Chapter 45: The Great Journey

“No one knows Garen Antor better than I do,” said Andreï, in the reserved tone of a guilty child. Like mine, his name is not that of his parents. He comes from an unimaginably wealthy, dynastic family, which he rejected and which rejected him in turn. Before the events that caused the break, they had pushed him to join the elite of a society that nonetheless claimed to be fundamentally egalitarian.

“Here begins the Mythical Earth, here end the values of men,” said Ravzan, quoting a famous pamphlet on inequality.

“There is only one key to understanding Antor: he is a man ruled by emotions of violent intensity and uncontrollable nature. He dreams of freeing himself from this burden—essentially, of becoming a psychopath—but has never been able to change, neither through medicine nor psychotherapy, all the more because it’s a source of shame for him. In his youth, Garen enrolled in a renowned public high school in London. These elitist schools welcome the offspring of the powerful in order to sanctify their network. In these schools thrive intellectual groups like Freemasonry or various philosophical fraternities, whose only goal is to provide an ideological veneer for the protection of a tenacious hierarchic system.”

“I’ve always hated those shitty politicians,” said Tohil, clenching his fists, strangely satisfied to pile up reasons to fight the Aleph.

“For the past few centuries, one such philosophical group has been the Xeno-origin cult known as the Grasp. At its core, the Grasp is not evil. It’s a cult that says, ‘Seize without restraint whatever you desire.’ It’s an interesting cultural strategy among Xenos, most of whom don’t possess, like us, the gene for war or territorial ownership. But the Grasp mostly provided humans with a way to unburden their morality. I would say there are three types of human followers of the Grasp: fools who want a thrill or to feel important, careerists seeking to build a network, and the truly convinced cultists. The last category reflects Garen Antor’s stance. Through the Grasp, he healed. He managed to rewire his emotions. Compassion or fear were weaknesses, fit only for the lower castes, and he felt a paralyzing shame about them, on top of all the other emotions. The Grasp taught him he could hide them under other, more socially acceptable emotions—ambition, pride, impatience, rage, recklessness, envy ... I won’t say hatred. I don’t think Garen was ever hateful.”

“Do you admire him, Andreï?” asked Ravzan.

The captain answered only with a polite silence, as if an explanation would have pointed to the foolishness of the question itself.

“The Grasp changed him. And with that new mindset, the child who used to cry every day became a shark in the academic system and later in the bureaucracy, ultimately rising to the highest ranks of the Stellar Fleet. A fleet that, in recent years, had a thorn in its side. Humanity had encountered rough patches with some Xenos, like the Escalusians, but never engaged in open war with another species. All our wars—like the one with the League—were civil. But the show of force by the Waus during the Lennox crisis chilled the Stellar Fleet to the bone: humans, clearly, with an arsenal more powerful than the HS army. A single human, more powerful than an Endymion.”

“Yeah, but we still dropped that damn terraforming bomb,” declared Tohil.

“With the brilliant result we all know,” stated the Wau.

“What I mean is you’re not fictional superheroes. Maybe you did go toe-to-toe with an Endymion, but we achieved our objective. Think about that the day he’s the only one standing between us and the Aleph.”

“The sheer power of the Wau Order and their phenomenal resources disrupted the Stellar Fleet and the HS Council. A sophisticated suit, a trained supersoldier, seemed more effective than the vast historical cruisers praised by war manuals and AIs. Had we made the wrong development decision? It was Garen Antor, at the time a high-ranking official in the Fleet and the gray eminence behind many members of the HS Council—a man as influential as he was unknown to the public—who was put in charge of the matter.”

“I’ve never heard of him,” said Tohil. “You, Rav?”

“I know who he is. I was young, and he scared me. But he worked hard and got results—and that’s something I’ve always respected.”

“Tohil, this was a hundred years ago, and you were probably still Captain of the Alecto. He very quickly—because he was impatient—proposed an ambitious project called the A-Wau, in other words, the Anti-Wau. The HS funded it as a sunk cost, partly because it was a real issue, and partly because Garen had asked and had the ear of the powerful. Now that I’m telling you this story out loud, I wonder whether he had planned all along to build himself a personal army and carry out some scheme that would put him in the position he holds today. The Anti-Wau training camp was established on Lodovico: a dismal planet with coordinates protected under military secrecy. No atmosphere, a sky full of stars, a lunar surface, but strong tectonic activity that powered a large base housed inside a decommissioned Endymion. They selected from among HS’s children aged 6 to 12 the intellectual elite.”

“Shit, Lodovico ... that was him?” whispered Tohil. “And you...”

“There were 500 spots, and I was 501st. But one of my cousins—brilliant, truly—wasn’t interested in the experience. So he declined his summons, and I was allowed into the program. The last to join. The weakest.”

Andreï paused to take a breath.

“My cousin committed suicide—without the After—five days before Garen’s trial. Upon arrival, we were injected with a genetic modifier to improve our metabolism. It made me slightly less frail than I had been, but the technology was not yet perfected, and I think I have less muscle than half of my crew. We were also injected with A-Wau compound, an extract from the spinal fluid of a Xeno from Booz, which significantly altered our intellectual abilities. It didn’t make us more intelligent per se, but ... let’s say that if a question is a starting point and an answer is a destination, then the path between the two becomes more or less illuminated.”

“That extract, if my sources are correct,” said the Wau, “enables its recipient to see the future. Is that accurate?”

“As strange as the wording may sound, I have ‘impulses’ from my future. I’m compelled to do certain things.”

“If you can see the future, will our counterattack succeed?” Tohil asked, just in case.

Andreï looked into the void again, his face turned away. Without emotion. Then he resumed:

“I see myself dying.”

“We all die one day,” said Ravzan.

“On Lodovico, Garen Antor secured our loyalty through compliments and individual roleplay. He severed us from our families and presented himself as our surrogate father. It’s hard to explain how you can break and drain the will of a child in three years, but he used every method—positive and negative. It’s rather difficult to talk about. I think he had psis who amplified a latent feeling of loneliness so that we would see him as the only way out, the only point of reference, forcing us to obey his orders. We received fake letters from our parents, designed to make us believe they no longer cared about us. The weakest among us were eliminated—I’m talking about ordered killings or mutilations—carried out by the most deserving. Brainwashing also involved long sessions of speeches, sometimes absurd or stupid. To break us, in addition to the psychic and physical abuse, there were other forms of abuse. The goal was to preserve all of our intellectual faculties while more or less annihilating our consciousness so that we could endure the neural interfaces of the AIs within the A-Wau armor. And to ensure our obedience to the end. After the first disciplinary killing, blind obedience became the key to the project’s survival. Personally, I was broken when I had to eliminate one of the members of a group of five friends we had secretly formed to endure the abuse. I see your distraught expression, Admiral Tohil, but I’m aware this wasn’t your fault: Garen Antor had total control over the project and mastery of secrecy. Thank the Blind Gods, Lodovico was subject to a surprise inspection by the Empty Eyes, which led to its shutdown, the classification of the information, and a trial. Out of the 500 admitted, only about thirty children were still alive when it was stopped. Around ten, fanatically loyal to Antor, mutinied against the shutdown, and it took eight hundred elite soldiers to contain and kill them, because they had been equipped with experimental A-Wau armor models.”