if his own thoughts were being monitored, by a
hidden presence within him.
He held enormous power.
A casual comment from him could change the fate of a
planet.
What he held in his heart, was never the same thing as what
he could give voice to.
His survival, and the lives of billions upon billions of
people depended on him playing the script as true to the expectations of him as
possible.
The higher he ascended into the mysteries, the more he
felt he was shackled by the dogmas and traditions of the Imperial Cult, by its
creeds and doctrines, its laws and cannons.
It was a prison of the mind, a prison without walls.
His circumstances were unique.
None of his peers experienced the same things, little was
expected of them, they were merely functionaries, men and women fulfilling
roles like cast members in a play.
They were a colloquy of extras.
El, on the other hand, had a following.
It was unprecedented, he had no experience of this, and
neither did the magisterium.
The Collective was fascinated by the control he
exercised, the care he gave. They followed him closely and obsessed on the
successive waves of consequences that flowed from his most casual utterances.
The Observer Core was tasked with manipulating his life
and circumstances daily.
El found that there are no words available in any
language to articulate universal truth regarding the infinite, and eternal.
Every attempt to do so was manipulative and false, while
at the same time he could affirm that not every manipulation of religious
doctrine was malicious, and not every articulation of universal truth, no
matter how errant is an intentional prevarication.
Most people believed in the errors that they promulgated,
making them innocent of wrongdoing, even though they were in error.
They believed what they had been taught to belive.
Even most bad actors are innocent, because they believe
in their heart that the erroneous doctrines they promulgate serve some greater
good, they believe in the mission they carry out, in the Imperial Cult, in the
Great Chain of Being which are the foundation of orthodoxy.
They believed in what the Continuum promised, while
confessing that the mechanics of it; the how and the where and the why of it
remained a mystery to them, a matter forever situated beyond them in a great
cloud of unknowing.
The religion of the Empire was a web of lies, coercions
and control mechanisms, lies that had been perfected over millions of years,
lies that held the people together.
It required a breakthrough in cognitive thinking to
shatter the controls that governed the thoughts of the ordinary citizens, very
few people could endure the strain.
It drove them mad.
Of all the castes, it was only the priestly caste that
even attempted to prepare people for such a watershed in consciousness.
The Continuum delighted in the observation of every
failure, through those failures it learned even greater controls.
El studied and meditated and pushed the discipline of his
mind and body, he embraced the cloud of unknowing, pulling it into himself, and
he passed through the crucible with ease.
From his childhood he learned to reject imperial
conditioning.
He was always a rebel at heart.
Emergence 4.0
Part Six, The Empire
Chapter Forty, Faith
A Novel – In One Chapter Per Week
#Emergence #ShortFiction #365SciFi #OneChapterPerWeek
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