 
Behold the Wanderer
Mathijs Koenraadt

Behold the Wanderer

A Novel against Modernity

First edition 2019 Copyright © 2018 Mathijs Koenraadt

Published by Morningtime www.koenraadt.info

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Paperback ISBN 978-1790336968 Also available as e-book

Cover photo by "shakko", CC BY-SA 3.0
For Europe
Bijltijd, zwaardtijd,

Schilden gespleten,

Windtijd, wolftijd,

De wereld gaat verloren.

(Völuspá)
Contents

Ambition

Prison

Exile

Revival

Ragnarok

Epilogue
1

Ambition

At six o'clock in the morning, the garbage truck humming five floors down woke up Wulf Gungnirsson, a restless, tall, and broad-shouldered, though thin-armed man in his early twenties. His wavy blond hair fell over his ears. It was the third day of June, the summer of the year 213 NE, New Era. The old era had ended during an event called the Big Reset.

Wulf got up to prepare himself a breakfast; two slices of bacon substitute and three factory-bred eggs. With a faux-wooden ladle, he slid his routine creation onto two slices of toast with a layer of mayonnaise-flavored grease in between. He dreamed of being able to afford real food one day. For now, he pretended to enjoy his artificial protein. It tasted like carpet, but at least it would suppress his hunger for a couple of hours.

Wulf peeked out the window of his studio flat. The sun had come up, but it was still dark outside. Rows of residential towers standing along his avenue, many hundred stories high, blotted out the sun. Near the end of the avenue, he could make out the brightly lit peak of the Citadella Tower, the tallest building in the Europolis, and the seat of world government. Down here, on the fifth floor, where Wulf had his lair, he might catch a few minutes of natural daylight in the late afternoon when the sun shone directly through his apartment window.

Wulf had moved here from the city's northwestern coastal outskirts. Just two days ago, he had settled in his new studio flat. It was small. The mahogany wardrobe took up more space than necessary. There was scarcely enough room for a kitchenette, a single-person bed, a cramped shower, and a writing desk that doubled as a dining table. In a mass man's world, this was considered a luxury condo. It came with a parking garage below street level, in case he would ever be able to afford his own vehicle.

Wulf was getting ready to start his new job as an intern at a prestigious technology company. He had responded to a job offer for a position in the field of business intelligence. Recruiters had considered him a high-potential. His resumé had caught the attention of his future supervisors, Bart Al-Habib and Susannah Carola. They shared an office in the strategic marketing department of the Alpha-Beta Company. The company supplied vehicle manufacturers with software for their self-driving hardware. Its offices were located in the heart of the Europolis, also called the World City, the world's only continent-sized urban settlement.

This internship was going to be Wulf's ticket to a better life. For the next six months until the Shortest Day Festival in late December, when family members exchanged gifts to celebrate the economy, Wulf was determined to prove himself. He was going to show his new colleagues; he was an intelligent, creative, and highly motived person. He had ambition. He was going to make it to the top.

A five-minute conference call between Wulf, Bart, and Susannah had been enough to establish the initial goodwill to hire their new recruit. Wulf accepted the offer without hesitation. Other interns hadn't been so lucky. They had been squeezed through a lengthier elimination process involving multiple assessment days, a psychological fitness test, and several stress tests. Wulf had been given red-carpet treatment. The company was going to pay him enough monthly credits to cover food, rent, his commute, and his weekend expenses.

He should have known it was too good to be true.

Someone was knocking on the door. Wulf turned down the stove and opened it.

— "Hello," said a man in a posh accent. "I wanted to leave some things in front of your door. I wasn't sure if anyone was at home, or awake, so I knocked. I'm moving out today. My name's John, by the way, John Alfalfa."

— "Err, sure. I could use some things," said Wulf. "Nice to meet you. I just moved in two days ago. I haven't met any neighbors yet."

— "You won't," said John. "Everyone in the urban heart is too busy. After work, they crash in front of the TV or suffer from a food coma. Say,... aren't you the new intern for the Alpha-Beta Company by any chance?"

— "Yes, that's right. I'm getting ready to start my first day today."

— "Fantastic. I was the co-founder of the Alpha-Beta Company. I founded it about twenty years ago. But I sold most of my shares. I sometimes like to check up on my old company to see how she's doing. Anyway, I'm traveling back east today. I hope I didn't bother you. Goodbye."

John turned around and headed for the stairwell.

— Leaning out his door, Wulf said, "Wait, do you have any advice for me, err, to make a good impression?"

— John paused for a second, looked back over his shoulder, and said, "If you mean you wish to scale the corporate ladder, be prepared to climb over corpses."

John ran down the stairs and disappeared.

Climb over corpses? What did he mean by that? Wulf thought it was an unusual coincidence to meet the co-founder of the company he was going to work for. In this city of seventy billion, you never met the right people by accident.

He picked up John's leftovers—some oatmeal, half a pack of natural coffee powder, an unopened carton of real milk, still fresh, and two green bananas—and stored them. He got dressed in a suit and tie and hurried down the same stairwell. The apartment building offered several elevators, but it was faster to run up and down the first five flights than to wait for an elevator to come up.

* * *

Outside, commuters were flooding the avenue. Buses, trams, and other vehicles transporting corporate herds to their offices were jamming traffic. Wulf caught a glimpse of the red morning sky, high above the rooftops. Life in the city had always bothered him. He sometimes compared the streets and the avenues cut from the concrete buildings to life in a rock quarry. People were forced to live out their lives in a small corner of the quarry, never knowing what wonders lay beyond.

With great strides, Wulf marched himself two blocks from his building's entrance toward the underground train system. A maze of color-coded tunnels guided the silent masses to their departure platforms. In the Europolis, fast-track trains could blast passengers from one end of the continent to the other in under three hours. Short-distance trains, much less efficient, could take just as much time to transport people from one district to the next.

Wulf walked through the orange tunnel system for ten minutes and found his platform. Waiting for his train to arrive, his attention drifted to an advertisement screen hanging on the wall across the tracks. It displayed an ad for a family hiking trip across Northern Scandinavia, the last patch of unspoiled nature left on Earth. He would love to go, but such a trip was going to cost him his life savings. He decided to forget about it.

His train arrived. The doors opened with a hiss, the lemmings exited their cars. Men and women in the prime of their lives moved toward the platform's exit. Nobody said a word. Nobody was looking at each other. A flood of strangers happened to occupy the same space. This was a community of atomized individuals. People hurried through the transit hub to donate their overqualified brains to their underpaid jobs. The Europolitans were efficient people, optimized for economic output. From now on, Wulf was going to be one of them.

Wulf hopped into the steel worm's belly and wriggled his body through a crowded standing section. There was one empty seat left. It was going to be thirty stops to the office, a ninety-minute commute. The trip gave Wulf time to think about his life in the urban heart. He wondered if it would be worth it.

Why didn't I bring a book? he thought.

After a boring and monotonous commute, Wulf exited the tube system and resurfaced right in front of the Alpha-Beta Company's main entrance. A fountain appeared to be holding a mock globe steady in the air. He walked up to the entrance, went past the information desk and was stopped by a security guard.

— "Hello, how may I help you?" said the overweight guard. His face was lobster red.

— "I'm here for my internship at the Alpha-Beta Company," Wulf said.

— "Identification, please," said the guard.

— "Identification? I have my citizen ID right here."

— "Your corporate identification, please," the impatient guard growled.

— Wulf scratched the back of his neck and said, "I haven't received my corporate ID yet. This is my first day. I'm supposed to meet with Susannah Carola?"

The guard, frustrated, put his hands on his hips.

— He repeated, "Identification!"

The guard sputtered some words in a local dialect Wulf couldn't make out. He decided to walk back to the information desk to ask for help. The lady behind the counter explained he needed to register for a temporary office ID, using his citizen ID as collateral. He would get it back once exchanged for a permanent office ID.

While Wulf was trying to figure out how to reach his new offices, a woman in her mid-thirties with short, bleached hair arrived. he overheard her inquire after him, so he went and introduced himself.

— "Ah, Mr. Gungnirsson? Hi, I'm Susannah, Susannah Carola. Nice to finally meet you in person, Mr. Gungnirsson. May I call you Wulf? You may call me Susannah."

Susannah helped Wulf fill out his application for his temporary office ID. Together, they walked past the security guard and stepped into an elevator.

— "So, this internship will be your first step up to a successful career," she said as she pushed the elevator's buttons. The doors closed, and the elevator box moved down. "Our strategic offices are located in the basement, on the twelfth floor below ground level."

To create more space in the overcrowded Europolis, construction companies had long dug into the earth wherever possible. Belowground, they had built offices, cinemas, hospitals, even residential apartments. The people who lived there permanently were called the underfolk. They were the city's underclass. Aboveground folks considered it better to be a street-level bum than to live down under.

Wulf and Susannah got out of the elevator and walked over to the strategic office. She introduced the intern to his other supervisor, Bart Al-Habib. Although they shared adjacent desks, Bart and Susannah weren't working on the same projects. Susannah was a level-nine employee. She was working on a top-secret acquisition project. Bart was just a level eight. He was working on a balanced scorecard system. Both reported to their boss, the director of strategic marketing, Heinz-Achmed Klopek. Wulf was supposed to meet with Mr. Klopek, but since he wasn't in today, they would try another time.

The new intern overcame his initial shyness. He mustered up the courage to introduce himself to several other employees working in the office, including two other interns. For the time being, Susannah and Bart explained, they were too busy getting started on their new projects. They thought it best if Wulf spent time acquainting himself with the company's computer systems. Wulf didn't mind. He made use of his first long day sitting behind his desk diving through company policy documents.

Around noon, a big man from a neighboring office came over to grab a cup of water from their shared water cooler. When he noticed the intern, he winked at Wulf.

— "Hey cheesehead, didn't you get enough sunlight today? You look so white, ha-ha!" the big man said.

— "One shouldn't call people that word," said Wulf, grudgingly. "It's offensive."

— "Oh, I'm sorry," said the big man. "Are you the new intern?"

— "Yes, I am," said Wulf. "Nice to meet you."

— "Likewise."

The big man left. By the end of the workday, around eight o'clock in the evening, Susannah came over to Wulf's desk to thank him for his first day's efforts. He hadn't really done anything but open and close computer folders looking for things to read. Over the next few days, Susannah assured Wulf, she and Bart would think of more things for him to do.

Wulf returned the next day. He flashed his permanent office pass before the security guard who let him pass without further trouble. He understood it was customary for an intern to earn his supervisors' goodwill. To win their trust, he attended to their every request. That's just how things work around here, he thought to himself. He reminded himself of a business axiom he had learned while at university. A savings account is best maintained by depositing frequent small amounts without making large withdrawals. His deference to his supervisors would pay off in the end, he believed.

As weeks went by, Wulf started to get impatient. He wished to get started on a more important project of his own. For quite some time, however, Bart and Susannah took little to no interest in their hire. Wulf didn't complain. He tried to be professional. While he waited for his supervisors to make time for him, he gave himself plenty of preparatory work to do.

His supervisors sometimes asked him to take their incoming phone calls, to take meeting notes, to ensure the office printer's tray was full of paper, to escort visitors from the building's entrance to the meeting rooms belowground, or to supply them with cups of coffee. Wulf didn't show it, but he felt unappreciated. His appetite for intellectually stimulating work made him cynical. Surely, four years of university training and two years of business school qualified him to take on more advanced tasks. Playing the office monkey made sense to prove his dedication, but Wulf reasoned this condition should not last for much longer.

Why am I here? What am I doing here?

Susannah called Wulf to her desk. She had finished typing a personal email. It hadn't been sent out yet and was being displayed on screen for all to see.

— "Hi, Wulf," Susannah said. "I have received this new data binder we ordered last week. Would you mind going through it and tell me what the numbers mean? Thanks. Wait, hold on."

The phone rang, Susannah answered. As Wulf leaned over Susannah's desk to have a better look at the data binder, he could make out the contents of her email. Apparently, Susannah was in the middle of a relationship breakup. Her ten years younger boyfriend wanted her back, but she didn't feel comfortable rebooting the relationship. Wulf wondered if she wanted him to see that email. She finished the phone call and handed Wulf the binder.

— "Sure, no problem," he said. "I'll have a look."

Finally, something more interesting to do...

Wulf, a voracious student of management literature, knew everything there was to know about the latest managerial, strategic, and consumer persuasion sciences. If Bart and Susannah required it, he would happily support them with a plan to harden the company's operational effectiveness. It's what he was trained to do. In between the small tasks they dealt him, Wulf had started drafting a plan of action. At least he was making use of his idle time behind the desk.

More weeks went by. Thoughts of Susannah's ex-boyfriend preoccupied her during the workday. Once, he even came by her office to throw a tantrum, to the amusement of the rest of the company.

Wulf spent his lunch hours talking to different employees working in his department. Some, he got to know well. Others preferred to be left alone. Most of the fixed employees fit a generic description. They were over thirty, not very ambitious, and numbed by a decade of office politics. They called it middle-management hell. Once you got stuck in it, you would never get out. You would never get a real promotion, except one for the show if you turned fifty, but you would still keep doing the same work you had always been doing, until your retirement.

Wulf realized he didn't want to become like them. He wasn't going to spend a decade doing menial work in this basement office. It was time for him to discuss his opportunities with the company. Bart had other things on his mind. Susannah found it laudable that Wulf had been such a high-spirited, proactive intern, but she, too, was too enmeshed with other matters. They didn't have time to listen to Wulf's project proposal.

To Wulf, his supervisors' lack of interest translated into a sense of meaninglessness. Why had they hired him in the first place? They must think I went to business school to play their secretary. After all, if the two had needed a personal assistant, they could have advertised for one. But they hadn't. They had specifically requested a strategy intern to work with them to expand the market. Two months in, he had gotten to know the office printer better than his senior staff. It was clear Bart and Susannah had wanted to hire a personal assistant but couldn't get the budget approved. So, they hired a graduate for an essentially unpaid internship, aside from the studio apartment and the monthly allowance.

Perhaps Wulf was too arrogant, he thought. He was too eager to get ahead in life. Others had been here for a decade. Shouldn't he, too, wait for his turn? Nevertheless, the lack of anything to do at work and a lack of natural sunlight during the day didn't help. For a while, Wulf was thinking of looking for another internship. Should he quit and start over elsewhere? In hindsight, he would have been much happier with a rewarding but less prestigious job at a less well-known company. What mattered most to him was to put his education to use. No one should have to waste one's talents doing work below one's ability.

Wallowing in self-doubt, Wulf tried to justify his predicament. His expectations of work-life had been unrealistic. In the real world, people worked long hours doing next to meaningless work, progressing slowly through the ranks of the corporate world. Susannah certainly thought so. She had been at the Alpha-Beta Company for nearly fifteen years, and she was still doing favors for her boss, Mr. Klopek.

No matter how hard Wulf tried to lower his ambitions, increasingly rebellious thoughts pushed back. I'm not going to give up so easily. He knew it was wrong to give in to apathy. He was going to stand up for himself, plead his case. Wulf's frustrations with himself turned into a conflict with his supervisors. He made it clear to Bart and Susannah that they should allow him to work on a more important project befitting his skill level. If they didn't need him, they should let him go.

Shocked, Bart and Susannah scheduled a meeting to discuss the intern's one-man insurgency. They met in a small, cold room.

— "Well," said Susannah. "First, let's hear from you about what you have to say to us."

— "I don't mean to be disrespectful," Wulf said. "It's just that I think I can be of greater value to you and the company if you let me work on something more meaningful. Over the past two months, I've prepared a plan to harden the company's operational effectiveness. It's what I was trained to do. I will still happily attend to your requests, but I just feel I need to put my education to use."

Susannah just sat there, staring at Wulf. The very notion that the tasks he had been given somehow weren't up to par with his capabilities offended both his supervisors. Susannah's suppressed anger showed through her teeth. She had started work at the Alpha-Beta Company as an intern. She had dreamed of getting a promotion. She was going to show this arrogant young man how things worked around here.

— "I also had to start at the bottom, you know," she said. "When I started here, I also had to make sure the printer had enough paper in the tray. I also had to bring coffee. That's how things work. It's always been like this."

— Bart chipped in, "Haven't we given you plenty of tasks to work on already? If you needed more to do, you could have asked for it."

Wulf countered that was the very point of his revolt. He wanted to put his education to use to support them and the company. Susannah and Bart were stupefied. Never once in their own careers had they found the courage to stand up to their seniors to demand more interesting work to do. Realizing how complacent they had been all these years, the only emotion they could express was anger—at Wulf, for pointing it out to them.

Susannah kept staring Wulf down without flinching.

— "Careers are earned, not given," she said, repeating the company's mantra. "Everyone has to start at the bottom."

Wulf's equally determined gaze met with Susannah's. It was a stalemate, but Wulf knew he had to back down if he wished to keep his job. Defeated, Wulf returned to his desk. Bart threatened that if Wulf didn't complete the minimum six-month internship contract, he would never get a favorable reference from them. Without one, in this world, it would be next to impossible to land a job elsewhere. There were billions of others who wanted Wulf's job. There was no way out of this place but past the gallows.

* * *

To take his mind off things, Wulf attended the interns' Stammtisch, an event held twice a month on Wednesday nights. Alpha-Beta Company interns met there to speak casually. Tonight, two dozen showed up. Wulf had made his first few superficial friends here. He found it hard to befriend people in the Europolis. You had to be part of a clique to have a social life, but he didn't like cliques. He preferred the solitary hunt.

Strangers had become the moving wallpaper at the end of his world. Europolitans were preoccupied with making money, for themselves if not for someone else. Time was money. There was no time for the losses incurred by randomly socializing with passersby. Progress couldn't wait. How often hadn't Wulf heard people say, "We don't have to like each other as long as we can make money off one another." A mantra befitting parasites, he thought. Human beings shouldn't be like that.

The Stammtisch offered Wulf a welcome break. The group was sitting in a cozy café, situated in a back alley, decorated with big-leafed plants. They were made of plastics, but you could hardly tell. The café's tall windows offered a view of bums going through trash containers. At least the place was affordable.

To Wulf's left sat Shashank, a short, physically underdeveloped fellow with a sandy complexion and a boyish head. He introduced himself to Wulf and promptly mentioned his ethnic heritage. He was a blend of Indian, Chinese, Hispanic, and Aboriginal Australian with a few percentages of Faroese. The young man appeared to take pride in his genetic diversity. He was his own one-man race, he said. His Indian side had once inhabited the top caste of Indian society, before the nation's economic collapse. Today, he was a basement-dwelling intern like everyone else.

Agnieta, seated across Wulf, a tender woman, said hello and mentioned her Polish-Nigerian-Paraguayan ancestry. Tomás, Israeli-Somali, and Celine, Xhosa-Japanese, also said hello.

— "Nice to meet you guys," said Wulf. He shook hands with the people seated around him. "My name's Wulf, and I'm with the strategic software department down in the basement of the main building. I started my internship about two months ago."

— "Nice to meet you," said Angola. "I'm the intern for the crowd control department. I'm half Central African, a quarter Indonesian, and a quarter New-Zealand Kiwi. But what about you, Wulf? What's your ancestry? I don't think you've told us yet."

In the Europolis, people habitually showed off their ethnic diversity whenever introducing themselves to someone. Since nation-states and national governments had been dissolved long ago, people regarded their ethnic pedigree as a status symbol. One's collection of ethnic backgrounds was a fingerprint of one's identity and the foundation of a diversity-based class system. People of three or more backgrounds were considered enlightened individuals. Homogenics, the least diverse people, the ones with a homogeneous ethnic background, were frowned upon and considered backward.

— "I'd also like to know," said Agnieta. "You haven't told us about your background, Wulf. You look so pale. What are you?"

What am I? Wulf thought.

— "Oh, well, I'm just a dull native, I guess. My family is from the northwestern outskirts. Some pockets of homogenic people still survive there," Wulf said.

He didn't like having to apologize for being ethnically homogenous.

— "Oh, we're so sorry to hear that. You do look a bit strange for someone working in the urban heart," said Agnieta.

— Celine asked, "Is your whole family homogenic?"

— "I don't have a family," Wulf said.

— "Why not?"

— "I'm an orphan. They found me under an ash tree. Police records state they thought my father left me there after my mother died. That's all I know."

— "You do look a bit like a cheesehead," said Shashank.

The interns burst into laughter. Wulf calmly changed the subject. He wasn't interested in people's ethnic backgrounds. He had come to learn from the other interns' experiences at the office. After some drinks, the crowd relaxed and opened up about the stresses of daily life.

— "So, do you guys feel you have some autonomy in your jobs? Or do you also feel as if us interns are being put to use as a bunch of office monkeys?" Wulf wondered.

— "Hey, that's offensive!" said Angola. "Did you just call us monkeys?"

— "Huh? Err, no," said Wulf. "I meant to say I feel as if our supervisors are using us as their personal slaves. They expect us to fetch the printer spit-outs, move some boxes around... They're not interested in our abilities. It's denigrating. What was the purpose of killing myself studying late nights for six years to get a business degree just to be somebody's assistant? I don't get it. Is this how it's supposed to work?"

The other interns looked confused and didn't answer. Wulf thought they wanted him to keep talking.

— "The problem is I can't stand being a gear in some machine. I need more freedom to determine my own projects. That nagging feeling my supervisors are the ones holding me back bothers me. What about you, guys? Have you had similar experiences?"

— Celine said, mocking Wulf, "Well, I would rather serve as a gear in an important machine than be a big nothing. It's better to own a small piece of a big pie than a big piece of a small pie. Besides, I love being told what to do so I can switch off my mind during the day. If you just do your job, you will get ahead, eventually."

— "I second that," Shashank said. "I like having a supervisor who tells me what I have to do. How else are we supposed to know what to work on? My supervisor tells me, his boss tells him, and the CEO tells the boss. I don't mind it at all mind to wait for my supervisor to ask me to help him out. It gives me a kick to do things perfectly right. I want to be a good dog."

Did he just say he wants to be a good dog?

— "Yes, progress," Wulf mumbled. He leaned back and said, "Of course, we all do it for progress." He picked up his glass, held it high, and proposed a toast, "To progress!"

They're all crazy. I'm the only here who can think for himself.

Wulf wondered where this mythical progress was supposed to lead to. What would people do next if they reached the end of the road? Then what? The belief in progress, he thought, was a clever mind trick designed to increase people's productivity. Wulf preferred to keep such thoughts to himself. Questioning the dogma of progress could get him into a lot of trouble in this politically correct society. People were under great pressure to conform.

After the Stammtisch, Wulf took a walk back home, a couple of blocks from the café. He needed to get his mind off things. Why do people keep calling me a cheesehead? He assumed his words about freedom and self-determination had stirred up feelings of insecurity among the interns.

Wulf had plans. Strolling past the heavy traffic, he wondered about urban society's inner workings. How had people come to internalize its rules? Who determined them? Monkey see monkey do. It's an echo chamber. The fear of standing out shamed citizens into obedience. The World Council only had to guard the boundaries of permissible behavior, set and enforced by the clergy of his time, the global media. After decades of propaganda, people had simply forgotten what it meant to be a human being.

At work, good employees kept quiet and followed orders. That's what everyone else did. As long as some received a promotion in return for their loyalty, the rest would keep their mouths shut and play a good employee, a good dog. As long as citizens blended in with the rest of the humanzees, the behavior police would leave them alone. Their neighbors wouldn't report them for wrongthink. Most people, Wulf realized, didn't expect much more from life other than a minimum-effort lifestyle. An average citizen performed the tasks required of him to make ends meet, then asked to be left alone with his favorite TV show.

Europolitans had surrendered. Mankind had given up on itself. To Wulf, that sheepishness felt unnatural. If all you ever do each day is get up, take a shit, commute, complain, suck up to the boss, have a few drinks, and sit in front of the TV for the remainder of the evening, then you've lived the life of an animal. To cope with the stresses of urban life, people shut themselves off.

A sadness overwhelmed Wulf. He had never been able to root in the city. He felt the city had robbed him of a more humane life, but he couldn't explain to himself what it was that he had lost. A tear flowed across his cheek. We're not cattle, he thought. We're human beings. People have the right to live as who they are and not as who urban planners design us to be. Human beings aren't supposed to spend their days waiting around to be told what to do.

I hate this city. I hate it.

Wulf had felt the urge to surrender before. He had never given in to it. He had fought it. Some nights, he lay dreaming of a time before the Europolis, of a time when people were living in rural communities where everyone knew each other, where every face was a familiar face, where people waved at each other and greeted each other from across the street.

The global urban society had turned out to be a prison from which no one could escape. The World State had never meant to emancipate humanity. It had never meant to wake people up from their propaganda-induced sleepwalking. On the contrary, the World State and its controllers had always intended to keep the masses ignorant of the true state of the world.

Real men aspired to their potential, Wulf reckoned. They dreamed of daring greatness, of a heroic life forged in fire and ice, of conquest, of overcoming defeat, of winning back freedom. Men were built to face the endless struggle with nature without flinching. The conflict made them stronger. The free and the brave sought no elevation of the masses, no equalization of the multitude, no effacement of culture, and no erasure of personalities. A free man projects his infinite soul onto the finite canvas of the universe.

Not in this world.

Back home, tired, Wulf prepared himself an easy dinner—pasta with a vegan meat substitute. He vowed never to follow in Bart's footsteps. He vowed never to be as complacent as Susannah. He would break the cycle of self-defeat and find a purpose, a noble cause to live and die for. Outwardly, Wulf maintained his obedient attitude toward his supervisors. Inwardly, he knew it came at the expense of an emotional turmoil that was eating away at himself. He had to do something about it fast.

* * *

The next day at the office, Bart and Susannah had forgotten all about the conflict with their intern. They were easy to satisfy as long as Wulf attended to their trifles. It turned out Bart hardly knew how to operate his computer despite having worked at the Alpha-Beta Company for over a decade. Wulf had to show him how to store files on the corporate network. Instead of using the table feature of her reporting software, Susannah used a paint program to draw lines and boxes. That way, it took her hours to add in another row.

They were stupid, incompetent people not worthy of the title supervisor. They were the ones who needed Wulf's supervision. They were never going to get a promotion. Yet, that false promise was the illusion that prevented them from quitting their jobs. To Wulf's astonishment, he found out his supervisors were getting paid top salaries. They both drove a company car and could trade it in for a new one each year. The prestige of owning a vehicle was part of the company's ploy to buy loyalty from its employees. Once you got in, you never wanted to leave.

Urban society works the same way. By this time, Wulf realized his predicament had been his own fault. Too eager to move to the urban heart, he had made himself susceptible to dreams of easy wealth. He had been quick to accept the first internship offer that had come his way. He should have played harder to get. He should have walked away from the negotiations and demanded challenging work. He should have asked critical questions before signing the contract.

