I Have Joined the Stars - Part One

         

         The sun rises over an urban sprawl; rows and rows of decaying buildings once skyscrapers now bitten off at their peaks, and no longer destined to touch the sky. These structures are pulled down to the fissure-ridden concrete by some sadistic force of despair. Perhaps the sunken spirits of the destitute humans mucking about between their bases is what weighs them down. The humans are at a slight disadvantage in terms of evolutionary progress. They are primitive; Neolithic in their advancement of science and soul. The concrete is not one to yield any produce nor does it give way to vegetation easily through its fractures on account of its thickness and the sewers below. Any vegetation that is perchance bestowed upon the migratory humans is variable to the point of unreliability. They are starving. There is no prey to hunt, only predators now. The wolves seem to have been blessed by natural selection; they are much stronger, faster, and sharper of teeth, and they can climb; all too well do the humans know they can climb.
         The humans have abandoned their curiosities and their ambitions for grandeur; all such foibles of the human ego were dissipated in the terrible holocaust that consumed their world. All ambition ever did for them was put them in this pile of rubble. To be more honest they actually have no idea what had happened to their world or what had caused it. There is a wall, one that the word giant does no justice for, which encloses all of the urban wasteland in its magnitude and shelters the humans from the wilderness outside, and for the most part from the wolves. But of course, the wolves can climb.
         These humans, the ones that dwell the concrete jungle in tattered garbles of clothing and often lack enough sustenance to keep alive form the proletariat of this sad world. A tribe of several hundred humans shuffles across the ravaged city roads. They are migrating in search of plants and carcasses. As the bulk of the group continues walking a few elders and their families stop to scavenge at a gas station. One finds a glass bottle of soda; fully preserved on the floor inside. It is warm and considered a luxury drink and could trade for enough food for days from a richer tribe.
Then they come from the shadows; masked men belonging to a self-proclaimed government of the entire known world, known to all as The Masks. It is an oligarchy of one hundred men in their prime of life with no individual identities or ruler. They evenly walk in silence, and proceed in circling the group. The people still moving take notice of the masks and hurry their pace, walking as quickly as possible to escape without drawing attention. Then the shot rings out.
         Everyone ducks, the masks keep walking. Six of them, all wearing black leather masks and flak jackets; they are armed to the teeth with firearms and blades. They all keep pace with one another. Rather than wait for commands each one simply feels the time for an action and conducts it. They are one unit, one body, and one mind. The humans all put their heads to the ground and weep. One Mask motions to the human with the soda bottle. When the human gives him the drink he holds it in examination for some seconds, then puts his pistol to the human's head and pulls the trigger.
         The people stampede like livestock; trampling one another to get away. One mask pulls a combat knife from his boot and goes about executing those humans still in the gas station; the other five masks hold big guns at their hips and open automatic fire on the crowds. They are cruel to the rest of the weakened humans. All raids and executions are justified as keeping order, ensuring the continuity of their leadership. After the raid the streets are lined with corpses, the masks casually sling their guns over their shoulders.
         I remember that day all too well. The masks had slaughtered nearly my entire tribe without a second thought, few other than me escaped. I was on my own after that. Survival required a type of evolution I did not yet have in my possession. I learned the simplest way to avoid the masks, by avoiding any other humans. They only searched out large groups; the only loners they killed were ones they stumbled upon by accident. I kept my head low and began my training in the arts of survival. When I was fifteen I killed a wolf with stones. A gruesome, barbarous operation to say the least, but that was the way the world was then. One has no time to question the humanity of his acts when he is attempting to preserve his own life.
         Over time I developed techniques for scaling the faces of the crumbling skyscrapers. The top floors were excellent shelters as they were well out of the way of the Masks and hardly any wolves bothered to show up. I was much older, oh eighteen, nineteen, when I killed a mask. I killed him with an arrow and a stone hammer, which were products of my own ingenuity; I shocked myself with my own rage. My blood grew warm and clogged, my stomach felt stuffed with helium, my hairs stood on the back of my neck and my nostrils flared impulsively. I couldn't control myself until it was over, when another mask came behind me and knocked me out.
