“Why not? How can something natural be so difficult? You’re supposed to have the solutions. There were seven billion of us for christ sake” said The Love General.

  “Were my friend. Are, is completely speculative. I would put it in the hundreds of millions maybe. Who knows? But what we are certain of is that while women are breeding naturally, they aren’t lactating and their offspring that survive the two day buffer are carrying, or rather, not carrying, this genetic deficiency. I’m afraid until we find a cure for the famine and we are able to inoculate women or, given that the loving proves effective and these children of ours through their emotional learning reignite the quenched spark of universal law and then grow to be prime for breeding, then, my steadfast generals, and of course revered sirs, we are many years away from natural production and even when we do reach this point, we are still what may seem like a lifetime away from civilised loving. The kind you sing about in song. Without a cure for the empathy gene, we are looking at no more than seventy years until total human eradication; the last hoorah for our species. If we find this link, we save humanity. Now does that sound like something you want to be a part of? I think that about answers your questions” said The Scientist closing over the documents on his clipboard.

  “Thank you that will be sufficient. Generals return to your duties and prepare your scripts, The Dosing will commence mid-morning. I think it’s safest if we go with weather again. Everything is as is; focus on what you need to do. The only thing that can change our direction is the map we keep in our mind. Maintain yur focus, your state of one. I want you to be vigilant. If you see any sign of the famine creeping on your children you are to dispose of them immediately” said Marcos.

  “Sir, what about the rumours? Are they real?” asked The Work General.

  The men stopped shuffling their documents and all looked to Marcos with childish apprehension, expecting him to deport the absurd idea that this fairy tale was tangible and also partly hoping that he would concede to the idea that its existence was possible, that it could be true.

  “Let me make this abundantly clear, New Utopia is not real. Look over those walls; The Famined, they come to us. Why? Because we are Utopia. We have the cure. We are humanity, all things come to us” he screamed smashing his fist down on the table.

  “If I hear one more word of this desire, this conscious wanting, you will be ex communicated, scavenging like the rest of them for dog scraps and weather reports” he said spitting with every word.

  “Excuse me gentlemen” said The Scientist, pushing his spectacles forward again and sliding his chair back before slipping out of the board room and off to the lower dwellings to put his incredible mind to a more pragmatic use.

  The generals all lifted themselves from their places and left in the same fashion as they arrived, thinking of their own concerns. The White Hearts held their place having never changed the direction of their sight or attenuated the immediacy of their focus during the entire meeting.

  Marcos and the Behemoth sat in directed stare in the company of the muted Teller, hidden in the dark cover of his thick black hooded cloak.

  “How is your woman?” asked the Behemoth.

  “She’s fine” said Marcos; though he didn’t really know.

  00110111

  Seated behind his grand oak desk, Marcos sifted through an assortment of papers, most of which brought him concern. It was true; they had not the food to see them through the winter. They hadn’t harvested in over a year and a half and the condition of the soil meant that in all likelihood, they would not reap from another seed for as long as they continued to kick about this impotent poisoned earth.

  The weather too was unrelenting and gave them little respite, sickening The Children and reducing them to an amoebic state capable of nothing more strenuous than wiping the feverish sweat from their furrowed brows.

  What was most troubling was the mind of the worker Child. The Children couldn´t see the result of their work at the end of the day, and as such, they became bitter and emotionally perturbed. They longed initially for title, for promotion, for recognition of work undone. The span of their sight was dreadfully short and they desired more than they deserved and when they couldn’t bask in the spoils of their labour; if the result of their effort was not immediate, they would move on to more emotionally encompassing past times.

  In the case of The Nest, this meant downing one’s tools, and in pack, forming a circle around one and any Child and taunting that Child until he or she fell unto tears. Failing that they took to lighting small fires and destroying established crops or infrastructure. The effect of their cause was to become agitated, disorderly, violent and unfocused.

  They demanded a pure emotional response, like a puppy left unattended and to its own devices. They tore, burned, ripped and smashed their way into and at anything within the immediacy of their sight and found the discipline that came down upon them by The Fathers; absolutely intoxicating.

  They longed for direction; emotionally charged direction of any sort; be it a pat on the back or a fist to the face, anything at all would suffice. And just as torrential weather and painful open sores were stressful to their well-being and overall productivity; it was their famine that was debilitating.

  Marcos looked not with concern for that would be illogical; instead he looked engagingly at the results of the past quarter, accepted the outcomes and the probabilities of their collateral effect and scribed action. In the face of such depressive results and the apparent bleakness of the immediate future, Marcos focused his emotional reasoning, thinking only one; no fear, no doubt and no delay.

  “There does not exist”, he thought, “a problem without a solution.”

  “How far have you gone?” asked Marcos looking up from the papers.

  “Alone? Past the bridge; along the tracks that lead to the old station. I sat in the reeds about a couple of hundred meters off. Kept my distance” replied The Behemoth.

  “What did you see?”