During his idle hours, Wulf began taking an interest in world history. Where had it all begun? When had the world taken a turn for the worse? He found an online brochure detailing the "approved historical record" since the beginning of the New Era. The booklet had been authored by the World Council itself, the Europolis' governing body. In it, the Council's engineers gave their account of the revolution titled The Big Reset. Revolutionary forces had founded the World State in the first year of the New Era. A single governing body established itself to rule over all of mankind. Its loyalists had seized control over the world's nations by infiltrating the world's democracies.

The newly founded World Council had ordered the erasure of all history books. It forbade history to be taught in schools. The revolutionaries reasoned that a revival of old knowledge would only lead to struggle and war. From now on, the Council believed, tribes and nations would stop fighting each other since there would be no more tribes and nations to fight. People's cultures were reprogrammed. Their identities were effaced and woven into a single global narrative.

For a while, there was a fear that old beliefs might resurface, undoing the perceived benefits of the Big Reset. Stubborn traditionalists the revolutionaries believed had held mankind hostage had to be crushed, once and for all. So, the revolutionaries became social engineers. They began redesigning people's culture and behaviors in the name of progress. They truly believed to be liberating mankind.

What the official account of the Big Reset didn't say was that the revolutionaries had also burned all holy books, not just the books of the world's great religions but of all religious factions and of all spiritual groups worldwide. The engineers had erased humanity's belief in some Greater Being altogether. All Bibles, all Qurans, all the Talmudic texts, and all references to God, gods, goddesses, or other supernatural phenomena were stricken from mankind's collective memory.

The World Council centralized public information streams, both online and offline. A global firewall was installed to ensure criminal ideas would be filtered out. The firewall was still in operation in Wulf's day. Above all, it helped erase any knowledge of historical events that had taken place before the Big Reset. The human species had rebooted itself with a blank slate.

Since the New Era, the European continent had been transformed into a single urban area. Residential towers, offices, and urban infrastructure now covered every square inch of land with concrete and asphalt. The Rhine and the Danube rivers were repurposed as the Europolis' main sewerage lines, filling the North Sea and the Black Sea with human filth and industrial pollution. The Mediterranean Sea was used as a dumping ground for toxic waste.

Nature had yielded and submitted to man's maximization of returns on investment.

The Europolis, the world's only remaining city, offered no escape from noise and fumes. There was no alternative. The financial collapse of superpowers China and Russia, of African and Arab nations, of India, as well as the Americas, had forced almost all of humanity to migrate to Europe. On this continent, mankind's new masters built the last refuge for humanity's survival. At first, tens of millions of immigrants washed up on Europe's shores. In their wake, hundreds of millions followed. Soon, billions of people had come looking for a better life in the old world while the rest of the planet collapsed in disarray.

Europe's corporations, looking to expand their markets, welcomed the billions of potential consumers. Within several generations' time, moneymen uprooted the masses and held them to Europa's bosom. Industrials transformed the planet into a burning pile of salt and sulfur where nothing was planted, nothing was sprouting, and no vegetation was growing on. If you wanted to stroll around a windy lake, you could do it in virtual reality.

To make room for everyone, Europe became a skyscraper continent. Social life became stratified by the floor you were born on. If you were living below the fiftieth floor, you were considered lower-class. Only the richest one percent could afford to enjoy a sunny summer day from their penthouse balconies.

Such dense masses of people didn't curb the population's continued growth. On the contrary, growth accelerated. The human population first doubled, then expanded tenfold, and ultimately reached close to seventy billion people on lands once populated by just a few million. Europe had become a human anthill. Short of a couple of million outcasts inhabiting the scorched planes of a dying world outside of the city walls, the large majority of people lived out their lives on this world-continent. Most people would never see a bird fly, never breathe unpolluted air, never know the taste of uncontaminated water.

A network of pipelines extending from the city reached around the globe to haul in the resources needed to feed the urban octopus. Its nine iron tentacles held Erda, Mother Earth, in a chokehold. The calming blue color of the world's oceans had since turned into a deep red hue from the daily poison released into it. Erda was bleeding; she surrendered her resources to the city to provide for mankind. When she could give no longer, men broke open her crust and dug deeper.

Here lay the Ravaged Earth, a dying planet, while the social engineers in charge of it kept the great majority of citizens in a state of ignorance about it. The few who knew were either complicit or silenced. The Council considered an ignorant herd more profitable than unproductive people.

Upward mobility had become a literal concept. People pursued ruthless careers in hopes of someday renting the upper floors to escape the urban hell below. Humanity had long reached the end of progress, but utopia was nowhere near. Efforts to colonize space had failed to create habitable new worlds. There was nowhere left to go but back and down. To prevent a collective psychosis that might spark mankind's descent into chaos, the World Council carefully maintained its progressive illusions.

Everyone was a global citizen, everyone was treated equally, and everyone was a slave of urban usurers. Just a handful of people managed to live outside of the Europolis. Perhaps they were a few million strong, no more. They were the unloved and the unwanted, the outcasts and the rejects; they were illegals and vagabonds, those headstrong characters willing to defy a scorched Earth.

At the head of the Council stood the Programmer, a democratically elected dictator who coded people's permissible behaviors. The Programmer's algorithms were in charge of law and order.

Wulf absorbed every bit of information he could find about the Europolis' foundational events. The official documentation gave the impression of a self-congratulating caste of social engineers that had shaped the world in its own puny image. The few available documents detailing the Big Reset never spoke critically of the early revolutionaries. The engineers had, in effect, successfully programmed people's old beliefs into new ones designed by themselves. They had aimed to elevate the working classes and build a more equitable world. In reality, the Europolis was being run as a business, and the top caste accrued all profits.

The engineers who operated the Europolis claimed to derive their legitimacy from the scientific worldview. Their beliefs, they said, were objectively and universally true. The definitive truth about the universe's inner workings had, at long last, been discovered, they said. Fixed constants and immutable laws governed reality. With the end of scientific progress came the beginning of man's ascent from the struggle with nature, the newly founded Council proclaimed. Men would no longer need to perform physical labor. The state liberated women from their reproductive duties by providing incubation facilities where they could choose a donor and grow a child in a bag.

* * *

The uncritically optimistic reports forced Wulf to question the official account.

At home, he pondered about what he had discovered. He looked out through his studio window. Looking up at the glass buildings across the street, he could see the sun's reflection. Below, cars, buses, trams, and lorries paved the multilane roads, maneuvering their cargo through ever-congested traffic. Two narrow bike likes ran on each side, the outcome of a citizen wellbeing initiative. By day, the city's poor, the under-folk that lived in the catacombs below street level, packed the lanes with crates and carts. They would sell passersby fruit substitutes or roasted corn over a cart fire. Pedestrians, beggars, and cyclists spilled over into each other's lanes, causing head-on crashes and as many headaches.

Wulf wondered how citizens had come to terms with their roles as the worker drones of a human termite colony. Why doesn't anyone rise up and revolt against modernity? he thought. Why can't we escape the city and repopulate the Earth? Wulf imagined joining a movement if someone started one. How exactly did one start a revolution? How could an individual convince seventy billion others to abandon the only world they knew?

Oh, this world was full of progressive innovations. It had the thirteen-day workweek, the one-day weekend, the ninety-two percent income tax rate, the child-free lifestyle, even contraceptive tap water. Women who wanted to have children would have to quit drinking regular water and buy bottled water instead, which was only available per a doctor's prescription. To get the prescription, a woman had to apply for her breeding rights, a process that could take years. Both the woman and the prospective father, or the anonymous donor, were required to submit their DNA samples for state approval. If the couple's genetic makeup were deemed too homogeneous, the state could deny the application.

Wulf was a child of the last generation of legal homogenics. Since then, the Programmer, the city's chief lawgiver, had changed the laws. No more children of homogenic parents were allowed to be born. Long before the laws were passed, ethnically homogeneous people had become a rarity. They were looked down upon—as cheeseheads or monochromes—if not outright discriminated against. It was one more reason why Wulf couldn't quit his internship and look for other work. As a homogenic, a stain on his resumé would bar him from launching another career. No one would ever hire a homogenic dropout.

Bart from the Alpha-Beta Company was also a homogenic. While Wulf had been spending long office hours researching the Big Reset, Bart once approached his intern from behind and pressed his hands into the intern's shoulders, an awkward sign of dominance. It was supposed to be amicable, but he startled Wulf.

Wulf thought of Bart as someone stuck in a corporate web with no future waiting for him, someone forced to slave away twelve floors underground. When Bart caught Wulf reading non-work-related materials, it set him off in a rage. Though the insults came out muffled, everyone else in the office turned their heads to watch Bart shout, "Asshole! Asshole!"

Wulf understood Bart's rage wasn't aimed at him. Still, as an intern trying to get a positive review from his supervisors, he had to endure Bart's verbal abuse. Bart had won breeding rights with his African-Polynesian wife. He had been lyrical about it, at first. The couple had been lucky ones. Susannah, overwhelmed with jealousy upon hearing the news, was nearing thirty-six and still trying to date guys from the upper floors.

By the time Bart's first and only child, a boy, had reached the age of one-and-half years, an unexpected twist of fate hit the happy family. The baby began taking after its mother so strongly that it wouldn't even look at its pale-skinned dad. Anytime when Bart came over to play with his son, the boy rejected him and crawled back to his mommy.

Father and son didn't connect. Perhaps people inherited their souls from their mother's side, Wulf thought. People of different backgrounds can mix, but a soul that is used to being born into an African body won't warm up to an odd-duck dad. Instead, the boy preferred to play with his mom and her relatives. They looked more like him. It upset Bart. He brought his emotions to work. He had trouble suppressing his frustrations. He tried so hard to be a good father, but his boy didn't want anything to do with him. Wulf thought it was sad to see how diverse parents could keep deluding themselves into thinking that everything was going to work out, somehow.

To blow off steam after the confrontation with Bart, Wulf went to find a quiet spot in town. He walked for an hour until he reached a public lookout point on top of the three-hundredth floor of a generic residential riser. A public elevator system attached to the outside of the building hoisted him to the top. A poorly maintained park lay on the rooftop, with some trees, a pond, and one unoccupied bench. It offered an unobstructed view of the city's skyline. Wulf sat down and tried to relax. Taking deep breaths, he took in the view. Before and below him, in every direction, lay an urban maze of streets and towers. Around him, he saw the penthouses where the rich and famous lived, the one-percenters who could afford sunlight and barbecues on their private patios.

A thought crossed his mind—not even the rich can escape the city. What was the point of chasing a life-long career just so you could afford to live above the fiftieth or seventieth floor? Bart and Susannah would never make it to the top. By the time they reached the age of fifty, Susannah would still be trying, and failing, to date richer guys, and Bart would still be crunching numbers, trying to connect with an estranged son who didn't identify with his pale father.

Why do we do it? Why do we keep chasing failures?

My life isn't going anywhere, Wulf thought. I'm tired of living for myself. No matter how hard I work, I'll just end up spending my life waiting for a promotion I'll never get, and then I'll get the sack over some minor conflict. Why even bother? There has to be something more to life.

A dark thought entered his mind. What if I could break the people's programming, show them the truth? What if I could bring the whole system down?

* * *

The following one-day weekend, his only day off out of every fourteen, Wulf decided to do more soul-searching. He was going for an afternoon run at a rooftop gym. The gym had a running track laid out on the one-hundred-and-seventieth floor. Tall windows gave a spectacular view of the city around it. It would take Wulf a two-hour commute and several transfers to get there, but it was worth it. The gym's indoor architecture resembled a natural pond surrounded by dense rows of trees. It was all artificial, but you couldn't get much closer to running through a forest than this. Like most Europolitans, Wulf had no idea what a natural environment was supposed to look like.

Running around the track in his tracksuit, Wulf had a daydream. Random scenes flashed before his mind. His consciousness sank into a deeper state. Concentrating on himself, he forgot about his worries. After around thirty minutes, Wulf was no longer paying attention to his surroundings. He felt strong, focused, determined. Without being consciously aware of it, he began running faster and faster. Taking one deep breath after another, he imagined running through a pre-urban, wilder Europe. Vast woodlands once covered this old continent. Streams of water provided wandering tribes their lifelines.

Unconsciously, Wulf clenched his fists and punched himself forward. His calves kicked away at the track. Angry emotions rose to the surface of his psyche. He felt his spirit wanted to outrun his body. In his mind, he imagined chasing a deer through thick foliage. In the daydream, the hind spotted the runner. It was now or never. With his spear ready to strike the hind's thighs, the hunter leaped. He was going for the kill.

— "Hey! Watch out!" said a young woman.

The blonde was just ahead of Wulf. Instead of the imaginary hind, he had come storming after her. The tall, athletic girl had thought Wulf was going to crash into her. As she jumped aside to avoid a collision, Wulf snapped back to reality. He tripped, fell, and rolled over.

— "Are you alright?" she stopped to ask.

— Exhausted, he said, "Yeah. I'm fine. I didn't see you. I wasn't paying attention. I think I was daydreaming."

— "You looked like you were going to kill me," she chuckled. "Were you chasing after me?"

Wulf blushed and got up again. The two looked each other in the eye for a while and smiled. She liked him.

— "My name's Wulf. What's yours?"

— "I'm Inga."

They decided to run a couple of laps together. Wulf suggested they should have a drink after showering. She accepted. They met in the corner of the gym at a drinks bar with a comfy seating area. Inga was a homogenic, too, and a rare beauty. Her straight blond hair fell to below her shoulders. It was uncommon to meet other homogenics, especially in the urban heart of the Europolis. Inga tried not to show it, but she was happy to meet Wulf. She kept her arms crossed, but she couldn't stop giving out flirtatious smiles.

Wulf and Inga spoke to each other about life in general, about their dreams and aspirations. They spoke as if they belonged to each other, as if two lost souls had been reunited. They felt a common understanding. She had been called a cheesehead, too, and a monochrome. Wulf disliked the city as much as she did. They both wished to live in the real world, the natural world.

Inga told Wulf she had to head back home to meet another friend she had already agreed to meet. They would keep in touch and decided to meet the next one-day weekend again.

Fourteen days later, as planned, the two met in front of a historical building repurposed to function as a second-hand bookstore. It was the size of a cathedral. A tall entrance with massive bronze doors lured customers in. It was the largest bookstore in the urban heart. Inside, a maze of Escherian stairwells and mezzanines carried many rows of bookcases. Marble columns supported a vaulted roof. The bookstore's windows were made of glass in lead though it appeared these weren't the original designs but bland, modern replacements.

Wulf and Inga strolled around for a while and wondered what the original purpose of such a building might have been. The store was quiet and empty. It was the perfect place for two people to get to know each other better.

— "So, what's your career plan?" Wulf asked.

— "My career plan?" said Inga. "Everyone in this city always worries about their careers, their next move, their next promotion. I'm an artist, actually. I paint, and sometimes I make sculptures. Are you one of those career guys?"

— "No... I don't know. Well, I thought I was until I started working at the Alpha-Beta Company. I don't like it at all. I've been looking for something more meaningful to do, but it's hard to find it when you're just another gear in the machine."

— "What do you do in your free time?"

— "I sometimes write about my dreams. One day, I hope to turn them into a collection of stories and publish them. My dreams are quite bizarre."

— "Oh. Tell me one of your dreams?" Inga said.

— "Uhm, okay. So, a couple of weeks ago, I had a vivid dream, a lucid dream. I thought I'd already woken up, but I hadn't. My room was there, my stuff was there, everything was there. One thing was different. There was a wooden spear leaning against my door. When I went to examine it, because I didn't remember owning one, I felt a shock. I held it in my hand, and for a brief moment, the urban world around me disappeared and revealed the old European continent from the time before it had been urbanized. I was floating in the air above the treetops and saw nothing but woodlands, lakes, and rivers below me. Then, I fell down. When I hit the ground, I woke up."

— "That's a very strange dream. I'd love to read your book sometime."

— "It gets stranger. When I woke up, my arms and legs showed the scratches and bruises from the tree branches I had hit when I fell down to the ground in my dream."

Inga giggled and thought Wulf was making things up to impress her. They walked up several flights and found the political history section. As expected, it didn't go back in time further than the first year of the New Era.

— "Do you have relatives?" Inga asked.

Wulf, suddenly shy, looked down at the floor for a moment. He felt ashamed.

— "No. I'm an orphan. I hate to tell people this, but they found me under an ash tree. I don't know anything about my family. My father left me there when my mother died. That's all I know. I never knew them. The state raised me in an orphanage. As a teenager, I went to a boarding school. After that, I went to university."

— "I'm sorry to hear that. You seem alright. You must have had a very strong character to get through all that."

— "I had to be strong, or I wouldn't have made it... Inga? Have you also noticed that none of the books here tell us anything about what happened before, I mean, before the Big Reset?"

— "Yeah, I was wondering about the same thing."

— "What do you know about this? I know it's an odd topic. It's been on my mind lately. I spent a lot of time reading up on the Big Reset. All I could find were these official government brochures that didn't say much. They're full of praise. There's no critical account of what really happened."

Inga hesitated before speaking again. She had thought similar thoughts, too, but had never met someone she trusted enough to talk to about it.

— "No one knows what came before the New Era," she said. "They—I mean, the social engineers working for the Council—they erased everything. We're not supposed to know what happened. They say people should stay ignorant of the past. Whatever history came before the Big Reset is lost forever."

— "That's what I mean. But why? Why wouldn't our government want us to know the truth about our origins?"

— "All I know is that the engineers wanted to remove old beliefs from people's minds to stop the endless cycles of war and famine. It seems they have succeeded, haven't they? There haven't been any wars I know of."

— "Haven't there? What about the zone wars in the east of the Europolis? Entire blocks have been burnt to the ground. I only found out about it because I went there for a visit. The media won't tell us, but this city is not as peaceful as the Council wants us to believe. Progress hasn't solved poverty either. They just hid the underlings underground, out of sight."

— "I know, I know," said Inga. "Wulf, we have to be careful. If people can hear us talk like this, they might report us for wrongthink."

Wulf lowered his voice and checked to see if they were alone.

— "I'm tired of this world," he said. "I've been thinking of escaping. I saw an advertisement at the train station about a couple going for a hike to the Arctic. That's where I want to go. I just want to leave everyone behind and live someplace I don't have to bump into a million dull faces at every corner.

"Everywhere around us, there's inequality. The rich live up top in their penthouses. The poor live as roaches in the gutters. I'm sick of the way people talk about how enlightened they are by referring to their apartment's floor number. Twentieth floor, thirtieth floor. Am I supposed to feel ashamed for being a fifth-floor guy? That's five more than I was born on."

— "I live on the fifty-first floor... but I understand what you're saying."

— "Seriously? Painting pays that well? I definitely chose the wrong career."

— "Wulf... It's different. I inherited the place from my parents when they passed away last year. I guess I'm an orphan as well. I feel the same as you about all of this. I've never met anybody who talks to me like this. I also think the Big Reset was a big lie invented to—"

A few people walked by the book aisle. Wulf and Inga paused to make sure no one was eavesdropping on them. The coast was clear. It was just an old couple strolling by.

— Wulf asked Inga, "Have you ever thought of leaving the city? Going offline?"

— "Maybe. I'm not sure. I don't think I could leave my life behind that easily."

— Wulf pressed his hand on Inga's upper arm and said, "This city makes me feel dead inside. I don't think I can stay here forever."

The two went back down the steps near the back of the bookstore. Inga wanted to have a look at the art section. There seemed to have stood several statues here. Their pedestals still remained, but the statues themselves had been hacked away during the Big Reset.

Acting on impulse, Wulf grabbed Inga by her hand and pulled her into an alcove in between two pedestals. Out of sight of other visitors, he grabbed her by her ponytail, pulled her head back, and kissed her gently. She was surprised, but it felt good. When he tried to put his arm around her waist, the two lost their balance. As they leaned against the wall, a muffled sound exposed a hidden door. The two fell through it and landed onto a dusty floor.

* * *

The secret door had been made to look like part of the wall. Judging from the dust, it hadn't been opened in a long time. Their curiosity lured them deeper into the hidden space down a narrow passageway. They found another level below the bookstore's ground floor. Its ceiling wasn't high enough to stand upright, so the two had to lower their heads a bit. The space offered a collection of old relics and even older books. One bookshelf caught Wulf's attention.

— "Look, more books," he said. He picked up a few of them to read their titles. "Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger, it says. And this one, Industrial Society and Its Future by Ted Kaczynski, written in 1995. 1995? How can that be? This one is called Guerilla Warfare by Ernesto Ché Guevara. Inga, this is incredible, these are all books from before the New Era!"

— "Oh no," she said. "If anyone catches us with these in our pockets, we'll be sent to jail."

Inga reached for Wulf's hand. Together, they explored the underground space a little more. She noticed a couple of paintings in a style unfamiliar to her. One that caught her attention covered the wall in the back. According to the label, this was The Birth of Venus by Sandro Botticelli. She couldn't keep her eyes off it. Her art school had taught her to paint in abstract, meaningless shapes designed to avoid eliciting an emotional response. Botticelli's Venus moved Inga to tears. She was so beautiful it gave her goosebumps. Wulf squeezed her hand.

— "She's a homogenic, just like us," she said.

— "We have to get out of here. We've seen too much."

On their way out, they walked past a section with weaponry, maces, crossbows, and battle-axes. Each of these items should have been destroyed, molten, or burned long ago during the Big Reset. How had they ended up here, below the bookstore? Wulf couldn't resist a look at one more book. It was placed atop a bookstand. He wiped the dust off its cover. The title of the book was written with strange symbols he couldn't read. Below it, someone had scribbled in handwriting: The Norse Völuspá.

Wulf flipped through the sheepskin parchment pages. It was in perfect condition.

— "Do you think this is a history book?" he whispered.

— "Wulf, we have to leave."

— "Wait."

Wulf tucked the book under his jacket behind his back. He grabbed Inga by her arm and headed back out. They peeked around the corner to see if anyone was expecting them. There was no one there. Inga closed the hidden door behind her. The pair left the bookstore as if nothing had happened. Wulf checked to see if there had been surveillance cameras nearby, but there were none. No one could have seen them. They were safe.

Inga suggested going to her place. There, they could study the book Wulf had taken. Inga's luxury apartment was quite an upgrade from Wulf's. She had a large, sunny balcony facing a courtyard. Twelve feet high ceilings offered a healthy ambiance. It offered a proper kitchen and a separate bedroom. These were luxuries Wulf had only been able to dream of. Not even Bart and Susannah could afford such a place.

He was impressed, but the book had his attention. Wulf put it on the kitchen table and began studying the pages with pictures alongside rows of strange symbols. They were runes. Inga joined him and sat down on his lap.

— "Look! Here, in the back of the book, there is a transcription of the symbols. This one looks like an 'F'. It's called fehu. It means wealth or cattle. This one is like our 'TH', thurisaz. It means Thor, the giant."

— "I've never seen anything like this," Inga said. "What do you think the book is about? The images look magical. I think they're telling us a story. Here, on the first page, it shows two worlds, one of ice and one of fire, with a big gap in between."

— "Wait," said Wulf. "I can transcribe its name. It says Gin... innung... ungagap. The void between the two worlds is called the Ginnungagap. But what does that mean?"

— "I don't know," said Inga. "On this page, it shows a giant and a cow from the ice world. And here, on the next, three men are born from the cow.

— "Their names are... Vé, Villi, and Votan."

— "They kill the giant."

— "Ymir."

— "And from his flesh comes the Earth," Inga said. "From his blood, the sea and the lakes, from his bones and teeth, the mountains. From these two tree trunks, a man and a woman."

— "Ask... and Ambla."

— "Inga," Wulf said as he looked her in the eyes. "Do you see? The men and women in the book, they all look like us. They're homogenics. This book is about us. It's about the history of our people. It must have been written by our ancestors."

Wulf skipped to the last section of the book. The imagery showed a man holding a spear while fighting a giant snake. The monster was depicted with its body curled around the Earth. The snake was called Jörmungandr. The man fighting the snake was the same Votan from the first pages. Votan stood with his back against another man's, his son Thor. The latter held a hammer in his hand and swung it at a group of monsters to protect his father.

— "What does it say on top?" asked Inga.

— "It says... Ragnarok."

Wulf put his arms around Inga and said softly, "I think this book foretells the end of the world."
2

Prison

Dark-blue sheets covered the king-sized bed dominating his prison cell. Sitting on a squeaky wooden chair, the kind you can fold to free up space, Wulf was looking out a narrow window. The TV set in his cell was broken. Good riddance.

Two days ago, the prison's warden, only known to inmates as the Warden, had upgraded his high-profile prisoner to the special treatment wing. Cells on this block offered more privacy, a luxury bathroom, by prison standards, and that big bed with comfortable matrasses that molded to the shape of one's body. Wulf had never slept so well. The irony didn't elude him. He was on death row.

Wulf was sitting there, overthinking the events that had led to his arrest, conviction, and incarceration several years earlier. A lot had happened since he kissed Inga in the bookstore for the first time. Inspired by the mythology of his ancestors, he had finally stood up to Bart and Susannah, quit his internship, and moved in with the love of his life. He was going to support Inga with her art business while they were figuring out what to do next. She was going to experiment with Botticelli's painting style.

Inga's creativity sent a shockwave through an art world obsessed with broken abstractions rooted in depression and angst. Her works evolved beyond the incomprehensible contraptions of her nihilist education. She introduced, or rather reintroduced, the heroic artform. She felt her art was meant to strengthen people, both emotionally and physically, and not to weaken visitors with self-hatred. Art should be daring. It should dare to praise beauty and worship fertility. Inga broke with the culture of critique imposed on her by a dying world. A world that criticized reproductive health had no future.

Confronted with Inga's art, people awoke from a chronic dullness as if they had forgotten they were human beings instead of the mindless algorithms of a post-industrial world.w

But now that Wulf was considered middle class, living off Inga's inheritance for a while, he felt empty. Lacking corporate direction, he didn't know what to do with his life. Chasing a business career seemed futile. The discovery of the old book underneath the bookstore had changed his outlook on life. He began feeling there was something more important for him to do, a nobler cause to pursue. Late-night discussions with Inga brought him to a resolve. He vowed to spend the rest of his life fighting to free his people from the chains of modernity. Wulf began having dreams of liberating humanity from the gutters or urban life and returning citizens to the rural lifestyles of a long-lost past.

With Inga's support, he would strive to revive the suppressed human spirit. He would usher in a new age founded on traditional values of family, community, fertility, and growth.

In any case, pursuing company profits for the sake of indefinite progress lost its appeal. If progress only meant to spend one's life toiling away in meaningless office jobs, perhaps his ambitions lay outside of the global economy. Oh, what a fool had he been! A stuffed lure had been enough to chase it around the tracks of financial purgatory. How tired had he grown of the urban rat race. No, this was not him. He desired a life of action, a heroic life emulating the forgotten gods.