         I awoke in the capital; which is what the masks call their HQ. Surrounding me were the other ninety-nine still breathing masks. Only here they were out of uniform. All of them had shaved heads and a multitude of different faces, and they wore togas. That day I learned that when any human manages to kill a mask, he becomes one so as to ensure they remain at a stable one hundred population mark. I was inducted into their little group that day...I had thought I hated them before. But I was showered not with physical gifts but with mellifluent speeches of the grandeur that came with being a mask. A divinely ordained oligarchy destined for absolute despotic power over the entire known world. I was told we were born to rule; created for it, I was told that the celestial order had brought me to their eyes and had meant for me to dawn the mask. I was created with the inherent freedom to oppress my fellow man, so they told me.
In the center of what was previously described as a "city" sat the Capitol, a perfectly maintained white building with a tall round dome and a wing for each compass direction. In the north wing were books piled high, well organized and alphabetized. The east wing was a greenhouse fraught with nutrition, and equipped with a bubbling freshwater fountain, the south wing was an armory decadent with all makes and models of murder tools fit for the grandest of countries. The west wing was an infirmary capable of sustaining any life form far beyond its original expiration date. The hub was filled with a hundred beds. At the center point of the building, the exact core of the city, sat a grand alter, which was an elaborate sculpture of a selection of the Greek gods.
         Being one of them I became open to the gates of worlds past, all the other masks were well learned in philosophy and science. After I learned to read some other masks swayed me to taste the words of Plato. It seemed surreal that he was the favorite of so many of the oligarchy, as Plato seemed to stress equality and justice for nearly all men. As one mask explained to me, his ideas were relative to the world he had lived in away from this one, but the way he went about deducing the answers to all his questions had enchanted the insatiable curiosities of the masks. Their education was widespread across a plethora of diverse ideals and philosophies ranging from economic policies to religious and moral concepts.
After the first ever masks had stumbled upon this haven of knowledge and had been exposed to such wisdoms they had stressed for some time as to how the world could best be run and with what moral standards to use. The end result was that cooperation and brotherhood was key in a utopian state, but then came the issue of demographics. The population was much too large to harness and as far as productivity went there were too many stragglers. Birth defects, madness, greed, lust, and other human factors in the sum of the earth's populace made a utopian government infeasible.
As far as morality went the Masks adopted a Nihilist approach. It was concluded that there was no true moral law, and no human life was sacred. The state lived past the bodies of the men who built it, and men's souls were inevitably tied to it. Thus the first masks designated a plan from which their utopia could sprout, an isolated and elite class at the top of the social spectrum that would bask in the glory and knowledge and resources of the state, and enjoy the fruits of democracy amongst themselves. In return they would uphold the sanctity of the state with only one utility: genocide of the outsiders. By taking all unfair advantages and frequently dominating the wide population of the existing world they could ensure that the state was not risen up against. But, simultaneously, a much more useful and ingenious effect would result. Only the most exceptional of human beings could manage to survive the onslaught of the privileged one hundred, and only the exceptional would be allowed to join the one hundred under one condition: They kill their way in, ensuring that the state could do nothing but grow stronger as the millennia lurched forward.
Life was anything but an idealistic joyride in the capital, though. The one hundred of course focused on physical as well as intellectual dominion over their lesser subjects. Every day there was a minimum of four consecutive hours set aside for drills with firearms, and another two hours dedicated to wrestling and sword dueling. Their meals were that of an intense level of protein. Chickens and cows were bred in bulk in the Capitol courtyard so that meat and eggs could be served with every meal. Natural protein shakes of egg whites and various plants were an essential dietary staple. It may be an exaggeration to say we ate our weight in protein, but one could not shake the feeling that such a statement may be true. Often during free time when there were no votes to cast and drilling had been done, the masks would split up and choose between a quiet study in the library or a trip to the weight room underground.
         Truly these men had the minds and bodies fitting of absolute tyrants, but yet they were tyrants of democratic cooperation. Leadership was a queer commodity in the Capitol; minor leader-like duties such as counting votes or leading a service to the gods were purely voluntary, and the system worked well. Each man quietly and humbly assumed each individual duty and preformed it efficiently without any sort of bump in the road. Important leadership roles were always temporary, such as one charged with the designing of the day's drill. In situations such as this straws were drawn, and one person was randomly selected for the task.
