Moho (Part One: Rise of a Symbol) (9 page)

I open my eyes and look over to Maya but she is no longer standing next to me
— and any romantic atmosphere had gone with her.

She is pacing around the tree, her head lowered but her shoulders tense. I have never seen her that unbalanced. And the longer I watch her, the more unbalanced I become myself.

“Is everything okay?” I ask, fearing the answer as soon as the words leave my mouth.

“Okay? Nothing is okay. Not any more!” she snaps.

“But it’s not my fault. She brought her Bellybutton Erasure memory into MNOP. And she let go of her memory herself,” I say.

“Your fault? Of course not. Who cares about guilt anyway. She is ruining our reputation! Mine, yours, Ravi’s, Cosmo’s. She is ruining everybody! Decrying Cosmo like that! Those chastes should be thankful that Cosmo is giving them permission to loiter on his islands.”

Shouldn't she be thanking the chastes that they found a human? And that they are ‘cleansing’ her beloved Islands? But all she seems interested in is how Pax’s behavior reflects on her reputation.

“No one is going to think less of this place, or you. And it's not like she was the first human to come out of The Spring, right?"

“Ugh… Those humans! Ravi is right! We need one final cleanse!” she says and my heart drops.

This has turned into the worst date of all time. Essentially
, Maya wants me gone from this world. But she still isn’t questioning my actions in CEBOS. In a way I’m glad she is so focused by her hurt pride. And yet I can't help but wonder when she will think clearly and realize the cause for my actions.

“Aren't those very extreme words?” I ask. The
question catches her so off-guard that she finally stops pacing the floor. She looks at me in disbelief and I continue, "I mean, you said yourself that there is another essence out there that completes one's own. So isn't Pax’s presence on Persadia necessary because without her essence another essence will remain incomplete?"

“I was not talking about humans. There is no place for humans on Persadia,” she says coldly.

Her words are acid on my heart but there is no arguing with her right now. So we walk back in silence, now ignorant to the heat and visual wonder of the jungle. We walk over the land bridge between the Red Island and Maze Island, through the tunnels and over several islets to the assistant dorm on Element Islands. When we reach her place she is still angry. I really want to end the date properly but all I get from her is a tepid “See you tomorrow” before she vanishes into the darkness of her dorm without waiting for my response. I wave and wait but she doesn’t turn around.

“Do you finally see now?” a voice says behind my back. I turn my head and Pax appears from behind a rock.

“Ugh, Pax. What do you want?” I ask impatiently.

“You,” she says in an eerily serious voice.

“Leave me alone,” I say and start walking home but I can't shake her off that easily.

“That’s what she'd say if she knew what you really are,” Pax hisses.

“She likes me.”

“We both know she wouldn’t even look at you if she knew your dirty little secret. ‘We need one final cleanse!’ Wasn’t that what she said? Oh, and by the way it was me who said that the other night, not Ravi. Ironic that our nominee Maya was quoting a ‘despicable’ human, isn’t it?” she says amused.

I stop walking, turn around, and look at Pax. She is clearly more confident about her assumptions than I am about mine. So she goes on.

“I, on the other hand, I am like you. I get you Moho.”

“We are nothing alike. And I agree with her. Humans like you really belong darkened,” I say with all the confidence I can muster.

“Moho, who are you trying to fool here?” she sighs.

I'm losing my patience quickly and stare at the ground so I don't have to look at her any longer. I think about leaving but she would follow. Then I realize that I can use the soil we are standing on to get rid off her. I connect to the soil right behind her and form a hand with it, about twice as large as my own hand. I carefully let the hand rise behind her back until I can see it lingering behind her neck, ready to attack.

“You and I, we are both
—” and before she can say it to my face, I make the dirt hand grab her throat. But instead of panicking, her eyes light up with playful excitement.

"Yeah, Moho… there it is…that is the real you
," she stutters with waning breath. She is still not taking it seriously. So I make the soil hand grab her tighter. She finally starts panicking and scratches the dirt from her neck. Then she turns red and I see real dread in her eyes. Her eyes move away from me and flash when they notice something behind me.

"Help! Help!" she groans. There is true terror in her voice.

Xerxes bumps into me while heading towards Pax. I lose control of the soil hand and the dirt falls onto Pax’s shoulders and clothes. She drops to the floor, dirt all over her body.

"Here you are again, Moho,” Xerxes says. "Trouble seems to hunt you down."