To truly stand up for oneself meant to stand up for one's people. Wulf's determination grew. He wished to fight the World State. Modernity had declared war on his soul, but he was determined to win that war.

His curiosity for the events surrounding the Big Reset had paid off. Without anyone finding out, he had made several more trips to the bookstore's secret basement. Bit by bit, he collected clues about mankind's lost past and pieced together a vague historical account of his own. It was incomplete and flawed but insightful nonetheless. One thing he knew for sure, namely that an unfathomable crime had been committed. The Council's engineers had erased history, made people forget about the erasure, and then replaced the truth with a lie.

* * *

Tonight, Wulf was expecting his only, and last, visitor. Inga. They hadn't seen each other for months. The prison regime dictated a maximum of two visits per person per year.

— "Mr. Gungnirsson? Mr. Gungnirsson?" said the guard through the door.

Copper was knocking on the inmate's cell door.

— "Mr. Gungnirsson? If you're ready, my colleague and I will escort you down to the visitor rooms. Your guest is waiting for you. She just arrived."

— "Sure, Copper. I'm ready when you are," Wulf said.

— "You know the drill," Copper said through the top hatch. "Turn around, please, and put your hands through the hatch in the center of the door behind your back. We'll cuff you." Wulf complied. "Alright. Well done. Now, sit down in front of the door and repeat the process with your feet. Put them through the bottom hatch."

— "No problem, Copper."

Feeling lazy, the prisoner leaned his shoulders against the wall and let his body slide down until he hit the bottom. Through the hatch, the guards put the chains around Wulf's ankles. Copper and Wood, the guard's trainee, opened the door and helped Wulf back to his feet.

Copper escorted Wulf into the prison dome, a panopticon adjacent to the special treatment wing. Inside, several floors of prison cells circled around the watchtower. From there, guards could monitor each inmate's movements. How had he ended up here? Wulf hadn't murdered anyone. He hadn't dealt drugs. He hadn't exploited women and children. He had committed a thought crime. Wulf had dared to question state doctrine that said social progress would one day liberate humanity from its struggle with nature.

The belief in a coming utopia, Wulf had proclaimed publicly, was a lie the Council's engineers had devised to increase people's productivity. Although the informed bourgeoisie of the past had been replaced by an informed revolutionary class, the transition hadn't elevated the masses from poverty. It hadn't made people more equal, either. Inequality had skyrocketed. The only noticeable difference was that the bourgeois, who once hoarded the economy's wealth, had been substituted for revolutionaries who squandered it.

Nothing else had changed except for the fact that a more regimented society tricked people into thinking they didn't have a free will, a soul, or a consciousness. Citizens had willingly given up on their humanity in exchange for so-called sexual liberties.

— "This way, Mr. Gungnirsson," said Wood. He showed Wulf the way through a badly lit corridor leading to the visitor rooms.

— Wulf said, "Why do you guys always put me in shackles when we're going for a walk?" He shuffled ahead on his worn-down shoes. "I would never harm a fly."

— "Shut up, you bastard!" said Copper. "You told Silver the same thing. He's still recovering from that pencil you jabbed into his eye socket. You almost hit his brain."

Wulf laughed. A few weeks earlier, the Warden had ordered another guard, Silver, to take Wulf down to the experimental medical facility. The Council's science institute had approved a new apparatus designed to erase a man's beliefs about himself, others, and the world. The device was supposed to wipe a subject's memories of the past while retaining specific, more desirable beliefs. The Council had looked for a lab rat to experiment on. Wulf was it.

With Wulf strapped into the contraption's seat, Silver discovered what could happen if a particularly stubborn patient was somehow able to resist his mental reprogramming. The machine cut short, and Wulf blacked out. When he woke up again, both he and Silver were lying on the floor. The guard had a pencil sticking out from his left eye. According to the official report, Wulf's psychological resistance had sent the machine's software into an infinite loop. The device had then sent several targeted electrical shocks to the aggression centers in Wulf's brain. It sent the guinea pig into a frenzy that gave him the strength to break loose.

— "Here we are," Copper said.

The guard pointed to a rather uncomfortable stool in front of a window. It had a grey, two-way speaker system attached to it. There was no one there yet.

— "Where's Inga?" Wulf asked.

Copper didn't answer. The visitor room's white lights were too bright for this time of day. Wulf sat down. His hands were still cuffed behind his back. He was staring at the green interior beyond the glass when a door on the other side opened. A woman entered. It was her. She was a delight to see, that tall wonder of nature, the Europolis's own Venus. A soft breeze followed after her blond hair. She looked sad but tried to hide it. This would be her final visit to the prison. She knew she would never see Wulf again after today.

Wulf didn't say anything, not knowing what to say to the only woman who had ever loved him.

— "Oh, Wulf! It's so strange to be here. I don't want it to end like this, with you behind the glass."

— "I know. It feels strange."

Copper walked to the back of the corridor, away from the visitor rooms. Wood posted near the room's entrance. He barked that Inga and Wulf would get no more than fifteen minutes.

For a minute or so, the two were just sitting there, trying to think of what to say. They looked each other in the eye. Dreaming of old times, they matched their hands against the window. This was going to end in tears, Wulf knew. Time slowed down. Their gaze lasted an eternity. Wulf felt as if they had sat there without moving for several centuries. Inga felt it, too.

Then, the world around them started moving again.

— "I had a dream last night," Wulf said. "I dreamed of a man in his prime. In the dream, he spends a couple of days in a cabin in the woods. He just wants to get away from people. He's grown tired of the inescapable crowds of people constantly surrounding him back home. The two-story cabin is located in a clearing among the trees. Outside, there is a sawmill by a stream. The stream offers fresh water. You can stick a cup in it and drink from it.

"It's getting colder in the evenings, but you can still wear a shirt without a jacket. At night, the man lights a candle by his desk. The round window before him shows a view of the stream, the mill, and the forest beyond. He has brought a notebook. Something compels him to draw, although he knows he's not a good drawer.

"He rests a pencil in his palm. For thirty minutes, his hand is moving across the middle two pages of the notebook. He knows exactly when to press down, when to let go, how to turn, what shape to connect next. Yet, he has no idea what he's drawing. When he feels his work is finished, he briefly experiences a heightened consciousness. He just sits there, reflecting back on his artistic creation. It's certainly original. It looks like the work of a skilled artist. The strange thing is he can't figure out what the picture is supposed to mean. It makes no sense.

"The man in the cabin decides to keep this notebook with him for the rest of his life. He returns home and meets a woman whom he later marries. It's his second marriage, but it's the first time he will have children. The couple grows old together. Twenty years on, when the couple moves to another house, he goes through this old stuff and finds his old notebook. Carefully, he tears out the middle pages and frames them. His wife hangs the frame on the wall beside their bed. She is as mesmerized by the drawing as he is. They still don't know what it is supposed to represent.

"Years go by. An old man, he's lying resting on his deathbed. His final hour has come. Respiratory problems caused by his work as a first responder have taken their toll. His wife and children are there. They are holding his hands as they watch him struggle to breathe. He turns his head and takes one last look at the drawing on the wall.

"Now, he sees what the drawing means. It's a picture of himself lying on his deathbed, surrounded by his future wife and their five children. A tear flows across his cheek. For the second time in his life, he experiences that heightened consciousness. This time it leaves him. He turns his head back to his family. Gasping for breath, unable to tell his family he's seen the picture's meaning, he watches both them and the picture behind them fading away. He is not in pain anymore.

"Nine people who are not related attend his funeral. They are the grown men and women whose lives he had saved from a burning building shortly after his return from the cabin in the woods. It was that fire that damaged his lungs. Doctors told him the damage to his lungs should have killed him right away. None of the doctors dared to say it, but privately they all thought it was a miracle. Something kept their patient alive another four decades.

"You see, the man had gone to the cabin because he had wanted to end his life there. He'd grown tired of living for himself."

Inga burst into tears. Wulf didn't cry, but seeing Inga overwhelmed him with sadness.

— "Oh, Wulf! Why can't we do that? Why can't we draw a picture of us living happily?" She paused for a moment to dry her tears. "I know what your dream means. Your life isn't over yet. You don't know the purpose of your life yet. There's one waiting for you, too. You must know it. Wulf, you are going to find a way out. This war isn't over yet."

— "That's enough!" said Wood. "You both know the protocol. It isn't allowed to discuss illegal ideas. Stick with the protocol, or I will have to cut your visit short."

— Wulf turned to Wood and said, "Do you know the protocol? Do you really know the protocol?"

Wood didn't reply.

— "Wulf," said Inga, "do you remember the things we planned on doing? We were going to escape the city together. We were going to see the mountains in the North and drink from streams. We were going to stay young forever. If only,... if only they hadn't heard you speak."

— "Everybody heard me speak, but no was listening, except for the judge. He knew damn well what I said was true. He didn't want people to know. If people had listened to me, there would have been a revolution underway. I have no regrets. I said what I believed should be said out loud. If this world doesn't want me then I don't want this world."

— "Don't say things like that!"

Copper returned from his stroll to the end of the corridor.

— "Time's up!" he said.

— Wulf leaned forward and whispered, "After my dream, I tried my hand at drawing, but I don't know what it means."

Wulf stood up and turned around. With his back facing Inga, his hands out of sight of the guards, he managed to take out a piece of paper from his pants' back pocket, despite being in cuffs. He pretended to lose his balance and leaned against the visitor window. He slid a thin piece of paper through a crack below it. The guards came and grabbed Wulf by his shoulders to help him upright. Inga slipped the piece of paper into her bag unseen. Copper and Wood whisked Wulf away.

The Titan looked over his shoulder to see Inga one last time. He didn't say anything. They would never see each other again. Inga couldn't take it, got up, and ran off in tears, angry and confused.

* * *

Back in his cell, Wulf laid himself down on his bed and put his hands behind his head. He thought about the few days he had left. Today was Tuesday. Friday at six o'clock in the morning, the Warden would come to take him down to the execution facility. Silver was going to have his revenge.

Through his cell door, Wulf could hear the sound reverberating from the TV set in the cell straight across his. The evening news was on. A nasal voice, almost robotic, was narrating a story about a new directive reached by the World Council. In the name of progress, the Council decreed to stop calling prisoners prisoners but pupils. A carousel of commentators, journalists, politicians, and academic staff chimed in to praise the Council's visionary leadership.

— One TV pundit exclaimed, "Hello everybody. As of today, crime is a disease of the past. The Council's engineers have solved all crime. We are now living in a world without prisons and prisoners." His right arm stretched out, the pundit yelled triumphantly, "Utopia has arrived! Hail progress! Hail progress!"

All evening long, words to this effect echoed through the city's zonal news channels to make sure every citizen heard them with undiluted enthusiasm. Newscasters obediently repeated the new doctrine:

— "The world is now crime-free," one said.

— "We are living in a crime-free world," echoed the second.

— "A crime-free world has arrived for our children," repeated another.

— "You've got to be kidding me," Wulf mumbled.

He got up from his bed and peeked through the latch near the top of his cell door.

— "Bear?" he said. "Did you hear that, too? Are you watching TV? We're pupils now, students of law. It really is a perfect world, isn't it?"

Before his arrest, Bear, an African-Chinese man, had been a businessman living on the one-hundred-and-twentieth floor. The courts convicted him of murdering his Latino-Icelandic wife. He had, in fact, killed her, without denying it, after having discovered his five children weren't his. Owing to his wealth and business connections, Bear and his wife had managed to secure breeding rights for five children. For twelve years, Bear had played the perfect father. He had been attentive and caring. He had been the dad who was "there". He had truly loved his children.

One day, when his oldest son got involved in a traffic accident, he rushed to the hospital. The seriously injured kid needed a blood transfusion, fast. Bear offered his blood but found out his blood type didn't match. Doctors said blood types could differ between fathers and their offspring. They saved his son with artificial blood. Still, the event led Bear to investigate his genetic relation to his children. Earlier suspicions he had had began making sense. He soon found out his wife had been having an affair with the doorman from the ground floor. His kids were downgrades, a derogatory term used when a woman had a child with a man from a lower floor.

His world collapsed. The discovery of his wife's fraud set him off in a frenzy. He trashed his office. It took him a while to calm down. After the realization he had been tricked into funding the cuckoo's brood, Bear calmly sent his kids away to a supervised children's carnival and invited his wife to a romantic home dinner. He prepared her three courses and entertained her as usual. She didn't suspect a thing. After dessert, she laid down on the sofa to rest. Her throat exposed, Bear slashed her with a meat knife.

From his cell, Bear looked back through the peephole and met Wulf's eyes.

— "Well, obviously," Bear said. "The Council always said they would create a perfect world without crime, didn't they? I guess they finally kept their promise, huh. Ha-ha!"

— "It's strange, isn't it? How every problem in his world is solved with words, never with deeds. Nothing ever changes. They change what you believe about things. They mess with your head. The media misrepresent reality to change our behaviors, to elicit our compliance with their exploitation," Wulf said.

— Bear, in a philosophical mood, said, "Let me tell you what's wrong with this world. I've been thinking about this a lot. Back in the old days, before the Big Reset, there were all these nations, you know, national states of various sorts and sizes, right? And they were all bad and oppressive and always at war with one another, right?

"But do you know what I think? I think nations had some advantages over our one-world dystopia. If you were being persecuted in, say, China, then you could flee to Germany or France and live free from the Chinese overwatch state. If you hated France, you could go to Spain. If you were wrongly accused of crimes in India, you could flee to Pakistan.

"I mean, individuals had options back then. Sure, their options were limited. Sure, it must have been hard to get into some places. But at least people had a choice. In our globalized world, there's no choice. There's no place left to flee to. They give you one political system to abide by, and that's it. It's either the city or the scorched Earth.

"You see, without a market for nations, there's no incentive to improve people's wellbeing. The Council can do whatever it wants. So, why would it help us?"

— "That's what I mean," said Wulf. "This one-world state was supposed to be all progress and zero oppression. That's what the news people keep telling us every day... Bear, I haven't gotten over the fact that you're getting your ass fried for killing your wife, while I'm getting the same deal for speaking my thoughts. This world has lost its measure for things."

— "You were always a bit timid, Wulf, ha-ha! You still don't understand it, do you? The Council doesn't reason the way you do. From the perspective of social engineers, words are more dangerous than actions. Words can propagate from one person's mind to another, like a virus. That's why most guys in this prison, err, I mean student house—ha-ha!—are in here for thought crimes. You just went a little too far."

Wulf paused. A dose of self-doubt usually entered his mind when discussing such topics.

— "Bear, you are a friend. The thing is, I often can't tell whether I'm right or wrong about something. How does one really know anything about anything? All I know is the official account of the scientific worldview has to be wrong. They've swept something under the rug, something big, but I don't know what it is. To make their formulae work, scientists had to attribute infinite creative powers to some nothingness from which they say an infinite number of universes can spontaneously arise. They may call it the Nothing, but I call it something Greater."

— "I know. You've tried to explain this stuff to me many times over. I think you're on to something." On a more serious note, Bear wanted to know, "What do you think this Greater Thing is? Do you really think that It, or should I say He, is real?"

— "I don't know what It is. All I ever found out about It came from that old book I told you about, the Völuspá. I was able to translate some parts before my arrest. It said something about the fate of mankind, Ragnarok, a sort of end times, the apocalypse. A man named Votan is supposed to come to Earth to fight the world snake that is holding humankind in a chokehold."

Despite his name, Bear wasn't a big and brutal man. He was called Bear because he had a habit of sleeping in like a hibernating bear. Tomorrow, he would have to get up early. He dreaded the thought.

— Wulf asked, "Your time is up, isn't it?"

— Bear spoke without enthusiasm and with a lowered voice, "It's been nice knowing you. If you don't mind, I don't like to talk about... about what's going to happen to me tomorrow. I never said I was innocent. I did what I did. She deserved it for cheating on me like that. For twelve years!" Bear was sobbing. He tried to hide the pain in his voice, "Hey, did you know they brought me a steak for dinner. Real meat! It was the best dish I had in years."

Wulf didn't know what to say. He felt the urge to say goodbye to his friend in a poetic style:

Mindful and brave Are man's great children,Daring and ready;Glad and happy Will each man be Until the day of his death.

Bear shuffled back to his bed. He turned off the TV with the remote control and curled up under his sheets.

The next morning, Wulf got up later than usual. His breakfast was waiting for him on the floor in front of the door's bottom hatch, a faux-bacon and substitute-egg sandwich. It still had the taste of carpet. When he went to pick up the breakfast, he noticed Bear's cell stood wide open. Two cleaning ladies were at work, steaming his mattresses. Bear was gone. On his knees, Bear's departure hit Wulf hard. This is what it meant to lose a friend. He punched his upper leg with his fist.

* * *

For most of Wulf's adult life, he had felt forced to patrol his thoughts, making sure not to say the wrong things to the wrong people. Only Inga and Bear had had open minds to listen to him and believe him. In a sense, Wulf had always been a prisoner, a prisoner of his own mind. He damned the world that wouldn't let him speak.

Almost three years ago, the day secret police had come to arrest Wulf, the day that would lead to his death sentencing, had been a pleasant, windy day in the fall. Leaves on the trees in the rooftop parks had turned brown and yellow. The sunlight falling through gave off a kaleidoscopic effect. Whether it had been his neighbors above or below who had called the thought police on him didn't matter to Wulf. The secret police had acted on the call, and they had been swift. They moved into his neighborhood, undetected and in civilian clothes. A woman rang Inga's doorbell.

With wild gestures, the stranger in need tried to communicate her child had, supposedly, fallen into an indoor fishpond near the communal area two floors down. She needed someone's help to get him out. Wulf, who had heard Inga and the woman talk, ran down two flights, straight into a trap. There was no child to be seen. While looking at the reflection of his face in the pond water, he saw three officers approach him from behind. They knocked him on the head, and Wulf collapsed.

His court case became a global spectacle. He was publicly denounced as a thought criminal. The judgment was broadcast live for all to see. The Council was going to make an example of Wulf to deter others from trying to think for themselves. Headlines called him the world's last thought criminal. Days on end, news anchors ridiculed his beliefs, misrepresented them, criticized his failed corporate career, and psychoanalyzed his persona short of declaring him clinically insane.

They didn't go after Inga but rather blamed Wulf for corrupting her and her artwork. After his conviction, the state banned and burned most of her creations. They called her work unfit for reasons of public health. The courts accused Wulf of having preached state subversion to a following of reactionaries. The Council and its global media empire fabricated a faux-reality to make Wulf look evil.

Still, Wulf's arrest, his trial, the conviction, orchestrated for a maximum political exploit, offered him liberation. With nothing left to lose, he was finally free to speak his mind. To the shock of the world's news commentators, Wulf's words made a lot of sense to people. Deep down inside, even the grayest office mouse still longed for the old values of family and community. Modern urban society hadn't crushed the human spirit yet.

Many of Wulf's beliefs weren't considered spectacular or revolutionary at all but rather common sense. The state detested it. To state officials, common sense could only lead to a populist revolt. To the surprise of the Council, many citizens were, privately, perfectly capable of thinking for themselves. People had learned to keep quiet because an oppressive surveillance system bullied them into silence. Wulf had dared to speak up, and he was going to face the consequences for it.

People who watched the court broadcasts began awakening to this young man pleading his innocence before a kangaroo court that was certainly going to convict him. Wulf knew he was facing life imprisonment no matter what he said or did next. He could have turned it into a show for his own sake. Nevertheless, he chose his words carefully.

State powers, on high alert, tried to paint Wulf as a loner, a zealot, a mentally unstable character. They flashed his business school diplomas before the cameras to show he once failed a math test. That proved how uneducated he was, they said. But Wulf knew himself. He had spent years searching for his soul. His thoughts hadn't been the random inventions of a madman but the outcome of a contemplative life.

Even if the majority of TV viewers regurgitated the state's caricature of Wulf, he knew some viewers, some groups of people somewhere out there in the caves and caverns of the urban world, would understand what he was trying to say. His words would resonate with them. People would recognize their own struggles.

When, during his trial, his final statement was broadcast to the world, it received the highest ratings. His conviction was the best-watched show of the New Era. Though heavily interrupted and commented upon by script-fed anchors, Wulf had been able to broadcast more truths than any other citizen since the Big Reset. In a slot of undivided global attention, Wulf had spoken the words for which he would receive the death sentence:

— "Our world is based on science, they say. But the scientific community has based its assumptions on the political, not the objective, belief that all in existence in the world is matter-in-motion, or matter and energy. This scientific worldview maintains that all matter was set in motion at some point of origin, originating from nothing, and is moving toward some utopia. But when has science ever proven its most fundamental premise that all reality must be physical reality to be true? Its own methods cannot be used to prove the hypothesis. Since the scientific method can only measure the physical, it can neither prove nor disprove the existence of non-physical realities.

"This belief that reality must be physical, in fact, comes from the doctrine of materialism. But that's just a political assumption, certainly not a scientific truth. Thus, science is not really scientific. Science is political. Science is not objective but subjective. The scientific method is reductionist; it can only measure the physical dimension of what we experience as reality. The broader reality that includes our dream world, the spiritual world, the world of the soul and the instinct, cannot be measured by science. A physical ruler can only measure physical objects. How does one measure an ideal that only exists in one's dreams?

"In all, the fraud of materialism reveals that the politics of scientific progress are a human construct. The belief in the scientific worldview, or scientism, is a human doctrine, not an absolute truth. There is no progress from zero to infinity, from nothing to utopia. There is only change. Utopia shall, therefore, forever remain a political illusion.

"The truth, I believe, is that a clique of intellectuals has successfully conned the human species into chasing a lure around the tracks of the economy. I believe time is cyclical, not linear, and that each cycle returns to the same. Though the future is not a repetition of the past, the faintest echo of past events shall be heard for all eternity."

The eternal return of the same. Had Wulf exposed the insidious fraud of a global elite, parading their subjective needs as universally true under the guise of objective science? The possibility that the belief in social and scientific progress could be based on anything other than objective truth posed such a threat to the world's ruling elites that the Council was forced to lampoon Wulf as a crazed zealot. Nobody, not even leading scientists, had ever dared to question the unquestionable truth of science's fundamentally flawed assumptions. Academic personnel best avoided the topic and, instead, focused on their research for fear of losing their funding.

During the court case, an order came in from higher up. The judge seemed upset by it and scheduled a lunch break. Secret police escorted Wulf to the high-security prison where he thought he was going to spend the rest of his life. His conviction had been rigged, ordered from above. This was going to be a political execution.

* * *

The prison pantheon was operated like a clockwork. Prisoners were the gears; the guards, the switches. Here, indeed, human beings were nothing more than matter in motion, the dehumanized remnants of their spiritual selves. Copper, Wood, Silver, the other guards, and the Warden appeared amicable at first. It was all learned behavior. Not a shred of genuine humanity was left in them. Once you got to know them, you realized the prison staff members behaved as machines programmed to do their jobs a certain way. They wouldn't alter their routines until the next state-endorsed policy upgrade was installed in their minds.

The prison guards would only let Wulf out of his cell once per day. It had been the Warden's personal idea to offer his students some fresh air. To the inmates, the brief human company came as a welcome break from their solitary confinement.

For thirty minutes, the inmates would be allowed to take a stroll through a gated walkway. It started in the center of the prison pantheon. A circular animal cage, about fifteen feet high, in the shape of a cupola, collected Wulf and his fellow prisoners. From there, the prisoners could walk through a narrow tunnel leading outside into the walled prison gardens. Grainy sand covered the outdoor area. There were a couple of big boulders to sit on. In the center stood a lonely ash tree. Its low-hanging branches flew out in all directions.

It was a cold day in the fall. Wearing a thick standard-issue prison coat, Wulf crouched down beneath the tree. Looking up through the leafless branches, he caught a clear blue sky.

A short, dark-haired man strolled toward Wulf. His name was Miguel, a Portuguese-Ugandan fellow.

— "Wulf," he said. "How are you? I know you're running out of time. Are you in the mood for a chat?"

— "Sure."

Wulf got back up on his feet and leaned against the ash tree's trunk. He towered over Miguel.

Miguel had been falsely accused of embezzlement. For no apparent reason, state police had sent him an invitation to come by a zonal police station to discuss certain undisclosed matters. A few days later, after work, the unsuspecting Miguel went by the station. The policemen asked him to fill out the paperwork concerning his domicile. They claimed the previous owner hadn't provided the proper paperwork, and this needed to be corrected.

Supposedly, it wasn't a very big deal, and it wasn't going to reflect badly on Miguel. He complied and signed everything. However, with his signature, he inadvertently signed his admission to embezzling funds through a real-estate scheme. He never confessed to the judge, but the police officers had his signature. The officers who tricked Miguel into signing his confession made a great profit. After Miguel's conviction, they confiscated his home, sold it at below market value and kept a provision for themselves. The judge convicted Miguel to ten years in prison.

— "Have you heard about the elections?" he wanted to know.

— "No. My TV is broken. Besides, I don't watch politics," said Wulf.

— "Well, the people of the Europolis have elected a new Programmer, a Babylonian named Mortimer Bilderberg."

— "It's just for show. The Council doesn't believe in democracy," Wulf said. "Besides, the majority of people don't think for themselves. After several generations of urban life, people just stop thinking. It's not required of them. Everyone's living on autopilot until some catastrophe happens. Citizens have become domesticated humans. The urban rabble has become human cattle."

— "Yeah," said Miguel. "They're NPC's, non-playable characters. They have no sense of agency. They've lost their capacity for critical thought. I used to think it was a meme, but it's real. In the city, people's personalities converge around the same ideals of socialism, equality, and diversity. That's because a docile herd secures profit and power for the urban usurers."

— "Exactly. Most people are, at best, actors reading off the script their employers feed them. They're willing to do a pretty good job at it as long as their compliance awards them basic securities and livelihood, or a promotion. A false sense of progress keeps them trapped in a state of passiveness.

"The brutes who used to bash their enemy's skulls in have evolved into emancipated wusses. But they'll use lies and deception to get ahead of others. And what for? The methods of survival have changed, but the conditions for life have not. Life is struggle. It still is. Progress hasn't ended man's struggle with nature but has come to mean struggle by different means. The once free individual has surrendered himself to the state's monopoly of violence.

"Totalitarian governments have to kill, oppress, and manipulate their own citizens so they'll sit still while they're being robbed. The transition from nation-states to the World State has made things worse. The Council's engineers say the World State doesn't oppress anyone, yet it has never been more difficult for women to have children. Never have so many women undergone state-sanctioned abortions. Social oppression shifted from the born to the unborn to hide it from view."

— "And they call it progress." Miguel hesitated to bring up the subject but couldn't ignore it either, "Did you hear about Bear? He's gone now."

— "I know," Wulf said. He felt ashamed for not having been able to do anything to save his friend. At the same time, his own fate loomed. "I woke up this morning, and he was gone. No one shed a tear. That's how it is. They fry you, and you're gone."