Every ordinance and suggested action, such as where to raid and what to eat, were put to a quick quiet vote amongst all one hundred of us. We each cast one smooth round stone of exactly the same weight into one of up to five bowls. Each bowl was connected to a scale, and whichever sank lowest by the end of the vote was the decision. Again, all went without a hitch. There were no sore losers amongst the masks.
         Their sense of identity was bizarre to put it mildly. All of us were obviously still individuals with our own experiences and knowledge; however we chose to reject this fact. We were more similar than different it seemed, what with all the drilling and the physical masks. The mask disguise played the most prominent role in the unique psychological culture that was the Masks. We had no names, only referred to each other as "brother".
We worshipped all of the old Greek gods, which the first Masks had chosen as the most appropriate deities for the atmosphere of the oligarchy. There was a special emphasis on Ares god of war, Hades god of death, Artimes god of the hunt, and Apollo god of the sun. Zeus had been removed from his throne; Apollo instead became head god in the world of the Masks. Apollo's two brothers and right hand men were Hades and Ares who were charged with keeping order amongst man by using the Masks as their heralds. Artimes was no longer Apollo's sister but his queen, and she provided the Masks with a sense of entertainment as they carried out Hades' and Ares' whims.
Before going out on a raid they covered themselves from head to toe in armor and flak and Kevlar dotted with knives, axes, guns, and explosives. They would breathe fumes from a rare burning spice, which they had found being kept for research in the basement of the capital building. It was a mild poison that undoubtedly damaged the masks' internal organs and ensured a young death, but also gave them an interesting high.                    I consumed it of course, as was the ritual before going on raids, and the sensation is not quite possible to describe in human terms. The first effect is the slowing of time - only slightly, say maybe one tenth slower, but still a noticeable effect. Next comes the omnipresence, the sensation of being able to see around corners and through walls, a constant din in your ears from which you can concentrate your hearing on any one sound. Whether the spice really enabled some sort of x-ray vision or whether it was merely hallucination is impossible to tell. I've often thought that the drug merely reorganized man's interpretation of events to convince us of godly senses. Another effect was the softening of experienced pain, and the evening of emotions. The most inexplicable side effect was not a temporary one, extended use of the drug seemed to outright negate the Masks' emotions. It eliminated anger, sadness, joy, and made them earthly shells. They called the drug Artimes' Kiss. Personally I had become a brother amongst them, and was willing to follow nearly all rituals at least on the surface, but I was careful with the AK drug. I wasn't ready for my soul to be put down by some intoxicant.
         The raids were cold and surreal; I still took some AK and it helped in the short run, but most of my first nights were spent weeping in private. We killed men, women, and children. Once I was caught by another Mask while mourning our victims. There was no penance for such things; punishment only followed the acts of treason or personal injury to another mask. I don't know how long he had been there watching me break down, but he told me it was natural. My soul was still chained to my body and was making the transition from my flesh to coalesce with the state. All new entrances to the oligarchy experienced this transition. At that point my emotions were soothed by the concept of my own typicality, that what I felt was only a natural barrier. But that was then.
We took wives too. To "take a wife" however, was not as one may think. It was a rape session, only befitting despotic rulers. Any woman taken back to the capital was sterilized, and expected to serve as a slave. Different masks often shared wives, so they were expected to be attractive to the majority of the group before they could be accepted. Most were young, and they had an awful time at first. But usually as time wore on they were ignored for newer younger wives, and they could dedicate themselves to chores and bask in the magnificence of the Capitol's technology.
         We made sacrifices to the gods often, usually piles of food bathed in a potent mixture of oil and blood and burned at the altar. A single mask was elected by way of drawing straws to preach in front of the altar to all his fellows. The religious text we used was a cut and paste job of passages from various ideological books; carefully chosen excerpts from The Christian Bible, The Islamic Quran, The Judaic Torah, The Communist Manifesto, Plato's The Republic, and still others. Each passage was crafted to further legitimize the Masks' ideology of their own supreme grip on the world. Needless to say, all was edited and changed so intensely that the books that the passages had come from were no longer recognizable in our tome. The masks did not honestly believe in the gods they allegedly worshipped. I did ask one of my fellows once why then did we worship them, and he replied that they are essential to the ethos of the Oligarchy and that most masks simply thought of the gods as being empathic representations of different aspects of life.
