3098

Two pairs of eyes, charcoal and emerald, gazed up at the globe on the screen.

It was still far away, the younger genius with the charcoal eyes mused dourly to himself. Much farther away than he would have liked. He had hoped to set foot on that sparkling new earth in his time—but alas, it would at least be several centuries till that space could be traversed.

The elder genius with the emerald eyes did not think of such things. He looked at the Glorious globe and he saw, instead of a far distant planet, a reflection of this selfsame earth on which he stood. It was not far away at all! It was right here; it was perfectly within sight, and within reach. Earth was Glorion, and Glorion was Earth. The main distance between these two worlds was not physical, but moral. By the time the men of this earth were morally prepared to set foot on that planet—centuries into the future, once the Protopian project was successfully completed, at which point many advances in space travel would have certainly been made—those light years would be as easily traversable as millimeters.

From a practical standpoint, he thought, those millimeters would thankfully still provide the necessary physical distance. Just enough distance to ensure that whatever disasters might befall the Glorious guinea pigs would leave the moral stragglers on Earth entirely unharmed.

But the temporal distance till then was yet quite far. Protopia had only just been born.

Protopia: the prototype of Utopia. A great stretch of land set aside for a community that would be morally engineered by the Collective Genius. It had not been difficult, for the Genius, to obtain that stretch of land. Just this morning, they had been granted the official legal rights to it. They had needed only to spin a few lies to the government and request a vast expanse of bare but livable land for research purposes. They had advised that dangerous substances would be tested here, and so it would be in everyone’s best interest to stay far away.

That dangerous substance was really, of course, an idea. A vision. A vision that had been conceived in one ingenious mind, and brought to life by the son of that genius.

The son looked at the Glorious spot on the screen with his hard charcoal eyes. Still, all that he could see was distance.

“Your uncle would have loved to see this,” the elder genius reckoned. “The birth of Protopia. It’s a shame he passed only a few months too soon.”

“Oh, I doubt that,” the younger contested. “He always swore that he was with us, but really I think he was deeply against us. He only knew that staying in our camp would keep him in the know. He only ever wanted knowledge. He only ever wanted not to be kept in the dark. So he pretended to support this thing, when really he detested it with a passion. He knew that if he went against us, he would be on the opposite side of the divide. In the camp that must operate without our lofty visions, our superior intelligence. Because we ought not tell them anything.”

The elder lifted his gray brows, his green eyes considering this genius before him. He looked and spoke no differently than the adolescent boy who’d once stood at the front of this room and first presented the inner circle with the Glorious discovery.

That was the day when the divide had been born. And in these past decades, that divide had since spawned animosity and deep, intractable disunity. From beyond these walls, this was still known as the Collective Genius. But within, the genius was strictly and sharply divided. There was the Protopian camp, and the so-called ‘Antitopian’ camp, which wanted nothing to do with these visions of moral eugenics. The camp that found these visions doomed, and wrong, and too unfair and dangerous for the morally engineered guinea pigs.

The Protopian camp reasoned that the risk of danger was negligible, and well worth the payoff of moral perfection. And, in any event, the Glorious vision would first be tested in this community on Earth. If anything began to go wrong in Protopia, the Genius would be here to remedy the error and save the day; no one would be harmed. And if this small-scale experiment fared well for centuries, then surely that boded well for the future generations of morally engineered humanity on Glorion.

That was their reasoning. They told themselves as much, and they believed it.

These two geniuses, the strongest proponents of the Protopian camp, had formed a sort of inner circle of their own. There was still the larger inner circle, which comprised all the most intelligent geniuses in the Collective—but most of the geniuses in that circle were Antitopians. A few claimed allegiance to the Protopian camp, but the charcoal-eyed genius doubted virtually everyone’s allegiance. Especially that of his uncle, who had passed away of old age just three months ago. He was glad that his uncle was gone. He hated him deeply; his uncle’s very presence had always disturbed him, even threatened him.

A great secret had died with that uncle—that was the one thing for which this young genius was gladdest. He wondered, to this day, just why his uncle had chosen to take that secret with him to his grave. He’d always sensed that his uncle had wanted to share it. And yet he never had.

He looked across the table at his closest friend, the only genius whose allegiance he could trust. This man was as a brother to him. Better than his blood brothers, most certainly—those fools who hadn’t the slightest idea of anything that was happening in the Genius. Those fools who led such blissfully ignorant, oblivious lives out on the common streets, among the masses. Those fools were no brothers of his. This man, with his keen emerald eyes, was his brother. At times, he seemed more like a father. But the charcoal-eyed genius did not like to think of fatherhood.

They were looking at the printed deed, a flat white sheet with small black scrawls that promised worlds of possibility. They were considering the prospect of Protopia. Now that the land was theirs, they would merely need to gather up the people. The willing subjects, the guinea pigs.

