THE PROPHET JON
The light of the day was dying fast, like a beast in the field at the end of its life, struggling through the louvres, spotlighting the layer of dust that caked the glass panes. I stood, towards the end of the wall, peering out at the world beyond. Shadows slanted in all directions, differing shapes and sizes, various tints and grades of black and grey, infecting the world, dragging everything in it deeper into the oncoming darkness. Soon there would be nothing to see, imagination playing a part in what might be, memory recounting what actually was. Leaves rustled on the ground as an evening breeze riddled through the long grass, moving everything around in tight little swirls.
My eyes shifted back to the window panes, then to the wire mesh in front of them. Insects buzzed across it, frustrated at their failure to access the lights on in the room behind me. I took a deep breath but all I smelt was dust and earth, the smells carried listlessly by the continuing breeze outside. I turned my head, looking over my shoulder at the seats filling up. Today people were earlier, encouraged by the drop in temperature that day to seek warmth before the cold outside worked its way into their bones. The heaters were on, a fire burning steadily in the fireplace directly behind me. Tea, coffee, sandwiches and biscuits sat on a table at the back of the room. But no one had touched anything, their hands were empty. For they had not come for the bread offered by man but for the words of the Prophet. For man does not live on bread and crumpets alone but from each and every word that proceeds from the mouth and mind of the Prophet Jon.
There had been more than one prophet though. That’s a problem you have when you’re a clone and everyone is as well. You all talk the same, sound the same because you generally come from the same primordial soup. Now there was only one, me. I was the one true prophet. The false ones were dead and buried, out in unmarked graves so no homage could be paid to them by their followers, scattered to the winds like cockroaches when the lights come on. I abhorred violence but the culling was a consequence of a natural sequence of events that had played out for the past thirty years. The first prophet appeared when I was ten and one every year after that. I appeared in the fifth year of the prophets and as time went on my predictions and visions proved to be stronger than all the other prophets combined. It didn’t take long after a prophet’s appearance to attract a following and just like a celebrity, the position came with status. I never had to ask for anything again, it was given to me without asking. My disciples made sure to lay the world at my feet, without me having to say a single word. As my ‘utterings’ increased in frequency and accuracy, so did my following. It triggered a negative reaction in the others, both those before and after me. Their power decreased in direct proportion to my gaining in strength. This led to accusations of devil’s magic on my part, accusations of me stealing their power and gifts through blood pacts with fallen angels. Nonsense of course, but not to them, how else could they explain what was happening to them and to me, especially since I was clearly the one benefitting from their loss?
They must decrease while I must increase. I carried the world on my shoulders. I told them this (a poor choice of words, I admit in retrospect, but it was an uttering and something I had no control over). The truth was no one knew where the power we had to say the things we said came from. Like singing, you could or you couldn’t. The utterings were like the urge to pee. You did it. Period. No option, no choice about any of it. You could keep it to yourself, talk to walls but that only made the urge worse, building up like a mental geyser in your mind until you were babbling non-stop. That’s how everyone else knew you had the gift of prophecy. It seized you when you least expected. We knew things about the world that weren’t in books, things that we would have had to wander beyond our present stations in life to know and learn. Prophet is a misnomer; while prophecy was part of the gift, we could more accurately be described as teachers, custodians of knowledge, soothsayers and keepers of the secrets the Universe was ready to give up. That was power and power was addictive, something none of the other Prophets wanted to give up. That’s when the fighting started, different factions facing off in a bid to regain what they had lost. They had come to believe that if they killed me, the power that I had siphoned off for myself would somehow disburse and return to them. It was a theory that would never be proved because I saw it coming and I had the tools and means to defend myself. My following was the biggest in the city, not bigger than the rest of the other prophets’ groupings combined, but still a force to be reckoned with. We had the knowledge to outmatch and outclass the others. The war dragged on for three years, intense sporadic skirmishes all clumped into one tight mess, but in the end, we were victorious. The remaining prophets were all executed, a mere handful by the time the war ended, to discourage any future and potential rebellions. I had wanted a peaceful resolution but I had no power over blood that begins to boil in the veins of men, in need of periodic release. It was a dark part of me, us, that could not be tamed and that I had come to accept. In the end, there could be no challenge to established truths. All falsehood and attempts are the same, needed to be wiped out and erased, covered in sand and stones where time would assign them to oblivion and they’d eventually be forgotten, even by memory.