         After some time had passed I stopped weeping for our raids. Partly there was the AK that was in my system, partly I thought that my soul had transitioned properly, but there was something I hadn't counted on. There was the lure of power. The masks' most prized knowledge was on the sciences of fitness and warfare. They had perfected it so that a mortal man like me had been accelerated to a point of godhood; improvement on their methods was an impossibility. They had access to mountains of protein packed meals, safe and effective testosterone boosts by way of needle, and such complex systems of exercise efficiency that I had to study algebra and advanced biology to comprehend it.
         In a week under their ruthless regime I had already seen results; one year after I started I was a titan. With enough effort I and one fellow could move a sedan like it was a bed mattress. We had a machine in our weight room, dubbed the battering ram for the fact that it was a literal iron battering ram that was meant to test the strength of your abdominal. My abdominal had been packed so tightly and so thickly that it was as if I had steel for skin, and when the battering ram was kicked up to its max I could spend several minutes being hammered with three hundred pounds of force. My skin would begin to peel and some minor bruises appeared, but after a night's sleep the injuries were gone. The raw power was invigorating; it was a virus that attacked my sympathy for my fellow man.
         Our standard firearm was a powerful automatic assault rifle, about three feet in length and a foot and a half at its highest point, which was the scope. With a simple twist of the barrel and a few adjustments here and there you could switch from the automatic .50 rounds to a semiautomatic shotgun extension or to a 50mm fragment grenade launcher. We kept extra chains of rounds on us which fed into our guns so we could carry roughly 3000 .50 rounds into combat, plus about four hundred shotgun slugs and sixteen grenades. We also carried sniper rifles with augmented scopes on our backs and small easily transported flamethrowers strapped to our thighs with about a minute's worth of fuel. There was a combat knife in either boot, a serrated edge sword on our backs, and two revolvers at our hips, landmines, claymores, brass knuckles, and a diverse array of attachments for our weaponry. We were the bane of the world inside the city walls; the tribal people called us daemons.
I remember my first legitimate raid. Of course, we had ambushed random tribes multiple times before but this was what qualified as a large-scale threat to the masks. Technological advancements were forbidden outside the capital, and violators of such magnitude required a certain amount of attention to fully extinguish. A tribe in what was once the city park according to ancient maps had begun extensive development of agricultural practices. We swarmed the area like locusts, twelve of us.
The farmers fell, squirming on the ground like maggots they squealed so as to further fuel our sense of dominance over them. With my allegiance to the masks now set in stone I thought surely they were born to be weak like this, I was created as their master. I believed that this: me and several brothers armed to the teeth slaughtering innocent farmers indiscriminate of their age or gender, was the one true justice in the world. But then, I saw her.
She was no fool because she cowered in hiding like the rest of them; only she hid alone so that none of her peers could blow her cover. When I opened the dumpster to find her there though, even though she cowered on her knees, her eyes looked at me with a burning intensity. She had defiance in her eyes, wherein the others I saw only ignorance.
         I had not taken a wife before at that point but I knew she had to be mine, mine alone. Not some community property to be shared between me and the rest of the masks. So I took her out of the dumpster and smeared her with trash to preserve her until we got to the capital. There I thought I would mask her beauty so that she would not be taken aside by any of the others. She resisted of course, and my face flushed in a sudden realization of the atrocity I was committing, but I buried such a feeling away because it was unacceptable to deny my god given rights. But...I covered her eyes and ears so she wouldn't be aware of what was happening to her loved ones.
When we arrived at the capital I immediately saw an issue that required solving: she couldn't speak any tongue but that of tribal grunts and gestures, which she used to undoubtedly curse me to oblivion. I determined then and there that I would have to break the masks' most prominent law; I would have to teach her. At first the task was daunting, in particular because she resisted every step of the way. At first she was too ignorant to realize I was giving her knowledge, the true gift of life. She was also in mourning over the loss of her tribe, my own sorrow over which I myself had shut out. Over time, however, she began to take to the language.
