The Wanderer's Quest
Oct 12, 2011 16:45:48 GMT -8
Post by Deleted on Oct 12, 2011 16:45:48 GMT -8
Well, here's my newest short story, and IMO the highest quality short I have ever written, placed here so that people can aptly tear it a new, superfluous new behind.
So... what do you think?
In that devastated world of countless wars from the ages past that the common man could remember no longer, there was only debris and broken fragments of a past best left forgotten. Between whatever scant stronghold of mankind dotting the landscape, an endless desert stretched from North to South, East to West. Whatever happened that broke the planet's back, nobody remembered. For all the people knew, they could not exactly care less about such distant, irrelevant times.
Neither could they care about such lofty ideals of an age long past - honor, philanthropy, charity, altruism and all that which the books used to endorse with words gilded with gold. Or at least, forgotten among the average person. Life was difficult and survival was as guaranteed as a candle before the wind, and that was all they needed to know. Those who still tried to maintain that flair of morality from the distant part were few and far between, more often than not victimized by the very ideals they attempted to uphold.
He no longer remembered exactly when he left his homestead to pursue the life he had upheld for his entire life. What he could remember were two things. First, it was out of first and foremost sheer curiosity that he left for the wastes, spending his days prowling the scorched landscape in search of things few men would consider useful – relics of that past. Fancy bits and pieces of shiny metal fragments. Articles of plastic and wires that ticked on their own. Bottles and vials of materials then unknown impeccably preserved under many feet of sand and dirt. Above all, what he sought was knowledge, and these derelicts promised him that.
Second, his motives were anything but altruistic. Bringing home strange materials and lost knowledge would bring him, he fancied, many more things that the satiation of his curiosity. Fame and prestige, to be exact. Finding things that no one had ever found before was an extraordinary act however he looked at it, an act that most certainly would grant him all the prestige, recognition and perhaps even wealth beyond the ken of the average survivor. He craved them all with a burning thirst of one lost in desert for sweet water. The prospect that these, too, would come as a by-product of the satisfaction of his ultimate desire for knowledge was just the icing on the cake.
Many years had passed since that day, and his adventures had been quite successful in the sense of sheer discoveries. Those findings in the wastes had granted him many things, some good and some bad. What he sought the most, knowledge and wisdom, however, still seemed to elude him. However hard he tried, he could not see the word with all the clarity of a sage or reach any conclusive understanding of the ages past. What he did have was the kind of meager wisdom to see quite vaguely what was wrong with the world and the scant knowledge that promised a way to fix it, but not quite.
The more he knew, the more he realized how incomplete and flawed his previous knowledge was. The more he knew, the more questions he had. Ever thirsting for answers, he drove himself further and further into the wasteland in search of solutions to those questions that kept popping up far more quickly than he could ever hope to answer them.
Some questions were simple enough in both form and answer. Stumbling upon the derelict of an ancient vehicle with a dusty manual in its hold would quickly and comprehensively provide him due knowledge as to how it was supposed to work in its prime. Reading the still clear instruction on a chemical bottle would tell him that drinking it was a bad idea and applying it with a sponge on a dirty surface was a good one. Others were more complex and not always obvious, like how the vehicle itself, made of a plethora of otherwise unrelated parts could interact with one another in such an impeccable manner as to bring that inanimate heap of metal into life. Still others were on another level of complication, he might as well not care, like how the so-called ‘molecular structure’ of said chemical would allow it to do unto dirty surfaces what plain water and sweat could not. All of those questions, however, he was quite certain they could be answered in due time, if only he could find the time to get around to it.
And then there are those questions that however hard he searched and toiled away, he could not answer at all. After all, even the very nature of those questions, nebulous and immaterial as they are, he could hardly grasp and come to terms with, let alone trying to find an answer. The nature of good and evil, for instance, or the purposes of any morality at all, especially in this godforsaken world. Nebulous and far-fetched they were, not to mention irrelevant to the everyday struggle for survival he had seen. Above all, a large “why” question remained ever burning in his mind, only flaring up brighter and brighter with every new discovery he made. Why a civilization so magnificent, so admirable, so… great like what they used to have, evident in all those relics half-buried in the sand, would come to such an ignominious end and reduced to what they were now, he could not grasp.
While those questions would remain forever unanswered, they did drive him on another quest, seemingly petty and much less grandiose than his original mission. It was not even an abrupt revelation, but rather the sort of trickling revelation into his subconsciousness day by day until the stalagmite had taken form. If there was good and evil, why do evil and not good? If there was a ground to help others within his powers, why not do so? If there was not any purpose to his previous life but a selfish desire for that which benefited only himself, why not make that his purpose? And so, day by day, the desire to help gradually replaced that desire to be admired by every living person and living in the admittedly scant luxuries of the world.
Philanthropy was an easy thing when all he had in mind was little things. Giving his spare parts to needy people he hardly knew and curing them of ailments, for one, or ridding them of the occasional trouble makers was easy enough, given everything he had collected both material and immaterial. For quite a few more years he spent doing exactly that, helping what people he explicitly saw to be in trouble, taking the joy in more the fact that he was of use to someone than of the recognition and praise therefrom.