— "Your girl, Inga. She will care."

— "The bureaucracy won't inform her of my fate until three months afterward. In case they botch the execution, and I live, no one will tell her."

The guards atop the prison walls were flashing a signal. It was time for their pupils to return to the cage. Miguel and Wulf strolled back.

* * *

Wulf returned to his cell. Knowledge of his nearing end didn't bother Wulf as much as the boredom. For twenty-three hours and thirty minutes per day, he spent his time waiting in his small though luxuriously decorated room. He had developed depression from the three years of inactivity since his incarceration, from the dullness of existence, from the pain of being fed like a caged animal. Wulf often thought about the times he and Inga had spent lying in each other's arms, in search of lost time, dreaming of escaping the city's machinations. Had life in the Europolis been much different from prison life?

City life extinguished the fire burning in people's souls, forced to spend thirteen-day workweeks staring at computer screens, responding to the crises of ad-hoc hell. Urban professionals spent so much time killing themselves with work they had lost all sense of self. Even after hours, you couldn't have a meaningful conversation with people who had tomorrow's work schedules on their minds. How could anyone pretend to enjoy urban life without numbing themselves to it with alcohol and drugs?

With no more future left to worry about, the events of the past became crystal clear. In these final hours of his life, the meaning of his thoughts trickled down to reveal themselves to Wulf. He began to see the arc of his life from the cradle of his birth under the ash tree to his waning being on death row. For the first time in his life, he felt he understood himself. He could see why he had clashed so hard with Bart and Susannah from the Alpha-Beta Company. He had been a simpleton. They had exploited his naivety. When he finally revolted against them, it was too late.

Wulf was a man uninterested in the urban ideal of exploiting others. He was a builder, a striver, a thinker, a man not helped but restricted by city life. If he could have left the city with Inga, they would have joined the other outcasts in the northern valleys. There, they had planned to build a house of their own. He would labor for his home-grown food. What more could a man need?

An uncontrolled sensation welled up in him. He felt it run up from his legs through his chest, then onto his face. He clenched his fists, ready to fight off a hidden danger that was not really there. Wulf had wandered about so often, hoping to find some meaningful activity to dedicate his life to; trustworthy friends, a career with a purpose, a wife and kids, a good life.

Unanswered questions made him restless. What kind of man had his father been? Why had his parents left him below the ash tree? Why had he been brought up an orphan, the child of an unwanted pregnancy? Why hadn't his parents ever come looking for him? Perhaps they had heard his speech in court. Perhaps his words had resonated with them without knowing this young man was their son. This was his only regret, never to have known who his parents were.

City life's biggest turnoff, however, had come from people's belief systems. Citizens invariably believed the exact same things. No one questioned their beliefs because they assumed them to be universally true, a false assumption. They would all regurgitate government propaganda. Why, he wondered, hadn't he understood that people who don't tolerate one's beliefs can never be one's friends? Having to deny one's self to please others amounted to self-betrayal. Wulf felt sad and angry. Life's lessons had come to him slowly. Now that they did, they arrived with a force that hit him hard.

On the day before his execution, the Warden entered his cell. He came to explain his pupil next morning's procedure. The Warden, flanked by Copper and Wood, presented Wulf's last supper, pepper steak and potato wedges, the same as Bear's.

— "Mr. Gungnirsson? May we have your attention?" said a monotonous Warden.

Wulf nodded and seated himself on his folding chair. The Warden continued. With his right index finger, the Warden pointed toward his forehead, his chest, his left shoulder, then his right shoulder, and spoke these words:

— "In the name of science, the cosmological constant, the speed of light, and the theory of relativity, I praise the Theory of Everything and its immutable laws that govern our universe for our daily progress. Eight point three one four five, so may the gas constant guide us.

"Well, Mr. Gungnirsson, I stand before you not only as your warden and executioner but also as your educator. You have not been an efficient cog in our machinery. Tomorrow, at six o'clock in the morning, I shall wake you up and escort you downstairs to our stoppage facility. Silver shall operate the device to arrest the motion of your matter. Let us pray that a more efficient cog will come to replace you. Do you have any questions?"

What was the Warden talking about all of a sudden? The gas constant guided him? Wulf was tired of this mechanical speech coming from the bureaucrats. The higher up in the hierarchy, the less sense they made.

— "What happens to me when I die, Warden?" Wulf asked.

— "Nothing. You are just matter in motion. Our device downstairs will freeze the motion of your atoms and suck the energy out of you. Then, once you have become motionless, your remains shall be repurposed for the economy."

— "That's not what I meant, Warden. What happens to me when I die? What happens to my mind, my memories? Do they also come to a halt?"

— "Ah, well, I see. Mr. Gungnirsson, we are all aware of your, err, rebellious thought processes. I assure you that your thoughts and feeling are no more than the mechanical byproducts of the matter set in motion by the Big Bang. If you think of a kidney, your thoughts are your brain's urine.

"Sadly, in your case, an unfortunate malfunction has been detected in your mental bladder. We cannot allow your defective mind to continue to spread its verbal feces through our sane society. That's what the sewer is for. We will flush your mind down the toilet in the name of the state and the Holy Council. Seventy billion people's lives depend on Her."

— "Warden, don't you think it's strange to talk about people like that? You speak of people fueling the economy in a literal sense. People aren't fuel. People aren't combustibles."

— "No one said anything about burning people, Mr. Gungnirsson. Perhaps it's you who takes things too literally. The stoppage device in the arrest facility will cast a blue light over your being and remove the motion from your atoms. I'm repeating myself. At any rate, we will not let your energy go to waste. We may think of your remains as waste, Mr. Gungnirsson, but we recycle everything. We are working toward a durable society. Your physical remains will be distributed among a number of industries."

Wulf stood up and moved away from the three men to look out the window.

— "That's the sort of thing that has me worry about your mental health," said Wulf.

— "Mr. Gungnirsson, I can assure you that there is nothing wrong with me. I'm perfectly rational."

The three men left and locked the cell door with a bang. Wulf had twelve hours left to live. He ate his steak dinner and enjoyed it as much as Bear had.

What is a man supposed to do during his final hours? Should he sleep? Should he stay awake and rob himself of the last dream he might have had?

Outside, a pair of birds chirped joyfully. You would never hear them in the city, only near this remote prison. The birds were free. No one told them what to do. If life was hard in one place, they could fly away to another. Wulf envied them. A gear in the urban clockwork can only turn and toil. Controlled by the managerial classes, working men and women could only stop and start their day at their employers' whim.

A bird, no matter how small, had a will to purpose, Wulf believed. A bird knows why it exists. It lives to build a nest, to attract a mate, to see its offspring soar. But people? What do we know about ourselves? The purpose of life could be as essential as preserving oneself and, by extension, passing oneself on to the next generation through procreation. Both prisons and so-called free societies, Wulf believed, robbed people of this innate drive.

* * *

Night fell. Prison doors stopped slamming open and shut. Life in the panopticon came to a halt. Wide awake, Wulf noticed an annoying humming sound. A mosquito had managed to get into his quarters. He felt no need to squash it. He rolled up the sleeve of his left arm and waited to see if the mosquito would bite. It took a while. Then, it did. Wulf observed the creature extend its snout to drill through his skin. Then it left. Life exists to fuel other life, not economies. An economy was the byproduct of man's struggle with nature, not the purpose of human existence.

Modern society, however, had made infinite economic growth its governing principle. It was all work for the sake of work—to provide the divine elites with a free life at the expense of the rest of the world. In the Europolis, the socialist promise of man's liberation from the struggle with nature had proven to be a fraud. Instead of elevating the masses, socialism merely maximized workers' output.

Staring at the ceiling, Wulf focused on his breathing. He decided that his last dream was going to be worth more to him than staying up all night and forgoing it without sleep. He mumbled to himself:

Only a fool Frets at night,Thinking the day will be better;Moody and tired,The morning will bring The same misery as ever.

That night, Wulf dreamed of a wanderer plowing through powdery snow. With each step, his foot sank to his knee. The old man was exhausting himself. He wore a cloak and a broad hat that shielded his face from the icy winds. He held a long walking staff in his right hand to keep himself upright. Perhaps it was a spear. With every gust of the wind, his grey beard flew out. The wanderer occasionally stopped to listen to the rustle of leafless tree branches. After a while, the wind laid down and silent snowflakes whirled onto his hat.

In the distance, the vagabond saw the prison Wulf was in. In the dream, it stood isolated atop a hill overlooking a rough sea. The wanderer from afar entered the building through a tall bronze door that wasn't there in reality. It looked like the door from the bookstore. Inside, everything was quiet. The old man approached the prisoner's cupola in the center of the panopticon. Except for Wulf, the jail was completely empty and abandoned. Still dreaming, Wulf got up and noticed his cell door was unlocked. Without speaking a word, he approached the wanderer who was waiting for him by the circular cage.

The cage's floor sunk down and revealed a spiraling stairwell. They descended together. The grey wanderer led the way, Wulf followed. With each step, the sound of their footsteps echoed into a hall below. After a short descent, the stairwell's outer walls stopped, but the steps spiraled further down around a thick column. Here, one had to be careful not to slip and fall over the edge.

The great hall revealed itself. The dreamer couldn't believe what he saw. This hall was bigger than the prison itself. The underground cathedral had a vaulted roof supported by two straight rows of decorated columns. When Wulf and the vagabond reached the bottom, sunlight shining through colorful glass windows high up in the walls dazzled them. Wulf had been here before. It was, in fact, the bookstore he had visited with Inga, now restored to its historical glory, cleared from mezzanines and bookcases.

This had been a place of worship. To their left and right, countless lit candles were pinned on racks. Torches hanging by the columns lit the way towards the apse in the front. In between the columns stood life-size statues of men carrying weapons and wearing battle-dress. The figures stood on three feet high pedestals. Some carried spears, others swords, some had bows and short-swords, others battle maces, axes, and guns.

As Wulf and the wanderer passed by the statues, each of the statues came to life. The first flashed an old runic symbol on his wooden shield. The second wore a coat of mail and carried a red cross on his chest. When this figure jumped down from his pedestal, the sound of thousands of links filled the hall with rain. The third man carried a hammer. When he jumped down, lightning struck indoors.

Wulf continued toward the apse. The statues that had come alive followed behind him. By the time he reached the altar, he was towing hundreds of warriors in his wake. They were all Europeans, homogenics, the natives of the northern regions.

Wulf turned around to address the men. He raised his arms and noticed he was wearing the wanderer's cloak. In his hand, he held the wanderer's spear. The wanderer's hat caught the rain pouring down on him. A thunderstorm passed through the cathedral. Around him, the walls of the cathedral crumbled and vanished, revealing a new world, a world without cities, a natural world without traffic and congestion, without steel worms transporting people from one end of the continent to the other.

Wulf spoke, and the men listened. They turned their backs to him. The men marched ahead. Europe's warriors were on the move again.

With a shock, Wulf woke up. Keys rattled at his door. The Warden walked in. It was six o'clock.

* * *

— "It is time," said the Warden.

Wulf cooperated. He got dressed. Copper and Wood escorted their prisoner down to the basement facility. They passed through a short spiraling staircase that debouched into a compact room. It was full of electronic equipment pressed against the walls. Silver awaited his patient. He strapped Wulf into a chair and locked his hands and feet with leather straps. The place must have been an old surgery room. Darkened stains of blood could be seen on the pale walls. The room's unpleasant smell bothered Wulf.

Next to him, Silver started operating a computer system. Above Wulf's head hung a lamp emitting a blue hue. It was called a bleamer, Silver explained. It would throw a blue beam of light over Wulf's body, knocking the material essence out him, arresting the motion in his body's atoms and molecules. The procedure would leave no visible damage to his body. Patients would simply stop being.

Dizziness overwhelmed Wulf. He realized last night's steak dinner had to have been spiked with a sedative. No wonder he had gone along in such a compliant manner. The state never gave without taking. A mist fogged his thinking. He had wanted to put up a fight. It was too late for that. He felt weak, ready to surrender.

— "Just relax, Mr. Gungnirsson," said Silver.

— Wulf yawned, "What was in the food?"

— "You know what you've done to the world," said the Warden. "Haven't you got any idea what your words have caused? It's a good thing the Council controls the media narrative. If we had allowed knowledge of the riots to spread, the whole world would have risen up against us. Your words spread like wildfire. If you only knew of the cost and effort we had to make to contain this catastrophe! We can't have people thinking for themselves, Mr. Gungnirsson.

"It all began right after you spoke the words that led to your death sentencing. On live TV! Few, luckily, understood what you had meant to say. Rest assured that the Council knew all too well. We'll have you know that our scientific methods are perfectly universal. That's what we've been telling people for two centuries. By the gas constant! People suddenly began questioning our truth, the truth we had so carefully engineered since the Big Reset. Citizens who had never questioned anything now had more questions than we were prepared to answer. One thing led to another, and a global crisis was on our hands.

"Imagine that—people demanding freedom, autonomy, and self-determination, all because of some schmuck who couldn't keep his mouth shut. What nonsense! People have to obey, Mr. Gungnirsson. Obedience leads to perfection. Perfection makes profit."

Fighting the poison in his bloodstream, Wulf tried to make sense of these accusations. He hadn't known anything about riots. Had people really listened to what he had been saying? Had they believed him?

— "What do you mean? I was convicted, didn't think... only Inga," Wulf stammered.

— "You led people astray from the truth of universalism!" Silver barked at Wulf's face.

Silver tightened the straps. The Warden looked on with approval, then turned his wrist to read his watch. He synchronized it with a wall clock hanging over Wulf's head. It was almost time to activate the stoppage device.

— Silver continued bullying Wulf, "For two centuries, we've been living in a perfectly rational world. And then you came along. You gave people hope. What a ridiculous thing to do! The whole world was running smoothly until you wreaked havoc. It was a perfect clockwork. Everybody did as they were told. It was efficient. It was durable. It was never going to change again—and then you changed it."

— "Sixty seconds," said the Warden.

Wood, Silver, Copper, and the Warden moved behind a five-inch thick glass wall near the back of the room, to the side of the entrance. The special glass protected them against the blue light that would submerge Wulf. Silver opened a hatch in the wall behind him, revealing a small lever. All Wulf could do was observe himself and the men behind the glass. He couldn't move. The lamp above his head began to hum, first at a low volume, then louder. Silver pulled the lever halfway down, and the device started to emit a high pitch.

— "Ten seconds," the Warden said.

On cue, Silver pulled the lever all the way down. The stoppage device bathed Wulf in a shower of light. He felt incredibly cold. The men behind the glass put on sunglasses. Wulf squeezed his eyes shut. There was no pain. His breathing slowed down. His thinking, however, sped up. Thoughts raced through his head, about himself, about Inga, about the world. He felt he had to say something. What should his last words be? Wulf fought the cold, took one last breath and, with great effort, he spoke these words:

— "I... am not... a machine... I am... a human... being!"

Having spoken these words, the blue hue that filled the room turned yellow, bright yellow, then blood red. The machine emitting the beam had caught on fire. Sparks of electricity hit Wulf's head and burned away a patch of his hair. When he opened his eyes again, he felt warm. His executioners were still standing behind the glass without moving. The device above his head had shut down. The lights in the room were out. A flickering flame coming from the machines next to Wulf lit the room and filled it with the smell of burning rubber.

Wulf noticed his shadow cast on the floor before him. He was alive. Smoke from the device reached a detector. It triggered the water sprinklers on the ceiling. Water gushed out, putting the fire out. Now it was almost pitch dark. The men behind glass still didn't move. Before he could decide what to do next, Wulf lost his consciousness. He came by again an hour later. The water from the ceilings had stopped flowing. To his shock, nobody had come to his rescue. Copper, Warden, Silver, and Wood just stood there with their sunglasses on. Their clothes were soaking wet.

They had turned into statues.

When the stoppage device malfunctioned, it had sent a dark red light through the glass. In a more powerful form, the device had instantly frozen the guards. It had knocked the energy from their atoms and molecules. Wulf, who was still cold from the blue ray, had survived the red beam. It had reversed the earlier effect on him and brought him back to life. He knew it was time to get out of here. Sparks of fire had damaged the leather strap on his left hand. It had slightly burned away the leather. He could almost rip the strap apart. Exerting maximum force, it broke. He could free himself.

Wulf exited through an emergency door to the side. It led him to a man-sized waste tunnel. As he ran toward freedom, he didn't stop to notice the rows of frozen bodies standing upright against the tunnel walls. Bear was one of them.
3

Exile

Out of sight, behind a railway station on the northwestern outskirts of the Europolis, someone, or something, let out a heavy breath. No one was paying attention to it at first. The sound was too faint to signify anything out of the ordinary. It was close to ten o'clock in the evening. The station square was quiet. Lamp posts cast a deep yellow light onto the cobblestone street parallel to the train tracks.

Then came that sound again. It was slightly louder this time. It didn't sound human. Was it a wild animal? Still, hardly anyone had noticed it. Few people walking outside at this hour had other things on their minds, except for Wulf and Inga. They were refugees on the run, walking on the sidewalk between the tracks and the cobblestone street. A car turned and drove past them. Its rubber tires skid over the slippery stones.

Again, there was that breathing sound, even louder. The interval between two breaths had sped up, too. What could it be? Inga heard it. The fourth time, Wulf also heard it. A longer, steamier sound reverberated from the station, followed by a gush. The fifth time, the interval between two puffs had sped up again and was accompanied by loud mechanical rattling. Then again. It was so loud it stopped Wulf and Inga. Curious to see what it was, they turned to look in the direction of the sound.

From underneath the station's roof, a plume of smoke appeared, followed by a black steel colossus, tall as a two-story building, as long as a snake. Behold, a steam locomotive.

Inga raised her eyebrows at Wulf and smiled. They had never seen a locomotive. Although the Council had burned all books and all human knowledge from the time before the Big Reset, it had allowed ancient technology to be assimilated or repurposed for education.

— "I didn't know these still existed," said Inga.

— "It's probably a rolling museum, for the kids," said Wulf.

After his escape from prison, Wulf had disguised himself as a vagabond. He had spent a few days wandering the streets in the shadows of the city's ground level. He had managed to reach Inga undetected.

No one had recognized him. His burned hair and blackened face made him look so different from the well-groomed, suited-up young man he had been before his incarceration. When Wulf took the elevator up to Inga's apartment, she was about to prepare dinner. He rang, she opened the door, and Wulf barged in. She thought he was a robber. He looked like a wild man. When she realized it was the man she thought had died a few days earlier, she fainted and collapsed onto the floor.

Inga was in shock for several hours. Wulf had risen from the dead. He had a lot of trouble calming her down. If the authorities found out she was harboring an escaped prisoner, it would get her in a lot more trouble.

The two spent a couple of days indoors thinking about what to do next. They both came up with the same idea. They decided to flee in exile, together, and leave the city behind for good, just as they had always dreamed of doing before Wulf's arrest. In the North, just above the arctic circle, they could join the communities of outcasts living there. All they had to do was make it across the city's perimeter without getting caught.

Inga was more than prepared to leave everything behind. The state had ruined her art business, even condemned her heroic style for corrupting public morale. If she couldn't express her soul any longer, there was no point for her to stay in the city.

In preparation for their escape, Wulf and Inga dyed their blond hair black. Inga cut hers short and changed her makeup to make herself look older. Wulf put on a fake mustache and glasses. The next morning, they left early, dressed as a couple going on a hiking trip, hauling their backpacks filled with ample foodstuffs. They were carrying enough between the two to survive for two weeks in the wilderness.

It wasn't illegal to travel outside of the city. Rich folks often went there on sporting and hunting trips. Holiday companies offered trips to rural resorts all over the world. It was, however, extremely expensive to leave the city. It was illegal to settle permanently outside of city walls or to live independently without government oversight. All of Earth's inhabitants were required to register themselves as citizens of the Europolis and hold a permanent domicile there.

Getting out of the city was relatively easy. The Council was careful to maintain the illusion of a borderless world. Getting back in caused so many bureaucratic hassles, only the rich and their lawyers could afford to risk it. The great majority of Europolitans couldn't afford to travel to the outside, anyway. Traditionally, the Europolis's policy toward illegal settlements had been to starve the outcasts to death. By slowly robbing illegal settlers of their means of subsistence, they were forced to live through famines or let the Council assimilate them back into the urban collective.

Wulf and Inga weren't rich, but with Inga's last batch of savings, they would at least be able to afford an outbound ticket on the Arctic Express train. Though there were no passport checks in this open-border world, the all-present surveillance system did track people's movements. Wulf and Inga weren't sure whether their disguises would fool the facial recognition systems. To reach the train station that would take them to the North, the refugees alternated between buses and taxis, paid in cash, and avoided surveillance cameras as well as they could.

At the station, Wulf and Inga bought their train tickets on the spot from a vending machine.

The Arctic Express would snake across the Scandinavian landscape, through the former nations of Denmark and Sweden all the way up to the territories of the old Laps, a now-extinct people. The trip was going to take two nights. Since a private sleeping compartment was too expensive, Inga booked coach seats. The train arrived on schedule to pick up its travelers. Forty cars long, it included a restaurant and a bar, but there were no bathrooms.

The train cars were next to soundproof. Unlike underground trains, one could hardly hear this train's weight banging on the tracks. It flew over them like a bird in free flight.

— "Car number twenty-four is ours," Wulf said, reading the number on his ticket.

Their seats were in the back half of the train. Hurling their backpacks onto their shoulders, Inga and Wulf walked down the platform to reach their train compartment. The people who exited the train returned from their springtime skiing vacations. Few new guests boarded. Conductors at each end of the train paid attention to make sure all passengers boarded safely. Inga and Wulf hopped on and found their seats, part of two sets with a table in between. Their car was only half full. Wulf stuffed his and Inga's baggage in the overhead bins. They sat down, and the train departed.

So far, no one had tried to stop them. It felt safe to be on the move. Inga was worried. Would their escape succeed? Had they left a trace? Had security cameras picked them up? Where would the authorities be looking for them? Wulf decided to focus on what to do next. He stretched out his long legs. Inga curled up against him. Together, they dozed off.

Noises woke Wulf up. Trouble. Two police officers had also boarded the train, bringing along a sniffer dog. The animal was looking for illegal contraband. Initially, the officers paid no attention to the couple on the run. They were about to walk past them when the dog stopped to sniff Wulf's leg.

— "Sir?" said the dog's handler. "Please take your bags down from the overhead so the dog can sniff them out."

Wulf complied. Would they see through his thin disguise? Was his fake mustache overdone? To get up, he had to move Inga aside. She woke up. Wulf looked straight into her eyes without saying anything to signal everything was O.K.

— "Please open the bag, Sir," the other officer said.

The dog sniffed, briefly. It didn't bark. It lost interest and moved on. Had it sniffed fear?

— "Thank you for your cooperation," the handler said.

The sniffer dog and its handlers went about their business and didn't return. They got off again at the next stop.

Wulf whispered into Inga's ear:

He who travels Needs his wit;At home, life is easy.People's eyes twinkle At the ill-prepared Who knows not what to do.

They went back to sleep. There would be no more interruptions.

* * *

The next morning, Inga's muscles were aching. She climbed over Wulf's legs. Standing in the aisle, she stretched her body. She was thirsty. The train's heating system had dehydrated her. Before she could think of what to do next, the landscape outside caught her attention. She froze. All she could do was stare at the pristine natural world flying past her. She had never seen such beauty. Out there, there were no residential towers, no office buildings, no congested roads, no herds of people. There was just space, wide-open space.

In the distance, a mountain ridge hid the morning sun. As the sun rose over the ridge, its light brought the valley to life. The valley was covered with woodlands and small lakes. Flocks of birds flew high in the air in the shape of a 'V'. Waterfalls of melting snow flowed down from the mountain tops. Their water joined together in streams that continued down into a river lake.

One thing confused Inga. The scenery the train was blasting through looked nothing like the scorched Earth urban media had always depicted. The world north of the Europolis looked perfectly healthy and clean.

Is this where the one-percenters go to party? Inga thought. She put her arms around herself, a shiver went down her spine. For a short while, she stood there, absorbing the landscape while the landscape absorbed her, too. This calm world kindled her deepest human desires. It felt slightly erotic; a sense of adventure and opportunity presented itself to her. The landscape breathed freedom. She knew her escape with Wulf had been the right decision.

Wulf was still asleep, so Inga decided to have a walk around the train to look for the restaurant car. The restaurant's oversized windows offered a panoramic view of the outdoors. She bought two hot drinks and paid in cash. When she sat down again, Wulf was awake.

Their train began slowing down for its next stop. The couple drank their drinks and watched passengers onboard. They were all scientists on their way further north. Ahead of them lay a research outpost where scientists and their families were allowed to live and work. Academic personnel and their families could afford to travel outside of the city, at taxpayers' expense.

Among the crowd of people standing on the platform, Wulf noticed a man and his young son, perhaps fourteen years old, waiting for the doors to open. The teen, not as tall as his father, said goodbye, picked up his rucksack, and strode towards the train. He appeared confident, but after only three paces, the boy stopped. In doubt, he turned around to look at his tall, broad-shouldered father. The teen ran back to embrace him. Now, the boy left for the train without looking back. Strong fathers inspire confidence in their sons.

Passengers flooded the aisles; their baggage clogged up the aisle traffic. Some had trouble finding a seat. Others realized they had been walking in the wrong direction of the train and had to turn back, causing more aisle congestion.

An older couple sat down across Wulf and Inga. For a moment, they almost forgot they were fugitives on the run. The wanderers introduced themselves as Joseph and Mary to hide their backgrounds.

— "So, what do you do?" said Wulf, pretending to be Joseph.

The academic couple, Anton and Ada DeClerck, looked at each other and smiled.

— "We're engineers. We work for the Council. Both of us. I mean, we're social engineers," said Anton, who sat across the table from Inga.

Anton and Ada were wearing deep-blue, three-piece suits. Both had put on a red tie over their white shirts. Anton was an average-built man with dark, curly hair. His green eyes didn't fit his face. He was effeminate. Ada was plain ugly. She was as tall as Inga but thinner, in an unhealthy way. Her jaw protruded forward.

— "Social engineers?" Wulf asked.

— Ada leaned in and said, "We like to say we design people."

— "What brings you to the North, then?"

— "We're on a research trip. We're going to study the illegal population near a research town called Kirana. And what about you?" said Ada.

— Inga, pretending to be Mary, said, "We're on a hiking trip. We're traveling all the way to the Arctic."

— "So, you'll be traveling one more night then. We're getting off in a couple of hours," said Anton.

Anton uncrossed his arms and hesitated to say more. He rarely spoke to ordinary citizens. For once, he felt a need to. There was something familiar about Joseph and Mary. He mistook his feeling for an invitation to open up.

— "We're on a research mission," he said. "It'll be interesting. Near the research town of Kirana, the Council has learned of the existence of a sect of illegals and outcasts. There have been rumors they've adopted a new religion of their own creation."