  “Abandon” said The Behemoth. “I saw nothing, just a few tricks of the eye; you know, faces forming under the stir of blown leaves tossed about by the bullish wind, shadows morphing in and out of barbarity, first one and then many; the form of a monster, the form of a man. I felt their eyes all over me and the generosity of their intention, inviting me to calamity. There is no kind lodging for a mind at wander” he said.

  “We need to pacify further beyond the bridge. We need more soil” said Marcos.

  “You want me to take you there? Today during the collection?” asked The Behemoth to Marcos who had his head buried in papers.

  The sound of a door shutting pulled them both from their focus. For the briefest moment, the numbers on the documents in his hands seemed to float about wavily, dancing in and out of time of one another. He felt a moment of doubt creep on his mind and his stomach to his throat. He lowered the pages and before him The Woman pulled herself a seat and rested. Marcos swallowed against the lump in his throat, reattained his focus and put the documents aside, out of The Woman’s sight.

  “We need to talk” she said.

  “Can this wait until we finish our day? I am with a lot of importance right now and I could use...”

  “Really? You’re with a lot of importance? And what am I? Inconvenient?” she yelled, throwing a piece of paper in front of his face and kicking away the chair then swinging the door open wildly.

  “Not everything is zero and fucking one Marcos” she said slamming the door shut, vanishing down the stairwell into the mass of moving figures below.

  Marcos waded momentarily in a sea of tempestuousness; neurons firing in his mind as a torrent of uncontrollable emotion flooded his fingertips. He clenched his hands irefully, until blood trickled from his fingernails down his palm then to his wrist and finally dropping in a tiny pool on a document sitting before him.

  Adrenaline pumped like light into a new day leaving him staring viscerally and shaking wildly. The Behemoth looked on unmoved.

  “Women?” he questioned to himself.

  Marcos picked up the document that lay below his sight and wiped away the droplets of blood on the cover creating a red smear across the page. He looked into the smear, still worn by the emotional rage which overcame him but now stupefied somewhat in an opiated endorphin induced trance. His vision blurred and swam with the mix of reds and whites on the paper and in his ears; torment beckoned. Gone was the immediacy of his sight. Lost was he now, to the theatre of the emotionally and mentally unhinged.

  The sound of a woman screaming in dire need was paralysing. The sheer force of her desperation tore at the inside of his mind shattering his calm. He pulled his hands up to his head clasping his ears and grinding his teeth. Sweat poured down his face and saturated his body. The eye in his mind awakened and he saw a flood of white, bright blinding luminescence, and from it, a spectre of dark in the distance at first miniscule and non-forming, then blackening and stencilling the light about his sight. The white fell onto the backdrop of black and grey wheels swinging wildly, left then right, left then right and turning with ferocious velocity, forward, forward, forward, vehemency, the fuel that drove its direction. The sound of voices, discoursing with one another, lexicalising the severity of the woman’s screams as they pressed on; her body thrashing about, her arms and legs strapped into place. A set of doors burst open as a knock on the door pulled Marcos from his stupor.

  He instantaneously pulled upon the reigns of his sanity lashing wildly at his disobedient conscious mind.

  “All things are one” he thought.

  Composure became him and he rose from his table, folding the blood stained document into an infinitesimal square and placing it in his pocket. His body looked physically battled; his face was sickly pale, yet his eyes, where every Father, Mother and Child kept their stare, were hardened, clear, convincing, certain and directing.

  He opened the door to be greeted by an adolescent child; so strange looking; so unseasoned; long straight black hair, fair pale white skin and emerald green eyes, a colour like he had never seen before in his life; one that swept you into distraction and cast you back out into your own reflection.

  She stood in front of Marcos with apparent sadness and feigned worry in her eyes and yet, the emotion in her voice was so convincing.

  “Safrine has gone” she said holding a thousand yard stare.

  “Safrine is your friend then?” said Marcos as he lowered his heaving self to be at level with the adolescent girl’s eyes.

  It was uncommon for children of any age to be At Father. Their place was below in the maze of corridors and addressing only of the four secular states of being and activity. Marcos rested both his hands on the girl’s shoulder; sensitivity uncommon from Father to Child, but in the wake of his own recent emotional decline, unexplainably warranted.

  “What do The Mothers call you?” he asked.

  “Milena” she replied.

  “Speak to me Milena. What has happened to Safrine?” he asked without a hint of condescension or mockery in his tone.

  Any other Father would have walked straight past the child, cursing the lack of discipline being administered in the four primal quadrants below. They would have walked through the girl and disguised her bruising as a lesson and the dislocation of their compassion as education.

  It wouldn´t be because they were wrong or ill mannered, it was simply the logic of their being that they followed under the philosophical rationale of Marcos; Mother listens through her breast and Father speaks through his fist. One would keep the emotional threat at bay, quelling the sensation of indecisiveness while the other would aggress upon any and all physical threats.