It did not take long, however, for him to see that in the grand scheme of things, his philanthropy changed little. His help did ease sufferings and spread joy, but whatever he did would be invariably extinguished sooner or later. The parts he gave would wear out and break. The ruffians he drove away would return in force. The diseases he helped cure would quickly rekindle. There seemed to be no way to get around that, for a hundred times he tried was a hundred times he failed to bring about any long-lasting effect. There must be something he missed, something he could do, but he somehow was unaware of, he thought.
Then one day he heard about the existence of a particular woman, to put it that way, who went by the name of “Mysterious Metaphysical Figure”, who dwelt in the furthest corner of the wasteland. She was rumored to know everything between heaven and earth, and then some. So far away from whatever remained of civilization she lived that few had even thought about venturing out there to search for her, fewer still having actually ventured out, and most of those who did eventually returned empty-handed anyway. And the rest, foolhardy as they were to continue forward still, never returned.
By the time he heard that rumor, it had been nothing more than an urban legend to pass the time. And yet he saw in that story a glimmer of hope. After all, for all his life he had been venturing far and wide in search of the ultimate knowledge and perhaps to use that knowledge for the greater good. If what it takes for him to fulfill that dream was to set out for an uncharted destination and all the dangers that would involve, it was a worthy endeavor. If he should lose his life in the meantime, he would rest knowing that he had perished trying.
It was the longest journey he had ever embarked upon. For months on end he trekked across the sandy wasteland, towing along his entire lifetime’s collection of both knowledge and equipment, only stopping for the occasional provisioning. His soles left their marks all across the uncharted sands of the furthest ends of the wastes. His eyes saw what nobody had ever seen before. His very person was subjected to the sort of danger that could take a man’s life within the blink of an eye on more than a few occasions. And yet he persisted on his journey, never once looking back.
If God existed, he had certainly blessed him with luck in reward for his perseverance. If God did not exist, he could claim sole credit for it. Either case, after a few years of prowling the deepest ends of the wastes, he finally found his coveted destination. The price was high – his youth had all but faded away, and the journey itself had taken an enormous toll on his person. Now he stood there at the gate of the answer he had always been looking for, a grey old man, his face wrinkled, his eyes sunken, his back slightly crooked, the mark of age weighing his entire body now but for the determination in his eyes, which flared brightly still.
Before him lay the prize of his adventure – a green oasis filled with grass and water and all the fruits of nature having been long forgotten by his ken. The land was unscathed and unpolluted by whatever that destroyed the world as it used to be. It was a paradise on earth, both figuratively and literally, at least to him. For there, in a green, thatched hut at the very middle of the lush pasture the person with the answer he had sought for all his life resided.
As he stepped into the hut, the first thing he saw was that the interior and the exterior were so detached they seemed like two completely different worlds. The walls were lined with shelves containing all sorts of books, treatises and theses, as though attempting to contain and condense as much of the universe’s wisdom into a single room as possible. Aside from that collection and a single, simple wooden table with two chairs on two opposite ends at its very middle, the room had no furniture worth mentioning, giving it an especially airy feel. The occupant of that hut was sitting in one of those two seats, facing him, wearing on her face a patient expression as though she had been waiting for him all those while.
A strange bewilderment crossed his mind as he looked at her, a kind of quizzical expression reigned over his visage as though he was facing the strangest thing in the universe. She was not of this world, something that required no vast amount of wisdom to tell. Her inhuman aquamarine hair was flowing down her shoulders like waves of misty rain. Her eyebrows were sharp and fierce like two bolts of lightning, especially stressing the malignancy in her eyes, which seemed to bear within them both the kind of wisdom he had always been seeking and a specific brand of contempt for those who did not have it. The general shape of her face was slightly thin and on the gaunt side, which, coupled with her hair and eye, had the unfortunate effect of making her look like some sort of evil being with an agenda.
His eyes twitched in anxiety when he realized that, unlike himself, she was accompanied by a duo of sharp-toothed, club-wielding goblins standing subserviently by her side, each of which towering several feet over her. In addition, on the table well within her reach was a superfluously luxurious golden revolver, should she ever find the need for firepower. Strangely, the look on her face was entirely non-threatening, if not benign, despite her remarkable arsenal. The weird monocle she wore over her right eye, if anything, only made her look even more benign in a weirdly quirky manner.
“Welcome, wanderer,” she began speaking, her voice airy and otherworldy in both tone and volume. “Take a seat and make yourself at home – I have been waiting for you.”
Despite the initial hesitation, he quickly steeled his resolve and stepped forward. After all, if he had taken the effort to find this oracle for the answer of his life, having trampled over multitudes of difficulties to even get to that point, there was no point in backing down. He stepped toward the seat, pulled it back with a resolute swish of his arms, then sat straight down and looked at the being in her eyes.
“So… you are the one they call the Mysterious Metaphysical Figure, aren’t you?” he asked, trying to whip up a suitable joke to both open a natural discussion and fortify his resolution. “I think I’ve understood why you are known as such.”
“I go by many names,” she said with a light giggle. “But you can call me Spyke. Easy to remember, no?”
“It would be impolite to not invite a guest to a simple drink, wouldn’t it?”
