The Straight and Narrow

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Alexei awoke after several hours in the rubble of his crumbled utility. The only value he had left was the value tied to humanity, and even that was in question. The base of his enemies went up in flames, and so did twenty-seven of his crew, all except for him. With the self-assured lies of him and the crew so did the clothes of his comrades burn, so all that was left of him and his people was a conscience looking for an explanation. Like everyone who seeks for that sort of answer, he would look up, and then inwards. No one to blame but me- no one to blame but us. It was not blood on his hands, it was soot. It was no theatrical victory, no death with dignity. It was a slow and recognizable descent into disgrace, that only which befitted dishonorable discharge, and he did not even get the pride of a rebellion gone wrong. This was not rebellion. This was the intent of a righteous man, for all purposes, lining the road to purgatory, as the souls of his fallen brethren skimmed the path, tossing rocks into the abyss and hoping something skips for substance. What would it take, for me to leave this world in glory again? What would I give, for a second try. After this, he realized, no matter how many tries were given, or how many universes this scenario was repeated in, he would have never anticipated the coming events, nor taken them seriously if he was informed. The fate of many, who knows how many, lied in his hands, and he let them fall through his fingers like sand through a sieve. Most of all, though- most of all- what bothered him was his name. The law of non-contradiction, the first law of logic, somehow broken just through this instant in a distant corner of the earth. It was so insignificant to him, and yet so abysmal. He had to yield his epithet, at least somehow, lest he declare that 2 plus two is five, or that there can be married bachelors, or that war never killed. At least the higher-ups accomplished a clever work-around to the latter. He couldn't call himself a defender, though he did wonder if this was determined from the beginning. Powers leagues above him using their soldiers as surrogates for a meaning long forsaken, wooden men and women slowly whittled into weapons. Nature's malleable, scraped machines. He almost pitied the puppet-masters over their victims- no matter how tossed around they became, a spark of independent conscience always left the higher with an unsatisfactory powerlessness. A rock in their shoe compared to a ground made of stone. ----- It had been three weeks at this point. He could tell by the amount of water accumulating in the trenches. One day, half an inch, then it would sink, and so on. He tracked these patterns, kept them preserved in his mind, the all-too-familiar sound of consistent sloshing and squelching only to be halted by the occasional rest- he would not second-guess his decision to desert base save for in these moments. The moments where his torture was suspended, sitting up on the edge, feet dangling and head lifted to the sky. This is undeserved, he thought, undoubtedly. The constant rhythm of limping across the field slowly shifted his perspective each time. There was an observatory, by which these things would happen, and the owner would gradually cloud its lens with scratches, streaks of the knife. Occasionally he would speak to reflections, and look away, and speak to them again, placing two fingers in front of his eyes, seeing through a small division, squinting, peering until his reflection was obscured enough. In that state were his comrades. Fading, blurry visions of the same ideal, the same general concept. The unity of the militia could only ever be retained through the slow erosion of nuance, and in that Alexei found some comfort, that he could grind away the detail of the exercises he did, to become the simple sacrifice he saw in his brethren. He would not let himself be wasted as he wasted their precious souls- no, instrumentation. Their souls would continue, their status as tools was void. Is this not mercy, he thought? Though, for a man's instrumental value to be stripped away is for a man to become a repetitive voice-box for the love of the truth, repeating it to people who already know, for those who have nothing to consume, and though it is holy, it is tragic for the survived to picture, because they cannot picture. He could not, no matter how much effort he exerted, the effort he exerted in continuing on was nothing compared to this. He would repeat phrases to God, repeat them out of remorse, repeat them out of great and terrible adoration. He was compelled, he was conscripted by his conscience. How could one simply abide without an iron, without a harsh whisper, without an incentive? Now, this was not that Alexei only valued his own rewards, it was quite the opposite. For he only found himself so inferior that he couldn't help but care for the superior. This was not always a conscious acknowledgment, before the incident. ----- He would find things, items, manufactured, which would split his little feigned dialogue, and direct his thoughts to forces outside of his control. Oh, Watchmaker, there you are in the center of the field, in the buried rifle, and the can of molded and eroded canned meat, which inexplicably carries years of institutional history. Yes, he tried to find awe in the division of labor it would have required, of the steps it went through, but it only served to further the sense of forced intentionality around these products. At once, he would reference the evidence of the image of God's ineffable glory enshrined in one of these farfetched items- "The people! The people it took!" and then denigrate the unnatural way about them, the inhumanness, the distance from himself and the fallen. He would stare into the eyes of the so-called inventors on the packaging, look upon the portraits, drill their portraits into his mind, fostering a robust gratitude, relating them somehow to those he knew. He couldn't place any immediate resemblance, but eventually he did enough hammering to find a piecemeal way to do it. He would take the eyes, and place them on a separate soldier, the mouth, and place it on another, each strand of hair, highlighted in a different way, to a different person- eventually, the mascot became an amalgamation of the muses carrying him across the trenches and he was deeply satisfied with the result. This satisfaction gave way to shame, soon enough, to have the audacity to treat them like EQUALS, then bridged into the uncanny valley.. was he beginning to forget their faces, individually, in this falsely placed collective? He soon realized he was seeking to solve a cipher that never existed in the first place, and in the effort to condense his comrades into this one figure he had condensed them into the can- and for this, he was disgusted.