- BB -

“Do you honestly believe in what he just said?” Madzistrale asked her brother, while applying frosting on her cake, her medium-length curly brown hair now encased in a hair net to prevent a strand from falling into her work.

“Why not? He’s had many theories over the years, but never incredulous ones, and always backed up with some proofs.”

“But the Apocalypse…”

“Mad, he’s a genius; geniuses look at the world differently, and what doesn’t match in it, they see it faster and clearer. Clearly, he saw something that doesn’t match what the world should be.”

“I hope you’re right. But I don’t think I’d be ready so soon... will it actually happen in our lifetime? Isn’t it something for the very far future?”

Tom shrugged in indifference; clearly, it didn’t bothered him any which way.

Madzistrale sighed and finished decorating her cake. Her brother had good instincts, and she could always count on them. When they met Gabzryel, he was the one that quickly understood their friend’s uniqueness; she understood someone’s emotions, but Tom understood the deeper motives and psyche. With both their understanding of a human’s more complex nature than what was commonly accepted, no one was strange for them; and especially not Gabzryel, despite his eccentricities.

“Can you believe it’s already been eight years since we left our home to come live here in Kansas?” Madzistrale sighed in reminiscence, looking at her garden through the kitchen’s windows. “Can’t say that I miss our winters, though. Between the snow here or the usual 2 meters high of piles of snow we used to get in Quebec...”

“I miss even less the arguments we had with our parents; and how they always belittled you for being different than them and their clients,” Tom scoffed. “Gab was luckily for us the only client idiotic enough to interest himself in something else than the eternal self-lauding guru-ism of our resort. And we were even more lucky to that we understood each other and got away from it all.”

Madzistrale sighed again as she wiped her hands.

“I just don’t get why he thinks we should be the ones facing off this… Apocalypse thing. I’m already twenty-six, you thirty-one, and we’ve finally begun to live our own life according to our own ways; I just want a simple life for us, helping people out around us...”

“That’s why he thinks it can be us. Who else than us in our village do what we do? Heck, we’re out by the docks saving lobsters and oysters, for God’s sake. And I think we singlehandedly managed our homeless gang at us three when our mayor can’t life a finger; you use your plant knowledge so that people don’t drive an hour to an hospital for a simple cut… not to mention our Three Kings of Kansas event at Christmas...”

“Don’t forget our little ongoing Project! The very important piece of the puzzle!” Gabzryel’s voice suddenly interpelled.

He entered the room with a pack of files under his arm, and sat at the kitchen island.

“I smelled your cake from the lab, I hope there’s a slice reserved for me!”

“No,” Madzistrale replied sarcastically, already having cut three slices.

“Itadakimasu!” Gabzryel tapped his hands together and thanked her as she set his plate in front of him.

“You know, you guys don’t help my diet when you request to eat cakes at two in the afternoon,” Madzistrale reprimanded them while tapping discontentedly her belly.

“Then don’t eat the cake,” Tom replied, already digging in his serving.

“But it’s delicious...” Madzistrale pouted before taking a bite and sitting down.

“Okay, here’s a few things I dug up to inspire you to follow my suggestion,” Gabzryel interrupted, spreading the files across the counter. “First of all, there is this weird monument in Georgia. Ever heard of it?”

“Nope,” the siblings simultaneously answered, their mouths full.

“Okay... Well, this monument is rather creepy. It has ten guideline engraved in stone, in the eight most common languages, about what the ‘ideal’ society should be. No one knows who build it, the author used a pseudonym, though there are various rumours circulating, inculpating various popular secret societies. Though some of the guidelines are rather innocent, the others are disturbing. Birth control, and more precisely, birth control against ‘unfit’ children; abandon of tradition, faith and ‘petty’ laws; and though innocent in itself, the imposition of one language.”

“One language? How is that dangerous? It would help to get everyone along if they all understood each other...” Madzistrale remarked.

“In itself, it’s not. But there is a saying: ‘United Language, United Fears’. It is easier to implement and spread orders around when everyone understand them.

» But all that is still innocent compared to the first and last command engraved: that humanity is a cancer, and it must be kept permanently under 500 millions individuals.”

Gabzryel let silence greet this last sentence. Madzistrale looked at Tom, silently asking if she heard correctly.

“This monument is justified by some to be guidelines to guide humanity after an inevitable catastrophe. But what catastrophe could possibly wipe out 92 percent of humanity? How do you think such a ‘catastrophe’ happens? And do any of you honestly believe that such a ‘catastrophe’ will be completely natural?”

Tom and Madzistrale looked at one another with concern; both also instinctively pushed back their halfway finished cake. This was no time to eat.

“They might have planned for things such as asteroids,” Tom suggested in an attempt to find the logic behind it.