“Your uncle, you know,” the green-eyed genius uttered as he put down the document and looked up at his dear, young friend, “was never as against you as you always thought.”

“I’d wager I’m the better judge of that.”

“Are you? If he was so deeply against you and your visions, boy, why do you think he kept your secret, all his life?” he inquired. He’d never stopped calling him boy. It was a thing of habit.

The charcoal eyes widened and darkened. Again, as in that moment so many years ago when the specter of guilt and the threat of exposure had first haunted him in this room, he looked awfully like a child. “My secret?”

“Well,” the elder genius continued, “it was never much of a secret, really. Those many years ago, in this very room, when your uncle first insinuated it, the entire inner circle guessed the truth.”

The younger genius picked up the deed and pretended to read it. The words to him were now an illegible blur, as if he were trying to discern them from a distance. “There are many truths in this world. And many secrets.”

“Indeed,” the elder agreed. “And your father’s death is one of them.”

“Don’t speak to me of my father!” the younger snarled, his face suddenly florid and mad. His uncle would have seen him now as living, heavily breathing testament to that terribly fine line between genius and madness.

“Easy,” the elder calmed him, extending a fatherly and friendly hand across the table, as if to pat his fellow genius on the shoulder. But that shoulder was too cold and far away for him to reach. “Easy. Your secret is safe with me.”

“Secrets are safe with no one.”

“Not even with oneself, it seems.”

The younger genius glowered at the hand extended to him. He wished his colleague would take that sorry hand back. It was a useless gesture.

As if in response to the unspoken wish, the emerald-eyed genius withdrew his hand, lifting it instead to rest against his temple as he looked upon his friend. “We men of great minds,” he spoke, “we may be intellectuals, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have morals. We, too, feel guilt. You know this secret has been festering in your soul for all your life. There is no safety in that.”

“It would have been safer in my soul than anywhere else.”

“I am not so sure. A secret is a dark and heavy burden to shoulder alone. What might have saved you all these years is the fact that you knew, all along, that the burden was shared.”

“By my stupid, despicable uncle?”

“By an entire inner circle. All the men who were assembled here that day. While most of them have passed, a few remain, myself included.”

The younger genius paused a moment. He continued to pretend to read the document. “So my uncle never made some private and separate confession to you? Exposing my secret?”

“Of course not,” the emerald eyes glinted in silent laughter. In moral and personal matters, he mused, this brilliant young genius was really quite stupid. “He exposed you and your secret that very day. To all of us. When you weren’t even yet sixteen, and he strode into the room and expressed his suspicions. Suspicions you did not, and could not, deny. All of us knew it. But when he exposed you, he did it in a very careful way. He never quite made it explicit. He merely hinted at it, so we geniuses would know of it—but would be able to ignore it. And so we have, for decades now.”

The younger blinked. “And why is that? Why was I not condemned?”

The elder raised his lower lip and shrugged. “You were young. You were mad. Maybe still a bit mad; that madness may well be the source of your genius,” he posited, flashing a quick and barely perceptible smile. “But at any rate, we geniuses know that, out there in the real legal world, youth and insanity are both mitigating factors. That was most likely the reasoning—whether conscious or subliminal—behind our collective decision to absolve you.”

“Most likely?”

“Yes. Most likely. I can only guess, since we never came to any explicit agreement about it.”

“So you never even discussed it!”

“Oh, no. We all kept silent, because we all knew that that would have been messy.”

“Messy? But there were mitigating factors, as you said.”

“Mitigating. Not exonerating.”

The young genius laid the document on the table. He could not pretend to read it any longer. “So I am guilty, then,” he murmured.

“Well, of course you are,” the elder confirmed. “And we are all a little guilty for so readily excusing you.”

“Then what are we doing?” the younger asked, his voice filled with a sudden childish urgency and desperation. “What are we even trying to do, with this vision of ours? This great, lofty vision? Meddling in something so momentous and so messy, with our hands so damned dirty—”

“Easy,” the elder spoke again, unwilling to extend his hand this time, but instead calming his young friend with a gaze of soft, hard green. “Every human hand upon this earth is dirty. And that is precisely why we want to make a world where hands are always clean.”

“But how could we accomplish such a thing? The mire from our own hands will get mixed up in it. It has to.”

“No,” the elder countered. “It doesn’t. And it won’t. These guilty hands can craft a guiltless world, I promise you.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“Yes. You do,” the elder assured him. “I know that you do. You were the one who brought this vision to life. You believe in it more deeply and more passionately than anyone.”

“I brought it to life, and so I can kill it.”

“You can’t. And you won’t.”

