Story:The End of Eternity/E2

 II 

A wasteland of cold, immoral, unjustifiable decisions and inexcusable crimes.

That was all the world was to him.

Arend Vitalis walked the streets of the large city with his hands in his pockets as usual. He walked with a self-assured, confident swagger, but his body held no such arrogance or self-confidence at all. He walked the way he did, unconsciously and unaware of anything in his path, simply because he believed that he was above all existence, and it showed in his manner. Anyone in his presence took cues from just his walk alone that he was superior, and that inferiority was all they would ever amount to.

This was not because Vitalis was a conceited man, nor did he go out of his way to believe that he was better than anyone else, but rather because of the particular philosophy he believed in with all his heart and soul. Arend hated everything in existence, equally and strongly. However, in every organism that exists – even a mindless insect – is a strong and unyielding sense of self-preservation. In Arend’s case, although he hated himself as much as he hated everything else he laid his eyes on, there was an unconscious mindset in his psyche that placed him an inch higher than everything else in the world. Although it was unconscious, the fact remained that he hated himself a little bit less than he hated everything else around him.

That rule was especially strong as he wandered the city.

He did not remember the name of this city, nor any of the cities he had lived in before, but he knew the way to his home quite well. It always seemed to follow the same route, he had long ago realized, but this was a mystery he had never bothered to investigate. Of all things, it was a mystery not worth his time in sleuthing.

The move had come unexpectedly, just as before, and was unjustified, just as with every other time. His parents barely ever spoke to him and never bothered to answer any question he ever had. The only things they seemed to be good at were garnering sympathy from strangers – always the strangers with money – and making sure they survived. They were like animals in this regard, in that they did anything they could to survive. It was amazing how dedicated they were to being professional beggars, but then, it took such hardy survival skills in order to prosper in this world.

He never saw them work an honest day of their lives, nor did he ever glimpse in their eyes the pride and content that shines in the eyes of one who has a fruitful career and a loving family, yet he had never a day gone hungry, even if they were homeless at the time. And when their business of sorts began to slow down, and it looked like things were about to get hairy for the small family, his parents pulled him from school and they moved to some distant city.

They were alive and weren’t starving, wanting for resources, or hurting, but Arend hated it all the same. They lived off the generosity of others and contributed nothing to the society around them. There was nothing they could do for anyone else and nothing any of them did would ever amount to anything. Were they no better than slugs? Is that all that they could hope for, was living such a life? Could that even be called living?

After a while, Arend had learned not to care about what his parents did or what they planned. He hated his parents with a vicious, burning passion, but in its own way, the aggression was no stronger than the same feelings he had for everything else he held.

The boy didn’t care about anything in school and never liked being at home any longer than he had to, so since a young age, he spent most of his days wandering around the landscapes of various cities and watching the world spin and turn. He watched people, all the time, and noticed the effects they had on their environment. He was never pleased. It was amazing, he had always thought, how creative the human consciousness could be, how intuitive some of its minds could be, but how utterly brainless most humans acted. Everywhere he looked, pollution rotted the nearby area, or overpowering greed and vile sin had caused some person to neglect someone or something they loved. Regularly, innocent people, animals, and natural objects died at the hands of their peers. He would hear of wars being fought between people and unimaginable amounts of money being spent on frivolous expenditures while people starved and were killed in peaceful and poor nations. He saw people dying on the streets, murdered by fellow humans, animals kicked out of warm homes due to neglect or disinterest, even humans taking their own lives because of what other humans had said or done to them. He thought that he had seen every sin there was to see in the world.

Did the Collapse do this to the human population? Even though every radio and every government press release and every bureaucratic worker swore that the human race was advancing ever further into the horizon of the future, that technology and the “human convenience” was evolving faster than nature could ever provide, all Arend ever saw was sin, everywhere he looked. No, he knew, this wasn’t something the Collapse had wrought. Sin and worthlessness was simply a human trait, one that could never be shaken off – if otherwise, would the Collapse have even happened in the first place? Would, as its name suggested, the previous world have collapsed so spectacularly if humans hadn’t induced such destruction?