— "Anton, I don't think we should tell them about our work," said Ada and poked Anton's arm with her elbow.

— "It's alright, Ada. They can handle it. It's not top secret. Anyway, it's our job to study the illegals and re-engineer their beliefs. We'll spend a couple of months posing as outcasts, living among them, pretending to be them. That way, we can learn all about their primitive customs."

— "The idea is to win their trust and rise in their ranks," said Ada. "Once we've taken positions of power in their communities, we can begin redesigning their society from the inside out. In the end, our goal is to dismantle their natural defenses. They won't be able to resist their assimilation into the global collective. We'll deconstruct them in every way possible; their genders, their marriage rituals, their sense of nationhood. Hey, ho, primitives have got to go!"

Anton and Ada laughed, feeling smug.

— "Oh, it's so easy to fool these primitives," said Anton, letting out a sigh of arrogance.

Wulf and Inga looked at each other and bit their lips. They hid their shock. Who were these people?

— "I don't mean to sound ignorant," Wulf said, "but what exactly is this thing you call 'religion'?"

— "Oh, we don't teach that anymore," Ada said. "We completely abolished and erased all religious beliefs during the Big Reset, centuries ago. We've gotten rid of that superstitious pest. It doesn't surprise us that you've never heard of religion. Before the Big Reset, I mean, before we established the global urban society, religion was rampant. It's a mental disorder. Religion is a set of doctrines rooted in irrationality."

— Anton hasted to say, "Imagine people suffering from a collective delusion. They'll believe anything science can't prove. For example, some people believed that a spiritual Being, a Father who lived in the sky, had sent His only Son to Earth. This Son was said to have died for all the sins of humanity. Can you believe that? Ha-ha! Billions of people gobbled it up."

— "As I said, it's a disorder," Ada said.

Ada and Anton were laughing out loud while Inga and Wulf had a hard time understanding what the couple was talking about. Like most Europolitans, they had never heard of a thing called religion, let alone of a Father who lived in the sky. School, media, TV, and newspapers never once mentioned the possibility of a spiritual reality in existence alongside the physical one. In their world, children were taught to believe in mathematics and physics. There was no room for extraordinary beliefs. Creative thinking was discouraged. There was no need for it. Social engineers performed all the necessary thinking for humanity.

— "It's best for you that you don't know anything about religion. It means we've made good progress," said Anton.

— Ada rubbed her hands and said, "Where exactly did you say you were going? Hiking?"

— "Yes, in the North," Inga repeated.

— "You better watch out," said Anton. "If you veer off the track, you may end up in territories occupied by illegals and vagabonds. We've been trying to get rid of them, but they're very stubborn people."

— "Oh, illegals?" said Inga. She frowned. "I thought we didn't have borders anymore? We were taught no one is illegal."

— "That's not what Anton meant to say," Ada said. "Illegal children are living up there, children from unregistered births. They didn't have permission to have children. We can't allow that. Homogenous communities are bad for diversity. We're going to prune their populations, one way or another."

— Anton added, "The Kirana project is the experiment that'll teach us how to get rid of all the other illegal colonies. Years ago, we tried sending special forces to sterilize the mothers. We booked some successes, but it seems we'll have to return someday and do it again. We can't have these savages running around. What's even worse is they're uneducated."

Wulf and Inga stared at the DeClercks. Inga bit her lip again, but Anton guessed what was on her mind:

— "Have you two applied for your breeding rights yet?"

— Inga crossed her arms and said, "We applied, but I was denied, a few years ago. I sent in my application along with our DNA. It came back saying we're not diverse enough. We expected that but tried anyway. I know I'm not allowed to have a child with W..., err, Joseph."

— "Well, I understand it must be difficult for you," Ada said. "But we can't have people promoting their homogeneity anymore. It's racist. We need more diversity. Diversity is strength."

— "Diversity is strength," Anton said.

— Inga tried to hide her pain and said, "I know. It's not anyone's fault. If you don't mind me asking... Why exactly do we need breeding rights? Shouldn't people be allowed to decide for themselves who they love and who they want to have children with?"

— "Oh, now you're on a slippery slope," Anton said. "In the past, people could do exactly that. They could choose a mate and have kids with whomever. It was chaos. Biological ties between families led to ethnically homogenic communities. It supported the ideas of nationalism and tribalism. It was a horrible world. Think of all the xenophobia."

— Ada said, "We knew we could never convince people with arguments, so we decided to sever people's biological ties with their kin. That's when the Council passed the Diversity Awareness Act. The law only allows women to have children with men from different genetic backgrounds. It has been a success."

— Anton leaned back. "Indeed, the world is a much better place now. Can you imagine tribes of homogenics, like yourselves, populating the world? The thought alone makes me sick. We, social engineers, have to work day and night to prevent that evil past from ever returning. We can't allow it. Besides, I feel so much safer in a diverse world. Don't you?"

Inga put on a poker face to hide the fact she wanted to cry. She held her head high and braved her inner turmoil.

— "Hold on a minute," Wulf said. "You're saying you've solved the problem of nationalism by sending forces to sterilize women who've given birth to illegal children? You've erased national borders, but you've made women's birth canals a global border. That's not a solution."

Wulf's slip of the tongue angered Anton and Ada. As special people shielded from civilian society, they had never been exposed to criticism from their subjects, only to adulation from their peers.

The train's conductor announced the next stop: Kirana. The DeClerck's got up, grabbed their luggage from the overhead bins, and went for the exit without saying goodbye. On their way out, Anton wondered out loud if they should report Joseph for his thoughtcrime. Ada reminded Anton they had more pressing matters to attend to than filling out lengthy forms. The couple would soon forget about Wulf and Inga again.

Wulf put his arm around Inga to comfort her. She was crying silently. She had always wanted to be a mother, but this totalitarian world was out to rob her of that opportunity. They didn't speak to other travelers for the remainder of the trip. The two spent one more night in their uncomfortable, upright sleeping positions.

* * *

When they woke up again, there was time for breakfast before the train would make its second-to-last stop near a place called Checkcha. Wulf and Inga disembarked there. The station amounted to a couple of signposts. There was no platform. There were no shops and no people. After gathering their belongings, Wulf held Inga's hand as she jumped down from the train onto the ground.

A couple of fellow hikers exited, too, but Inga and Wulf decided to fall behind them to avoid further contact with people who might recognize them. The train doors closed, the machine departed. As the train took off, a low-lying lake was revealed in the distance. It wasn't as cold as they had expected. Temperatures were above freezing. The winter season's snow had all but melted away.

A handmade sign was pointing in the direction of the start of the hiking trail. Wulf and Inga followed it southward. The first section of the trail led hikers through pine and birch tree forests. The couple headed for the sprawled-out communities of illegals and vagabonds the DeClercks had warned them about. Surrounded by nature, Wulf realized the city's propaganda conditioned people to stay within its walls like sheep in a barn. Urban enterprise relied on the proximity of consumers like a shepherd relies on his herd.

Inga suggested they could join the vagabonds. Even if the outcasts living in these remote lands recognized them as urban escapees, they might be sympathetic to their cause. Still, Inga urged Wulf to take precautions. They shouldn't blow their cover right away, but first blend in with the locals. Trust was best built up slowly. The outcasts might be on the offensive. Urban intrusions had caused them a lot of harm since the urban forces Anton told them about had forced illegal mothers to undergo sterilizations.

The trail was quiet. Birds were chirping. After half a day of hiking, nature had already healed the hikers' urban stresses. Fresh air erased the memory of traffic fumes in their lungs. The sound of quiet streams soothed their senses. The rustle of leaves in the wind disarmed their urban alertness. In the wild, the urban attack on their hearing, sight, and smell had finally come to an end. Nature worked therapeutically.

The smell of pine and birch lured the couple deeper into the woods. This wasn't an exile, this was a homecoming.

With each step along their hike, a changing Nordic jungle passed them by. The four-hundred-mile-long trail had been traversed by many tourists since the first recreational hikers arrived here centuries ago, before the Big Reset. The trail followed several streams and rivers southward. Some waters had to be waded through on foot. In other places, durable steel bridges had been built to help hikers across wilder sections.

There was no industry here and consequently, no pollution. The water from the streams was uncontaminated. One could consume it without having to boil or filter it. Inga held her cup in a stream and drank some. For the first time in her life, she was off contraceptive tap water, free of charge.

Over the length of the trail, smaller streams coming down from the snowy mountaintops meandered into bigger ones. Further south, bigger streams merged together into lakes. Lakes formed the starting point of broader, deeper rivers that hikers had to row across with a paddleboat. By the end of the trail, the various rivers combined into a single, unstoppable force. It emptied itself into the seas north of the Europolis.

For two nights, Wulf and Inga slept in the wilderness in a light-weight trekkers' tent they had brought along. On the third day in the wild, they packed up camp and walked straight into a herd of reindeer. There must have been hundreds of them. Last summer's mating season had produced many young. Near the back of the herd, the taller males were looking out for danger while guarding the rear with their bigger bodies. The females indicated the direction of travel.

Wulf and Inga didn't want to disrupt the herd and slowed their pace. In response, the herd split up into two groups. Each flanked the human threat to let the invaders pass. As the deer moved by, Inga noticed a couple of youngsters walking by the side of their mothers. The curious young were staring at their human guests, but their mothers spurred them on. The elderly knew better than to take an interest in bipeds.

Inga wondered where such instincts came from. Were all animals born with blank slates, like people? Did each generation of animals have to learn about nature's dangers anew? What if some collective soul, inseparable from their being, helped inform each member of the herd? Did human beings have a soul, too?

Inga reasoned people couldn't be blank slates, either. According to the theory of evolution, if souls could offer individuals access to the collective experiences of their ancestors, species that inherited such souls should be more successful than others. People, Inga concluded, had to be born with a soul, a force made up of one's combined ancestral experiences. Why else did she and Wulf feel so at home in the wilderness? They had never been here, but their ancestors had. Their forefathers had dwelled in such natural places for thousands of years.

There had to be something more to life than mere material existence.

* * *

The trail led Inga and Wulf further up a mountain ridge to a level above the trees. The hyperborean couple spent a day hiking along a plateau overlooking a valley of pine trees. In the distance, they could distinguish simple huts, pathways, even cultivated farmlands. Wulf reasoned that had to be where some of the outcasts were living. It was time to veer off course and explore the Valleys of the Vagabonds.

At the valley's lowest point stood a flood-hill with a large wooden cabin on top. The travelers decided to go there first. Before approaching the locals, Wulf reminded himself:

A cautious guest comes for a meal and holds his breath in silence.He listens and looks with reservation until he has won new knowledge.

The descent into the valley took two hours. When they emerged from the pine forest below, they saw people working on the field in the distance. Closer to the flood-hill, a blond woman greeted them. Wearing her long hair under a colorful bandana, she had been watching her guests' approach through the cabin window. She waved at Inga and Wulf and signaled they had to take a detour around the back of the hill to reach a walk bridge.

The woman's name was Linda. She was happy to meet new guests. The northern climate had blessed her skin with youthfulness. She was wearing a woolen sweater. Linda invited the wandering couple in for a hot drink. Inside the cabin, there was a kitchen with room for two tables. In another section, there were sleeping quarters for up to ten people.

— "What brought you all the way out here? Are you from the city?" she said.

— "Yes, we're from the city," Wulf said. "To tell you the truth, we're trying to get away from it. We came here to find some solitude. Perhaps we will stay in the region for a while. It's certainly nice of you to invite us in. I hope we're not disrupting your day?"

Linda didn't seem to recognize Wulf and Inga as the city's most wanted thought criminal and his abettor. Still, they would be wise to build trust slowly. Wulf wasn't ready to disclose his background.

— "Time slows down here," said Linda. "Besides, I could see from a distance you had to be friendly visitors. If you had been troublemakers from the city, you would have flown in here by helicopter."

Inga and Wulf smiled. Perhaps this was going to work out. In any case, it felt safer to be here than on the train. This was a place where simple people had built a life with their bare hands. Contrary to what the DeClerk's held of them, they weren't primitives. The valley's inhabitants were competent people. Linda and her guests spoke for a while about the vicissitudes of life in the valleys. Many travelers from the city had come here with the same story. They wished to escape the city, but for the most part, people would eventually return home again. Careers kept calling.

Linda felt comfortable speaking her mind. There were no surveillance cameras here. Nothing anyone said was being recorded and processed by the city's data harvesting networks.

— "Cities are the end of people," said Linda. "After my husband and I got married, we moved from the fringes of the Europolis to the urban heart. We thought life would be better there. We thought we would have good careers. We were going to climb the corporate ladder together and become one-hundredth-floor people in no time. We thought wrong. We went there, found an apartment, and landed good jobs. The rents were so high we had to live in a poorly maintained building. Where we lived, people defecated in the middle of the street.

"When you're rich, you can afford to have whatever you want. Then, the city can offer you a nice life. For the rest of us, it was shit. After one year, my husband, Burt, and I looked at each other, and we both knew we were thinking the same thing. We packed up and moved back. We quickly realized life on the outskirts was just a less exciting version of life in the urban heart. We wanted to break away. So, we left the city for good. It was the best decision we ever made.

"The difference between life as a citizen and life as a rural outcast is this: In the countryside, people own themselves. They have room to live as who they are, to express their culture and customs, to live out their traditions. Above all, they get to sculpt their unique and strong personalities. In the city, only economic growth matters. People and their personalities are pressured to conform to whatever behaviors offer the greatest benefit to their employers. Such as life comes at one's own expense. In the city, you have to allow your personality to be rewritten by politicians. Government and media propaganda blast their distortions of the truth at you wherever you look.

"Urban wealth has a natural tendency to flow upward from the poor to the rich, no matter what lies they tell you about social progress. Equality is a lie. Politicians never seem to be able to solve financial inequality, because they don't work for the poor. Politicians work for the rich. The poor can't bribe Congress. You have to be rich to lobby for your interests. It's a politician's sole job to con the poor into working harder and longer hours at stagnant or falling rates. The rich own the city. Urbanism is a scam, a business model.

"What do urban politicians care about things like traditions and customs, or about a people's wish to live free and autonomously? Well, they don't care!

"From a reductionist, economic point of view, things like culture, identity, and traditionalism are inefficiencies that need to be rooted out. That's how urban leadership reasons. The upper castes, the Council's social engineers, will gladly push for the abolition of undesirable behaviors—anything that makes people unique and human. They consider people who wish to live for their own communities backward, ignorant, and uneducated.

"After we optimized the machines, it was time to optimize the people. After the Industrial Age followed the Social Age, the age of reprogramming human beings and their cultures to suit the needs of the owner castes. People clinging on to their ways of life aren't progressing in the right direction. They're not earning profits for their owners. Cities, to stay profitable to their investment classes, must standardize and restrict the behaviors of their inhabitants. A citizen isn't free to live as he pleases. Real freedoms are too costly.

"Look at it this way. Over here, in the valleys, we keep reindeer as cattle, and people are their owners. In the city, people are the cattle, but who are their owners? You never see them.

"There are only two ways out of the city. Either you leave, or you spend the rest of your best years trying to climb impossibly steep career ladders hoping to enter the higher castes. Few succeed, most of us stumble and fall. What do you once you've successfully defied the ladder? Then you'll have the bigger apartment or the bigger office or the bigger garage for your car. Did it really give you more freedom? No, it gave you greater financial burdens.

"At this point, if you give up the fight, you will stall, you will fall behind. Then, all will have been for nothing.

"The lower classes have it even worse. Starting from the bottom, you will hardly be able to climb up the ladder, because its lowest rungs have been sabotaged. Such a life is no different from a life of serfdom or slavery. It's the fate of the majority, forever condemned to the bottom. The urban economy is eternal purgatory. If you're not born into the owner class, you're just a tool. You're cattle, a teachable animal. You are a means of production in the hands of those above you."

Linda's words pleased Wulf and Inga. These were the words they wished to hear. Wulf had been sentenced to death for a lesser offense. Linda had spoken her words with a fearlessness Wulf envied. Had she spoken these words anywhere in the city, she, too, would have found herself on death row.

Linda invited her guests to spend a couple of nights in one of the guestrooms. If they wished to stay longer, they could spend a few days acclimatizing to the new surroundings.

* * *

Later that evening, the travelers were introduced to a large number of people from the vagabonds' valleys. People were gathering around Linda's central cabin to celebrate the springtime. Boys ran around dressed as foxes, chasing after girls. They playfully hit the girls' bottoms with bushels of reed, a fertility ritual. The girls ran in every direction to try to hide from the boys. They would get their revenge at the summer festival, dunking boys into a pond.

Young women dressed in white dresses formed circles. They were performing traditional dances to entertain themselves and their audiences. Young men gathered wood to light a bonfire under the approving eye of the vagabond's elders. A crowd gathered around the fire. Men and women sang their poems dedicated to the spring.

An old woman, known as the shaman, seventy-nine years old, took the privilege to hold an opening speech. The spring festival had officially begun. Parents and their children sat on wooden benches, singing to the tune of drums played by a group of middle-aged men. Two women played their melodies on a flute. Another musician towed a long horn along his side. It was called a lure. When held upright and blown, it let out long notes that could be heard throughout the valley.

A choir of men and women stood in rows facing each other. They sang songs about the land and the food it produced for them. The women sang about the bees that fertilized the flowers and the crops. The men sang about hunting deer. Taken together, their songs formed a dialogue celebrating man's struggle with nature. Children were listening carefully. They paid attention to the words and to the knowledge they conveyed. Someday, they would use this knowledge to become successful farmers and hunters.

Inga and Wulf, still posing as tourists, joined the festivities and spoke with many about life off-the-grid, as it was called. The locals referred to the city as the tarpit and to their own lands as the gardens. This was a community of people unlike the couple had ever met. In the city, neighbors and work colleagues changed with the weather. In the gardens, groups of people were living together for decades to build up meaningful communities. You were interfacing with real people, not with their social media avatars. Nobody was in a hurry to get anywhere.

All these years, Wulf had spent striving to reach the fiftieth floor, he hadn't imagined finding the best life with his feet in the mud. A minimal but strictly functional hierarchy governed the free gardens. Though most were freemen and farmers, there was a court with two elected judges who helped end quarrels without bloodshed. For the most part, people lived as they pleased. Everyone in the valley knew his place in the hierarchy, but no one felt any anxiety over it.

Inga, overwhelmed with the joy of seeing young children dancing around her, went to speak with some of the mothers. For Wulf, the opportunity came to talk to the shaman. Linda's husband, Burt, introduced Wulf to the gray woman. She was sitting below a food storage box atop tall wooden chicken legs to keep its contents out of reach from wildlife. Wulf and the shaman spoke a long time about the world, about life, and about humanity. Her name was Freya.

— "What was it that brought you here, Wulf?" the shaman asked.

Wulf sighed. He wanted to get it off his chest.

— "We're refugees," he said. "We've been forced to flee the modern world. It wasn't voluntary. I was convicted of committing thought crimes. Certain opinions made me an enemy of the state. My words were considered corrupting, dangerous even. Inga, my girl, is innocent. In the eyes of the Council, though, her love for me made her complicit. They didn't go after her to put the media focus on me. She and I were hoping to settle in anonymity, out of sight from the Europolis's billion surveilling eyes. We thought we might find refuge in the North."

— "In our gardens, our minds are free," Freya said. "No one is taking notes. There are no cameras to record your movements. We've had rather unpleasant encounters with the state system, nevertheless. The Council and its one-world project are still pursuing the assimilation of the whole Earth. They don't have enough resources to do it. The urban world is running out of steam. The World State came this far, but it could go no further. Erda has been exhausted, but she has chosen to fight back."

The shaman looked over her shoulder toward the horizon and continued:

— "There is no Programmer here. Finally, we are free and truly equal. The city moves slowly, but it's slowly grinding itself to a halt. We're willing and able to fight back. The Council knows it. Rarely, the state sends its special forces to deal with us. Last summer, they came for the women, for the young mothers."

— "I know. They told us," Wulf said.

— "Who told you?"

— "We arrived at Checkcha on the Arctic Express train. We had met a couple of social engineers on their way to Kirana."

— "Oh, my! Did they speak to you? That's curious. Social engineers generally don't mingle with the public. Perhaps they were short on budget. These engineers, they live above us and adhere to the strictest separation between them and us. Have they told you about anything, anything out of the ordinary?"

— "Well," said Wulf, recalling his conversation, "the two engineers we met, Ada and Anton DeClerck were their names, they spoke of a thing called religion. They told us about a Father who lives in the sky who sent His Son to Earth to die for humanity's sins. I didn't know what to make of it. It sounded like a threat to them. They were headed for Kirana to study a sort of religious revival movement. They were going to infiltrate the illegal communities there and make sure to reprogram any unwanted behaviors."

Freya got back on her feet. She was agitated. She rushed off to meet Burt and Linda. If Wulf's information was correct, the Kirana community was in grave danger. The shaman, Wulf, Burt, and Linda went inside the main cabin for an emergency meeting.

Wulf and Inga had spoken to the engineers just a couple of days ago. The engineers would still be working on analyzing the Kirana communities. That meant the vagabonds had time to warn their fellow tribesmen. Burt called on the help of one of the valley's athletic men, a valley runner. He provided him with a written letter and sent him on his way. Sending a runner was the fastest mode of communication among the illegal tribes. It would take a few days for the message to arrive.

Burt and Linda thanked Wulf for his information. Sending Kirana a warning was all they could do from here, but it might be enough. It could mean the difference between life and death.

The four discussed the events that had been unfolding in the valley over the past decades. The first men and women who settled here had been societal outcasts, persecuted by the state for their beliefs and thoughts. The early settlers had known high death rates. They had faced a century of struggle before acquiring the skills to maintain a stable valley population. It had come at a great human cost to establish the traditions and customs necessary for the valley dwellers' collective survival.

Meanwhile, Inga had won the trust of several of the mothers. They explained to her the confrontation between them and the special forces. Unarmed, the valley dwellers knew they couldn't defend themselves against modern weaponry. The soldiers had intended to round up all of the young women for a so-called medical examination to see if any had given birth. The Council had determined the population too homogeneous to contribute to the diversity of the human species.

The women, however, had received an advance warning from their sister tribe of Kirana. The vagabonds were able to gather and discuss the threat. They decided on a tactic. They would hide most of the children, the teenagers, and the youngest mothers in a nearby forest for several days. When the special forces came, they rounded up the older women who did their best to appear younger. They would fail the medical test but convinced their examiners most of their children had died in a famine. The state forces fell for the trick, never bothering to look for the youngsters hiding in the forest.

So, the vagabonds successfully deceived the hostiles. The old mothers were sterilized, but the young and fertile remained unharmed.

Upon hearing this story, Inga's motherly instincts preoccupied her. She went up to the main cabin, looking for Wulf. She found him with the others. Wulf finally disclosed that he had been sentenced to death for his crimes and that he had escaped prison. They feared their stay in the valleys might bring trouble to the community. They asked Burt and Linda for help. Could they stay?

* * *

The next day, Burt had thought of a solution. Two valleys to the west, there was an old hikers' outpost waiting for new occupants. It wasn't frequently visited but easily reachable within a day's hike from Linda's cabin. Inga and Wulf could move there, if they liked, and live there for as long as they wanted to. Situated in a valley with a lake, there was an opportunity to start a fishing operation.

Inga and Wulf thanked Burt for this solution and looked forward to settling down. Wulf could become a fisherman. They could teach themselves the art of smoke- and freeze-drying fish. He could trade his catch with the vagabonds and other outcasts living in the North. After saying goodbye to their new friends, the travelers went on their way.

The hikers' outpost was situated downhill from where Inga and Wulf were coming. The small stream they followed fell a hundred feet down. From there, its water continued to flow along past the cabin that would become their new home. Inga discovered a small garden where flowers and edible plants grew. A separate shack contained woodworking tools, a saw, and an ax. A simple roof structure protected dry wood from bad weather. The place looked old and abandoned. Coming summer, the couple would have time to improve things.

Flanked by tall mountains, Wulf and Inga reached Erda's bosom. Before entering their new home, Wulf mused:

In a house of one's own,Though small it may be,A man is at home;To own two goats And have a rope-fitted roof Is still better than begging.

In a house of one's own,Though small it may be,A man is at home;His heart bleeds Who has to beg To bring food to the table.

Tired of their hike, Wulf and Inga started a fire in the stove. Inga took one of the metal buckets she found inside to fetch fresh water from the stream. They lit a pair of candles and prepared dinner, leftovers from last night's banquet. Afterward, the two made their way to the adjacent bedroom. This was an unexpected turn in their lives. Perhaps they could grow old here and escape the law forever? Their new surroundings offered a sense of shelter and safety. They didn't talk about it, but both feared paradise wasn't going to last forever. Someday, the city's troops were bound to find them. Lying on a provisory bed, Inga rested her head on Wulf's arm. She moved her hand gently across his chest. Wulf was lost in thoughts and stared at the ceiling.

— "What are you thinking about?" Inga asked.

— "I'm thinking about last night. I had wanted to talk to the shaman about the Skyfather. Then the Kirana issue came up, and we didn't talk about it anymore.

"After so much time living in the Europolis, I can't help but notice I've only just awoken to life. It's this environment. The valleys and the mountains we've passed through, the people we've met, the way the sun hovers over the grasslands... Everything is alive here.

"It's so different from the grey concrete world we were conditioned to believe in. In these gardens, I feel as I'm part of a living, breathing organism. It's the world of the bees, the birds, the plants, and the animals. They all seem to be animated by a sort of Spirit manifesting Itself inside of us. I don't believe anymore that we're just biological machines.

"What if the Skyfather is real? What if He's watching over us? What if He's on our side?"

Inga felt the same way. She hugged Wulf and closed her eyes.

Outside, the spring weather changed. Grey clouds were gathering over the mountain tops that blocked the moon, drowning the valley in a nightly shade. The rain was pouring down onto the cabin's roof. As the water flowed down the windows, it washed away the couple's worries. The fire in the stove simmered. A pleasant warmth filled the cabin's quarters. Inga rolled onto Wulf's chest and pressed her lips onto his. He placed his arms around here. They kissed long and passionately.

Wulf rolled Inga over to her side. He moved his hand along her hips and thighs. He was hungry. The natural environment had aroused both of them. Making love to her man, alone in the valley in these carefree lands, electrified Inga. Wulf took charge of her as if possessed by manlier energy built up since their escape. For a short while, Wulf tried to restrain himself. Then, with the strike of thunder, he lost himself in Inga's eyes.

Exhausted, they fell asleep. When they woke up again, Inga, thinking about the future, said:

— "Wulf, I want to have a baby." She paused. "We could live here forever, build a family. Maybe they'll never find us. As long as the city leaves us alone, there's no need for us to return to the urban world. The city needs us more than we need it. We'll be illegals, but we'll be free. We can have a child naturally. We don't need to take our DNA to the incubation facility. It won't have to develop in a bag. It could develop here, inside me."