The young genius took up the deed in his hands, each hand poised on one side of the sheet’s upper edge. Each hand beginning to push gently against the other in the opposite direction, threatening to tear the fragile sheet in two. “But I can.”

Emerald eyes shone silently in laughter at the sight. “That is a sheet of paper, boy.”

The whisper of the torn sheet rent the silence. “Now it’s two.”

“You always did have a knack for spawning divisions.”

“I want nothing to do with this vision anymore.”

“Very well. You can go scurry off to the opposite camp, though I doubt they would accept you. But if that is what you choose, then we need you no longer. Your job here is done. We have sucked out every ounce of genius from your brain, in using you to build this project; mayhap there is only madness left now.”

“Using me!”

“We men on this earth are all pawns.”

“I was the one with whom it all began!”

“Even the father of a vision can become its pawn. Its victim,” the elder genius stated. “Just like the father of an angry little boy.”

The younger lunged across the table, the feral anger of a lion coursing through his limbs and soul as he pinned his elder colleague to the floor, his fingers clenched about his throat. He wished that he could do to this man what he’d done to the deed.

“Go on. Make those hands even dirtier,” the green-eyed man rasped through the chokehold.

The charcoal eyes closed as the young genius withdrew his hands, rising from where he knelt over the other man’s body and crossing the room to its far end. The feeling had been too familiar. The feel and the sight of a man he so loved and respected, helpless underneath his feverish fingers. It was too familiar. Too dirty. He had hoped to keep a distance from that feeling, that guilt, for the rest of his life. But it had festered in his soul for far too long now.

A tear was welling in his eye. “I couldn’t help it,” he insisted through a choked back sob.

“With your father, or with me?” the elder asked as he rose to his feet, massaging his neck.

“With both. And all the time, with everything. I swear I cannot help it. There is anger in me, and darkness, and deep imperfection. And I loathe it. I hate that part of me so deeply, all the more because I swear I can’t control it!”

The elder looked intently at this man, this boy; this madman, this genius; this monster, this man. Whatever he was, those were the same charcoal eyes. “That imperfection, that lack of control—” he uttered, moving across the room toward his would-be strangler, “—that is humanity.”

“I hate it.”

“As do I. That is why we are going to remake humanity. And make it right this time.”

They were near enough, now, that he could lay a hand upon the younger genius’s trembling shoulder. He laid it there, and squeezed the shoulder gently. A grip so like the grip that, mere moments ago around his own throat, might have proven fatal.

But this was a grip of love, not raging hatred. He loved this little genius, truly, like a son. If anything, this young genius’s attempt to strangle him had reinforced his parallel to that young genius’s real father.

He had never felt more like a father to this man, to anyone upon this earth, than now.

“We cannot control ourselves, our souls, our actions. Not even in the slightest bit,” he told his would-be son. “But we can, and will, control the new breed of men that we make.”

“But if we are the ones controlling them, and if we are ourselves so imperfect…”

“It is not that kind of control. It is control like clockwork. We will set it all in motion, and once they have been rightly made, we’ll not so much as touch them. We will stay here on this earth and send them off to Glorion, and will watch them thrive and prosper. From a distance.”

The young genius smiled unhappily. “Suffice to say that we can never be a part of it.”

“Of course not. But you knew that.”

“Yes. I did.”

The young genius shuddered and sighed. He was fifty years old, but felt so like a child. For the first time that he could remember, he felt truly stupid. For all the things that he had thought and said and done upon this sad, cold rock, he felt so terribly stupid.

“I suppose you want to know the whole story? The details?” he asked his elder friend as they returned to sit across from one another at the table, the sundered deed lying between them.

“About your father’s death?”

The younger genius nodded.

“Is there much of a story to tell?” the elder wondered. “What story there is, I’m sure I can guess it. You stumbled across your father’s discovery, and his vision, by accident. Somewhere in his secret, private files, you found this great gem, and you saw and read everything. Then he found you out. And he was angry, and he urged you not to breathe a word. But you insisted that this vision ought to be shared. And he insisted that you ought not tell them yet. So there emerged a deep divide. You asked him why he had come up with such a vision, only to bury it alive. You sensed somehow that he did not want to leave it in your hands, because you were not good enough. That pained you, and it angered you. That pain and anger turned to blood upon your hands.”

The young genius absorbed these words and stared at the torn paper. “Not blood, not really. He never bled. Just stopped breathing when I strangled him. It looked just like a heart attack.”

“It was a heart attack,” the elder claimed. “An attack made because of a son’s broken heart.”

“Wordplay,” the younger humorlessly sniggered.

“Yet nonetheless true.”

The younger was silent a moment, and took up the two halves of the deed. “So I suppose, then, on Protopia, we ought to stifle all emotion. Since the heart is the source of all sin.”