He couldn’t answer this himself, and he wasn’t sure if he was really qualified to search for the answer, so Arend began to search instead for something to prove him wrong. Some shining beacon of hope, a sign that people weren’t all bad, that collective intelligence and hopefulness could prevail in the face of avarice. But no matter how long and how often he looked, watched, searched, all he ever saw was more sin and more pain.

It didn’t take long for him to decide that he had seen enough. He began to hate the very lights of hope he was once searching for.

There was always a possibility for change, in all things, but he knew the weakness of the human heart would never recover from what it had degraded into. As a child and in his adolescence, instead of worrying about teasing others or playing with toys or studying elementary schoolwork, Arend Vitalis would wander around his various urban domains and come up with imaginary solutions, theoretically easy resolutions for what struck every part of the world as immortal truths of tragic mortality. He didn’t know why no other person had apparently come up with these ideas, or better yet he knew that they had, but never decided to implement them. In his eyes, simply because it hadn’t yet improved its state of being across the board, all of humanity was responsible for its decline. He decided that he hated all of humanity for this.

These beliefs did not stem from any misguided sense of self-righteousness or a moral need for judicial rights in the world. Arend Vitalis truly did not care about any other human beings in the world and barely showed any self-preservation for himself. He simply observed, and gained knowledge as he watched, and his theories were proven right again and again no matter where he went. Humans would always sin. The world would always buckle beneath human influence.

Thus, humanity was the problem.

Arend did not get these ideals from studying any books or listening to any great minds, because he naturally shunned any form of schoolwork. The contrary was true; he was destined for these resolutions; they were his and he was theirs.

Even this was not a sign of his own egotism, which was indeed nonexistent. He simply knew these things, and did not feel it within his power to contest them, so he never did. He spent his time pondering and thinking of more serious issues, concerns he might be able to come up with a solution with. Although he often indulged in this practice as he stood watching and observing, there was only one solution that Arend came to every time, no matter what issue he was discussing, and the answer fit every question like a glove. This answer was that he knew humanity was declining and must be eradicated, and because he knew it without any doubt, he found this to be a universal truth, and found comfort in it.

He did not question these truths nor did he seek to have them unraveled. The simple fact that they were universal truths were all that he needed. Arend Vitalis thought of the world in terms of universal truths, and they were the only things he put any trust into. Besides the fact that humanity must come to an end, he also knew somewhere deep inside that he would watching the world as it ended. It became all that he wanted, so much so that his only ambition as he became a teenager was to discover what was going to cause the apocalypse and study it, so that perhaps in its last blaze of tarnished glory, he might be able to see an iota, fleeting but real, of reason in the blazing star of humanity.

He hadn’t always been alone throughout his childhood, but any companions he made soon left his presence because of his dark musings and isolated behavior. As a child, Arend was talkative and enjoyed telling his “friends” about some of the things he thought of, but they were always more than what the children could fathom, and they were either irritated or frightened by him. It didn’t take long for Arend to realize that he was driving people away, so he soon learned to speak only when necessary and never to share his deepest ideas with anyone, for they would never be able to understand. What he dreamed of would only drive people away; in that aspect, companionship and relationships were painful. Other humans were pain, in and of themselves. He knew, from that moment on, that he would always be alone, and that nobody could ever love him or get close to him, because he was different. He was neither superior nor inferior; he was simply the herald and the observer of the end times. Nobody did believe him, but that didn’t matter, and he simply lived the rest of his life in proud yet sorrowful silence.

Arend’s parents never knew what to do with him, and never had the chance to try doing too much. They were always incredibly busy with doing whatever it was that they did, and they both saw the changes in their son as time went on, but neither knew how to confront him about them, and soon became afraid of the boy as he grew more and more insightful. At some point, Arend didn’t remember exactly when, they had simply stopped speaking to him altogether. By then, Arend had long since given up sharing his truths, and was not hurt by his parent’s virtual abandonment of him.

His sister was the only living family he had that hadn’t abandoned him on some level, but even then, he knew that there was no point and no purpose to be had in growing close to her and loving her like a normal person would have done. If there was anything he saw more often than pain in the world, it was love, and he could see the clear connections between love and sin. If love didn’t invite sin, it provoked it; and if that failed, it would without a doubt induce pain.