Having said that, she turned towards one of the shelves and flicked her finger. To his astonishment, two soda can and two drinking glasses, each bearing the pattern of a lynx wildcat impeccably flew from their nesting place and landed perfectly before the figure and himself. For a moment he was unable to say a single word, having been well overwhelmed by amazement, less from her apparently physics-defying trick and more from the display of generous hospitality to a complete stranger. Such a practice was well dead and buried all over the world in that day and age.
He stared at the soda can suspiciously, part of him fearing for trickeries, a notion he quickly dissuaded himself from. After all, if she wanted to harm him in any way, he would have been dead long before he could approach her and sit down. Taking a deep breath, he opened the can and quickly pouring the liquid into his cup. And then he lifted the cup to his mouth in a gesture as natural-looking as he could muster, and took a sip.
“Thank you for your hospitality,” he said, trying to hold back his impatience, “but I hope you understand that I did not come here for pleasantries. I have many questions, and was told you are the only one who could answer them.”
The figure glanced at him, her previously maleficent eyes now having suddenly taken a sharp turn into a more benevolent form.
“I guessed as much,” she said, smiling, as though telling him to take it easy. “As a matter of fact, I know what you seek. I even know what exact question you are going to ask, verbatim.”
Once again astonishment surged in his eyes, but only for a split second. Of course a powerful and wise being like her should have no problem comprehending his admittedly simplistic mind.
“Then, by all means, tell me the answer,” he pledged. “If you know what I was going to ask…”
“… I know how much you long for the answer, yes I do,” she said, cutting his pledge short. “But I was wondering… would you like the answer if I were to give it to you?”
“I did not come here for a puzzle,” he said, once again trying, yet failing to contain his impatience, resulting in his voice rising significantly in both pitch and volume. “Do you have an answer for me or not?”
“Why, yes, I do, and I would gladly grant that knowledge to you,” she said, again smiling at him calmly. “Yet at the same time, I doubt that you would like to know that.”
“Why not?” he asked back, his already wrinkled face grimaced as he spoke.
“Because you don’t seek just about any answer,” she said slowly yet firmly, as though reading his mind. “You seek an answer that would go well with your previous impression and opinion about the world and strengthen them. You seek an answer that does not contradict your existing lines of thought and reasoning. You seek an answer that would not put you outside of your comfort zone. In other word, you seek an easy way out. Am I not right?”
“But…”
That was the only word he could utter at that moment. The figure had just pinpointed the deepest thought in his heart, the keystone upon which his entire belief lay, something that even he was unaware of himself. Never once had he considered the fact that the answer he was seeking would be at all incompatible to his previous knowledge and wisdom, if only because if it were, there would be no point in seeking it. After all, of what use would an ultimate answer be when it defied everything else?
“Well, it is your choice, wanderer,” the figure said, cutting off his train of thought. “I could give you an answer that is consistent with your previous knowledge, an answer that would make you feel good about yourself and the world, but also an answer that both you and me know is not the true answer. Or I can give you the true answer, something that you most certainly will not like.”
“And I can only choose one?”
“The true answer would invalidate the untrue as soon as you hear it, wanderer,” she said. “They literally cannot coexist. So yes, you can only have one.”
For another moment that seemed like an eternity he bent his neck and stared at the table, weighting his options. His eyebrows knitted, his expression strained, his lips tightly sealed as he thought, waging a battle against himself. A particular sort of fear completely unknown to him throughout his life now surfaced, something he was unsure if he was able to deal with it or not. On one hand, he did not come there to hear a lie. If he wanted a soothing lie, he could have conjured it himself and persuade his subconsciousness much more easily. But on the other, if the truth would be so harsh as to destroy the very foundation of his beliefs thus far, then, for a person who had lived just for the pursuit of knowledge, would it not be the same as depriving him of everything he had?
All the while, the figure just looked at him patiently, not even moving a muscle. It was a choice he had to make for himself.
“Very well then,” he finally said, looking straight at the figure’s eyes. “Tell me the true answer to my ultimate question.”
His voice and perhaps his entire person were shaking ever so slightly as he spoke. From the uneasiness on his face, it was obvious that the choice he had just made was the closest and most indecisive one in his entire eventful life.
“A brave choice, wanderer,” she said, nodding. “Now close your eyes and relax. The answer will present itself soon enough.”
Like a puppet he did as he was told, slowly closing his eyes and gluing them shut. Almost immediately his expression began to shift towards what could be charitably described as horror and disgust. Dancing in his mind were multiple picturesque images, one after the other in a seemingly endless stream, stretching his mental capacity to the very brink of collapse. That would already be unpleasant even if the images themselves were cute and lovely, which they clearly were anything but.
There were no words that could describe the disgusting, loathsome and utterly repugnant images he just saw. Permeating from each and every of them were all sort of vices and crimes he had a concept about. Cruelty. Vanity. Perversion. Selfishness. Stupidity. Willful ignorance. Jealousy. Scheming. Those vices and crimes were, as he found out in his horror, committed not by any barbarians, demons or otherworldly scourges, but mankind itself. Not the mankind used to living in the self-serving, subhuman life he had known throughout his life, but the mankind that lived in the golden pavilions of technology and advancement, the very ancient breed of men whose achievements and advances he worshipped.
