Ludo Brax: Intergalactic Gig Worker (Chapter 39)

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The System's story, like any good self-justification, began with an acknowledgement of its pure intentions.

This place, I was to learn, in bits of scripture and songs like the deliriously catchy "A More Perfect Human," was, as explained in the pre-chorus (just after the second solo):

A place made up to fix-a
All Earthly ills that afflict ya

Everything I had encountered: The Garden, my tailored Suburban life, had all grown out of this utopian vision. The idea was simple, even admirable.

Life on Earth — presented in the pageantry of The Cathedral as a hellscape replete with pyrotechnics and monstrous, gnarled beasts played by snaking lines of my costumed neighbors — was, to use The System's parlance: fallen, sinful, broken.

Within this chaos, the archetypal Good Person (a role I was never allowed to play for "costuming challenges" presented by my "unique stature") would find around every corner some charlatan or fanged succubus eager to unmoor them from the paths helpfully labeled VIRTUE and PROGRESS.

From this chaos, an IDEA was born, painted in MegaTech Sans™ on a gleaming gold tablet, lifted above the rafters by barely visible pulleys which strained under the weight of its enormous implications — and it's not exactly economical use of language:

Earth was irredeemable. No coherent system of rules governed reality. The wicked thrived while the righteous were punished by the indifferent hand of fate. The time had come for a new World. A just World. A World that was worthy of its selected inhabitants.

Now, having the distinction of being the only person in the place who actually remembered life on Earth, some aspects of lore were harder for me to get on board with than for some of my Neighbors.

For example, as far as I remembered, not every body of water on Earth was a boiling acidic cesspool, just most of them. And the roving gangs of criminals that supposedly roamed the streets preying on good people had long ago entered the private sector.

None of this necessarily invalidated the points The System's sermons were trying to make. I mean, even I, avowed champion of inherent human goodness, had to admit we'd lost the plot somewhere — probably around the time we collectively voted to fund a manned mission to Dethrone God (and just look how that turned out.)

But having been taken in my fair share of times by the promises of various organizations and digital dojos, I had a keen sense of when something didn't quite add up in a pitch.

Sometimes, it was the creeping suspicion that a supposedly world-renowned Sensei was behaving awfully more like several savvy children stacked up in one large gi.

In this case, it was the nagging feeling that some of the claims made about the architect of this place didn't quite line up with what I and every person on Earth knew about him.

I'm talking, of course, about Professor Pyque.

**

They never mentioned him by name. That would've been pointless. To the people here, hard as it is to believe, the name Pyque meant nothing.

It was surreal to consider.

When someone rises to prominence at the scale of a Professor Pyque, the very idea his existence represents in the popular imagination is so deeply woven into the fabric of existence as to be almost invisible.

It was only now, existing for the first time in a world that did not exist in the wake of his massive presence, that I truly noticed its absence.

It was in the little things. The dozens of times an hour I wanted to describe that uncanny feeling of awe and dread mixed with the looming threat of cellular reorganization with that singular word that summed it all up: Pyquean.

The whispered jokes I longed to make to my Neighbors that hinged on clever references to The Professor's Promise (that saccharine credo we'd all been forced to recite each week back on Earth before being dispensed a dose of The Cure.)

To be re-indoctrinated now, in this Cathedral, with this new, apparently sanctioned version of Pyque, created in me a sort of cognitive dissonance I hadn't felt since I'd been forced to defeat my Id in pitched combat in order to qualify for a loan.

The CLAMOGEPATO's Pyque, the one I encountered weekly in puppet shows and experimental spoken word, was simply referred to as The Creator.

He was aged, sagacious, warm, human. Almost tragically so. In all of his portrayals — the paintings, the statues, the glitching hologram who sometimes appeared to remind us of the sanctity of not asking incisive questions — his defining posture was a kind of radiant benevolence.

The Creator, we were told, possessed a singular vision and love for humanity. His intentions were pure. In fact, if he had any flaw, it was an almost naive belief in the inherent dignity of human beings.

This was, to put it mildly, decidedly not the Professor Pyque of daily life back home.

In fact, really, the two conceptions of the man couldn't have been more at odds.

I mean, of course, to his most fervent supporters, Pyque was a well-intentioned man. Why else, they'd ask, would he subject himself to the scrutiny and torment of a life lived in public when he was, literally, the wealthiest man who had ever lived?

But even they, as much as they talked about "the message" transcending "the man," would not have ever used words like affable or deigns-to-make-eye-contact-with-anyone to describe Professor Pyque.

No matter how much he had tried to bend public perception to his will, he was always an awkward fit as a State-Sanctioned Celebrity.

Even with the small fortune he clearly spent on charisma coordinators and gymnastics training, he came across in his appearances as cold, sterile — sometimes frighteningly unflappable. Every gesture felt rehearsed, every smile like he had focus-tested its market implications.

He was the sort of man who came across better in press releases than on his ill-fated Late Night Talk Show / Retribution Panel.

That was the Pyque I remembered. Aloof. Stilted. Unable, even on the back of the box for his popular breakfast cereal, Profess-o's, to avoid using a phrase like "designed to produce efficient Children."

**

Was this Creator, I wondered, really how Pyque saw himself? He'd never struck me as the kind of person who needed or even wanted to be liked. I mean, this was the same man who pushed through the edict to outlaw Idle Dreaming. You don't make many friends by forcing people to produce value while they sleep.

Maybe, I reasoned, he felt misunderstood. Maybe, here, he hoped to finally set the record straight. Who among us hasn't been tempted to mythologize ourselves, mandating a sanitized interpretation of our own motives within a Simulated New World of our creation? That ancient masculine urge.

But still somehow, over the weeks, I started to have the sinking feeling there was something else at work here.

If I had learned one thing in my time as The System's captive, it's that whenever you thought you had something figured out, there was always some new, dark layer just waiting to be uncovered. I had also learned to tap dance.

Had it only been Pyque who had been rebranded, I could've chalked it up to vanity. Had The System only exaggerated about life back on Earth, I might've called it propaganda.

But some things I'd seen couldn't be explained away. Not by ego, not by marketing. I'd stepped into the Occurrence, and I'd seen things I still didn't understand.

And now, watching the Cathedral's retelling, I realized The System wasn't just reinterpreting that story.

It was trying to overwrite it.