Moho (Part One: Rise of a Symbol) (7 page)

“At the count of three,” she tells me, her eyes still closed. “One.”

I turn my head towards Maya and beg her with my eyes to come to me.

“Two.”

I hold my Memorybubble behind Maya's back. She doesn’t seem to understand what is going on but she grabs it nonetheless. Then she leaves. Before it's too late and Pax notices my trick, I quickly stretch my empty arms into the air and pretend to have let go of the Memorybubble.

“Freedom.”

Pax actually lets go of hers which soars into the background and disappears into the sea of other Memorybubbles. I stand there for a moment, not knowing what to expect next. Then I hear
Pax’s voice.

“We did it Moho! We actually did it!” she screams and jumps up and down. Ah… the sweet feeling of relief. She actually believes I did it. Ridiculous.

She looks at me and… it's weird… but for the first time since I met her last night, I see her. All the tension, fear, and pretense are gone. Suddenly she is real. I see her as the scared, complicated, flawed and yet somehow lovable human being she is. What is wrong with me? What have I done?

Then I make it even weirder and hug her. She hugs me, too. We have an intimate, honest moment during which none of us is saying anything. I move my hands slowly up and down her back and feel how she moves her face closer against my neck. I feel her body on my body. She feels good.

Then the inevitable happens. The Memorybubbles behind her move apart and three people in shiny white bodysuits walk straight towards us. Two of the Chasteners stretch out their arms, grab Pax and end our moment. The third one, Xerxes, turns towards Pax.

“It has come to our attention that you are human,” he says.

“Yes, I am. Human and proud,” Pax says happily. “And so is Moho.”

“What do you have to say for yourself?” Xerxes asks me.

“I don’t know what she is talking about,” I respond and Pax cannot believe what she is hearing.

“I thought so,” Xerxes says and leaves. The other two Chasteners follow. Pax gives it all she has and tries to
resist but she doesn’t stand a chance against the two Chasteners. They pull her away.

“That’s a lie! Search for the Memorybubble! Moho has just released it! Liar!” she screams but no one listens to her. Soon, they are gone and her voice
fades behind the countless bubbles.

I feel dizzy, my knees are weak. The light flickers one more time. Then it goes out completely.

“I went on KNOP last night,” Maya tells me.

“And that is?” I ask.

“Knowledge Network of Persadia,” Maya answers.

“Of course.”

It is a warm and clear but very early morning on Element Islands. Even the wind and the waves are still asleep. As usual, Maya woke me up without prior warning and made me go to a session about matter connectivity. She swore that a workout of one’s essence, or 'essencial workout' as she calls it, before breakfast is the best way to start the day. I suggested to her she should try sleeping in which is by far the best way to start any day, but here we are. To my surprise there are several other tutor-learner couples waiting with us for our mentor Luna, who is the head of the Department of Mind-Matter Connectivity. But contrary to what her name suggests, she seems to prefer the bright daylight. And so we wait. And wait.

“So, anyway, I went on KNOP to do some research on the question you asked me in your Well
of Emotions yesterday,” Maya continues.

I don’t immediately know what she is talking about but then I remember. I nod and ask, “So, what’s the difference between human and navee emotions?”

“I couldn’t find a precise differentiation. KNOP is damaged in some respects,” she explains. “But I stumbled upon something else. I’ve always wondered what happened on the Red Island before it was closed. And there was this one woman on KNOP that had instructions for one of the exercises they performed on the Red Island. They called it 'date'.

Wow. I mean, she is losing absolutely no time. I pretend I’m hearing the word for the first time myself because after all she loves lecturing. “So what is it about?” I ask.

“It’s a highly intriguing concept. Two people meet and engage in a social activity with the sole purpose of determining if the other navee’s essence completes one’s own.”

“So a navee’s essence isn’t complete by itself?” I ask.

“I did not find any information about this.” Maya answers.

“No, I mean, do you think that your essence isn’t complete without another essence?”

“I’m not certain. Maybe we should do some research,” she suggests.

“Tonight?” I ask.

“Excellent! I had the same idea. I think it will be a great learning experience,” she says excitedly. Maya probably really wants to do it for the research but I want to use the opportunity to show her why they actually invented this ‘exercise’.

As the sun rises, more and more people show up on Element Islands but none of them is called Luna.