The montage concluded with what seemed to be a multitude of fireballs as though delivered from the very heaven itself, smiting and burning to a crisp everything, leaving behind but a charred landscape – the landscape he now lived in. And then it vanished as suddenly as it had come, leaving him back to reality. His forehead was drenched in sweat, soaking the rest of his face and dripping onto the table. His breathing became uneven and raspy, as though his lungs had suddenly been shrunken to half their size. He opened his eyes, only to find his vision blurry from the fatigue, the sweat and what seemed to be his tears.
“What… what did you just show me?” he asked weakly, even though at the bottom of his heart he had already known, something the figure acknowledged, if her understanding look was of any indication.
“Exactly what you thought it was, wanderer,” she said. “Those were but a few selected images of the last days of the perished mankind whose knowledge and wisdom you have so worshipped and longed for. As you can see, they were… less than stellar, to put it charitably.”
She then looked straight into his eyes, her expression remaining distinctly calm.
“I take it, wanderer,” she said, her smile strangely dissonant given what he had just seen, “that you’ve found your answers, haven’t you?”
“Yes,” he finally said. “Yes I have.”
He could not communicate verbally as well as he wanted to, having been all but taken over and mortified by what amounted to grief. The figure was absolutely right – what he just saw was the death of his every belief. The very notion that his own kinds were the degenerate culprits whose sufferings were but their own fault was a crushing one to him, and rightfully so. That was everyone he had known that was being denounced. That was the past he looked up to his whole life that was being denounced. That was everything he had come to identify with for so many years of his life that was being denounced. That was himself, too, that was being denounced and blamed.
“Could this be… some sort of mistake?” he finally asked, trying futilely to defend his people, their past and, by extension, himself.
“Not that I know of, no,” the figure answered, sounding completely nonchalant still. “It is your kind’s vices and failings that caused all this to happen. And it is this foolish and self-serving nature that will eventually be the death of them all.”
There was more silence. It was a while before he could lift his chin to ask his most important question thus far.
“Is there any way I could change this at all?”
“Same,” the figure shook her head. “Not that I know of. The nature of mankind is as corrupted as it is driven and ingenious – a combination deadlier than any anomaly space and time themselves could conjure. It’s like patching up a leaky ship’s hull. One single sponge can only do so much to delay the eventual sinking.”
“Are you sure?”
He asked, his voice reduced to a shivering, humbled tone akin to a hungry beggar begging for a scrap of food.
“You can change the superficial properties of something, but you cannot change its nature without turning it into something else completely,” she said. “And the nature of mankind dictates that this is the way it is going to be.”
“I see.”
Those words were uttered with a kind of crushing fatigue that clairvoyance was not even needed to read. His eyes sank lower, the wrinkles on his face seemed to have been etched a little deeper, and his hair growing a little greyer. His entire face seemed to have been frozen in thoughts and despair.
“Well, what are you going to do now, wanderer?”
The figure’s question rang hollow to him, if only because his mind had gone blank.
“I don’t know,” he finally answered with a long sigh.
“You’re not unwise for a human,” the figure said, nodding in approval. “I know - If you want to, you can join us here. I can give you all the answers and all the knowledge you would ever want from the greater collective consciousness of the multiverse. You will know more than the greatest sage could ever dream of, if that is what you want. You will die in peace a man more learned than anything mankind had ever seen or have any right to, for that matter.”
She looked at him with another smile, a smile that had now been so discordant with the atmosphere it made him uncomfortable even looking at it.
“What do you say, wanderer?”
Once again he remained silent for want of anything to speak, mulling over that offer. It was an attractive one however he looked at it, and had he not been already preoccupied with the harsh truth, he might have as well jumped at it at the first chance. After all, his entire life had been about collecting knowledge and wisdom, having gone to great extents just to gleam one piece of lost knowledge from the wastes. Now, the chance to approach an infinite source of that which he had been struggling for all his life was right there in front of him.
And then another question suddenly dawned to him, a question that he had almost forgotten to consider throughout his lifelong adventure. He stared at the figure, a particular kind of flame rekindling in his eyes as he spoke.
“Tell me, with all your infinite knowledge and wisdom,” he asked. “At the end of the day, what is knowledge even for?”
Now it was the figure’s turn to remain silent, albeit not for long.
“Knowledge can serve many purposes, but ultimately it is either a means to an end, or the end itself,” she answered. “Now, out of those two, what is it to you?”
A smile that was no less out of place and discordant flashed on his face this time, as though he had just found an epiphany for himself independent of her words.
“‘A means to an end’,” he repeated. “That is all I need to know.”
******
Many years later.
Among the rabbles of the wasteland, a particular town stood out as the most prosperous place to be. The market teemed with as much goods as the wastelad economy could produce. The people were happy and safe within its wall. There was more clean food and water to go around than the people could consume them. What was astonishing was that just a few decades prior, that town used to be the epitome of a slum, a dying township like any others.
Somewhere in the town’s graveyard, a humble gravestone stood among others, built of the simplest of materials – a stone slab engraved with a simple chisel. The simple letters etched on the plain stone formed a rather modest sentence: “A man may not change the world, but he can help.”