I started with English, because almost every major piece of literature had been translated to English in the ancient past. From there I figured I would move on to German; so we could read many of the great philosophers from what was recorded as the 'modern era' in their native language. Finally I would teach her Latin, to taste the wisdom of many of the most ancient philosophers in their tongue.
When she had learned sufficient English she began asking me questions:
"What are you?"
I looked at her and cocked my head a little, obviously we were people. Thinking it over though, I realized that this may not be so obvious to someone so nae at least from a moral perspective. How could she comprehend, without proper guidance, our mantra of superiority and natural rights? Or our justification of such genocide on the basis of Moral Nihilism and divine mandate? I made my answer as simple as possible without leaving her an empty shell of a response.
"I am a human like you. We are masks, and we believe we are destined to rule you and your tribe; and all the other humans for that matter."
"Why?" she asked softly
I continued slowly, spacing my sentences so as to give her time to think.
"Careful evaluation of the nature of the metaphysical world has led us to this decision. All has been tested by unbounded and unobstructed free thought." I motioned to the books strewn about us "We have used all our brains and all the knowledge in the known world to deduce the most effective and beneficial means of world order "
She looked at me hard with her dark gray eyes; it is difficult to say she was beautiful at such a point in time, as I had disguised her as ugly to avoid her being abused by other Masks. But her eyes still stabbed me poignantly with a venomous sense of feeling. It was an unidentifiable feeling; not anger nor sadness nor guilt but rather simply a rejuvenation of my human aspect in defiance of the AK drug.
         She told me "It seems not beneficial for what was once my 'tribe' as you called them"
I tried to change the topic "What were they other than a tribe?"
She stood up abruptly and searched for a particular book, then picked up a human psychology textbook and shoved it in my face, pointing at the word "family."
"This is what they were; and this"
She searched hard for another book that she doubtless must have had some terminology she had committed to her memory, when she found it she picked it up and showed it to me as well, pointing to the words soul mate.
I attempted to see from her perspective; she operated under a primitive train of thought that tied a sense of goodness to the bloodline or other groups of strong similarity, birth parents and siblings and such. It was an immature ideological approach; she didn't understand rationality over primal emotion yet. She also did not understand the concept of necessary sacrifice.
         I explained, "See here, not everyone on this earth is meant to live well. The bulk of mankind is chosen for mediocrity and inferiority, some are made strong and it is we the strong that deserve all that which the world has to offer. Otherwise the foolish and the wretched would infect the state with inefficiency and unfair equalization. Rather than those deserving few to live well and the rest living poorly we would have everyone living not well and in ignorance. Do you understand? It has been deduced by the masks' predecessors that human life is dwarfed in value by the necessity of experience"
Her eyes widened in befuddlement, I thought she still did not comprehend my words however she surprised me:
"Experience? What do you mean experience? How is this more important than human life? The people you kill have no experience"
I nearly smiled at that point; I was convinced she couldn't keep up with me yet she was now bombarding me with the next question.
"They all have the same experience; devastation. They are ignorant and desolate and doomed to the point of inhumanity. As Masks we experience everything the entire cosmos has to offer, meaning that everything has been experienced. We receive this benefit because we have proven to be capable to appreciate all this majesty and use it to accomplish a utopian world order. Now say we opened the doors of the capital and allowed everyone to learn; they would learn to various extents. Some would remain ignorant, others would remain weak, and some would be petty and malicious towards the common good. They may alter the state to the point of idiocy and flood the vote with ballots corrupted with ignorance and selfishness.
         In effect: we the masks would inevitably come into conflict with our lesser, be distracted by cleaning up after our lesser, or be cut off from certain knowledge by our lesser. Since this proletariat of ignorance would outnumber the superior, they would control the state and drive it into all types of pitfalls. Over time as The Masks died out; we would be replaced by the younglings of morons. At which point; most would ignore the sacred knowledge of the cosmos and not experience it. Meaning that all would not be experienced and appreciated the way it should be; and the beauty of metaphysical complexities could not be drank by those who can understand and prosper from it. In conclusion: The world would be made imperfect."