"If by trouble you mean Pax, then yes,” I respond.

"Moho is human!" she screams.

"Moho and Pax were just playing around, enjoying this beautiful night, getting to know each other a little,” a warm voice behind me says.

That is so blatantly wrong but she presents it witch such conviction and ease that even I believe it for a second. It's Aleeya. Aleeya! Wow. That is a strange but lucky coincidence. She smiles at me and rests her hands on my shoulders. I feel so much better immediately.

“If it makes you feel any better, Xerxes, I personally will help Moho with matter connectivity,” she says to him. “My dear,” Aleeya says to me and strokes my left cheek, “why don’t you go to bed? It’s quite late already.”

She doesn’t need to say that twice. I leave immediately without looking at Xerxes or Pax again.

As I walk through the endless tunnels of Maze Island, I try to understand this night. My mind is empty, like it is preventing me to process this mess of a night. I feel everything at once or nothing at all.

After what might have been way too long of a walk and might have included several unexplainable detours around the almost empty and quiet Islands, I can finally see my dorm.

Suddenly, I hear a sound. I look around but the moons and Cosmo's statue do very little to light the darkness of the night. The sound grows louder the closer I get to the dorm. It's a short, repetitive, high sound. I look around but I cannot determine the source of the sound. Then I see Pax leaving her hiding place in a couple of shrubs close to the entrance of the dorm. She is breaking a little twig into countless pieces which is causing the sound.

Pax looks horrible and considering what I did to her, I'm slightly unsettled by her presence. For a moment I simply wait for her to acknowledge my presence but she doesn't. So I ignore her as well and walk towards the entry of the dorm. Th
en I see her move and something hitting my head.

“Coward,” she says calmly.

“Don’t throw twigs at me.”

“It’s for you. Break it into little pieces. Destroy it. You’ll see, there is nothing better.”

“I prefer creation,” I counter.

"You are a piece of work,” she says and laughs. I figured that
this was a bit much coming from me but I play it cool. “You continue to attack me and yet I'm the one who got caught."

“There is a difference between attack and defense”, I argue.

"Whatever. But keep in mind: my secret is no more and I have nothing left to lose — you have everything."

“Ugh, Pax. I cannot wait for you to… to get darkened.”

“Make no mistake. When I am going down, you are going down with me.”

“Right. Well, enjoy yourself while you can. Just leave me alone,” I say and walk towards the dorm.

“No, oh no. You and I, we are just getting started,” she announces loudly and laughs in disbelief. “And you’re right, unlike you, I will enjoy myself. I mean, we have known each other for only two days and this here was already the third time that you tried to get rid of me. That's exciting. Vicious when threatened… I wonder how you will attack me next.”

Her words get to me and I feel all empathy for her leaving me. I turn back to her and can see how my cold stare scares her.

"Try me."

Xerxes' announcement
equalled a social earthquake and Maya must still be shaken by it. She completely forgot to wake me up too early in the morning like she usually does. So I wake up by myself to the sound of passionate but restrained chatter of hundreds of people who are gathered outside the dorm. I get up and make my way past mostly empty beds and down to the crowd outside. Neither Maya nor anyone else I know is in the crowd but I eventually find her at the Department for Inter Mind Connectivity on the Green Island where, as it turns out, Ravi is an assistant. She took her sorrows to Ravi and forgot about me. Perfect.

When I arrive at the Green Island they are arguing about how they could remove Pax from Cosmo's Islands before she can harm its, or I'd argue their own, reputation any further. The two don’t even greet me. Merely Vijay and Aziz acknowledge that I’m here.

"Someone should put her on a bird and send her back to where she came from,” Maya says.

"This approach would entail the risk of her return to Cosmo's Islands,” Ravi argues. "We need to send her on a one-way trip. The Dark Forest hidden deep inside Fogmountains is a suitable destination. Rumor has it that once you enter the Dark Forest, you cannot exit."

“That is cruel,” Aziz comments.

“My suggestion is certainly not as cruel as the disgrace she has already brought upon us,” Ravi counters. "Pax has almost an entire cycle to further defile this institution. I don’t even want to imagine what she might do to us during this time."

"Pax has already infected Moho which is forcing Moho to exhibit the most disturbing conduct,” Maya claims.

What is happening? First Aleeya comes to my rescue not once but twice and now nominee Maya of all people comes to my rescue? And who told her of my fight with Pax last night?

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to choke her last night but I had to defend myself, right?" I ask.