Inga placed Wulf's hands on her belly.

— "Here," she said.

— "The city will never recognize them as citizens. They'll be natural-born, illegal homogenics. If they ever want to go to the city, it will spit them out."

The so-called civilized world, Inga thought.

— She said, "But they'll be free in the valleys. They'll be strong and healthy. What reason might our children have to return to the city?"

For the next couple of months, Wulf and Inga worked hard to prepare for the winter. The fish were plentiful, and the soil was fertile. Inga gathered the edible plants she could find and attended to the household while Wulf taught himself fishing. He became good at it and used the nets Inga made for him to catch large quantities. One day, Wulf went to fell a couple of trees. He stored his blocks of timber under the roofing to dry them for the wintertime.

Wulf whistled:

Of dried logs and thatching bark,people know their measure.They measure the wood so that it may last one through many seasons.

Wulf and Inga maintained regular contact with the vagabonds in the valleys. Occasionally, they hosted a guest. With their fish trade, they paid for supplies and other needs. It was a hard but fulfilling life. Few distractions interrupted them. They lived free from the social carrousel city folk are accustomed to getting entangled in.

In the evenings, Inga and Wulf entertained each other by recalling their dreams, interpreting them together. They understood they were more than automatons performing their duties. They came to feel part of a higher dimension. They knew they were spirits, not levers; souls, not gears; human beings, not machines. In the wilderness, their unrestricted humanity roamed free and filled their valley with meaning.

When Inga unpacked her bags, she found the picture Wulf had drawn in prison. She hung it on the wall in their bedroom. They both had a look at it but couldn't figure out what it meant.

Although their lives had become simpler, there was enough to do in and around the home. They worked with their hands and planned with their heads. They baked their own bread, dug food storages, and, as owners of their world, patched up their cabin for the coming winter.

Wulf took up a hobby writing poetry. Inga began experimenting with sculpting wood. Her first sculpture was of a man standing on top of the world, his hands reaching for the stars while the city depicted below him sank in flames. It was not quite clear, though, whether the man was crying for help or crying victory. The look on the man's face could be interpreted both ways. Inga decided to leave the precise meaning unexplained.

Together, they discovered other, long-suppressed talents. Each morning anew, a growing sense of autonomy and self-determination greeted them. The frustrations of urban life wandered off. The frustrations of rural life motivated them to work harder. Hard work paid off. There was no need to wait for promotions. Their lives progressed naturally.

An easy life makes a man complacent and prone to failure, thought Wulf. An uncertain life forces a man to prepare. A hard life makes him stronger.

* * *

Having stored enough fish and wood for the winter, Wulf decided to go on a hike around the lake. He told Inga he would be out for several nights. Shortly after his departure, though, after he had reached the top of a hill, he could hear a man's cries. Ahead of him, coming toward him, a man had tripped over a branch and slid several feet down. Wulf hurried to investigate. The visitor appeared to be in bad shape. The old man's face was bruised and cut from the trail's sharp rocks. What was he doing here all by himself?

The man was carrying a shoulder bag. He looked like an academic. Wulf carried the man down to the cabin. He and Inga helped him recover from his fall. When she saw Wulf approaching, Inga hurried to prepare bandages and hot water for their unexpected guest. The old man, clean-shaven, was bald on top of his head but had wild white hair circling around the side of his head. It took a while for the fellow to come to his senses. Wulf sat him down on a chair in the cabin's kitchen.

He mused:

One needs a fire Who comes in the house With frozen knees.Meats and clothes Are a man's need Who has traveled from afar.

— "Thank you for your help, thank you," the man said. His hands were shaking. "I am sorry, but I am in great danger. I have barely escaped the law."

— "We know how to deal with the law down here," said Wulf. "Have some rest."

The man explained he was professor Altstein. He had spent a lifetime working at the prestigious Institute for Science and Technology, the IST, the world's leading academic organization. The IST advised the Council on material matters. Professor Altstein further explained he had been overseeing research on the origins of the universe. He told Inga and Wulf, who did their best to grasp what the professor was saying, a long-winding story littered with academic jargon about his early career and the history of cosmology.

His incoherent rambling didn't make sense. He told his hosts a story of plot twists, office politics, and betrayal. Professor Altstein had done the unthinkable. He had dared to question the scientific worldview. On a quest to prove science's most fundamental assumption, he had discovered a damning report during a routine search through the IST's archives. It had been written by no one other than the present Programmer, Mortimer Bilderberg, thirty years earlier.

— "This report," professor Altstein said, holding his head in his hands, "this damn report changed everything we believed. It was written in a most obnoxious, convoluted way meant to obscure the truth. Even I had trouble understanding what was written. Yet, when I crunched the numbers, I knew they couldn't be refuted. The report's conclusion was true.

"I found out scientists had always been wrong. For thirty years, this report had been ignored, sealed, locked away, never to be discussed. No one had ever cited from it, not even once! I found its only copy by accident. Foolish as I was, I spoke to the wrong people about it. Then, the Council found out about what I had found about."

Wulf inquired after the report and the reason why the professor had fled.

— "Don't you see?" said the professor. He was nervous. "All of the stories of the past... There was truth in them. What we did... We erased the stories; we burned the holy books. We erased the people's knowledge of the existence of a Greater Being."

Wulf's jaw dropped.

— "Do you mean the Skyfather?" he asked.

— "Yes!"

— "Professor, you're the second person I've met who tells me about this. It's about this thing called religion, isn't it? A few months ago, we met a couple of social engineers on the train to Chekcha. They told us the same thing. They spoke of a Skyfather, a Greater Being. What more do you know about this?"

The professor collapsed, bumping his head on the table. Too weak to speak, he mumbled:

— "Oh, the end is near, the end is near..."

Wulf and Inga carried the professor to their bedroom. The old man could lie down for a rest. Hopefully, they would speak the next day again.

An impatient Wulf opened the professor's shoulder bag. Therein, he found the report titled Evidence for Big G. It had been authored and signed by the Programmer when he was still a young man. Wulf plowed through the report's impenetrable language. It wasn't much different from the business nonsense Wulf had read during his internship at the Alpha-Beta Company.

Wulf's first impression of the report was that its author must have had access to forbidden knowledge that was supposed to have been erased during the Big Reset. How was that possible? Did the Council keep secret historical records not shared with the public?

Inga and Wulf went through the document together to see if they could discover anything out of the ordinary. On page nine, they found one paragraph that caught their attention:

"The ignorami were not entirely wrong in their beliefs. It appears the scientific community has borrowed the concept of infinite creative powers and applied it to the Nothingness to remove Big G from its equations. In doing so, however, the scientists did not disprove but rather offered evidence for the existence of such powers.

"Put colloquially, the scientific community swept Big G under the rug of Nothingness. They posited that the Nothingness was unstable and that it could spawn an infinite number of universes, each containing a finite though random amount of matter and energy—the multiverse hypothesis. But that also means the Nothingness was hypothesized to spawn a combined infinite amount of matter and energy divided up among the infinite universes born of it—a miracle.

"This miraculous force, as per the science community's own admission, must have always been there. Science fails to offer an explanation for the origin nor for the existence of such a limitless power other than the summary statement that the Nothingness was always there and is inherently unstable. Is it out of bounds to state that what the scientists attributed to the Nothingness is, in fact, the very same force the earlier ignorami attributed to Big G?

"Indeed, scientists may call it Nothing, but their ancestors called Him God."

— "The Skyfather!" Wulf exclaimed.

A euphoric Wulf was dancing around the cabin's kitchen table. Then, a cloud of anger fell over him. Before he could act on it, tears broke through. Wulf sat down onto the floor. This report proved that he had been wrongfully convicted. There really was a Greater Being, a Skyfather the ancients used to call God. Wulf was innocent. He hadn't committed a thought crime. He had spoken the truth.

From what Wulf and Inga could make out, the Council had declared all knowledge of God forbidden right after the Big Reset. The revolutions that followed coincided with the complete erasure of holy scriptures and all references to the existence of God. The revolutionaries had committed an unfathomable crime. They had murdered God before their children's eyes.

Wulf kicked the nearest table leg and let out a grunt. Inga kneeled beside him to calm him down.

— Wulf said, "This report proves it. There really is a Greater Being, a Skyfather, a God watching over us. We're not alone in the universe. See? I wasn't crazy."

— "I always believed in you. I never thought you were crazy," Inga said.

— "Oh, what have we done? I mean, we people? We've murdered the world. We've erased our history. We've forgotten about the One who was always there... At last, the truth has come to light. The whole world deserves to know about it. God exists."

From the bedroom, professor Altstein could be heard letting out a mortal moan. Though asleep, it was clear he had contracted a severe fever. When he opened his eyes again, they looked yellow. This was no ordinary fever. The professor had been poisoned.

Inga hurried to wrap a hot cloth around the professor's head. It didn't help. Wulf tried to get the professor to talk to keep him awake. Altstein's condition rapidly deteriorated. His pale hands wouldn't stop trembling. With no more strength left in his body, the professor barely managed to point his index finger toward the ceiling.

— "Big G...," he said, almost inaudibly at first, then louder. "Big G... G is real. G is God."

Professor Altstein left the world. Wulf closed his eyes, and Inga cried. They had become the sole inheritors of a secret too big to bear.
4

Revival

Wulf had a vision. He was going to rally the vagabonds, march them to the Europolis and drive a stake through the heart of the city. He was going to let the whole world in on the forbidden knowledge he had received from professor Altstein's report. He would return to the so-called civilized world and prove his innocence. Above all, he was going to preach the existence of a Greater Being, reawakening mankind from an age-long sleep. The New Era would come to an end. Its demise was going to fuel mankind's revival.

Wulf was determined to expose the scientific worldview for what it really was, an insidious fraud. By declaring physical reality the only real reality, eliminating the spiritual dimensions of souls, free will, and consciousness, scientists had constructed an economic doctrine in their shareholders' benefit but not an objectively true one. He believed the scientific worldview had been concocted by a caste of urban usurers to maximize the productivity of its captive peoples.

If a belief in God or a faith in religion introduced unprofitable inefficiencies, because the faithful believed there were more important things to do in life than to pursue profits, then these superstitions had to be effaced. So, the Council's top scientists invented the religion of scientific atheism. Gradually, the early revolutionaries removed God from public and private life.

Everything remotely uneconomical had to make way for progress. Along with it came the progressive urbanization of the world, the crime of herding human beings into concrete boxes, disconnecting them from the natural world, disarming them, grooming them, and conditioning them for the benefit of their exploitation.

Among professor Altstein's papers, Wulf found the foundational document of the Europolis, titled The Urban Declaration of Human Rights, the pinnacle of political achievement. Its introductory notes emphasized the perfect equality of all to all. Taken to its absurd conclusion, Wulf reasoned the document granted men the "equal rights" to become mothers and to bear children. "Determined to promote social progress," the declaration effectively treated all people like women. When, finally, all male differences had been effaced, the Council foretold there would be "freedom, justice, and peace in the world."

The declaration did not attempt to hide its political faith, stating that "every individual and every organ of global society... shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures... to secure their universal and effective recognition".

Article 2 of the declaration awarded everyone the rights outlined in it "without distinction of any kind," which also denied distinctions based on competency, skill, intelligence, and experience. To assert its status as an assimilative doctrine, the article further read "no distinction shall be made based on the... country or territory to which a person belongs". Wulf figured that meant the declaration applied to all people, even to individuals who did not wish to be applicable.

The declaration was full of irony. Article 4 stated, "no one shall be held in slavery or servitude," except for people's compulsory deference to the international order. Article 5 said "no one shall be subjected to... inhuman or degrading treatment," yet every Europolitan was forced to undergo the degrading treatment of being made equal to all others, which, by definition, implied lowering one's intrinsic value to the lowest common denominator. Article 6 granted everyone "the right to recognition before the law," but the declaration's enforcers would acutely dismiss and denounce anti-globalists, anti-urbanists, and other separatists who wished to live independently from the international order.

Article 9 read, "No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile," unless you opposed the international order or dared to criticize the validity of the very notion of scientific progress. Article 11.1 went, "Everyone charged with a penal offense has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty..." unless you angered the wrong social engineer, in which case the media would convict you of being a deplorable right-wing, racist, sexist, nationalist, xenophobic homophobe. Without irony, Article 12 then stated, "no one shall be subjected to arbitrary... attacks upon his honor and reputation."

Article 13 assumed people were generally too stupid to reason things through. How else could one push for an open-border world without angering opposition to it? Article 13.1 offered everyone freedom of movement and residence "within the borders of a State," but Article 13.2 surreptitiously added that "everyone has the right to leave any country," which awarded everyone the right to enter at least one other country and from there, another, and so on. Taken together, the two paragraphs declared mass migration from any state to any other state a universal human right.

That also implied no one had the right to defend one's nation against replacement immigration. People were awarded the right to outbreed others, but they did not have the right to defend themselves against invasive replacement populations. Article 13 became the foundational article for the global miscegenation agenda. Globalists and their accountants favored people who channeled their wealth toward having greater numbers of offspring at the expense of families who rather invested their wealth in better quality offspring. This, of course, was the very point of their equalization, namely to degrade the human species and weed out the strong.

Though Article 16 granted "men and women of full age... the right to marry and to found a family", further stating that "the family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society," it didn't say marriages had to be between one man and one woman. It also didn't specify what was considered full age. The article was subsequently interpreted to mean that any number of men and women of an arbitrary age could marry. Two men and a nine-year-old boy could legally marry, adopt a child, and found a family together. Moreover, the idea of founding a family said nothing about biological births. So, the advent of incubation centers for women's out-of-the-womb pregnancies was foreseen.

At least, critics thought, Article 17 guaranteed property rights, "No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property." But the word arbitrarily gave the World State the right to confiscate anyone's and everyone's property and land as long as officials said they did so in the name of progress.

Article 21 granted people the right to democratic elections. "The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government," it read. However, in highly urbanized societies, the majority of the people will end up living in cities. That meant democracies, eventually, always favored the will of urban majorities. In such urbanized democracies, rural and nomadic peoples could no longer use their vote effectively to vote against urban interests. Non-urban peoples could no longer vote to resist their assimilation into the urban collective. This was not considered a violation of one's universal human rights since the declaration offered no right to live independently from global urban civilization.

Article 26.1 said, "Everyone has the right to education." It added that "elementary education shall be compulsory." Article 26.2 explained why, "It shall promote understanding, tolerance, and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups..." and so, interpreted as a whole, the article declared people who stood up for their nation, race, or religion uneducated. Article 26.3 awarded parents "a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children," but the word prior indicated this right could be overruled by a secondary right, namely the Council's right to determine the kinds of education parents might choose from.

Article 27 guaranteed "everyone has the right freely to participate... in scientific advancement" but only to advance a scientific worldview based on unproven and false assumptions. Article 28 entitled everyone the right "to social and international order," as if the declaration's globalist doctrine wasn't obvious enough.

Articles 29.1 said, "Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible." Since this community was later understood to mean the global community, the article insinuated that anti-globalists could not have a well-developed personality. The Urban Declaration of Human Rights thus discriminated against everyone who wished to live free from any international order by questioning the development of their personalities. If you opposed globalism, you were not considered a well-thinking person; you were accused of suffering from having a false consciousness.

Lastly, Article 30 warned nothing in the declaration "may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein." The declaration had awarded all people the right to an international order but then denied everyone their right to live free from said international order.

Though the declaration stressed all people were equal and deserving of equal treatment, its fraud lay not so much in what it declared, but in what it didn't. The right to live free from usury and taxation was not considered a universal human right. This also excluded the right to live autonomously or autarkically. There was no right to live in a nation of one's own. The right to defend one's nation or territory against usurpation, for example, through replacement immigration, wasn't a human right either. The right to defend one's culture clashed with many of the declaration's articles.

The right to possess an intrinsic value based on one's experiences, skills, and competencies, which might be greater than another's, was not believed to be a universal human right. People were all equal and, therefore, no one could have value since value is derived from inequalities and differences. If we treated gold equal to dirt, both materials would be worthless. The Europolis was founded on a doctrine that considered the lowest equal to the best.

* * *

When and where had the scientific worldview originated? Who had concocted it? Where had this belief in eternal progress along the lines of self-improvement toward some indefinite utopia come from?

Wulf pondered long about such questions. He tried to find answers in the professor's papers. In the report, the Programmer had penned a concise and superficial summary of the history of human civilization. The scientific worldview, he wrote, had originated in the minds of ancient mercantilists. Their belief in linear progress flowed from ancient Middle-Eastern river civilizations that had developed along the Euphrates, the Tigris, and the Egyptian Nile for thousands of years.

The geographic reality of each of these river civilizations was, by definition, narrow, and progressing linearly in the direction of the rivers' flow. Along these small bands of fertile land running through desert wastelands, a one-dimensional conception of reality had taken root in their peoples' psyches. How else could it have been? For thirty dynasties, the ancient Egyptians knew no better. Their world was a long-winding band of river bedding flowing from dark Africa to the Mediterranean Sea.

The ancient river civilizations understood that their waterways cut through tribal borders and national territories. Goods and people traveled through geographies divided by language, race, culture, and religious beliefs. But to do business, the river merchants were forced to acquaint themselves with all of the different tribes living along their trade routes. They were forced to learn about others' customs and languages to become successful. To win the natives' trust, merchants had to infiltrate the tribes, mix with them, then open them up to international trade from within, just as Ada and Anton DeClerck planned to do at Kirana.

The river merchants knew that if they could get the tribes to speak the same language, accept the same currency, and adopt faith in the same One God, or no god, their profits would drastically increase. That's exactly what the Babylonians did when they subjected the belief systems of numerous nomadic tribes to the rule of Marduk, the chief god of the Babylonian pantheon. Marduk changed the tongues of the human herds roaming the planes encircling Babylon. Supposedly, Marduk defeated all of the other gods and subjected them to his will. He shepherded all the gods like sheep!

So, the idea of an open society was conceived in response to an inefficient tribal world. Precisely this narrow-minded, mercantilist, and strictly economic worldview was transplanted to Europe's fertile grounds. With the help of Christianity and the Catholic Church, the people of Europe were bound into a single economic faith until North-Western Europeans and their Reformation created a schism. Nevertheless, faith peddlers got what they wanted. A love of aesthetics made room for the most debauched pornography. People who chose dignity over profits were considered irrational.

With the establishment of the World State at the start of the New Era, mankind's financial enslavement was made the world's only permissible political doctrine. The belief in God was replaced by a belief in efficiency. The revolutionary Council and its helpers' helpers introduced their faux-scientific worldview sheepishly and surreptitiously. They targeted children's education first. They banned God from classrooms in the name of diversity, equality, or other such empty fictions. Whatever the axioms, the end goal remained the same, namely to maximize human productivity in the benefit of Earth's shareholders.

The way people perceived their reality changed, too. A belief in linear time replaced the older belief in cyclical processes. The very concept of linearity had sprung from the river merchants' accountants. Their minds were trained to see the world in terms of accumulative processes.

A shepherd only counts the sheep he owns. Shepherds want to maintain a stable population but forget about the members of the herd who died. The shepherd lets go of the past. A herd moves with the seasons. In the winter, the weaker members die off. Shepherds slaughter the old and fat to preserve feed for the young who must make it through the winter. In the summer, newborns replace the animals lost to the cold.

A shepherd perceives his world in terms of such cycles. Accountants think very differently. The calculating man keeps track of the past. He records both births and deaths as separate cumulative processes. By breaking the circle of life, he no longer sees reality as a collection of cyclical events but as linear ones. The number of births and deaths start at zero, at some arbitrary time when the accountant begins his recordkeeping. Accountants believe in an open-ended progression from nothing toward some indefinite utopia where the size of a hypothetical herd can approach infinity.

Infinite wealth is what the accountants are after.

From a shepherd's point of view, herds tend to have a stable size. The accountant's mental fiction, however, says herds have limitless potential for growth. On paper, the number of births soon outnumbers the actual size of the herd. If fifty had been born in the previous year, thirty died this year, and twenty new were born, an accountant records seventy births total. Next, accountants look for ways to increase the herd's yield. They wish to maximize its productivity by changing the individuals' behaviors, even their DNA, if necessary.

An accountant sees no wrongdoing in misconstruing a herd's past, present, and future, nor in reprogramming its culture and customs, as long as the productivity of the herd keeps growing. If only more lambs were born than died, the herd would never stop growing. This, then, became the accountant's religion, a religion not derived from God but from greed, not from Jehovah but from Mammon, not born of thinking beings but of calculating men.

It didn't take long for the intellectuals, so disconnected from reality, to realize human beings could be exploited as cattle. Urban masters realized people could be exploited in the same way a farmer exploits sheep or goats. And you, be ye fruitful, and multiply; bring forth abundantly in the earth, and multiply therein!

The shepherds of mankind herded their flock into walled enclosures called cities. The cities were guarded by walls that made men obsolete as the protectors of women and children. The strongest, manliest men posed a danger to urban peace. They had to be stationed outside of city walls in military barracks, sometimes to defend the city but more often to keep them away from the women. Young women preferred to frequent the city's temples to worship their inseminators—the pharaoh, the emperor, the king, the prince, or the odd Cuban dictator.

* * *

The faith of urbanism had spread across the globe. Now, Wulf was going to shut it down.

— "Where are you going?" Inga asked Wulf.

She was leaning out the door, topless and barefoot, wearing only a skirt. The summer morning greeted her with pleasant rays. Wulf had gotten up early to bury professor Altstein in the woods. He walked back to Inga. She noticed the acute determination in his eyes. Life in the wilderness had changed him. Wulf had grown a beard. It added five years to his age. Months of physical labor, long days fishing, and farming, had sculpted his physique. His formerly thin arms and legs now fit his broad shoulders. Bulging with muscles, he had become his manliest potential, a blond beast not to be trifled with.

— "I'm leaving," he said. "Today, I will climb the Skafer." He rested his firm hand on Inga's bare shoulder. "I will go up to the mountain and speak to the Father, who is said to be in the sky."

The wolf had made up his mind. Something bigger compelled him to act. Inga gave her man a hug.

— "I'm worried. Will you come back?" she said.

— Wulf gently pushed Inga away and said, "I've prepared the winter supplies you'll need to survive. When I come down from the Skafer, I will journey south through the valleys, gathering men to form an army. Together, we shall storm the city."

Inga feared for his life, for the dangers that awaited him there. Wulf picked up a long walking stick and set off to climb the Skafer mountain. As he disappeared over the horizon, Inga put her hands on her belly. She hadn't told him.

In ancient times, shaman Freya had told him, the ancestors of the Northerners would gather on the flat peak atop the Skafer to make their offerings. It took Wulf a day to ascend the mountain. With every gust of the wind, his wavy hair flew out. He occasionally stopped to listen to the rustle of leaves. After some time, the wind laid down. Raindrops drizzled onto his skin. He approached the mountaintop through a landscape littered with smaller and bigger boulders.

A breathtaking view lay waiting for him. An endless sea of ridges and valleys stretched out from one end of the horizon to the other. Up here, he had a view of the world. He stepped up to the edge of a steep cliff. From there, a drop down would land him onto the riverbeds below. There was no Father to be seen, no burning bush, and no talking snake. Wulf decided to wait for a sign. For nine days and nine nights, he sat on the ground atop the Skafer. He observed the wind blowing across the valleys below.

On these summer nights, the sun never set. It circled around one's head without dipping below the horizon. Wulf fasted. He drank water from puddles left by the summer drizzle. Without anyone knowing, a man atop a mountain transformed into a hungry animal. With each passing day, the beast within grew restless. As the urban view of the world lost its authority, the more menacingly the blond beast prowling around in Wulf's soul could be heard. He was ready to burst out.

Wulf didn't sleep. He was in a trance, sometimes chanting, sometimes murmuring, all the time thinking of what he wanted to say to his Father, of what to ask Him if he were given an audience. Wulf waited and waited until his patience ran out. Then, upon realizing his mistake, he cursed himself, growled, and waved his angry fists at the sky. While the son had been waiting for a sign from the Father, the Father had been expecting a sign from his son.

Wulf got up. He had wasted a lot of time thinking about what to say. It was time to speak. Delirious, it became clear to him what he should do. When Wulf began to speak, his voice echoed through the valleys. Storm clouds gathered, and the skies grew dark. Heavy rain poured down, chased after by a forceful wind. Looking up, Wulf gestured towards the sky with his walking stick.

— "Father! Why have You abandoned us? Why won't You save Your people?"

His voice roared through the rain. A bolt of lightning struck Wulf's stick with such a force it blasted him backward nine feet. He landed on the back of his head and lost consciousness. When he regained his senses, he no longer felt hungry. There was no pain. The walking stick was undamaged, but the bolt of lightning had sharpened the tip into a spear. On the spear's shaft, strange symbols had appeared. They were the runes, the symbols he had transcribed with the help of the book he found in the bookstore. He traced them with the tip of his fingers. He felt his mind expand as ancient knowledge flowed through his nerves.

At last, the Father had revealed Himself. Wulf was no longer a refugee. He had become his Father's prophet. His mission was clear. He was going to overthrow the city and free the citizens from usury.

He began his descent down into the Valleys of the Vagabonds. On his way, Wulf encountered a middle-aged man from a not-so-far-away illegal settlement.

— The man, pulling a cart, wondered aloud about the wanderer and asked, "Where are you headed, fellow traveler?"

Wulf, with his spear in his right hand, turned and said he was going to tell the world of a great discovery. He told the cart puller everything he knew about the evidence for a Greater Being and about his revelation on the Skafer.

— "One day, our people will come to believe in Him again, for a belief in the Kingdom of God in us represents the belief in ourselves. We do not choose to believe in God to submit ourselves to authority but rather to become masters of our destinies."

Mankind ought to wake up from the sleep induced by collectivism, Wulf explained. Only the unbelievers forever remained trapped as gears in a soulless and will-less machine. When the dumbfounded cart puller asked how Wulf had come to know such things, he sang:

Only he who travels far,Who bears the journey's burden,He who is mindful and aware,Only he knows What minds govern the men Conscious of their actions.

The cart puller put down his cart and leaned against it for a while. With his hand below his chin, he pondered his existence and realized he wasn't a beast of burden. He concluded he should acquire a horse to pull his cart henceforth.

Wulf continued his trip down the Skafer and soon met the vagabonds. He spoke to Linda and Burt. He told them about the professor, the Programmer's report, and the revelation. With their approval, he proceeded to knock on each cabin door in the valley and invited the vagabonds to a gathering. It was going to be held that evening in front of the flood-hill. People were curious. They showed up in great numbers. Meanwhile, Wulf acquired a horse from the shaman, a white roan. The animal would serve as his companion for the long, two-thousand-mile pilgrimage back to the Europolis.