We both sat in absolute silence, she stared at me again with her sharp eyes and I couldn't understand how she felt about what I said, or even if she understood all of it.
Finally she said, "I need to sleep."
         I nodded and walked her to her chambers, a separate dorm below ground where hundreds of wives were forced to stay in penury conditions. She went in hurriedly without saying goodbye, and I was left to my thoughts as I ascended the stairs to the hub. I thought how ridiculous it was to keep this woman here when I had just slaughtered the centerpiece of her ideology; her family. I had attacked all she had believed in, and now how could I expect her to make good company? What use was she to me if she couldn't serve as a love interest? I thought I might have my way with her and get it over with, except for those deep eyes of hers. Something about her eyes still possessed liveliness and a fascination with me, albeit either good or bad. If I hurt her one more time like that, I may never see her look at me with those stunning eyes again. I decided it wasn't worth the risk, her eyes gave me a more glowing sense of contentment then the carnal dissection of her body ever could.
         When I arrived upstairs I was hailed by my brothers and invited to sit down at my throne. The night began with a vote over whether or not to deal with a growing tribe that had not yet developed any forbidden technologies. We all tossed our stones into the scale that embodied all that was our democracy, and the vote turned out in favor of sending several of us to eliminate the tribe. I felt, for the first time since I first joined the masks, a small pang of discomfort. I had voted against the raid, with the thought of my woman friend in mind. Normally I was not sore over losing a vote, but that day I was distraught. I wondered if there were any others out there with eyes like my new wife, I thought maybe they could be spared.
         I retreated to the library where I comforted myself with a few scattered chapters from various Ayn Rand books. The messages were not quite as impacting on most of the other masks because the literature preached objectivism on an individual scale. A single strong and potential person should be able to fulfill their potential and feel morally correct doing so, not letting any others weigh them down. In my head I adapted the message to fit a large group such as the masks. We could not let our potential be weighed down by the inferior people, and at all costs we must prevent this. It only made sense.
         The rest of the night I slithered around the capital from wing to wing finding something to keep me preoccupied until I ended up in the weight room below. By all scientific accounts we had found, I had reached the maximum level of physical fitness possible for a human being. It seemed tedious to me now, and boring. Somehow I felt trapped but I didn't know why.
         I climbed the steps one more time, this time all the way up to the ceiling. There were walls and turrets all over the different wings in case there was ever an uprising, which none of us could honestly expect. Up above I saw the stars, the ancient mythological constellations. My favorite of all these beautiful star patterns was the simple big dipper because I had discovered it for myself before I had ever read about it. It was one of the constellations that were always there, you could always find it when you needed it. I waved to it like an old friend. I sat there, a fully grown man encumbered with muscle and overflowing with an ocean of unadulterated knowledge, yet I was totally absorbed by the majesty of six distant stars like a moth obsessed with a simple light.          From my perspective those stars were so small, so insignificant, such a tiny and unimportant aspect of life, or rather, my life. Yet each of those stars was as powerful as the single almighty sun that gave all of mankind life here on the earth. The big dipper, as insignificant as it might seem to an egocentric human, was more powerful and more grandeur than anything all of mankind could ever hope to accomplish. We the masks could have just as easily worshipped the big dipper as any of our self constructed gods. We could have bowed before all the stars before we ever cowed to our own human-oriented ideals. I had to chew on that for a while before I returned to my bed in the hub and slept.
         The next day I had to escape, and I determined I would bring my wife with me to a settled tribe. I presented the idea to her under the guise of my desire to let her see people like her again, yet really I just wanted to get out for awhile. It was uncommon for a mask to behave in such a way, yet we had no rules against it so of course I was allowed. I never had anyone to ask for permission; after all I was as much a leader as the rest of them.
