On a screen that spans the dimensions of the wall is a face ravaged by time. The Planner, the world creator, presides over the large white room like a Titan from Greek mythology. The wrinkles on his skeletal face fold in on each other like stained parchment. Veins rise on his temples, resembling the gnarled limbs of an ancient oak tree. His hair and beard are as white as the mountain of salt on the edge of the Four Cities.
His eyes are the only things that appear untouched by age. They stare at the wispy image of the Crone as if she were the only being that exists in the room. In the world.
They have been here countless times before. It is a game of cat and mouse that ends with each cycle, only to begin again in the next.
“Must you keep them here until Tabula Rasa?” the Crone asks.
“It’s for their own good while the Officer Scyllas straighten out all the mess they were a part of.”
“What will happen to them?”
Metis’s face is smooth and expressionless. Aris is next to him, silent in forced slumber. Their bodies are in reset mode. They will not wake again until the Planner allows them to. It is his way.
The Crone wonders what is going on inside their heads. There is no conclusive data on what happens to the human mind while it is resetting. But there are parts of the brain Tabula Rasa cannot touch. She knows. It is what she has been devoting her life to protect.
“In six days, they will be brought to the hospitals—he in Lysithea and she in Callisto. As it has always been. They’ll wake up to new lives,” the Planner says.
The ancient woman looks up at the owner of the voice. Emotions dance inside his clear deep-brown eyes like fireflies on a warm night. She fears she will not be able to contain her own feelings, so she shifts her gaze to the bed where Metis and Aris lie unconscious.
“They should stay together. It’s the right thing to do,” she says.
“You know that’s not protocol.”
“What the Interpreter Center did was not protocol,” the Crone says. “Your Interpreter took some of Metis’s dreams. I think we should even out the score a little and make it fair. All you have to do is assign the couple to the same city, the same hospital room. The rest will be up to them.”
“They mean a lot to you?” the Planner asks.
She turns toward her husband on the screen. “They mean nothing to you. What are two people to the Four Cities?”
“You should know better than most what two people can do.”
They hold each other’s gaze for a long while. His penetrating stare makes her feel vulnerable. Once upon a time, it made her feel loved. The thought saddens her. She turns her back to him and sighs.
“Without their memories, they’re not a threat. It was their separation that started all this.”
“Just as Absinthe is not a threat?” he asks.
“It’s only a tool to help remember. Like Tabula Rasa is a tool to make people forget.”
“The mind needs to be wiped,” he says, “Like a room full of clutter. Tabula Rasa cleans it of prejudices and hate. With the mind a blank slate, everyone can be free from the burden of their past and move forward unchained.”
The glow around the Crone intensifies, brightening the white room with the power of a hundred stars.
“Spare me your propaganda. It’s a concoction of your belief. What you think people should be. It’s not who we are. We need our memories. They’re a part of us.”
“We’re still humans—just the best parts distilled in four-year increments. Our ideal selves,” the Planner says.
“Our ideal selves,” repeats the Crone in disbelief, “A people without the ability to learn from mistakes, without the love of another to smooth out our edges. A civilization of sleepwalkers.”
“We’ve had hundreds of years of peace. Isn’t that proof enough?”
“A hollow peace. This is your vision of paradise. Not mine. You’ve made this place into a prison with death the only way out.”
A pained expression crosses the Planner’s face. How can his wife not see it? He is the wall that stands between the Four Cities and its demise. The Last War destroyed the Old World—a fearful world. A civilization of people so afraid of losing what they had that they saw one another as enemies. A world where people had their whole life to accumulate prejudices and harbor hatreds. A lifetime to develop a taste for power and build empires.
He fears that side of human nature. He created Tabula Rasa so another atrocity would never happen. No memories. No attachment. No possession. No one needs to fight, because no one owns anything or remembers owning them. A utopia of amnesiacs. One of life’s greatest paradoxes. But it is his to protect.
The Crone looks at her husband from the corner of her eye. She loves him still. For his idealism. For his faults. He is still her Eli. The guardian of those precious few who are left. But the only way he knows how to love something is to control it.
She wants to tell him control is an illusion. Even in the precisely designed perfection the Four Cities created, based on an ideology so beautiful it was a song, it will all come tumbling down. Maybe not soon, but one day.
It has happened throughout history—ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, ancient Rome; the Mongol Empire, the Ottoman Empire; Russia, the United States, China. Powerful kingdoms, dynasties that spanned millennia, wealthy countries with military might—they all collapsed under the weight of time and at the destructive hands of humans. She knows this, but she lets him dream. With luck, they both will be gone long before the walls of the Four Cities collapse.
She looks at the two lovers. There is something in Aris and Metis that inspires hope in her. They did not want to light the world on fire with change. They simply wanted each