That evening, shortly after dinner, the vagabonds of the valley, the people he had come to trust and love, the people he now sought to protect by making them strong again, gathered to listen to what he had to say. Had they, too, heard last night's storm? A young man said the storm had kept him up all night. The eerie sound of a flock of birds flying low through the valley had kept others worrying. A young mother said she felt that the whole world had changed when she woke up in the morning.

Wulf addressed the crowd. He told them of the new wisdom he had received from the Father. He told the vagabonds about professor Altstein's discovery in a language they could understand.

— He spoke, "There is something more to this world than mere mechanical existence. We are souls, not empty shells. We are human beings, not machines. I have proof there is a Greater Being out there who watches over us, a Being who was there before time began. His Kingdom resides in you, in all of you, in your hearts and in your minds. Your actions are an expression of His actions. Your will is derived from His will. Your thoughts are as free as His."

A young man wanted to know what wisdom Wulf could share about the purpose of life. Wulf recited:

A fire is best For the sons of life;The sun's light For their health.Keep these things near And live without flaw.

Life is better endured Than not lived at all.Get up early to catch the cow.Once, I saw a fire burning In a wealthy man's house.Outside, he had died in the cold.

The lame can still ride;A man with one hand Still attend to his flock.The deaf can fight;Better blind than burned.Dead, no one is useful.

We must rise early If we are to win Freedom and a future for our kind;Seldom shall a sleeping wolf Receive a ham,Nor a sleeping man his victory.

The idea of a God who animated people's souls, of the One who provided men with a spirit of their own, lifted quite a burden off the vagabonds' shoulders. They understood they were no longer rejects condemned to a life of shame. They were, in fact, the strong ones. They, the defiant, had braved the city's authority and had chosen freedom over the restrictions of urban careers.

An older man joked he had never seen a man fly through the sky before. So, where was this Skyfather? Why hadn't He revealed Himself to all, why only to Wulf? The man called the notion of a Greater Being nonsense. Wulf defended himself:

The man missing a purpose,His life in bad shape;He always laughs at something.To him, it does not occur He should know That he, too, is full of flaws.

* * *

Several men came to ask if they could join Wulf on his journey. The men said they wanted to support the wanderer in his quest to spread the new faith. They offered to be his personal guard. Wulf and the men gathered around a campfire. Sitting on boulders and blocks of wood, they introduced themselves.

To Wulf's left sat a man named Njord and his son Freyr. They were mighty men and fair of face. Father and son had spent years working on a fruit farm but wished to join Wulf's uprising against the World City. They wished to fight the oppressors of mankind. Next to Freyr sat T‎yr, a daring and stout-hearted man who had never lost a fight. Then came Bragi, short of stature but strong-willed and famous for his wisdom. He was a learned man. Heimdall was the name of the next one. He had the palest skin of all. Hodr joined, too, a blind man guided by his housecarl. Vithar was leaning against a boulder. He was a thinking type, one who had seen the deep. Ullr, quick on his feet, was the one who taught men how to use a bow and arrow. The last man to join was Forseti, a long-bearded character renowned for his ability to resolve conflicts. Slow to judge others, people valued him as a good friend.

The men spoke long about the future of mankind. Together, they were going deurbanize the world, return the land to the people, and the people to the land. Men and women would learn to live free again, in communities of their own.

— "In the city," said Wulf, "people don't even know their neighbors. You could wave at them if you wished to greet them, but who would look up from their cellphones to notice? Everyone there is in a hurry to make it to their next appointment."

— "Children should be free to run around as they please," said Njord. "In the city, parents lock children in gated playgrounds. I remember it well. I was the first generation of my kin to leave the city. My parents brought me to these valleys." Njord put his hand on his son's shoulder. "My son here, he's the first freeborn in our family. He has no knowledge of life in the city."

— Freyr said, "You've told me your stories, now I want to see for myself. I want to see what the city was like before it is destroyed."

— "It's quite something to set out to destroy the known world," said Vithar. "What's your plan, Wulf? How do you expect to pull it off?"

— "We'll infiltrate the city through the underground systems. We'll join the underfolk who live there, the ones who perform the labor so the aboveground folks can have their illusion of progress. Through their tunnels and caves, we can reach the Citadella, the home of the Council. From there, we go up the tower until we reach the living quarters of the social engineers, the Ministers, and the Senators. We'll bite off the snake's head; we'll go after the Programmer himself."

— "If you really want to destroy the city," said Bragi, "we should sabotage the nine main pipelines that feed it. If we cut through its tentacles, we can bleed the octopus."

— Tyr objected, "Those nine pipelines feed the city and all the people in it. If we cut them, the population will have just a couple of days to leave, lest they dehydrate. Are you really willing to wage that kind of war? A war against innocent citizens?"

— "That's the plan, Tyr," said Forseti. "Besides, citizens aren't innocent. Ignorant, they are, complicit in the rape of the Earth. There's no excuse for people to hide behind city walls. Cities are and have always been the main source of pollution in the world. A bunch of hicks didn't cause climate change; cities and the industries required to maintain them did."

— "We're not appeasers," said Ullr. "We're not going to do a half-finished job. We're not going to the city to save mankind. We're going to the city to save Earth. I'm all for it. We should put an end to urban society, drive a stake through it."

— "It can be done," said Heimdall. "But first, Wulf must confront the Programmer. We'll have to help him plow through the Council's security guards up the Citadella. Hodr? Ullr? What do you think?"

Hodr, the blind, and Ullr raised their mugs in agreement.

— "Guys, what do we call ourselves? We have to have a name," Bragi asked.

— Vithar said, "I have a suggestion. Back in the old times, these territories were called the gardens of the Æsir, Ásgarðr, or Asgard. We should name ourselves after the Æsir. Let us be their reincarnations. The souls of the men who first arrived here, over five thousand years ago, live on in us. They are us, and we are them. With our ancestors' experiences stored in our souls, we can lead a Nation of Men to fight the World City. We shall break the chains that hold humanity captive."

The group appreciated these words and cheered for Vithar's suggestion. They would carry the name Æsir with pride.

— Heimdall got up, kicked a rock into the fire, and said, "Men, if we complete this mission and destroy the city, our peoples shall give birth to a new civilization, a better one, a freer one, one supported by thinking beings, not by calculating men."

— "Perhaps, one day," said Forseti, "we shall be remembered as gods!"

The men burst into laughter and raised their mugs.

— "To Wulf and his vision!"

After a good night's rest, the men got up early and began their journey south. Before they departed, Wulf made sure each of the men carried his weapon.

Without his weapon,A man should not Traverse the field;For sure, he knows not How far he can go Before he will need his spear.

Equipped with weapons and food, the men set off. They followed the afternoon sun along the streams past a jagged mountain ridge. After several days of hiking, Wulf and his crew reached the Woodlands of the Wronged. The men entered a valley populated with pine trees, among which the Wronged hid. Carefully, they proceeded through the forest, guided by the smell of roasted meats. They discovered a pathway leading to a clearing where the locals had built a conglomeration of log cabins.

Wulf and his men went door to door to introduce themselves. They were in good spirits and took precautions not to appear threatening. The locals welcomed their guests but seemed wary. Nevertheless, they invited the band of men to a joint meal in the communal longhouse. Wulf and the Æsir accepted the invitation, joined their hosts around long tables, and mingled with them.

Many of the villagers came to listen to what Wulf had to say. He spoke calm and deliberate words. By now, he had become a trained speaker, versed in his wisdom. He spoke of the Father and of the century-old scientific deception maintained to this day by the Council. He spoke of the fraud that denied there was a Greater Being. Wulf told his listeners of his trial, the botched execution, his escape, and exile. The Wronged fell silent. Some of the women had trouble holding back tears.

One of the villagers rose to his feet in anger.

— He exclaimed, "I knew it! I've always known there was a God. Those lying creatures, those we call politicians, it was them, it was them all along! They did this to us. They robbed us of a greater Truth. They sold us progress, but to where? To ignorance and dehumanization!"

Most attendees agreed, but several skeptics demanded evidence. Wulf showed them the runes on his spear. These bound him and his people to their collective destiny, he said. Another man came forth. He wished to know if indeed Wulf was so wise, and what advice he would give to a man insulted by his enemies?

Wulf recited:

He who knows himself well Leaves the table When guests scoff at him;Only the self-ignorant Keeps laughing and grinning When insulted by madmen.

An unwise person Believes all who smile Are sure to be his friend;He does not understand How badly they speak of him When he turns his back to them.

The man, satisfied, sat back down. He realized no one could ever insult him if he didn't allow himself to be hurt by words.

A woman who had recently become a grandmother was sitting close to Wulf. She had been listening quietly and turned to the prophet with a complaint. She had learned how to avoid insult but had been hurt trying to deal with conmen. Men had scammed her out of her wealth. What advice did the wanderer have for her?

Deal not with someone You do not trust.If, to acquire his good, you must,Then speak kind words,Be clever and cunning,Repay lies with lies.

Again, do not deal With the ones you do not trust,Whose minds are suspect;Laugh with them But hide your mind.Give them empty gifts.

The old woman picked up her grandchild from her lap and embraced the girl lovingly. Never again would she deal with untrustworthy men. From now on, she placed her trust in the ones who deserved it—the family she loved.

Others from the Woodlands of the Wronged, who had heard Wulf's words, debated among themselves which one of them should ask the prophet for more wisdom. One matter had been on everybody's mind. How does one avoid being hurt and deserted by one's own friends?

Wulf touched the runes on the spear and produced the following:

An unwise person Believes all who smile Are sure to be his friend;When he needs their help,He will soon learn None shall come to his rescue.

Wulf delivered the wisdom people sought. People left the dinner tables and praised Wulf for his teachings. He had left a good impression. Words seemed to heal pains. After Wulf's performance, the Wronged were more willing to place their trust in him and the Æsir.

At the break of dawn, the Æsir resumed their journey. Several dozens of young men from the Woodlands awaited them by the edge of a clearing. They wished to join Wulf on his campaign. They had brought swords, axes, and other weaponry as well as horses to carry supplies. Wulf welcomed the recruits. He guided his growing following up a rocky path that led to the Dwellings of the Drunk.

* * *

For three days, the band of men hiked across valleys and planes. Evenings were spent resting and restocking water, food, and other supplies. The men stayed close to the river beds that flowed south. By now, the calm streams had grown into a wider river. Water gushed past the bends. Here and there, the rivers dropped several feet. Salmon fish swimming upstream were an easy catch for the hungry.

The further south they went, it seemed as if the natural environment, aware of the men's mission, began to offer them support. The men were acting on nature's behalf, and nature responded by sending more deer their way, more fish, and fresher water. Erda, Wulf realized, had a consciousness of her own and a vested interest in getting Wulf and as many men as possible down to the city. The birds had spread word of Wulf's mission throughout Asgard. Each valley the Æsir passed through, more men were waiting to join.

The men arrived at the Dwellings of the Drunks. These were named so because the men and women who lived there drank more during the day than during the night. The journeymen were appalled at the sight of the rundown huts scattered throughout these lands. Their people lived uncomfortably but had made little effort to improve their condition. Wulf dismounted and guided his roan to a water reservoir. It stank of beer. The horse would not drink it.

When Wulf's men went around the dwellings to wake up the drunkards, they found many children crying and begging their intoxicated parents to prepare them food. The children were wearing dirty rags. The extent of the neglect angered Wulf. He thought it wrong to treat one another this way. He discussed with the Æsir what to do next. Bragi and Vithar proposed to dig a shallow channel from the river beds to the dwellings. Wulf's men went to work. The channel brought fresh water straight into the dwellings so the children could drink from it as they pleased.

Wulf and his men then destroyed the drunks' distilleries. Hungover and angered, the drunkards went to fetch their weapons, but these, too, had been taken away by a foreseeing Heimdall. That night, Wulf's band of followers, the Nation of Men, invited the drunkards to a dinner. Water and milk would be served but no alcohol. Without a local leader to contend with, Wulf appointed a big man from among the drunkards to act as the local authority. He seemed to have enough wits about him to establish a proper hierarchy and steer this society clear from further self-destruction.

Wulf preached to the Drunkards as he had done to the Vagabonds and the Wronged. His words sobered up many inebriated minds. They listened carefully. Wulf told them about the evidence for the existence of God. Caught by guilt, the drunkards welcomed the wisdom of the runes:

This is not good To say that beer Is good for the sons of time;The man who drinks more Knows less and less Of his own spirit.

The drinker should not get drunk.He drinks the mead with measure,He speaks coherent speech.No one blames him For his lack of endurance When he leaves the feast early.

I, too, have been drunk.I have been totally drunk At the learned Bragi's home.A drinking party is best When the drunkard Returns to his spirits.

No better load Can a man carry Than his own good sense;No worse food A man can bring Than drinking too much ale.

Wulf explained life offered men more than their exile into alcohol. A good drink required a proper setting, a festival, or a wedding. Perhaps the death of a loved one may compel one to ease the pain with mead and ale. Alcohol should not, however, interfere with more important things to do, namely the care for oneself, for one's children, and one's community. Drunk men cannot build proper homes. They build a shoddy shack, at best. It's better to raise one's children sober than to leave them to the wolves.

The drunkards vowed to change their ways. A group of young men, eager to escape these intoxicated lands, requested to join Wulf's gang. The Nation of Men welcomed them as equals.

* * *

Wulf's men marched on. They went looking for the Lairs of the Lonely. They followed a broad river for seven days. It meandered into a plain where no trees grew. Just one pine tree stood there alone, surrounded by the homes where the loneliest men and women lived. As in the Dwellings of the Drunks, these homes lay dispersed throughout the open plane. Though thousands of people lived here, they had put no forethought into developing villages. They had surrendered to despair.

On the evening of their arrival, Wulf's men, once again, went knocking on all doors. They invited the inhabitants to a banquet organized by the Nation of Men. Shy and uneasy, a large portion of the Lonely attended. A long-standing, mutual distrust had kept people at bay from one another. The crowd joined before the pine tree. Wulf rode his roan in front of the attendees. When he held his spear high, the horse jumped onto its hind legs.

Wulf spoke to the listeners. He told them of the important mission he and his men had set out to accomplish. They were going to tell the world about the evidence for the existence of God. They would grind the city's machinations to a halt. If the lonely men, the strongest and healthiest ones, would join his growing army, they could march to the metropolis together. They would bring down the city walls, not to demand entrance but to free the prisoners within.

Acting together, they would break the spell that held mankind in a state of willful ignorance. His wish, Wulf said, was to save Europe and smite its enemies—the social engineers and the urban planners. He said he believed it was wrong for people to live out their lives in square boxes, boxed in between strangers, stacked a quarter of a mile high in anonymous towers. Human beings, he believed, were no one else's property but God's.

Wulf then spoke to the lonely about their condition:

The pine tree withers In a village meant for men;Bark nor needles shelter it.So, too, withers the man Who lives by himself.Why should he live long?

Once, I was young,Alone with myself,Wandering along a bad trail.I felt rich and content To find a companion;People take pleasure in one another.

You don't need to give Another too much.Praise can be bought cheaply With half a loaf;With a half-empty bottle,I made a friend for life.

Having heard these words, the Lonely became more talkative. Strangers turned into neighbors, neighbors made friends. Over time, the Lairs of the Lonely would become a lively village with lasting friendships built on trust. The inhabitants began constructing roads to provide better access to the plane. Inspired by the new faith, they erected a temple for the worship of God as well as a longhouse for community get-togethers.

When the sun rose in the morning, Bragi met with hundreds of young men who had all decided to join Wulf's quest to overthrow their urban oppressors.

— Bragi said to them, "If you choose to join the Nation of Men, you will join as our equals. You shall become part of a people born of vagabonds, illegals, outcasts, drunkards, convicts, and even of the loneliest rejects such as yourselves. We are your new family, your tribe.

"We all are descendants of the race that settled in the North thousands of years ago, long before urban civilization subjected us to its regimentations. In us, the spirits of the freest men to have ever roamed the earth live on. Our victory over the Europolis shall secure our offspring a worthy life for ages to come. This is the fight too expensive to avoid and the one too costly to lose."

The lonely men cheered. Their cheers were heard across the plane. They were no longer the isolated individuals the city had designed them to be. They were no longer gears and levers operating a grotesque, mindless machine, the Moloch. They were brothers, kinsmen, defenders of the race, the sons of the old Asa and their gods, the children of the Æsir.

Wulf and his army left for the Fiefdoms of the Foes, their final stop before the Europolis. A large number of people had settled in the Fiefdoms. They, too, had been banished from living in the city but had since been unable to make peace among one another. The struggles among Fiefdoms prevented their nations from making a joint fist against the World City.

To better organize his swelling following, Wulf appointed the Æsir as the army's generals and commanders. In turn, each of them promoted the most competent men to become their officers. Ullr went to fetch horses for them. Vithar and Heimdall rode ahead to scout the trail.

Bragi rode up to Njord and pulled a bottle of mead from his rucksack. He offered Njord some.

— "You shouldn't drink and ride," Njord said.

— "Why not? I'm not a drunk!"

Freyr laughed.

Forseti rode up to Wulf. Beyond the horizon lay the Fiefdoms, also known as the lost tribes of Europeans. When Forseti asked him what was on his mind, Wulf said he was thinking of the words he should speak to unite the European Fiefdoms.

— Forseti wondered, "Wulf, the Skygod, what is He like? Did you really meet Him on the Skafer?"

— "No one can see Him. God is a Force, an Originator. He is the One who prevents our reality from sinking back into the nothingness. He gives time its direction. He is the past, the present, and the future, all in one. This Force was always there before people named It. He exists in all of us, in you and me, in Bragi, in Vithar, in the Nation of Men. He animates the trees and the birds. This Greater Being gifted all living things a free will and a soul of their own.

"We are branches of the same trunk. An individual human being is a stream that branches off from the river of mankind. If we live our lives properly, our souls will flow back to the source after our deaths. Many streams form a new river from which new streams branch off. That way, we pass on our eternal souls to future generations, renewed and reinvigorated with experience."

— "Our sons and daughters...," Forseti said, "it is through them that we progress. True progress stems from the defense of one's race, one's nation, and one's kin. Our souls flow to our children and to our grandchildren. We are all reincarnations of past heroes, of the men and women who won crucial battles for our collective survival."

— "When I stood atop the Skafer mountain," Wulf said, "lightning struck in my head, but it did not kill me. In prison, the stoppage device did not drain my soul but turned the beam on my executioners. On the train to the valleys, the social engineers I met did not recognize me. Something or someone is protecting me.

"But you should know, friend, that despite my informed words, I believe a force of destruction drives my actions. It is not benevolent. It is angry. I sense it is an old soul, the one who was there at decisive moments in our people's history. He is not a force of good but a force of necessary evil. In the fight against evil, the good perish. Thus, we need this evil to fight a bigger evil."

Forseti nodded. He understood.

— "What do you think will happen when we reach the Europolis?"

Wulf didn't answer anymore. He looked over to the horizon and exhaled by blowing air against the insides of his cheeks. He kicked his heels against his horse and took off.

— Wulf signaled to this following, "Men! Let's go!"

* * *

Njord, Freyr, Bragi, Ullr, T‎‎‎‎yr, Hodr, Forseti, and Wulf hurried to the front of the colon to catch up with Heimdall and Vithar. They followed the sun further south. If they were going to fight the city, they were going to need a bigger army. The Fiefdoms, they reasoned, could provide them with the men required to achieve their goal. Wulf instructed the Æsir generals to go to the Fiefdoms and gather five-hundred-and-fifty divisions of eight-hundred men, each.

Morasses, lakes, woodlands, and small settlements covered the lands of the Fiefdoms. The people living here were of the same stock but of great inner diversity. Between the Fiefdoms, they spoke different languages. Within the Fiefdoms, they spoke different dialects. They were people who made an effort not to be understood. Though the many kinship groups formed small settlements, the inhabitants fiercely defended their right to be left alone, to live an unbothered life, disconnected from the superstructures of urban civilization.

Vithar and his men went to speak with the leader of the Germans. The Danes invited Njord for an audience. The island peoples, the Icelanders and the Faroese, welcomed Tyr. The Dutch and the Belgians invited Bragi, the Swedes Forseti, and Hodr spoke with the Swiss. Heimdall went to meet with the Austrians, and Freyr was hailed by the Norwegians.

Wulf set up camp in the Fiefdom of the people of Liechtenstein. His first job was to negotiate a truce among the Fiefdoms so their leaders would be willing to gather and listen to what Wulf had to say. If he could get the chieftains to listen to his words, Wulf trusted he could forge these great peoples into an army strong enough to fight the World City, the snake Jörmungandr.

With the help of the Æsir generals, it took Wulf nine days and nine nights before the fiefs finally accepted his offering of peace. On a designated evening, the fiefs, their inner circles, and each of their nation's strongest men joined to listen to Wulf speak. He spoke before a sea of men. Never before had they been inspired to fight a common enemy. This time, the men would fight side by side.

Wulf stood at the lowest point in the valley. The Æsir relayed his words further back so that everyone could hear:

A cowardly man Hopes to live forever If he avoids battle,But old age Gives him no peace,Even though spears evade him.

Mild and generous,Tough and fearless men Get the best life;A coward, however,Fears everything.He moans and doubts a lot.

A man is not deprived of all,Even if his health is poor.Some have sons,Some have kinsmen,Some have wealth,Some have done a job well.

Cattle die,Friends die,We die, too,But good fame Never dies Of he who has done well.

Cattle die,Friends die,We ourselves die, too.One thing I knew Will never die:The fame of a good man's deeds.

Wulf spoke long about the evidence for God. He told the gathered crowds that God's spirit lived in all of them. Some men wept when they realized they were not fatherless children. Others felt reassured that they were, after all, brothers of the same race and not the atomized individuals of urban society.

The chieftains of the Fiefdoms were not convinced so easily. It was their job to guard the safety and prosperity of their tribes. Waging war on the World City would bring them great casualties, possibly the Fiefdoms' demise. Was a potential loss of so many lives worth the fight? The fiefs agreed to hold a council in a nearby grove. There, the European leaders would meet with Wulf and the Æsir generals at a later time to discuss a strategy. They agreed that the leading women and the chieftains' wives should also be invited to attend this extraordinary council.

Meanwhile, Hodr, the blind general, spent some time talking to the common men, farmers, and workers. He learned of their pains and quarrels, of their dreams and their morale. Hodr discussed his concerns with Wulf. Morale was high, he said. The common men, tired of life as rejects, were certainly willing to fight for a freer world. They understood the threat coming from the Europolis. If they didn't push back, one day, they feared, the urban armies would come to assimilate them.

They would never stand a chance against the urban majority. They feared the city would re-educate them against their will, reprogram them with a new culture and new behaviors to make them more profitable. So, what choice did they have but fight against the city that had colonized their ancestral lands? If their choice were between fleeing or fighting, the men would choose the fight.

There was another problem, Hodr had discovered. Here, among the Fiefdoms, birthrates had been low, and, due to circumstances, few of the remaining fertile women had been able to find suitable husbands. Hodr wanted Wulf to know this was the underlying reason why the men came to join Wulf's quest to overthrow the city. They wished for an influx of young women to come and live with them on the land.

Wulf thanked Hodr for these insights. Though his own words of wisdom stirred men's souls, words alone were of no importance to a man's life if these weren't followed up by action. The ultimate goal of his quest to destroy the urban world should end with the birth of a new one, a world where men could have wives, where women could be mothers, and children could play by the streams without worries. The energy released from the collapse of the old city serves only to revive the ancient world.

Hodr agreed. The two then joined the secret council, held hidden in an ash-tree forest. With his hand on Wulf's shoulder for guidance, Hodr followed.

At the council, the Fiefdoms' powerful men and women gathered around the trunk of a dead tree. The trunk stood taller than a man's height. They called it an Irminsul and was considered a holy site. The chieftains, the noblemen, their wives, their eldest sons, and daughters arrived to quarrel on a clear autumn day. Standing on their feet, the party listened to the various speakers express their arguments for or against a war against the city. The chiefs were divided along a clear line. Half of the fiefs supported the Æsir and Wulf's call to war. The other half backed a man named Segester, a critic.

Segester climbed on top of the Irminsul and reminded his audience of the benefits of alignment with the city. The inhabitants of the Fiefdoms, he explained, had only been barred from a life in the city due to their never-ending quarrels. If the people could come to see a benefit in surrendering their sovereignty to the World State, all should be able to have a better life in the city.

— Segester spoke, "This is not my first day of steadfast loyalty towards the urban people. From the time that the Programmer gave me citizenship, I have chosen my friends and foes with an eye to our mutual advantage, not from hatred of my fatherland but because I held that city folk and countrymen have the same interests, and that peace is better than war. And, therefore, I denounce Wulf Gungnirsson, the ravisher of our lands, the violator of our treaty with the Europolis.

"I urge you to arrest Wulf and his accomplices and throw them into chains. I show my preference for the new over the old, for peace over commotion, not to get a reward, but that I may promote myself a fit mediator for peoples of the Fiefdoms, should they choose repentance rather than ruin.

"There is only one way forward. The Fiefdoms must seek their assimilation into the Europolis."

Segester's supporters applauded but not before noticing the icy stares coming from their opponents. Segester came down from the Irminsul, and Wulf took his place. The wanderer praised the separatists and their enduring revolt against their assimilation.

— "Noble the father," Wulf said, "mighty the general, brave the army which, with such strength, decides to surrender without a fight. Before me, nine legions have formed, led by nine excellent commanders, my Æsir brothers. Not by treachery, not against pregnant women, but openly against armed men do I choose to wage war. Let Segester dwell in the city; one thing there is which us freemen will never excuse, us having seen between the North Sea and the Caucasus the paved roads to servitude. Other nations, in their ignorance of urban rule, have no experience of punishments, know nothing of surveillance systems, and, as we have shaken them off, let us not quail before an inexperienced stripling.

"All people have the right to live as who they are and not as who the social engineers want them to be. No one ought to have his personality obliterated to produce economically desirable behavior. Our way of life is called the free life; it comes with a price tag that we are willing to pay. Before the time of the Fiefdoms, the people lived freer, but it is not true that the World State improves the restrictions of national life. It worsens them. Globalism has brought men less freedom and less democracy, not more. The urban world offers us a diversity of visual impressions but no diversity of thought. In fact, the city does not require us to think at all. Its masters do not want us to think.

"The urban leadership's sole interest lies in maximizing the economic output of the human races. It is to the Fiefdoms' praise that they have managed to resist their people's assimilation for so long. The way forward, however, lies not in surrender but in eternal struggle. We must never give up resisting our assimilation. We must never, never, never surrender. If we do, men will be condemned to live like sheep. We are not sheep! We are not cattle! We are human beings!

"The ideology of peace and progress has turned lions into house cats. If you prefer your fatherland, your ancestors, your ancient life to tyrants and to urban colonists, then follow the Æsir to glory and to freedom rather than Segester to ignominious servitude."