Perhaps that was as true a quote as any.
******
So... what do you think?
******
The Wanderer's Quest
In that devastated world of countless wars from the ages past that the common man could remember no longer, there was only debris and broken fragments of a past best left forgotten. Between whatever scant stronghold of mankind dotting the landscape, an endless desert stretched from North to South, East to West. Whatever happened that broke the planet's back, nobody remembered. For all the people knew, they could not exactly care less about such distant, irrelevant times.
Neither could they care about such lofty ideals of an age long past - honor, philanthropy, charity, altruism and all that which the books used to endorse with words gilded with gold. Or at least, forgotten among the average person. Life was difficult and survival was as guaranteed as a candle before the wind, and that was all they needed to know. Those who still tried to maintain that flair of morality from the distant part were few and far between, more often than not victimized by the very ideals they attempted to uphold.
He no longer remembered exactly when he left his homestead to pursue the life he had upheld for his entire life. What he could remember were two things. First, it was out of first and foremost sheer curiosity that he left for the wastes, spending his days prowling the scorched landscape in search of things few men would consider useful – relics of that past. Fancy bits and pieces of shiny metal fragments. Articles of plastic and wires that ticked on their own. Bottles and vials of materials then unknown impeccably preserved under many feet of sand and dirt. Above all, what he sought was knowledge, and these derelicts promised him that.
Second, his motives were anything but altruistic. Bringing home strange materials and lost knowledge would bring him, he fancied, many more things that the satiation of his curiosity. Fame and prestige, to be exact. Finding things that no one had ever found before was an extraordinary act however he looked at it, an act that most certainly would grant him all the prestige, recognition and perhaps even wealth beyond the ken of the average survivor. He craved them all with a burning thirst of one lost in desert for sweet water. The prospect that these, too, would come as a by-product of the satisfaction of his ultimate desire for knowledge was just the icing on the cake.
Many years had passed since that day, and his adventures had been quite successful in the sense of sheer discoveries. Those findings in the wastes had granted him many things, some good and some bad. What he sought the most, knowledge and wisdom, however, still seemed to elude him. However hard he tried, he could not see the word with all the clarity of a sage or reach any conclusive understanding of the ages past. What he did have was the kind of meager wisdom to see quite vaguely what was wrong with the world and the scant knowledge that promised a way to fix it, but not quite.
The more he knew, the more he realized how incomplete and flawed his previous knowledge was. The more he knew, the more questions he had. Ever thirsting for answers, he drove himself further and further into the wasteland in search of solutions to those questions that kept popping up far more quickly than he could ever hope to answer them.
Some questions were simple enough in both form and answer. Stumbling upon the derelict of an ancient vehicle with a dusty manual in its hold would quickly and comprehensively provide him due knowledge as to how it was supposed to work in its prime. Reading the still clear instruction on a chemical bottle would tell him that drinking it was a bad idea and applying it with a sponge on a dirty surface was a good one. Others were more complex and not always obvious, like how the vehicle itself, made of a plethora of otherwise unrelated parts could interact with one another in such an impeccable manner as to bring that inanimate heap of metal into life. Still others were on another level of complication, he might as well not care, like how the so-called ‘molecular structure’ of said chemical would allow it to do unto dirty surfaces what plain water and sweat could not. All of those questions, however, he was quite certain they could be answered in due time, if only he could find the time to get around to it.
And then there are those questions that however hard he searched and toiled away, he could not answer at all. After all, even the very nature of those questions, nebulous and immaterial as they are, he could hardly grasp and come to terms with, let alone trying to find an answer. The nature of good and evil, for instance, or the purposes of any morality at all, especially in this godforsaken world. Nebulous and far-fetched they were, not to mention irrelevant to the everyday struggle for survival he had seen. Above all, a large “why” question remained ever burning in his mind, only flaring up brighter and brighter with every new discovery he made. Why a civilization so magnificent, so admirable, so… great like what they used to have, evident in all those relics half-buried in the sand, would come to such an ignominious end and reduced to what they were now, he could not grasp.
While those questions would remain forever unanswered, they did drive him on another quest, seemingly petty and much less grandiose than his original mission. It was not even an abrupt revelation, but rather the sort of trickling revelation into his subconsciousness day by day until the stalagmite had taken form. If there was good and evil, why do evil and not good? If there was a ground to help others within his powers, why not do so? If there was not any purpose to his previous life but a selfish desire for that which benefited only himself, why not make that his purpose? And so, day by day, the desire to help gradually replaced that desire to be admired by every living person and living in the admittedly scant luxuries of the world.
Philanthropy was an easy thing when all he had in mind was little things. Giving his spare parts to needy people he hardly knew and curing them of ailments, for one, or ridding them of the occasional trouble makers was easy enough, given everything he had collected both material and immaterial. For quite a few more years he spent doing exactly that, helping what people he explicitly saw to be in trouble, taking the joy in more the fact that he was of use to someone than of the recognition and praise therefrom.