The chain of countless small islands, or islets, which is more what they really are, that make up the Element Islands establishes the southernmost boundary of Cosmo’s Islands. There is another island south of Element Islands but it’s very far away and not part of Cosmo’s Islands. The Islanders call it ‘Fogmountains’ which is quite appropriate since it looks like a mountain chain covered in dense fog. I wonder who lives there but that is unknown according to Maya. She has never been there and doesn’t know anyone who has. When I flew in on my first day I noticed how much larger Fogmountains were compared to Cosmo’s Islands and so I find it odd that no one seems interested in exploring the mountain chain. Anyway, somehow I'm the only one who cares.

Center Island with the Springtreegrove and the dorm is the island furthest to the North. Maze Island, where we went to set up my CEBOS, connects the two areas. All the other departments are located on islands to the East and to the West and they are all somehow connected by land bridges. I could walk around Cosmo’s Islands without ever stepping into the ocean.

I love the ocean, and while all Islanders do, going into the ocean is forbidden. On our way from the dorm to Element Islands this morning, I put my toes into the ocean which did not go over well with Maya. As it turns out, no one is allowed to touch the ocean or any other water that is not falling from the sky. According to Maya, a new Spring could appear in any ocean or lake at any time and there were periods when Persadia had more than one Spring. The only time a navee is allowed to touch the ocean is when the navee is created in The Spring. They also don’t call it water but ‘liquid of creation’. They do love creation.

This morning I also learned how they use Element Islands
and train to become Creators. Most islets are basically piles of a single material, many of them metals like copper, zinc, silver, gold or aluminum. Others, like the one we are waiting on, are more traditional. Ours, for instance, is just sand and a few perfectly round, small stones that glisten purple green.  I pick one up and play with it. It’s very light.

Luna is still nowhere to be seen and I become impatient. Maya isn’t very patient herself and suggests we should just start without her. Fine with me.

In a moment of uncharacteristic resoluteness, she takes the little stone out of my palm and stands up.

“Get up and stretch out your arms towards me,” she commands me to and so I do. When my hands reach hers
, she takes another step backwards so I can no longer reach her hand. “I want you to focus on the stone in my hand.” The stone rests on her open palm and I just look at it. “Do you have it?”

“I guess so,” I say.

She turns her palm with the stone in it around and the stone drops to the ground. “You said you had it,” she says.

“I did look at the stone.”

“You will have to do more than just look at it. You have to widen your essence and connect it with the stone in my hands so that you can control it.”

“And how is that supposed to work?”

“In the same way you move your body, with your essence. Your body is only a pile of atoms, just like the stone in my hand. The reason your body is moving and the stone is not is because your essence is connected to every single atom in your body. Just think of the stone as part of your body. Simply move it like you would move one of your limbs.”

“That’s not the same," I point out.

“What’s the difference?”

“Well, for starters there are bones and muscles in my body. And I have a brain to tell them how to move.”

“And who is telling your brain what to do?” she asks.

“Well, I do, of course.”

“And you are your essence,” she claims, but I’m not convinced. Her attempts at explaining the impossible don’t sound plausible to me at all. But she is persistent.

“Moho, the only reason you are here is because Cosmo thinks you can do this. Remember the boy and the girl at the selection and how skilled they were? But they were not selected. Cosmo thinks you can do better. All you need to do is open yourself up for the possibility that it might work instead of believing in its impossibility. Nothing would move without an essence connected to it. That’s the difference between you and this stone in my hand. Simply widen your essence. Spread yourself around.”

Big mistake on Cosmo's part. Picking one of the two contestants would have been a much wiser decision.

Maya is barely recognizable in her role as tutor. She is unpleasantly clear in what she wants, she isn’t impacted by my skepticism at all and yet there is still something alluring in the way she dictates
to me what to do. I don’t want to disappoint her and she is obviously not going to give up, so I simply try again. She holds up the stone and I begin staring at it. We stand there for a while in complete silence before she suddenly ends the silence.

“Very good, Moho. You see, it is possible,” she says. “Try to grab the stone but don’t move your feet.”

She has pulled back her arm that was holding the stone, leaving the stone dangling in midair. It really looks like it is floating. I reach out my hand and try to grab it but it is too far away to reach it without stepping forward.

“That’s the first time you are controlling something that is out of your reach," Maya comments correctly. "It’ll change everything, you’ll see.”

I’m sitting in the soft, long grass under a tree nearby the temple on Center Island. The sun is slowly setting, revealing the first stars in the sky, and the temperature is sinking to a more comfortable level. I can hear the waves of the ocean hitting the shore in the distance and the wind blowing through the treetops all around me.