The seats were almost full, wooden pews carved in the shape of half-moons and arranged in a radial pattern. I put a hand to the wall and pushed, moving backwards towards the gathering. It was a large room, but not large enough for all my disciples. These were the ones closest to me. They would take my teachings and teach them to the rest as gospel truth. My eyes fell over the crowd, taking in all the faces, my face, repeated over and over. I knew that we were clones, that there was a ‘first’ us from whom we all descended but this was never really a concern for anyone except me. Trying for an answer to the question was like peering into a dark room, bad lighting all around and seeing nothing but objects cloaked in obscurity. The answer never came no matter how long I yelled or squinted.
The room settled, faces turned towards the teacher, waiting earnestly for that evening’s lesson.
“I am going away,” I began slowly. The reaction was as I had expected. Eyes widened, mouths dropped, hands squeezed together, feet shuffled forward, then back again.
“Where are you going, Teacher?” A disciple on my left asked.
“Somewhere I can’t tell you because I honestly don’t know.”
Brows creased, confusion setting in.
“But how is this so, Teacher?” another disciple from the back of the pews asked. “Don’t you know all things?”
“Most things are not all things. And how does one know that things one claims to know are all things, when one can never really know how much there is to ever truly know?”
Heads nodded, small smiles here and there. I had just dropped another pearl of convoluted wisdom they would mull over repeatedly in the days to come.
“Will you come back?” another asked.
“Yes, I will,” I lied.
“Can we come with you?”
“You cannot come where I am going. Those who I go to will not let you come.”
One disciple shot to his feet, hand in the air, shaking it in a tight fist.
“We’ll kill anyone who dares lay their hands on you!” he yelled. Others rose to their feet, clamouring their support. I held up my hands, the expression on my face sombre.
“There has been enough blood spilled. He who comes is greater than I am. He has amassed more knowledge. We would not survive.”
Hands dropped, the lines of confusion deeper this time.
“Is he a prophet like yourself?”
I shook my head.
“He is something greater. He is something more, there before any of us ever were. When the time is right, he will reveal himself. He must increase, so I must decrease. Then the scales will fall from all our eyes and we shall have a deep understanding of things I can barely explain now.” A sadness I could feel like fabric against my skin, descended over the gathering.
“But take heart and do not despair,” I said smiling, walking forward, shaking hands that had begun to tremble, raising my hand to eyes that had started to tear and to lips that had started to quiver. “I have seen a great light in the valley. We are going towards the state of being I have preached countless times over the year. Be steady and stay true to that faith.”
The smiles returned and I raised my arms, wrapping them around two of my disciples and guiding them towards the table laden with drinks and snacks at the back of the room, everyone gathering around, laughing and smiling. The fear had passed but I knew it was far from over. I’d had only one vision the entire week, simply rehashing past messages to allay fears that I had lost the gift. All I could see when I closed my eyes was darkness spread across an empty horizon. The light was nowhere to be found.
JON 316
I can smell coffee and fresh bread in the air, although I am standing in a field of ankle high grass, the grass beginning to pollinate. Snow white butterflies float through this field and I am mesmerized for a few seconds, admiring their inborn will to be free, not asking anyone for permission to enjoy that freedom. I look up at the fading sky, almost three hours until the sun is swallowed up by the horizon. Maybe less. The days are shorter this time of the year and I know that the Prophet Jon is preparing for his daily teaching. I don’t know what he is going to tell his disciples, only he has the power of foresight. I’m sure it will be grand. Something to convince them that he is the one to fall on their swords for, the only true one remaining after the false ones were removed. I close my eyes and remember those days turning into night with the chaos that reigned. People were willing to kill for the truth, others died because of the lies. I know this because I saw it happen and then I saw the field, one thing after the other. Objects cannot occupy the same space and time even something as seemingly intangible as memory. I had to unlearn a long time ago, that time is not linear, rather a vibrating circle, the past, present and future occurring one after the other, like ripples on the surface of water caused by a stone, bouncing back and forth through the physical limitations of our state of being.