"Choke?! You choked her?" Maya asks.

“Please tell me you're telling a despicable joke,” Ravi says.

I shake my head and notice how the temperature of the conversation drops even further. “What can I say? She provoked me with wro… with accusations,” I mumble. “And she talked poorly about Maya. And she was spying on Maya and me during our date.”

“Date?” Ravi repeats loudly. He is flabbergasted. And hurt. His eyes are fixated on Maya who doesn’t seem to understand his pain.

“Correct. We are currently researching a highly intriguing form of inter-navee amusement,” Maya tells him.

It appears that Ravi has finished his research in this field already. But he knows that Maya is still in the dark and so I get all his jealousy.

“You have to get a handle on your mental disease,” he snaps.

“My mental disease?” I repeat loudly with offended disbelief. “Hold on a second - weren’t you just trying to figure out how to get rid of a fellow Islander? At least I didn’t actually choke her.” 

"Shame, frantic denial, elevated heartbeat, denunciatory gestures, exaggerated posture - you show all symptoms of someone suffering from revenge. Pax has infected you,” Ravi analyzes. He is suddenly back to his eerily calm and painfully precise self. He stands there, totally unbothered
, and looks at my twitching lips, my heavily breathing chest. And I understand. I lower my raised arm and try to look as empty as he does.

“Actually, this is a very fortunate coincidence. Ravi specializes in the treatment of mental diseases,” Maya explains in a voice so relaxed that it raises the question if she is able to read the situation correctly. “I’m sure you would appreciate his meditosis sessions. I’ve always found them quite enlightening,” she says with a smile. Ravi is enjoying this compliment.

“If you say so,” I snap.

“Great. Then let’s refocus our attention to Pax,” Maya says.

“I don’t have a treatment for this disease.” Ravi sighs.

"This is your Happinessmeter,” Ravi explains.

It's the smallest space I've seen so far in CEBOS but as it is standard in CEBOS, the floor consists of this soft, thick mesh and the ceiling is glowing brightly. The difference to the other spaces is that the Essencestrings that usually run inside the walls are simply hanging from the ceiling. The golden-white Essencestring closest to me forms some flat, round
shelf filled with dozens of fist-sized Memorybubbles . Most of them are completely dark and the rest show the subtle glow of a Nightstone which must mean that I made those memories in the dorm.

Then a new small Memorybubble appears out of the mesh next to me and flies over to the other dark Memorybubbles but the shelf is already filled up. The Essencestring notices that and expands the
shelf to accommodate the new Memorybubble.

"So this here collects all my memories about sleep?" I ask Ravi.

"It represents your need for tranquility. Sleeping is one way to satisfy this need and therefore memories about sleep attach itself to your need for tranquility. It grows the more you feed it with appropriate memories,” Ravi explains.

"And the other strings represent which needs? They look a bit too artsy to identify,” I say.

“Only for the uneducated eye. Your other navee needs are social contact, status, power, acceptance, order, idealism, creation, and curiosity,” Ravi says.

I walk over to the Essencestring that is supposed to represent my need for curiosity
, which basically just looks like a globe, when one of its Memorybubbles drops to the floor. It rests there for a moment before it starts to slowly seep through the mesh into the darkness below us. It shows Victor giving me a piece of Whitefruit.

"One is urged to constantly have new experiences in order to maintain satisfaction of one's needs and happiness of one's essence. The satisfaction an experience initially provides wanes over time,” Ravi explains.

I wander around my needs and try to figure out which sculpture made of Essencestrings represents which need - but it's impossible. Some Memorybubbles exist several times but on different needs. I guess that makes sense if the same experience satisfied several needs but it prevents me from understanding which sculpture represents which need. But maybe the problem actually lies in my ‘uneducated eye’.

"I see. So why was it created?" I ask.

"For two reasons. The most important being that the more one’s need is fulfilled, the more important it becomes to one's essence. Constantly fulfilling one's need for social contact will eventually make a person more social because that person's need for social contact gains a bigger share of that person's essence."

"So are you saying that my personality is my essence?"

“The extent to which each need influences one’s essence is unique in each navee. It’s what makes you unique. It’s what makes you you.”

"But what about important experiences? They shape your personality too, right?"

“Important memories are represented by big Memorybubbles and so they cause one’s needs to grow which in turn gives that need a bigger share of one’s essence. However, the other reason for the creation of the Happinessmeter is the more satisfied one's needs are, the happier one's essence is which results in stronger Essenchi. MNOP, KNOP, TNOP, INOP and matter connectivity is only possible because of Essenchi,” Ravi claims. So that's why I'm able to mentally connect to matter.