It did not take long, however, for him to see that in the grand scheme of things, his philanthropy changed little. His help did ease sufferings and spread joy, but whatever he did would be invariably extinguished sooner or later. The parts he gave would wear out and break. The ruffians he drove away would return in force. The diseases he helped cure would quickly rekindle. There seemed to be no way to get around that, for a hundred times he tried was a hundred times he failed to bring about any long-lasting effect. There must be something he missed, something he could do, but he somehow was unaware of, he thought.
Then one day he heard about the existence of a particular woman, to put it that way, who went by the name of “Mysterious Metaphysical Figure”, who dwelt in the furthest corner of the wasteland. She was rumored to know everything between heaven and earth, and then some. So far away from whatever remained of civilization she lived that few had even thought about venturing out there to search for her, fewer still having actually ventured out, and most of those who did eventually returned empty-handed anyway. And the rest, foolhardy as they were to continue forward still, never returned.
By the time he heard that rumor, it had been nothing more than an urban legend to pass the time. And yet he saw in that story a glimmer of hope. After all, for all his life he had been venturing far and wide in search of the ultimate knowledge and perhaps to use that knowledge for the greater good. If what it takes for him to fulfill that dream was to set out for an uncharted destination and all the dangers that would involve, it was a worthy endeavor. If he should lose his life in the meantime, he would rest knowing that he had perished trying.
It was the longest journey he had ever embarked upon. For months on end he trekked across the sandy wasteland, towing along his entire lifetime’s collection of both knowledge and equipment, only stopping for the occasional provisioning. His soles left their marks all across the uncharted sands of the furthest ends of the wastes. His eyes saw what nobody had ever seen before. His very person was subjected to the sort of danger that could take a man’s life within the blink of an eye on more than a few occasions. And yet he persisted on his journey, never once looking back.
If God existed, he had certainly blessed him with luck in reward for his perseverance. If God did not exist, he could claim sole credit for it. Either case, after a few years of prowling the deepest ends of the wastes, he finally found his coveted destination. The price was high – his youth had all but faded away, and the journey itself had taken an enormous toll on his person. Now he stood there at the gate of the answer he had always been looking for, a grey old man, his face wrinkled, his eyes sunken, his back slightly crooked, the mark of age weighing his entire body now but for the determination in his eyes, which flared brightly still.
Before him lay the prize of his adventure – a green oasis filled with grass and water and all the fruits of nature having been long forgotten by his ken. The land was unscathed and unpolluted by whatever that destroyed the world as it used to be. It was a paradise on earth, both figuratively and literally, at least to him. For there, in a green, thatched hut at the very middle of the lush pasture the person with the answer he had sought for all his life resided.
As he stepped into the hut, the first thing he saw was that the interior and the exterior were so detached they seemed like two completely different worlds. The walls were lined with shelves containing all sorts of books, treatises and theses, as though attempting to contain and condense as much of the universe’s wisdom into a single room as possible. Aside from that collection and a single, simple wooden table with two chairs on two opposite ends at its very middle, the room had no furniture worth mentioning, giving it an especially airy feel. The occupant of that hut was sitting in one of those two seats, facing him, wearing on her face a patient expression as though she had been waiting for him all those while.
A strange bewilderment crossed his mind as he looked at her, a kind of quizzical expression reigned over his visage as though he was facing the strangest thing in the universe. She was not of this world, something that required no vast amount of wisdom to tell. Her inhuman aquamarine hair was flowing down her shoulders like waves of misty rain. Her eyebrows were sharp and fierce like two bolts of lightning, especially stressing the malignancy in her eyes, which seemed to bear within them both the kind of wisdom he had always been seeking and a specific brand of contempt for those who did not have it. The general shape of her face was slightly thin and on the gaunt side, which, coupled with her hair and eye, had the unfortunate effect of making her look like some sort of evil being with an agenda.
His eyes twitched in anxiety when he realized that, unlike himself, she was accompanied by a duo of sharp-toothed, club-wielding goblins standing subserviently by her side, each of which towering several feet over her. In addition, on the table well within her reach was a superfluously luxurious golden revolver, should she ever find the need for firepower. Strangely, the look on her face was entirely non-threatening, if not benign, despite her remarkable arsenal. The weird monocle she wore over her right eye, if anything, only made her look even more benign in a weirdly quirky manner.
“Welcome, wanderer,” she began speaking, her voice airy and otherworldy in both tone and volume. “Take a seat and make yourself at home – I have been waiting for you.”
Despite the initial hesitation, he quickly steeled his resolve and stepped forward. After all, if he had taken the effort to find this oracle for the answer of his life, having trampled over multitudes of difficulties to even get to that point, there was no point in backing down. He stepped toward the seat, pulled it back with a resolute swish of his arms, then sat straight down and looked at the being in her eyes.
“So… you are the one they call the Mysterious Metaphysical Figure, aren’t you?” he asked, trying to whip up a suitable joke to both open a natural discussion and fortify his resolution. “I think I’ve understood why you are known as such.”
“I go by many names,” she said with a light giggle. “But you can call me Spyke. Easy to remember, no?”
“It would be impolite to not invite a guest to a simple drink, wouldn’t it?”