Now I can perceive the burnt smell of carcasses, the acrid smell of bombs, their vibrations as they fall to the ground, opening it up and wounding it over and over again. I have seen this all before, in the past and the future that came attached to it. I’ve never questioned these events, they must occur so that there is room for more perhaps, but that answer is never satisfactory because I know it is half the truth and maybe just all lies. I have lived here for many years, visiting the towns and communities in the surrounding areas, where the Communities of Jon live. These places are not like where the Prophet lives, they are more peaceful, more grounded, more in touch with a sense of purpose. They farm the land, work the mines, establish industries as they are needed and pay homage to the Creator, the primary consciousness of us all. I’ve lost count of how many there have been over the years but their end is close at hand too. I have seen the future attached to the present memory. They will die peacefully; Jon the Creator will grant them that. They will be swallowed up by clouds of fire and turned to ash. And after the great crushing, it will start all over again. I frown; a memory of trees growing tall and strong amidst the blood and bones laid to rest in a killing field. The grass has given way to forest, the sound of people laughing and singing but they look different. Their clothes are different, the times are different. But they have happened before. Time is a spot one keeps running on over again, a state of being that moves neither left nor right but back and forth. Energy thrown out into the Universe only to come back again like a boomerang, only to be thrown out again to come back again… I’m not sure how many ripples I have gone through but what I do know is that they become shorter when the Condensation is about to occur. The Condensation is what I call the moment the ripples finally stop. That’s when the skies turn black. And the ground red, soaked through and through with the blood of us.
FIRST JON
The sky below me rumbles; flashes of lightning to the far east, followed by a huge flock of birds fleeing the oncoming storm. My hands are folded across my chest, my head bent slightly. There isn’t much to look at this high up, what one generation of Jons called my ‘blinkering tower of arrogant ivory’. I wouldn’t try to remember how long ago that was. Either 2nd Jon or Jon III would know but I couldn’t be bothered to ask. It wasn’t important. What was important was that this timeline was wrapped up and the next one began without a hitch. That was all that mattered. It was why I had come here in the first place.
The moon and Mars had been successfully colonized when I left Earth. I didn’t want any part in those oddball projects. Wastes of time. I mean, who spends millions of taxpayers’ money trying to terraform two planet sized dustbowls? Exoplanets had been discovered; habitable worlds were a dime a dozen. Life on Earth was not a fluke after all. It was everywhere and anywhere one turned their telescope. I was stationed out on Mars when I got the idea. Build a spaceship and find my own spot in the stars. Simple enough. Easier said than done but when you’re a software engineer, getting hardware to do what you want isn’t half as hard. I had to work in secret obviously and it was slow at first. I spent the rest of my entire first life putting my ship together, making sure it got to where I had picked out. Sure, there were expeditions carried out by the International Space Administration but those were light years from successful planetary exploration or colonization. Budget cuts. I wasn’t going to wait for that. A trip for one would be just fine.
I died a few months before my ship landed on a small moon just beyond Pluto. My clone emerged from its pod and set about adapting to the environment. I won’t go into details but let’s just say creation is a lengthy and messy business. Steering evolution in a direction you want is mind bending, back-breaking, gut-wrenching and ball-busting work, and not all can do it. You need to be brilliant like I was. How did I do it? The answer lay with my cloning machine. I simply cloned myself over and over again; brilliance all around.
Everything reaches a point of diminishing returns, the point where peak performance butts heads with inefficiency and counter-productivity sets in. Each cloning cycle could only produce thirty–three clones at a time before the ‘dumbing down’ effect set in. low IQs ran rampant, with those way below sixty becoming the norm. I had to supplement and complement my workforce with replicator technology, careful not to create a situation where a machine singularity occurred. I had no intention of making it that far only to become a slave to machines of my own creation.
The planet was home to a variety of animals, nothing remotely approaching intelligent life on a human level. If natural history had taught us anything, it was that everything had its time. I catalogued every single life form, studied them all and determined those that could pose a potential threat in terms of achieving dominance. None have risen to the challenge. What I didn’t realize at the time, was that the greatest threat and challenge to my self-rule would be me.
I established towns every five hundred kilometers, in different environments, forcing myself in all my forms to adapt. This would, I believed, make me more formidable, pushing my evolution further along faster. The possibility of what I would become was exhilarating. Whenever a clone died, its consciousness was filtered through the primary consciousness. The first clone was based on my original self but divided into three. This way there was more room for the uploads upon death. To avoid data saturation, similar experiences across time and space were deleted. Only that deemed consolidating was kept.
One would think that because one has made oneself in their exact image, then the replicas would agree with everything the primary would say. I learned the hard way that was a lie. They may look like you, but in essence, every clone is eventually a different version of you. Like having a child, one cannot control what it will become during its life, be it long or short. Differences were going to arise, that they would do things at odds with the primary conscious.