         When we were a ways away from the capital (we walked) I took my mask off and stuck it into my belt, I felt as if this act may make me less threatening to the inferiors and show them I meant no harm. The situation was grim to say the least. Bodies were strewn across the camp. Their stomachs hung out grotesquely, bloated from starvation. What was more disturbing than this was that the living were forced to walk over bodies and continue about their daily lives. My wife wept softly at such a travesty, I felt pity in my heart but I resisted the urge to allow myself to connect with such lesser beings. They were lesser beings that could not comprehend the majesty of the big dipper, who, if given the chance, would waste any spare life given to them and squander it on petty selfish compulsions. I was trapped again.
         I told my wife we had to leave; she refused. The further we traversed into the realm of the destitute the more of them took notice of me and stared at me in awe as I let my wife lead me by the hand through their lands. Eventually we had to stop and sit on a flattened old shell of a car, and I took out our lunch. My wife immediately began handing out her share of the fruits and vegetables I had packed. Starving people swarmed her like maggots; men women and children shoved each other and gnashed their teeth for the nutrition like animals. I had to rescue her from the descending crowd and shot my pistol into the air, scaring them off.
"You'll only make them weaker this way" I said.
"I'm making them more alive."
"They will never be alive the way you and I are."
She was quiet and sat beside me like a prisoner, something that made me sick. I lost my appetite and told her:
"You can talk with them if you'd like, you don't need to cling to me."
"I can't bring myself to do it."
"Why not?"
"It's painful."
I cleared my throat uncomfortably and gazed upon the hopelessness that was their lives. I imagined the painful stomach contractions that came with the beginning phases of starvation, the unbearable emptiness and the feeling of your body collapsing on itself. I imagined the sensation of having such frail malnourished arms, with thin peeling skin indenting at the crevices of my bones. I imagined the sweltering heat twenty-four hours a day even in the night as I tried to sleep, the constant fever that could never be eliminated and the dryness of my mouth with no water...no water. I made myself very thirsty just then, I could feel my tongue shriveled and sticking to the bottom of my desiccated mouth.
         I took a long drink from one of my water bottles and resolved to not think like that again, because now I felt guilt in the pit of my stomach. Now a younger man with a pair of magnificent gray eyes approached me and stared. I don't think he realized the power he had just taken over me; he had merely come to beg. But his eyes, like my wife's, made me empathic towards him. I gave him my water, and some vegetables. He was smart; he stuffed the food into his mouth as quickly as possible so nobody would see, and then had to drink the water to choke it down because he had no saliva with which to moisten the food. I gave him some nuts next; I was about to break them open for him when he pulled out a stone knife that was tied to his waist and used the handle to crack the nuts himself.
"You see?" my wife asked "You taught me, this made me smarter, but even without the unlimited knowledge we have access to they can still become sophisticated...and they will become sophisticated no matter what the masks do!"
I turned to her condescendingly "Is this what you believe? That it is written in stone that man's destiny will shift towards an equal and democratic means of living?"
"No. It's written in stone that man's destiny will change. Today his destiny is to die by the hands of people like you, tomorrow his destiny will be to overthrow you, the next day his destiny will be his own decision."
"I am still a part of mankind, and I shape my own destiny. I am ambassador between humans and the cosmos. If just one man can comprehend the universe then it is better than mass happiness."
"How? Who said that this is the goal? And who says you do in fact understand the cosmos? How do you know?"
I didn't answer, I instead stared at the pitiful being that was now cracking nuts at my feet and stuffing them into his mouth. Somehow he had realized, probably by way of a strong sense of empathy, that my wife was on his side. He went to her and sat on the other side of her, so she was between him and me.
"He's obviously smart" she said, "You should take him back and teach him"
"No" I said bluntly "I'm not taking a man back to the capital with me, I'm not a homosexual."
She raised an eyebrow at me "I know, and you know too. Who else is there to judge? The other masks? I thought you all shared a single identity"
I paused, and she took the opportunity to continue, "You are an individual. You even refer to the masks as if they are separate from you. Accept it: you've always set yourself apart from the rest. They only share an identity because through drugs and brainwashing they've all become inhuman, you took all knowledge regardless of whether your brothers suggested it and I've never seen you take more than a pinch of Artimes' Kiss."