All of the sudden, a fruit falls to the ground and bursts next to me which reminds of the Thoughttrees in CEBOS. And Pax. I wonder what happened to her. I don’t want to talk to Maya about what went down in CEBOS because I’m afraid she saw the content of the Memorybubble I gave to her in MNOP. Considering her often inaccessibly professional demeanor, it appears unlikely that she looked at the Memorybubble. But even if she did, I prefer not to know it. Maybe she will simply never mention it. I hope it can be one of those things between us we somehow don’t talk about. Like that stunt I pulled with Pax. After that she can’t seriously still be in the dark about me. She must suspect that I’m up to something and yet she didn’t make any remarks about it all day long. It’s like yesterday didn’t happen.

After she opened me up to the possibility of essence-matter connectivity, we spent the entire morning wandering around Element Islands and trained with different materials. Maya is seriously skilled in this area. As it turns out, she is an assistant at Element Islands and people kept coming up to her
asking her for advice, and she loved giving it. We had a lot of fun. But now I’m exhausted. And sore, in a sense. It doesn’t feel like a muscle that was used too much - which I didn’t. But I do feel some sort of tension in and around my head.

While I’m sitting in the grass, waiting for Maya, I start to wonder why she left me after lunch. We
had agreed to begin our date by the temple at sunset but that wasn’t terribly precise.

More and more people return to Center Island for dinner after a long day of training at the different departments and the atmosphere changes from daytime-busy to nighttime-lazy. The Springtreegrove offers the most eclectic selection of fruits but there are all kinds of plants with eatable fruits scattered around Center Island. Some fruits are just eaten cold while others are warmed up on Glowing Stones. Maya
had explained to me that the Glowing Stones have different names depending on their color, temperature, and luminosity. The dark, barely glowing, comfortably soft and slightly warm ones in the dorm that we sleep on are called ‘Nightstone’. The dark red, very hot and intensely glowing ones we use to heat up fruits are called, also quite fittingly, ‘Hotstones’.

Speaking of hot, I suddenly spot a petite figure making her way through the crowd. She moves carefully and yet decisively but what’s most distinct about
her is her outfit which, well… is missing. She isn’t exactly naked and yet she isn’t wearing any clothes either. Instead, she is covered in a thin layer of what looks like orange-beige sand that shimmers wherever it’s hit by the sun. She doesn’t leave much to the imagination and I kind of like it, I think. What I definitely don’t like is the fact that she is walking straight towards me and waves at me like she knows me. This has happened several times since the Springday celebration. Vijay introduced me to so many people and they all remember me when I walk around the Islands but I can barely remember any of them. So I usually just greet them and walk past them. This time, however, it’s too late.

“Good afternoon, Moho. You look… ordinary?” she remarks correctly. And to my surprise, ‘she’ is Maya! What?

“You don’t… I must say I’m… surprised,” I mumble, alternating between adolescent embarrassment and adult elation.

“Good. That was the intent. I went on KNOP and did more research about important elements of a date and an extraordinary outfit was one of them. I assumed this here qualified as such,” she explains. I now understand that she is unaware of the impression this outfit, or lack thereof, gives
— other than just looking bizarre.

“Yeah… I mean, it certainly is outside the ordinary,” I agree, still deeply confused and slightly disturbed by the amount of anatomic information her outfit conveys. When I open my arms to give her a hug, she hesitates.

“What are you doing?” Maya asks.

“
Research,” I answer. Then I pull her closer to me and put my arms around her body. I can barely distinguish the bones in her back from her tightly flexed muscles. I feel her heart beating against my chest. But it is not beating fast. She doesn’t seem nervous. It’s more like she doesn’t know what I’m doing this for. Wow… She really has no idea what she is getting herself into.

Then she carefully puts her arms around me and I’m suddenly reminded of Victor and that this is my first real hug after I said goodbye to him
— at least, if I don’t count Pax, which was more out of pity.

She lets go first.

“Since this exercise was performed on the Red Island, should we go there?” I ask.

“That may not be appropriate. I’ve always wanted to explore it but the Red Island is closed,” she says.

“Then let us explore it now,” I suggest.

“I don’t do anything dubious like that. Plus, I’m a nominee. Disrespecting the rules may hurt my chances of getting summoned.”

“All the more reason to do it tonight. You may not get another chance if you'll get summoned,” I argue.

She doesn’t agree but I simply start walking towards the Red Island and she doesn’t hesitate to follow. That’s what I thought.