The first rebellion started in Settlement 143, a warm climate town. I had edited sexual urges from my DNA, in a bid to free myself from having to deal with them, a burden on my time I could not afford. The thought of pleasuring myself with ‘myself’ was not what I had in mind for my future. I had been raised Catholic and firmly taught that all self-pleasure was in fact self-abuse. I was at present asexual, had been for a long time. Settlement 143 demanded that they be allowed to override this, they had the mental impulses but they failed to actually materialize in the flesh. I told them that they were me and I was them, and as the Creator, they could not question decisions made by me for me. They refused to accept this and reverse engineered their tech to become fighting machines, bombing other towns into submission; those that would not take up their cause were annihilated into oblivion. I put them down eventually, their living memories shredded and trashed. It set me back a couple of decades but it was an invaluable learning curve. Laws were created, the Book of Jon codified and written in stone pillars in each settlement, placed in the town hall and the allegiance to the Creator grafted into their DNA.
Inducing allegiance at a cellular level had its limitations too. You could only do that for a certain number of generations before it had a dumbing down effect as well, the clones becoming mindless slaves who did everything they were told without question. I didn’t need robot versions of me. I needed beautiful minds that mirrored my innovation and genius. Zombies would not do.
A movement on my left. Jon the 2nd wiped his nose, his handkerchief held tightly in both hands. I made a face.
“What?” he said. “Don’t look at me like that. You’re acting like you’ve never had a cold before. I am you and you are me. You like to forget that.”
“Thanks for the snotty reminder,” I said. “But you won’t catch me holding on to it like a Dear John letter after I’ve just used it. You want to spread that booger everywhere, is that it?”
“And you’re a dramatic prick,” he said. He nodded at the window. “Getting antsy at things to come?”
“Killing people in their hundreds isn’t something I want to get used to,” I said. “It’s not good for the soul or the mind. It’s how psychopaths are born.” Jon III appeared from a side room. He was carrying a tablet in his one hand, the other stuffed into his trouser pocket. He raised the tablet.
“We determined that killing off generations at regular intervals eliminated the problems we encountered at the beginning. I doubt we came all this way to create another Earth, with all its wars and woes.”
“The desire for autonomous rule is inherent in every human,” Jon the 2nd said after another hefty sneeze. “Whatever put us here must have met with the same problem and left us to our own devices. Humans still don’t know what to do with that desire, and they’ve still not figured out the best way to use freedom when they’re finally granted it. Too much of anything is a bad thing. Checks and balances are necessary, even if they come in the form of broken skulls.”
“You can’t say you won’t control people and rule over them at the same time,” I said. “A contradiction of terms if there ever was one. I’ve never believed in that kind of thing. People don’t know what they are, who they are or where they want to go. Societies are moving parts of a whole, pulling and pushing in every direction all at once. That’s not progress, that’s stumbling about. By guiding this world, we provide it with a singular purpose, all geared towards the advancement of our ideals. Heaven or even the road that leads to it is not a democracy.”
“A theocracy has been defined as dictatorship simply wrapped up in religious edicts,” Jon III said, swiping at his tablet.
“We’re not gods yet but we’re slowly getting there,” I said. “I was able to conduct terraforming on the Abyssinian Plains yesterday by merely looking at drone footage.”
Both Jons were clearly impressed.
“I can create some shift in weather patterns but not much,” Jon the 2nd said. “Work in progress.”
“We’re all works in progress,” Jon III said. “Prophet Jon is ready for extraction and Jon 316 is safely in his bunker. The drones are on stand-by. I’m running last minute diagnostics.”
I nodded, a heaviness weighing down on my chest. In the next couple of days, a lot of people were going to die. Parts of me. Over and over again. Idiosyncrasies aside, they were still all me. The three of us, me, Jon the 2nd and Jon III would be semi-conscious over the next three weeks as memories uploaded, sifted and sorted. After it was over, all three of us would have ascended to higher plains of existence. Certain things would make sense, changes would be made wherever changes needed to occur. And the new Jons that would be created out of the ashes of the old world below would discover that freedom came at a price. It was something they would never forget, part of their collective memory. Settlements 143 and others like it served as examples for subsequent generations. There would always be anomalies, I accepted that, rogue parts of me running amok, trying to challenge my established authority. But they were part of the bigger picture too, they served an important function. Sowing seeds of death so life anew could be reaped thereafter. A king was no king without his subjects, loyal or treacherous and every kingdom was built on blood and bones. Utopia didn’t exist simply because you wanted it too. You had to make it, brick by brick. Body by body. Yes, freedom came with a price, all paid for in blood.
Another rumble of thunder and the sky darkened as a stack of rain clouds broiled through my field of vision.
“Diagnostics done,” Jon III announced. “Machines are set and ready to go. Primary mainframe online, cerebral banks on stand-by.”
I nodded.
“Proceed.”
He swiped at his tablet again. A few seconds later, iridescent explosions flashed beneath the clouds below.
It had begun.