  Marcos was very much unlike the other fathers and becoming it seemed, quite unlike his self. A group of fathers passing through the adjacent hall had stopped and gathered in curious wonder at their truculent leader on one knee addressing an adolescent child benignantly. Their lingering stares grew that of Marcos who raised his own stern cast of an eye and as such, in an instant, the bulking men lowered their heads and briskly made their way to wherever it was that was not there. Marcos returned to the girl. She looked at him adoringly and smiled.

  “You are Marcos, yes? You don’t, look, like a giant” she said.

  “And who says that I am a giant?”

  “The other children” she replied. “They say you are a million feet tall and that The Fathers had to build a hole in the sky, just to fit your head” said the girl.

  “They do, do they? And what else do they say?” laughed Marcos with a grin widening and the colour returning to his face.

  “That you eat children who don’t follow the rules. And that you’re mean and that you stink sometimes. And that your breath is like…” she said.

  “Ok, ok” he said putting an index finger gently to her mouth. “Tell me Milena, what evidence have you of Safrine’s disappearance?” he asked.

  “My eyes, Father. I saw her with my own two eyes” she said with a sense of honest panic filling her focused stare.

  “And where did she go?” he asked.

  “She was taken.”

  00111000

  The Woman had left Marcos, but he had not left her. Her mind felt stained with his cold reason. As she moved about the complex, she passed many a child At Peace, running about in a disorderly fashion, in lure of being caught. One child playing The Collector and; adorned in a torn grey sheet and with filthy brown bag in hand, ran about trying to collect the other children, enticing them into his snare; fouling rhyme and melody with deception and treason.

  She sat in still wonder for a moment and balanced her conscious thought. A feeling in her stomach was rife with ill-being. She had, since the inception of this city, accepted how her lover had thought and in many a time once past; sensualised over the outcome of his mind, stupefied at first by his mania, then lustful at the force at which it tore many an idea to shreds and reduced many a man to an argumentative end; ungrateful shamed losers. She had, through the course of their relationship, supported and endured the decisions they had brought upon themselves, but of a great many had been directed solely by him. One decision though, of which, was of her own accord, and of her own will, gave him reason to question no more, the wilful acquiescence of his partner and suggested gravely upon her, abidance to his every word.

  The Woman pulled a plastic crate from beside her and sat herself comfortably in front of the children At Peace. What a splendorous thing to do, to sit and watch a child simply being. That idea on its own, for an adult, would never suffice. Some description, some adjective, some state, would need to be attached to this simple idea, of being; a label or an imaginary figment of desire, the delusion of intellectual and or spiritual complexity.

  “In being!” she exclaimed in her mind, “a child simply is. There is no doubt, no mal-perception. The child simply is.”

  It can be of many things and many temporal states, but as long as the child is being, it has not the burden of conscious buggering; or what Marcos described as, At Distraction, to firstly interrupt its play and secondly to brand this play with an illusionary third person state, a state that is outside of being, one that is transitory, brailed in collective conscious; the state of absence from self; the state of adherence to individualised collectivism; the state of being different whilst being of equality; the state of marginalised being; the state of unbeing.

  “All things are, when they are being” she said out loud.

  Some children turned, pulled from their play; smiling wildly, then returned in under a breath to their focus; mind speaking to muscle and tendon, to shift and turn on a whim, the energy directed from the sub-state, flowing from their mind’s eye to their toes, collecting in their knees and spiring to their fingertips as they dodged and wove from the chaotic flux of bodies and pressing off of obstacles that maligned their path.

  It had, in an instant, become abundantly clear; or relative to her, the science of one. That being, the teachings and thoughts that were commanded by Marcos; what in fact she had been cloudlessly practicing in her class and disguising her misunderstanding as, in the moments alone with her lover. When a child is At Peace, a child is At One.

  “What irony” she thought, “that we put such great effort into something that in its essence is the absence of effort and that we lose ourselves in the intellectualisation of the absence of thought.”

  A wave of dopamine released by this revelation brought her to an image of her lover, his physique; chiselled, his eyes; veneered, her state; wilful submittal. She felt lust; she was lust and she and her lover were one.

  She smiled a grace upon herself, an imaginary weight shedding from her shoulders and the gravity of au courant burden lifting her out of and away from her conscious trappings. She watched; distant from herself, as one of The Children; masked as The Collector, pulled from his filthy bag a tiny thing.

  What he did next was not what had been done before. He laid the tiny thing in the centre of the group and walked away into the cold shadows that lined the walls. The Woman saw the drama unfold, watching enticingly as the play unravelled into something more unsettling.

  As the figure vanished, a sharp cold breath became her and a shiver ran her spine as some dark and vile spectre crept on her soul. The sensation was unconscious and it swept over her and seemed to brush over her like a Cimmerian breeze.

  The sound of metal clanging made The Children conscious to the figure’s absence. Each Child looked at one another in naive assumption that the game had ended. They gathered around the toy in a large circle; The Children locking arms and peering over in wondrous curiosity. The circumference of the circle held nine Children and behind them and through their feet, the remainder of the group scuttled, battled, tugged, and even climbed to get a closer look.