“Oh, you could not be more wrong about that, boy,” the elder admonished. “There are many sins committed in cold blood, with no ounce of emotion behind them.”

“So what, then? We stifle the blood, too? The mind, and the hands, and everything else? What, then, is left?”

“We stifle nothing.”

The younger genius laughed as he fitted the two broken sheets together, only to let them both fall to the table, apart. “Then what, my genius friend, do we do?”

“I know not why you ask me. Your father laid everything out, in great detail. You know and understand his project more fully than anyone else.”

“But I was never good enough, never brilliant enough to execute it properly. Is that not so? I am unworthy of it. Mayhap I’ve never properly understood it all along.”

“You are letting your guilt get the best of you.”

“Mayhap my guilt is the best of me.”

The elder contemplated this awhile.

Both pairs of eyes turned once again to the globe on the screen overhead. It had been watching, listening to them all the while. It knew all of their secrets.

“Well,” the elder broke the silence at length, “you said yourself, that there was never blood upon your hands. So mayhap they are cleaner than you think. Mayhap you need not worry that your dirty hands will spoil all our visions for Protopia. And for Glorion.”

“It’s not about the bloodstains.”

“No. But it is about control. And if you had no control over these sins of yours, then why should you be guilty of them? Why should they dirty your hands?”

The younger bit his lip.

“There is a sense in which no human hand is dirty. A sense in which we are not guilty of anything,” the elder proclaimed. “We have much less control than we think. All the guilt lies in the all-powerful hands of our maker. Our determiner.”

“That sounds religious. Almost magical.”

“Religion, magic, science. All the same. The subliminal operations of our minds and of our souls—whether these be controlled by some god or some great, godless natural design—these are what determine and control us. In order to have any power over our own actions, we would need to control these deep things.”

“But those are inaccessible to us. We could never control them.”

“And that is the point.”

The young genius paused and considered his hands. “So I am not guilty, then?”

“Of course you are guilty.”

Charcoal eyes glanced up at green ones in confusion.

“Wordplay,” the elder genius explained. “Guilt means much too many things. These moral words have many different meanings, and that is what makes them messy.”

“But we’re messing with the moral, all the same!”

“Yes. But we are going to do a clean job of it. What we cannot control in ourselves, we are going to control in others.”

“But they, in turn, will not be able to control themselves.”

“Of course not.”

“So then we will be the ones accountable for the actions of our guinea pigs. As we will be their makers, their determiners.”

“Naturally. In some sense of accountability.”

“And in the other senses?”

“In some sense, they will be accountable. And in another sense, no one and nothing is accountable at all.”

“And which of these senses is right?”

The elder genius shrugged. “I prefer the last and largest of these three. I think accountability and guilt are just illusions. That seems most intellectually sound to me. Most deeply true.”

“So then no criminal is guilty, and no crime should be punished.”

“No. The law must operate on another sense. That second sense, in which each agent is accountable for everything he does. Unless, of course, he’s young or mad,” he smiled in uttering that half-ironic stipulation.

The younger genius ignored the irony. “But that second sense is less sound? And less true?”

“Much less so. But the world does not always need truth. It is not built on theory or on reason. It is built on practice, action and reaction. On a false sense of control over these things.”

“But that is our world. What of Glorion?”

“Glorion will be no different from our world.”

“But the entire point is that we will make it different. That we will make it perfect.”

“There is no such thing as a perfect world. Nor perfect people.”

“But you would often use such words, in describing our project.”

“Words are never adequate. They have too many different meanings.”

The emerald-eyed genius presently rose from the table, taking up the two halves of the deed in his hand. These he crumpled in his fist, crushing the paper like a strangled throat. “The deed has done its job,” he announced in response to his friend’s furrowed brow. “It has informed us that the land to build Protopia is ours. We do not need the paper any longer.”

The younger genius simpered wryly. “You said the same of me, moments ago.”

“Did I?”

“To the effect that I am a disposable pawn.”

“Ah, yes,” the elder acknowledged. “Well, we are all pawns, as I said, and all disposable. But you and I can still be useful to each other, I am sure. And to Protopia, and to Glorion. I don’t think we’ve yet exhausted our mutual genius.”

“Mutual?”

“Yes. We’re a Collective, are we not?”

“Well, yes.”

“There are no divides here, between you and me. No differences, no distance.”

“So we then share mutual guilt?”

“I already told you, boy, about your guilt. Talk of guilt is all wordplay.”

“Yet it might be nonetheless true.”

The elder genius smiled a proud, fatherly smile. “Quite right, boy. Quite right.”

The Glorious globe on the screen silently watched the pair of geniuses as they left the room. It knew that these men had been playing with words. It knew, too, that they soon would be playing with worlds.