I didn't want to believe it at first, but I knew deep down that this was how I felt all along. I nodded slowly "You're right...I have become something other than the masks. I've been thinking about it lately too; but I do believe what they believe. So what if the capital houses two identities now? We both still serve the same ideology; we both have the same goals. I deserve dominion; I'm... a god"
My wife wrinkled her nose and looked at me with pity in her eyes - she pitied me "Is that what you think? With all your logic you may have found life answers which appeal to you, you may have found some dribble you can swallow as purpose, and you may have found an ideology that your world revolves around; but you can't prove that anything is correct in the grand scheme of things. And you can't prove you know everything about the world, only the known world. The world can only be right if all people can shape their own destinies, and create more experiences for themselves and others; even if that means nobody will know everything. The only possible way you can deny all this is by admitting that you think you deserve to rule the world because you want to. The only way you can truly justify your concept of the perfect world order is via selfishness"
She was right, that was exactly the notion I had been struggling with. That was why I had felt trapped.
Both the gray-eyed deviants looked expectantly at me, and I decided it was time for a change. I had been wrong, so I thought.
I pulled one more apple out of the bag attached to my belt and I set it down inside the car. I communicated to the beggar, after some time, that he was to stay in the car and I would return the next day.
"You're still leaving him here?" my wife asked
"I'm going to bring some books and food back with me tomorrow. I will feed and teach some of them, as many as I can"
She looked at me blushingly and gave me a warm embrace, I wasn't the devil to her anymore, it seemed.

         The next day I returned in an old military jeep with a mounted turret on the back. At first they all scattered, mistaking my entrance for a raid. But when my wife and I jumped out of the jeep and hastily began unloading crates of the masks' surplus food they soon found the courage to come crawling back. Those few tens out of the devastated masses knew nourishment that day like never before in their lives. I welcomed and personally served men, women, and children alike, regardless of their outward beauty or even their attitudes toward me. If one gluttonously pushed another out of the way in a mad dash for his share, I merely separated the two and gently reprimanded the instigator. I was like the hand of god coming out of nowhere and touching their lives.
         When the food was finished I sat them all down in a circle. I taught them English as best I could; knowing full well that they themselves didn't realize they were being taught and had certainly not expected such an event. Even so, with time they learned to learn. It was a period of many days that I would continually go back to their camp, each time leaving them I taught them to hide well and avoid the other masks. After some time most of them had learned basic English; some proved remedial, and none of them really spoke the language well. I managed to converse with them in spite of this. One day I asked them in conference:
"How do you feel?"
They all took time to interpret what I had said and then they replied:
"Hungry" said an old man in the corner rubbing his stomach
"Tired" said one of the women
Most of them fell into either of these categories, but one voice rose above the others
"Angry" said the gray eyed beggar
I turned to him and asked not with some hint of patronization in my voice, as I already knew the answer, "Why angry?"
He responded in a clumsy passion, often mispronouncing words and getting so worked up that he tripped over everything he said "Your people make me angry" he turned to the others and announced "And his people make you hungry and tired. And they take us away from each other through death!"
There were some murmurs amongst the crowd in both tribal and English, but the consensus was that they all agreed unanimously. I had to quell them like a parent quells a child.
"Now see here" I said "It may be true that you are angry, but I'm sorry to tell you that there is nothing you can do. No possible feat you could perform would exempt you from the dominion of the masks." I paused; I realized I could not expect them to survive here forever. The masks would find and kill them eventually. I hadn't really wanted to create a new movement for order, only wanted to help these people take care of themselves. But moving on I decided what was inevitably my solution to their misery all along "But there may be some escape for you."
"An escape?" questioned the old man in the corner "Silly idea. Just silly. City is surrounded by walls. No escape past the walls. Unless?"
He looked at me expectantly, stupidly even. He was reaching out to me for leadership, as if I had to solve their problems for them. Contemptuously, I responded:
"Escaping the city is actually a fairly simple process. Climbing the walls could take days and would be sure to attract the Mask's attention, but with proper tools a hole could be drilled easily enough. It would take only a few hours or so"
The gray eyed one chirped "And the wolves? We cannot fight the wolves." He turned to the rest of the crowd and waved his hands as a primitive body language emphasis on his primitive speech "We need...guns!"