Having said that, she turned towards one of the shelves and flicked her finger. To his astonishment, two soda can and two drinking glasses, each bearing the pattern of a lynx wildcat impeccably flew from their nesting place and landed perfectly before the figure and himself. For a moment he was unable to say a single word, having been well overwhelmed by amazement, less from her apparently physics-defying trick and more from the display of generous hospitality to a complete stranger. Such a practice was well dead and buried all over the world in that day and age.
He stared at the soda can suspiciously, part of him fearing for trickeries, a notion he quickly dissuaded himself from. After all, if she wanted to harm him in any way, he would have been dead long before he could approach her and sit down. Taking a deep breath, he opened the can and quickly pouring the liquid into his cup. And then he lifted the cup to his mouth in a gesture as natural-looking as he could muster, and took a sip.
“Thank you for your hospitality,” he said, trying to hold back his impatience, “but I hope you understand that I did not come here for pleasantries. I have many questions, and was told you are the only one who could answer them.”
The figure glanced at him, her previously maleficent eyes now having suddenly taken a sharp turn into a more benevolent form.
“I guessed as much,” she said, smiling, as though telling him to take it easy. “As a matter of fact, I know what you seek. I even know what exact question you are going to ask, verbatim.”
Once again astonishment surged in his eyes, but only for a split second. Of course a powerful and wise being like her should have no problem comprehending his admittedly simplistic mind.
“Then, by all means, tell me the answer,” he pledged. “If you know what I was going to ask…”
“… I know how much you long for the answer, yes I do,” she said, cutting his pledge short. “But I was wondering… would you like the answer if I were to give it to you?”
“I did not come here for a puzzle,” he said, once again trying, yet failing to contain his impatience, resulting in his voice rising significantly in both pitch and volume. “Do you have an answer for me or not?”
“Why, yes, I do, and I would gladly grant that knowledge to you,” she said, again smiling at him calmly. “Yet at the same time, I doubt that you would like to know that.”
“Why not?” he asked back, his already wrinkled face grimaced as he spoke.
“Because you don’t seek just about any answer,” she said slowly yet firmly, as though reading his mind. “You seek an answer that would go well with your previous impression and opinion about the world and strengthen them. You seek an answer that does not contradict your existing lines of thought and reasoning. You seek an answer that would not put you outside of your comfort zone. In other word, you seek an easy way out. Am I not right?”
“But…”
That was the only word he could utter at that moment. The figure had just pinpointed the deepest thought in his heart, the keystone upon which his entire belief lay, something that even he was unaware of himself. Never once had he considered the fact that the answer he was seeking would be at all incompatible to his previous knowledge and wisdom, if only because if it were, there would be no point in seeking it. After all, of what use would an ultimate answer be when it defied everything else?
“Well, it is your choice, wanderer,” the figure said, cutting off his train of thought. “I could give you an answer that is consistent with your previous knowledge, an answer that would make you feel good about yourself and the world, but also an answer that both you and me know is not the true answer. Or I can give you the true answer, something that you most certainly will not like.”
“And I can only choose one?”
“The true answer would invalidate the untrue as soon as you hear it, wanderer,” she said. “They literally cannot coexist. So yes, you can only have one.”
For another moment that seemed like an eternity he bent his neck and stared at the table, weighting his options. His eyebrows knitted, his expression strained, his lips tightly sealed as he thought, waging a battle against himself. A particular sort of fear completely unknown to him throughout his life now surfaced, something he was unsure if he was able to deal with it or not. On one hand, he did not come there to hear a lie. If he wanted a soothing lie, he could have conjured it himself and persuade his subconsciousness much more easily. But on the other, if the truth would be so harsh as to destroy the very foundation of his beliefs thus far, then, for a person who had lived just for the pursuit of knowledge, would it not be the same as depriving him of everything he had?
All the while, the figure just looked at him patiently, not even moving a muscle. It was a choice he had to make for himself.
“Very well then,” he finally said, looking straight at the figure’s eyes. “Tell me the true answer to my ultimate question.”
His voice and perhaps his entire person were shaking ever so slightly as he spoke. From the uneasiness on his face, it was obvious that the choice he had just made was the closest and most indecisive one in his entire eventful life.
“A brave choice, wanderer,” she said, nodding. “Now close your eyes and relax. The answer will present itself soon enough.”
Like a puppet he did as he was told, slowly closing his eyes and gluing them shut. Almost immediately his expression began to shift towards what could be charitably described as horror and disgust. Dancing in his mind were multiple picturesque images, one after the other in a seemingly endless stream, stretching his mental capacity to the very brink of collapse. That would already be unpleasant even if the images themselves were cute and lovely, which they clearly were anything but.
There were no words that could describe the disgusting, loathsome and utterly repugnant images he just saw. Permeating from each and every of them were all sort of vices and crimes he had a concept about. Cruelty. Vanity. Perversion. Selfishness. Stupidity. Willful ignorance. Jealousy. Scheming. Those vices and crimes were, as he found out in his horror, committed not by any barbarians, demons or otherworldly scourges, but mankind itself. Not the mankind used to living in the self-serving, subhuman life he had known throughout his life, but the mankind that lived in the golden pavilions of technology and advancement, the very ancient breed of men whose achievements and advances he worshipped.