But while his parents and most of his friends had abandoned Arend within a short time of knowing him, there were only two people he had ever known to actively make an effort to get to know him and stay in his presence. Now, as an older teen, he did not remember these two people’s names or faces, but he knew one of them was a girl and one was a boy. When he lived in a large western city, awash with technology and sprawling with poverty and economic ruin (like every other city in the world), Arend had spent time in the urban landscape much as he usually did; blankly attending school and philosophizing in the day, wandering the streets and watching humanity in the night. By the time he had realized the two people were always following him, they had been doing the practice for days, and they agreed to join him in whatever it was he was always doing, even against his strongest protests.

Arend had suspected that the two were siblings, for they were themselves always together, but this was only a conjecture he did not care to prove. They did not look alike, but they were indeed always in the presence of the other, which is to say that they whenever he saw them, they would be following him around. When he was thirteen, they had grown attached to almost all of his theories, and had loved to hear them; by then, he had grown to hate saying them. But share he did, and listen they did, and for the first time, Arend saw how radical his ways were when juxtaposed with normal people.

But they were not intimidated like anyone else he had ever spoken to. If anything, the two dingy students began to admire Arend, as if they recognized his inner greatness and were bowing to a great conquest king. They viewed his every action and thought as if it were something to be worshipped, not from some regal difference in class, but because of an unconscious bowing to his nature. He didn’t know where this came from, nor did he particularly enjoy it, but eventually he ignored it.

They died not long after that.

Their cause of death had been a mechanical accident, he was told. But those were lies, and he knew that from the bottom of his heart. He was with them when he died. More accurately, he had been the reason they had died.

On the course of their wandering one night, when he was almost fourteen and they were of some age he hadn’t asked about, the three of them had wandered into a factory. Factories were extremely commonplace, especially in a city, and their production would vary wildly from building to building. The particular industrial setting they found themselves in that night was one that produced convenience androids – humanoid robots with artificial, remotely controlled intelligence, built to assist the elderly or the disabled. They would have no personality at “birth” – the date they were first activated – but were programmed to grow and learn from their masters and those around them. There had never been a case of these androids ever hurting any person – to follow this rule was the very first thing introduced in their programming – until the day those two had died.

Arend was in one of his waxing moods again, and was speaking passionately upon insistence from his two friends. Looking back, they were the only people he ever considered as friends, and would likely be the only ones ever to reach this title.

He didn’t remember much besides his pain after the accident had happened. The factory floors were usually unmanned and incredibly efficient due to the human supervised machines that assembled whatever it was the factory specialized in, so there was no way to help them until minutes after the deed had already been done.

He had stopped walking, stopped wandering for just a moment, when apparently he had stepped right in the face of danger. A falling weight somewhere, a motion that was efficient for melted steel and twisted wire, but incredibly hazardous to the fleshy and weak body of a human – whatever it was had to be lethal. But he hadn’t noticed that, he had been blinded in the face of passion and confidence and complete assurance of himself.

The only thing that saved him were his two friends. The ones who weren’t caught up in his fantasies, the ones who couldn’t see what he saw. They pushed him out of harm’s way, moved at the same time and in perfect unison, but a moment too late to escape, themselves. He had been forced out of his reverie, watched their disgusting demise with wide open eyes pulled back to reality. The sound of their crunching bones and their smashed organs being smashed into the mold of an android followed him for weeks, months, years. He still heard it sometimes, when he slept.

Authorities and management services didn’t manage to get to the factory until their barely recognizable insides had been completely forced inside the template of a helper android. Arend had mindlessly followed the metallic body through its construction, unsure of what else to do for them, and was only able to mutter what he was saying to them before the accident. He had, in the final stage, tugged the android off the assembly line, its usually chrome and sterile body stained from the inside by gore and a sense of lost dreams. It couldn’t hear his words, and the friends he had known were dead, but he still talked to them, crying silently and hands shaking.

Since then, he had been even emptier inside than ever before. The only thing that could fill his cold body – empty and hollow like an android’s – was his burning hatred and apathy. That was all that ran in his veins these days. Like the visceral soup of his smashed companions, the feelings said nothing, saw nothing, and heard nothing, but he could feel its presence inside of him no matter where he went or what he did.