“Yes, true. And as we speak, as the world prepares for space colonization, there are talks of bringing asteroids close enough to Earth and the Moon for harvesting their metallurgic resources. At the same time, there is this shadowy group which wants to see 7.5 billions people die to ‘rid’ Earth of a ‘cancer’, while having a getaway plan, as space colonization is no longer science-fiction but reality. I don’t know about you, but I start to doubt any ‘natural’ catastrophes threatening humanity; including asteroids.”

Madzistrale and Tom looked uncertainly at the files. Gabzryel smiled kindly.

“Look guys, I know I’m usually on the optimist side; we all are. But when it comes to the safety of eight billions people, in a world that would rather exterminate a problem than solve it peacefully... And when I see the government and military constantly accused of all the evils, while someone in the shadows play them like fools, and at the same time, creepy guidelines from that same someone that we know nothing about... I don’t want to take risks. No one will help the world; but we already started to. Let’s take it a step further and prepare for the worst. Nothing is lost by that. If it doesn’t happen in our lifetime, we still did some good in the world; we might even pass it down to the next generation if one of you two have kids…”

“Hey!” the siblings looked at him with ardent eyes.

“Just saying. Mad seem the likeliest candidate…”

Madzistrale stared even harder, but she subtly blushed, as she knew he was right. Tom smiled mischievously, as he wasn’t personally overly fond of the idea of a ‘next’ generation coming from him.

“We want to be heroes; that’s what I like about both of you. We don’t care if it’s a silly idea, if it’s old-fashioned, not proper in a ‘modern’ world, or that ‘ordinary’ people can’t possibly be heroes. We might not even succeed at hundred percent, or even need these preparations. But we won’t look back and say that we haven’t done our best. We can be heroes, we have the spine for it, and valuable qualities: I’m the fake mad genius; Tom, you’re the logical and best scenario guy; and Mad, you’re the empathic and what-feels-right girl, not to mention medical knowledge. Let’s be heroes for real. It doesn’t require superpowers or suits. It requires caring about the world when no one will. Didn’t we already start, with the homeless and the animal kingdom?”

Madzistrale looked excitedly at her brother, urging for his approval. Tom considered Gabzryel’s finds for awhile, and his instincts told him there was a high likelihood for the world not being quite right and his friend seeing it better than the siblings.

“Heck, why not,” he finally accepted, to the joy of his sister. “How are you planning to begin, Gab?”

“How? Why, by continuing our Orb Weaver experiments, and do our daily run of help around the city,” Gabzryel enigmatically answered with a corner smile.

Madzistrale and Tom sighed and rolled their eyes, before resuming eating their cake; they knew he wouldn’t explain or clarify further.

Tom, meanwhile, browsed quickly through Gabzryel’s files while the latter finally began digging in his own untouched cake, and found something.

“What is that?” he asked Gabzryel, pointing to the file’s title.

Gabzryel shrugged.

“Don’t know yet. It’s interesting, but still in the realm of ‘rumour’. It’s basically that an underground movement is trying to wake the ‘Sleeping Mother’.”

“Sleeping Beauty?” Madzistrale joked.

“Something in that vein. According to this mysterious movement, they come from a highly royal bloodline, whose origin is a powerful woman, nicknamed ‘The Mother’; and they try to find her tomb, to somehow wake her up. Not only can’t you wake up a dead person, where it gets fuzzy and really over-the-top is who that ‘Mother’ is, and what kind of power she had. Most claim she’s Mary Magdalene, and that she was the true influence behind Christianity, and that this group is descendant of her and Jesus, and should thus rule the world. Absolute nonsense.”

“So why you’re keeping the files, exactly?” Tom asked amusedly, replacing the file in the pile.

“Because some people are idiots and who knows when such a fairytale will surface and be spread as ‘truth’. I’ve got to keep anything remotely society threatening, to fight it. I’ve got tons that are a pile of rubbish,” Gabzryel said in indifference.

“I’m seeing that,” Tom replied, even more amused as he cycled through files names such as: ‘Move To Heaven With Your Third Eye!’; ‘Aliens Influenced the WWs’; ‘Colour-Blindness Result From 70s Alien Experiments’; ‘The Queen Has A Green Patch!’; ‘1880’s Mars Invasion Prank Was Created By The Next Terrian Society!’; and more ludicrous titles. “What makes you trust this Cyan Ray Project, then?”

“Because I got it from the military’s website, not from blogs. And I told you, I do believe it was an hoax,” Gabzryel replied, as if it explained everything.

Tom’s eyebrows rose in annoyance, and he decided to let go of the subject and, instead, finish his cake.

Gabzryel suddenly rose with an ecstatic air, and rushed to the basement door.

“I think I know what went wrong: the wheel’s wire was grounded!”

Tom and Madzistrale realized he was now speaking of his failed free energy experiment that they witnessed beforehand. They waited expectantly for a few minutes, feeling that they knew what would happen. As expected, they heard an angry cry from the basement, and a heavy thud as an object was clearly thrown across the lab. The rest, they didn’t heard as they fell into a fit of laughter over Gabzryel’s eighth failed attempt at a free-energy machine.