The montage concluded with what seemed to be a multitude of fireballs as though delivered from the very heaven itself, smiting and burning to a crisp everything, leaving behind but a charred landscape – the landscape he now lived in. And then it vanished as suddenly as it had come, leaving him back to reality. His forehead was drenched in sweat, soaking the rest of his face and dripping onto the table. His breathing became uneven and raspy, as though his lungs had suddenly been shrunken to half their size. He opened his eyes, only to find his vision blurry from the fatigue, the sweat and what seemed to be his tears.
“What… what did you just show me?” he asked weakly, even though at the bottom of his heart he had already known, something the figure acknowledged, if her understanding look was of any indication.
“Exactly what you thought it was, wanderer,” she said. “Those were but a few selected images of the last days of the perished mankind whose knowledge and wisdom you have so worshipped and longed for. As you can see, they were… less than stellar, to put it charitably.”
She then looked straight into his eyes, her expression remaining distinctly calm.
“I take it, wanderer,” she said, her smile strangely dissonant given what he had just seen, “that you’ve found your answers, haven’t you?”
“Yes,” he finally said. “Yes I have.”
He could not communicate verbally as well as he wanted to, having been all but taken over and mortified by what amounted to grief. The figure was absolutely right – what he just saw was the death of his every belief. The very notion that his own kinds were the degenerate culprits whose sufferings were but their own fault was a crushing one to him, and rightfully so. That was everyone he had known that was being denounced. That was the past he looked up to his whole life that was being denounced. That was everything he had come to identify with for so many years of his life that was being denounced. That was himself, too, that was being denounced and blamed.
“Could this be… some sort of mistake?” he finally asked, trying futilely to defend his people, their past and, by extension, himself.
“Not that I know of, no,” the figure answered, sounding completely nonchalant still. “It is your kind’s vices and failings that caused all this to happen. And it is this foolish and self-serving nature that will eventually be the death of them all.”
There was more silence. It was a while before he could lift his chin to ask his most important question thus far.
“Is there any way I could change this at all?”
“Same,” the figure shook her head. “Not that I know of. The nature of mankind is as corrupted as it is driven and ingenious – a combination deadlier than any anomaly space and time themselves could conjure. It’s like patching up a leaky ship’s hull. One single sponge can only do so much to delay the eventual sinking.”
“Are you sure?”
He asked, his voice reduced to a shivering, humbled tone akin to a hungry beggar begging for a scrap of food.
“You can change the superficial properties of something, but you cannot change its nature without turning it into something else completely,” she said. “And the nature of mankind dictates that this is the way it is going to be.”
“I see.”
Those words were uttered with a kind of crushing fatigue that clairvoyance was not even needed to read. His eyes sank lower, the wrinkles on his face seemed to have been etched a little deeper, and his hair growing a little greyer. His entire face seemed to have been frozen in thoughts and despair.
“Well, what are you going to do now, wanderer?”
The figure’s question rang hollow to him, if only because his mind had gone blank.
“I don’t know,” he finally answered with a long sigh.
“You’re not unwise for a human,” the figure said, nodding in approval. “I know - If you want to, you can join us here. I can give you all the answers and all the knowledge you would ever want from the greater collective consciousness of the multiverse. You will know more than the greatest sage could ever dream of, if that is what you want. You will die in peace a man more learned than anything mankind had ever seen or have any right to, for that matter.”
She looked at him with another smile, a smile that had now been so discordant with the atmosphere it made him uncomfortable even looking at it.
“What do you say, wanderer?”
Once again he remained silent for want of anything to speak, mulling over that offer. It was an attractive one however he looked at it, and had he not been already preoccupied with the harsh truth, he might have as well jumped at it at the first chance. After all, his entire life had been about collecting knowledge and wisdom, having gone to great extents just to gleam one piece of lost knowledge from the wastes. Now, the chance to approach an infinite source of that which he had been struggling for all his life was right there in front of him.
And then another question suddenly dawned to him, a question that he had almost forgotten to consider throughout his lifelong adventure. He stared at the figure, a particular kind of flame rekindling in his eyes as he spoke.
“Tell me, with all your infinite knowledge and wisdom,” he asked. “At the end of the day, what is knowledge even for?”
Now it was the figure’s turn to remain silent, albeit not for long.
“Knowledge can serve many purposes, but ultimately it is either a means to an end, or the end itself,” she answered. “Now, out of those two, what is it to you?”
A smile that was no less out of place and discordant flashed on his face this time, as though he had just found an epiphany for himself independent of her words.
“‘A means to an end’,” he repeated. “That is all I need to know.”
******
Many years later.
Among the rabbles of the wasteland, a particular town stood out as the most prosperous place to be. The market teemed with as much goods as the wastelad economy could produce. The people were happy and safe within its wall. There was more clean food and water to go around than the people could consume them. What was astonishing was that just a few decades prior, that town used to be the epitome of a slum, a dying township like any others.
Somewhere in the town’s graveyard, a humble gravestone stood among others, built of the simplest of materials – a stone slab engraved with a simple chisel. The simple letters etched on the plain stone formed a rather modest sentence: “A man may not change the world, but he can help.”
Perhaps that was as true a quote as any.
******
Also, the first sentence runs on a little bit, but overall its alright.