"Does that mean you think that all you have to do to be happy is get what you want?" I ask.

"Obviously."

"But when you get what you want, you don't want it any more because you no longer need it. I think getting closer to what you want but not actually getting it is what makes you happy. That way you get some satisfaction but you still have something to strive for,” I argue.

"An even merely unfulfilled need does not lead to true happiness,” Ravi states with the usual amount of indifference towards my questions.

"Then what about satisfying your needs too much? Overconsumption makes you unhappy, right?”

"The only way to decrease your happiness is by feeding a parasite which is exactly the problem you are experiencing,” Ravi answers and walks over to what looks like a tenth Essencestring hanging from the ceiling, but this one is not glowing. There are a few Memorybubbles attached to it, most of them showing Pax. "Contact with humans is very dangerous. They spread diseases navees are not prepared to cope with. Pax infected you with this revenge need. It forces you to behave violently because it only feeds on violent memories,” Ravi explains.

The Memorybubbles attached to my revenge need show me choking Pax, pushing her off the branch of the Thoughttree, tricking her into releasing her Bellybutton Erasure memory and Xerxes attacking me during Springday. 

"So what can I do to cure myself?" I ask.

"Meditosis,” Ravi answers and disappears. So I leave CEBOS as well and find myself back in the temple.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

It’s already late in the afternoon and the light in the temple changes from yellow to orange. Even though it’s the first time I see the temple from the inside, it feels very familiar. It looks like the Memorystream in CEBOS minus the Memorybubbles. It’s just an empty space. But the way the light shines through the ceiling and runs in thin slits down the walls is an exact replica of the Essencestrings in CEBOS. However, in contrast to the Memorystream this space clearly is subject to gravity.

There are a few small groups scattered throughout the temple. We sit in an empty spot in the middle on the very soft floor that mimics the mesh-look of CEBOS.

"Revenge is a sickness,” Ravi says.

I have to laugh a little. “A sickness?”

“A sickness!” Ravi insists with a scarily straight face. I immediately sit up straighter. I feel like he is in charge now. “But it can be cured.”

“Lucky me,” I chuckle, trying to take the seriousness out of this conversation
, but to no effect. All I get from Ravi is a sustained stare.

“I have combined the enlightening powers of meditation and the awareness-altering powers of hypnosis into a method called
—”

“Meditosis,” I remember and he nods, albeit slightly disgruntled by my interruption.

"Over the course of this multiple-cycle long therapy we will meditate on the absurdity of violence. Once we have understood the consequences of violence and thereby changed our consciousness, we will move on to hypnosis to do the same for our subconsciousness. That way we ensure that your essence is truly healed,” Ravi explains.

“Why do you do it?” I ask.

“Prophylaxis,” he says, and I remember that he thinks humans like Pax are infectious. Then he closes his eyes before giving me any instructions. I have never meditated before so I simply start to hum.

"We meditate in silence,” Ravi lectures me.

And, I mean, wow! Silence has never been that loud. We sit there for hours that feel like days and I can't even hear him breathe. The only way to check on him is to move a tiny bit, which he always hears and always punishes with a dismissive look. At first I can hear myself breathe but that sound fades away after a while. Then I start to hear my very slow heartbeat and yet even this sound fades away at some point. My back begins to hurt but I suppose Ravi doesn’t want me to meditate lying on the floor. Then there is silence for a while but the silence grows louder and louder in my ear. It becomes unbearable. I get the impression that meditation is actually making me mentally ill instead of healing me. Needless to say, when the session is finally coming to an end, I didn't meditate on the ‘absurdity of violence’ for a second.

"That felt really good,” Ravi says slowly and exhales even slower.

"So good,” I repeat.

"That was really deep,” he says to himself.

"So deep,” I repeat once more.

“You must be so much happier already after your first Meditosis session.”

“Indeed. Now that it’s over I am much happier,” I say but he doesn’t get it.

"I am looking forward to the next session tomorrow."

"Oh, me too. I'm terribly excited,” I lie and stand up.

"Meditosis is a lengthy process but in the very end, you will be enlightened,” Ravi claims, now looking into the bright ceiling with a smile
, seeming disconnected with the situation at hand. The prospect of this repeating itself daily for multiple cycles makes me want to cry.