Wulf's words energized his supporters. He even convinced some of his opponents from Segester's camp. It was decided. Wulf had the majority of the chieftains' consent to send the European armies to war.
5

Ragnarok

The Æsir were standing on a hill overlooking a strait. Across it, the Europolis and its high risers could be seen colonizing the skies. Wulf's armies were resting on the plane by the sea, facing the end of their world. What a grey, inhospitable world the city seemed in comparison to the fertile North. A thick concrete wall so wide and so high it blocked the horizon snaked around the Europolis' perimeter.

In that city, that place of desolation, tens of billions of people enjoyed their universal human rights; the right to live in a square box, the right to breathe exhaust fumes, the right to have one's personality altered to increase the profit margins of urban usurers, the right to have one's culture and language abolished in the name of progress, the right to be a marketers' guinea pig. Were the people living there really free citizens? Were they better off than wild men?

— "Those walls weren't built to keep us out," said Vithar to the Æsir. "They were built to keep everyone else in."

The Æsir dubbed the strait between the armies and the city the Ginnungagap, the gaping void between the North and the urban industries further south.

— "And there," said Bragi, "over there goes one of the main pipelines, sucking the life out of Erda's crust."

The nine steel tentacles feeding the urban octopus stretched around the planet. Men from the city were working day and night to provide the Europolis with gas, oil, uranium, and anything else that could burn. The Æsir leaders planned to attack these snake tails first. Wulf was going to deal the lethal blow to their common poisonous head, the World Council.

— "Anybody with a soul and a mind of his own would have left that prison by now," said Bragi.

— "Don't worry about the citizens," said Wulf. "Soon enough, we'll awaken the urban masses from their mechanical sleep. Each citizen is going to find out what they're made of. This world was never meant for unthinking beings. She was meant for the foreseeing, for the brave and the willing, for those able to fight their progressive assimilation into that cursed continent's machinery."

The Æsir commanders brought with them over half a million men, each guided by the souls of the North's most daring heroes. They set up camp by the quiet seas on the shores of the Ginnungagap. A thick mist sailed across the void. The soldiers were prepared. They knew this was going to be the decisive moment in the history of the human species. Were men mice, or were they men?

At night, the moonlight shone over the poisoned sea. It reflected its red hue. Hiding in the mist, the Nation of Men spent their time building an armada. Their primitive vessels would suffice to sail around the Europolis to take command of the pipelines. The Æsir generals appointed their best officers in charge of the mission to encircle the Old World. The commanders themselves would join Wulf in his attempt to infiltrate the Citadella.

Bragi commanded his men to stay on the northern flank. They were going to seize the nearest pipeline. Vithar, Tyr, Freyr, and Hodr instructed their men to sail eastward along the Austerveg until they reached the Mediterranean Sea. The others, Heimdall, Forseti, Ulr, and Njord, sent their men westward across the North Sea. Once all nine fleets were ready to blow up the pipelines, Wulf and his commanders planned to storm the seat of world power, the home of the Council, as well as of the residencies of the Ministers, Senators, and their social engineers.

On the eve of the invasion, Wulf spoke to his army one last time. The Æsir relayed his words for all to hear:

— "Men! Today, we set sail to claim our rightful dues, to reclaim the lands that were taken from our ancestors. We didn't come this far to save humanity from her sins but rather to save the world from human greed.

"For two centuries since the Big Reset, the World City and its benefactors have lived off the spoils of man's labor. They've enriched themselves at everyone else's expense. These parasites justified their greed with the empty fiction of equality and diversity. What diversity? They all think alike. What equality? They send dissenters into exile.

"The social engineers have molded people into their own worst image. Through the destruction of the old, we shall give birth to the new, a world no longer ruled by moneymen. The lie of never-ending progress has been unmasked to mean eternal slavery. Eternal struggle is our credo!

"We shall destroy the machine that made it so hard for us, so impossible to live a dignified life. We demand a life befitting our being. A man is not a gear. He is not a lever. He is more than a programmable machine. He carries the Divine Spirit in his heart. A man is God's trailblazer. With the High One on his side, he knows not how to quit. He never surrenders. Nothing shall deter him from doing what he believes is just, not because some international order told him to think a certain way but because he thought for himself and reached his own conclusions.

"Even if a man's conclusions are at odds with the manufactured consent of a globalist media, he must not shun the fight; he must step into the light. He alone knows that his personality, uncut like a raw diamond, still possesses greater potential than the combined psyches of the groomed urban collectives. Deceived by the false promise of socialism and welfare, the surveillance state has sold the urban masses into slavery.

"The urban world before us has trampled men's souls and imprisoned their minds. It has ignored their pleas for reason, denied them warmth and kindness. All it ever had to offer was stone-cold bureaucracy. The World City has attempted to teach wolves how to live as sheep, men as cattle, and human populations as termite colonies. To a large degree, the city has succeeded in doing just that.

"We, however, freemen, rejects, and outcasts, don't need an organized society to tell us how to act. We don't need to be re-educated. We sculpt our personalities as we see fit. The city didn't want us, but we didn't want this city. From where stand, there are only two kinds of people, the Asa and the rabble—us and them!"

These words sent the soldiers into a frenzy. They boarded their vessels. Nine fleets sailed across the void into the mists. A division of nine-hundred elite warriors stayed behind to support the Æsir's push for the Citadella. They were going to expose the Council's lies and leave the tower in ashes. The Æsir and their elite troops then sailed across the Ginnungagap to reach the border wall built to hold the human herd captive.

* * *

Wulf and the Æsir planned to infiltrate the lowest levels of the Europolis, a network of underground tunnels, caves, urban infrastructure, subterranean buildings, and underfolk dwellings out of reach from aboveground surveillance systems. They were counting on a bottom-up revolution. The men set out to travel through the underworld to reach the urban heart. Inhabitants of these lowest levels were living in destitute poverty. They performed the most menial jobs. They were urban society's waste recyclers, industrial workers, sewage maintainers, and undertakers. They worked the most ungrateful jobs at the lowest rates. Without them, the urban machinery would grind to a halt.

The Æsir discovered cracks in the walls used to smuggle goods in and out of the underworld. They were able to enter one section and descended into the darkness. They reached a narrow tunnel system and marched on in the dark for several days to reach a poorly maintained transit system. Its run-down trains were being operated by some of the under-folk to provide for their people's underground commutes across the continent. Wulf convinced the machinist, Charon, to take his men across the Acheron, the divide between the outskirts and the urban heart.

What they found there, in the region right below the Citadella, were the filthy lairs of a forsaken people. They possessed just enough oil-infested water for drinking but not for washing. There was food for the young, but there wasn't enough for the elderly, many of whom volunteered to starve themselves to save their grandchildren. This was a society of last resorts, one sustained by sacrifice, perfectly hidden from the friendly-faced upper levels.

The underlings had carved their dirt homes from rock and clay. Burning waste helped light their quarters and their corridors. A maze of tunnels and caves lay stacked on top of one another. In some places, the inhabitants had created hollow sections they called clearings. These had tall ceilings. Some were the size of a small town, a place where underlings gathered. The clearings' walls looked like swiss cheese, each hole leading to another transport tunnel or another underground neighborhood. In the center of such clearings, the place locals called the pit, they had built marketplaces where traders met to do business.

Much of the industrial infrastructure required to maintain the upper world cut deep wounds through the underfolk's social arteries.

The Æsir led their elite troops deeper into the urban underworld. The closer they got to the urban center, the greater Mammon's intrusions into the soil became visible; more pipelines, more machines, more industry, more waste. To allow for residential homes aboveground, the supporting urban industry had to be moved below ground. The underlings who operated this most crucial machinery were often no better off than the serfs and slaves of ancient times.

Wulf had never realized how many people lived down here, the lowest of the lowest classes, defecated upon by the richer world above. Seeing with his own eyes how these lowest members of society lived, and realizing how much he, too, had profited from their labor, he felt ashamed of himself. For most of his adult life, he had strived to become a top-floor guy. Nothing but blind greed had motivated him. His desire for luxury and entertainment had blinded him from his plight to support the very people who had never been able to reach the first rungs of an unforgiving society's ladder.

Wulf and his following approached a large clearing, close to the Citadella tower's base. This particular clearing had the size of a valley. Bragi and his men went on a reconnaissance trip to secure resources for the troops. They found an abandoned waste processing facility that could house the men for a couple of days before making their push to the Citadella.

Owing to the height of this clearing, about one hundred feet high, the cave gave visitors the impression of a sky with clouds of smoke hanging below the ceiling. The locals had fitted the cave's roof with sets of lighting that mimicked the movements of the Sun, the Moon, and the stars. It offered the underground dwellers a rudimentary day-and-night rhythm. The circadian system didn't always work. Aboveground society frequently demanded surges of electrical power. During the resulting fallouts, the basement dwellers were temporarily forced to live in sheer darkness. They then had to make a fire or light torches to see. The fumes produced by these fires damaged people's lungs.

At first, Wulf assumed the people living here were as diverse as the higher-level populations. Their faces ranged from brownish to blackish. They appeared to be a mixture of ethnic backgrounds. It wasn't until a band of destitute women seized the opportunity to offer themselves to Wulf's men that his assumption proved wrong. The girls were asking around and convinced some of Wulf's men to wash their skin—for a price. Learning of these encounters, Wulf realized nearly all of the people down here were, in fact, homogenics. Underneath layers of dirt, they were all descendants of Europe's once native population, condemned to a life in hiding.

Wulf and his commanders spent some time wandering around the clearing to gather intelligence. The site was run by a group of elders chosen by the underlings based on seniority, experience, and calmness of character. Wulf asked to speak with the local leader. In a small clay house close to the bottom of the clearing's pit, Wulf met with the eldest. He was named Marbod, a bald grandfather.

— Marbod instantly recognized his guest and said, "So, you are the wolf, the criminal, the reactionary... I've seen your televised pleas. You were a well-groomed man back then, suited-up and clean-shaven. Now, you have turned into a barbarian. I must say I didn't quite agree with what you had to say back then. Have you come to seek my help?"

Wulf admitted he was the one who Marbod thought he was. There was no point in denying it. He was the thought criminal that urban society had wished dead. Marbod informed Wulf that the Council's police had gone looking for him all around the city, but it hadn't informed the public of Wulf's escape. When the authorities realized Wulf and Inga had gone into voluntary exile, they decided to abandon their search.

Marbod wasn't a supporter of Wulf's beliefs but curious to learn more about the wanderer's quest.

— Marbod said, "So, you wish to overthrow modernity? What exactly do you wish to return our world to? To the time before the New Era?"

— "No. Further back than that. I wish to return the human races to a time before even taxation and usury gained common ground. I wish to de-urbanize the world and return people to autonomous rural lifestyles. I wish for humanity to live free in all its true diversity, from the jungles of Africa to the rice fields of the East. I wish for people to speak their own languages again, for them to cultivate their own customs and traditions, and to display their rituals with pride. I wish for people to think for themselves again. I wish to end the culture of critique, of shame and guilt, and to revive the heroic age."

— "Hmmm. So, you wish to turn back time? The world only moves forward. Not even your gods can change that."

— "If we must, we shall resist the gods!" said Wulf.

— Marbod shook his head, "You're not a revolutionary. You're an ignorant man, a thought criminal. If the authorities above knew you were down here, they would raid our communities. We have nothing left to lose, Mr., err, Gungnirsson. We cannot risk more aboveground intrusions. The lives of my people are too fragile. Give me one reason why I shouldn't immediately report you?"

— "Report me, and you'll regret it. Support me, and I'll prove to be your strongest ally. I don't intend to stay here for long. I'm only here to prepare for our final push. You have no reason to deny my cause. If we succeed, we shall turn the red seas blue again and the grey skies bright. I've already put my armies in position. They're ready to strike at the city's pipelines.

"Whether my mission to take the Citadella succeeds or not, the Europolis' machinations will most certainly come to an end. Your people will be able to live free again, aboveground. Their children shall repopulate the Earth."

— Marbod sighed and seated himself, "Are you really that vengeful? Do you really wish to destroy the whole city? If you do so, you will plunge humanity into another Dark Age."

— "Hasn't your people's age been dark enough down here? How many more centuries do you wish for your people to live in shame in these forsaken lairs? I offer to put an end to urban oppression. I will remind the world of higher values, of fertility and beauty, of a world, populated by families living in small communities. I will remind the Europeans that they are a family, yes, a race. I shall drive the urban usurers into the seas!"

— "We'll see about that," said Marbod. "What exactly do you need from me?"

— "With your help, we can rally the under-folk to rise up against modernity. Together, we can grind its machinations to a halt. Let us reclaim our continent."

— "What you really want is the end of progress."

— Wulf growled, "What progress? Your people have been stuck here, underground, for nearly two centuries. How much longer should they wait for the fable of a better life? Even those living aboveground have never experienced it. Don't you see? Progress was a sham. Man's promised liberation from the struggle with nature—ha!—an empty promise. That's all it ever was, a lie."

— Marbod persisted in his criticism, "Say you succeed in breaking into the Citadella, take control of the media channels, broadcast your version of the truth... Then what will you tell the people of the Europolis?"

— "I will tell them their urban masters murdered the ancients' gods before their children's eyes. I will tell them there is God and that an urban conspiracy covered it up. I will show them the proof, for I have in my possession the report written by the present Programmer, Mortimer Bilderberg. In it, he admits that scientists deceived humankind into forgetting about God."

Marbod lifted his eyebrows in disbelief.

— "What good will your God do for us? What difference does it make whether we believe in secular rules or religious morals? Don't both serve the same purpose, namely, to secure the obedience of the masses? What will this Greater Being do for us now that He hasn't done for us during the past two centuries?"

Marbod's words angered Wulf.

— He said, "What difference does it make whether we are machines or human beings? God was banished from the city, but He never left our hearts. In us, He preserved His strength so that we might one day revive the heroic spirit. That day has come. With the High One on our side, we shall fight the urban usurers and liberate humanity from the chains of progressive slavery."

Marbod knew he couldn't stop Wulf. He had merely wanted to test Wulf's resolve before offering him his support. Ragnarok was upon them. The elder granted Wulf permission to speak to his people. He arranged for a gathering in the clearing's pit the next evening.

* * *

After Wulf left Marbod's home to speak with his commanders, an old woman emerged from the shadows. She had been sitting in a pitch-dark corner, eavesdropping on the conversation.

— "It is him," the figure said.

— "But he doesn't know," said Marbod. "When will you tell him?"

— The old woman moved her leprous face into the flickering candlelight and said, "I will speak to him tomorrow, in the afternoon, before he holds his speech."

The Nation of Men had grown restless. The darkness numbed their senses. Some left the waste facility to stroll around the main marketplace in the center of the clearing's pit. Wulf and the Æsir joined them to have dinner. They invited some of the local leaders, too. In a large restaurant tent, the men feasted on roasted rat and sewer weed.

Prostitutes seized the opportunity to mingle with the newcomers. A nineteen-year-old girl, Liana, noticed the Æsir toasting to Wulf. She figured he was their leader. The girl was pretty. Long, straight black hair fell below her shoulder. Her face was clean.

She waited patiently for the men to become drunk. She made her move and swung herself around Wulf's shoulders. She whispered her offerings into his ear. Wulf wasn't in the mood. He had abstained from drinking but was drunk from a lack of sleep. He hadn't left Inga behind in the valley to cheat on her. Liana persisted. Wulf pushed her away and demanded her to leave him alone. She said she didn't want the money. Wulf said he didn't want her.

Liana taunted Wulf. As she walked away, she called him unmanly. Was the wolf afraid of a girl's bite? Some great leader who fears a prostitute. She ran out of the tent, but Wulf took the bait. When no one was sober enough to pay attention, he chased after her. Liana was waiting for him outside, pretending to be talking to other potential customers.

— "Hey," said Wulf. "Wait."

Liana looked over her shoulder and sped off. Wulf caught up with her and grabbed her by the arm to stop her.

— "Auwa! Let go of me."

— "Let's talk."

— "I'm not in the mood for talk, I'm working," she said.

— "Let's go somewhere," Wulf said.

— "What makes you think I'm still available for you?"

Liana wrested herself free from Wulf's grip. He jumped in front of her and took hold of both her wrists, pressing her hands behind her back.

— "Give me a kiss," he said.

Liana got what she wanted, but she made him say it again.

— "Kiss me!" he growled.

Wulf hadn't been with another woman since he had met Inga on the running track, years ago. In an impulse, the two ran off, escaping further into the tunnels, away from the clearing.

— "Where do you girls go to wash yourselves?" Wulf asked.

She showed him the way to a series of candle-lit rooms, each with a bowl of hot water. Wulf seated himself on a wooden bench and watched Liana undress. He took the sponge from the bowl and wiped Liana's body clean. He cleaned her arms and her legs. When he sponged her bosom, Liana's pinkish nipples revealed themselves.

Now, it was the girl's turn to wash Wulf.

The next day, in preparation for his speech, Wulf went to speak to Marbod again.

— Marbod said, "I won't stop you, but that doesn't mean I agree with your plan to endanger all of the Eurpolitans for some uncertain cause. Even if you succeed in destroying the city, it will leave the underground in a catastrophic state. We have no guarantee we can all make it out on time."

Wulf was annoyed by Marbod's lack of enthusiasm. Then, a veiled woman appeared from the shadows, the leper.

— She spoke softly, "Have you had enough of the washer girls?"

— "Who are you?" Wulf shot back.

She revealed her face. Her ugliness startled Wulf.

— "My name is Norn. I was your mother's midwife. I was there when she gave birth to you."

The orphan didn't believe her. The old woman told Wulf what she knew about the events surrounding his birth. She told him about his first days resting on his mother's bosom. She took him to see his house of birth and the very crate that had been his cradle. Though Wulf wanted to know the truth about his origins, he was wary. Anyone could cook up a story to try to deceive him.

— "Did she die here?" Wulf asked.

— "No. Your mother died on the run from the authorities."

— "Old woman, tell me everything you know! Tell me how my mother died. Tell me who my father was. Why did he leave me under the ash tree?"

— "Your father? Your mother was the one who left you under the ash tree. Your father was the reason why..."

Wulf dismissed the woman's ramblings. He didn't believe her. He was ready to walk out.

— Norn shouted after Wulf, "Your father ordered her killed! His men got to her. He is still alive."

Wulf froze and turned around. Could the old woman be telling the truth?

— Norn continued, "Why don't you have a seat? Wulf, your mother's name was Frigga. She was a washer girl when she had you... Like the one you met last night."

— "Bullshit! I don't believe you!"

The shocks from the past angered and confused Wulf.

— "When you were born, you had a birthmark on your left side. Do you still have it?"

Wulf touched his side. It was still there. Norn was telling the truth.

— The old woman said, "Your father didn't want the child. You were born the natural way, illegally. He didn't want the stain of an illegal child on his resumé.

"Your father sometimes came down here from the top floors, to explore the underworld, to get to know its strengths and weaknesses, its opportunities and threats. That's when he met your mother. He visited her several times, for her beauty, for his relief. He was already on his way to becoming a very powerful man.

"When he found out your mother had become pregnant with you, he sent his bloodhounds after her. She ran. She escaped the clearing with you on her arm and disappeared into the tunnels. Your father's hounds kept chasing her until, about two weeks after you were born, they found her, exhausted. She must have run hundreds of miles through the underground tunnels on her bare feet to try to keep you out of their hands.

"She reached the northern outskirts and surfaced there. She had planned to escape the city, to flee further north toward the Valleys of the Vagabonds. She didn't have the stamina. She knew this was the end of her road. They found her twenty miles from where she had hidden you... under the ash tree."

Wulf sobbed. For the first time in his life, he had heard the true story of his birth and abandonment. What son wouldn't cry over the murder of his mother and over the father who had ordered her killed? He beat his fist against the rock wall and hurt himself.

— Filled with a mix of anger, vengefulness, and desperation, Wulf asked, "Who was he? Who was my father? You say he's still alive?"

— Norn hesitated, "Your father is... our Programmer, Mortimer Bilderberg."

Norn's words released Wulf's anchor in reality. For a moment, he felt afloat in the nothingness as if he were drowning in a sea of darkness, unable to cry for help. His voice choked. His tears turned to stone. His father was the Programmer, the man responsible for the totalitarian design of the Europolis, the man whose algorithms governed the beliefs and behaviors of nearly seventy billion people.

Having fallen to the lowest levels of society, the forgotten son was sitting right below his father's offices, below the Citadella. He was the rejected child, the abandoned infant, the man denied a family, cast out, condemned, declared a zealot, and sentenced to death.

Everything he had come to believe about himself had been a lie. If Mortimer was his father, then Wulf wasn't a homogenic. The Programmer was a Babylonian, his mother, a Germanic. Wulf was a mixed-race child. He wasn't a cheesehead, he just looked like one.

— "I can feel it," said Wulf. "I can feel the conflict in me, the battle raging between the Babylonian and the German. The Babylonian is my rational side, the calculator, the intellectual, the ruthless careerist that drove me toward a corporate summit. I, too, once dreamed of One World, One Truth, One Science. The Germanic in me is the barbarian. He revolted against the rational. Intellectually weak, naïve, perhaps gullible, at first, the barbarian managed to learn from his many mistakes. In the end, the furious German succeeded in submitting the Babylonian to his will."

— "So, you have chosen a side," said Norn.

Wulf's world collapsed. The fabric of reality tore away before his eyes. If he wasn't who he thought he was, then who was he? He was a child of extremes. He was a man of high birth born below ground level. He was a fusion of the high and the low, of the noble and his whore, a blend of rich and poor, both oppressor and oppressed together in one. He was the son of a mother who had loved him, of a father who hated him.

All that was left of his sense of self converged into a cold, determined gaze that said:

— "I'm going to kill him."

It took a while for Wulf to get back to himself. For so long had he tried to emulate his father. Wulf, too, had been ambitious. He had strived for the top. Hadn't he secretly wanted to join the ranks of the Council? Wulf ran out of his birth house to find Liana. She noticed Wulf had changed. Wulf didn't have time for chitchat. He came to warn her. She and her colleagues had to leave the city as soon as possible. The urban world was going to come down in a ball of fire.

Wulf went on his way. The conflict in him had come to a resolution. He would continue the fight for his Germanic people, the one whose soul he shared. He ran back to his men. The Æsir noticed the change in Wulf's demeanor. He was a killer now, cold as stone. More focused, he moved about with the confidence of a leader, calm but lethal, ready to strike. Wulf had achieved his highest potential, not as a corporate careerist like his father but as the defender of his mother's people.

Here walked a man who no longer lived for himself. Fusing his father's intellect and his mother's spirit, Wulf felt certain his plan to overthrow the Council was going to succeed. Wulf, the Æsir generals, their elite troops, and the Nation of Men controlling the city's pipelines were going to put an end to modernity. They were going to destroy urban society.

Standing at the lowest point in the clearing's pit, Wulf spoke his final words before storming the Citadella. A large number of underfolk had come to listen:

— "My beloved people of the underworld... The desert grows, woe unto him who hides the desert within! How, exactly, do deserts grow? Do you know? A desert consists of sand, of dead matter. Deserts do not and cannot grow on their own. Deserts grow when the plants and the trees standing at their edges give up their roots. Why do plants and trees give up their roots? They give up on fighting the desert. They permit the sands to erode them.

"When life ceases its struggle with the desert, that's when deserts grow. When life surrenders, that's when deserts grow.

"So, too, grows the human desert. What is the human desert? We recognize it by looking for the perimeter beyond which human beings still have roots. We find, then, that cities are our deserts. The countryside is where we are rooted. Few plants and trees grow in the city. They cannot root in the asphalt, but neither can people. People living in cities have lost their roots, too. Their assimilation into urban society has uprooted them from their traditional, more meaningful communities.

"The city grows, woe unto him who hides the city within! To fight the city, we must root ourselves again, firmly. We must replant our communities on the lands where we belong, where the plants and the trees grow, where the birds have their nest, and where foxes and wolves have their lairs.

"Together, we shall resume our eternal struggle with the desert. We shall end the city's advance. To here and no further! We shall sow our offspring in the present so that our children may shoot their roots in an ancestral past, branch out, and extend their souls toward a fruitful future. I beg you, my people, my European family, and her offshoots around the world, rise up, fight for what is right, defend a future for your children. Rise up from the darkness and let your light shine!"

* * *

Wulf and his elite troops surfaced from the sewers. They broke into the Citadella's basement levels and reached its main lobby, to the astonishment of its understaffed and unprepared security personnel. The filthy barbarians, barefoot, clothed in hides, each with the look of a bored animal, paralyzed the effeminate security guards. The Citadella tower's base was a mile by a mile wide. Hundreds of elevator shafts awaited the warriors to take them to the top, to the heavens where the Programmer, his Ministers, his Senators, and the social engineers lived and worked.

Scared, Citadella personnel ran off to alert more security guards. Never before had their isolated world been invaded. Urban society was supposed to have put an end to all wars. To this end, nations, civilizations, and religions had been effaced. Forced miscegenation had all but erased ethnic differences. All spoke the same language. What cause for war might people still have? No intellectual had ever imagined a bunch of rejects would come to overturn urban society itself. Nobody had thought the bottom twenty percent would make the city and its usurers their enemy.

Wulf, his generals, and his nine-hundred elite warriors entered the elevator systems of the Citadella. They hoisted themselves up to the top. In cars of fifty passengers each, it took the vertical trains half an hour to reach the seat of global power.

A couple of dozen security guards stood waiting in the elevators' arrival hall, panting and sweating, trembling with fear. Yellow lights signaled the arrival of the barbarian hordes. A pinging sound was heard. The boxes came to a full stop. For a short moment, it was quiet. One or the other guard's footsteps could be heard echoing through the hall. Then, the doors slid open. The guards watched dozens of boxes spill their contents out onto the marble floors.

The barbarians smelled blood. Some carried wooden spears, others wielded short swords, axes, and daggers. The wild men went straight for the security guards' throats. Growling and howling, the bare-foot berserkers slaughtered the servants of power. Their victims were cleanshaven family-men, men who showered twice a day; their invaders were bearded killers who hadn't bathed in weeks.

Wulf's men were in a frenzy. Nothing was going to stop them. Alarmed, more guards arrived, some coming down from higher floors, others coming up from lower offices. They were effeminate men and masculine women, rendered identical to one another. They were the acolytes of a gender-neutral society.

The guards of the Citadella first confronted a group of warriors led by Hodr, the blind one. They activated a button on their waists that projected a laser shield out in front of them. In this pacified world, their laser weapons were configured to burn their attackers' skin, not to kill. Their fancy shields proved utterly useless. A group of barbaric youngsters threw their wooden spears straight through the laser shields. The guards' pleas for mercy were pathetic. Modernity failed to stop sticks and stones.

Freyr and his father Njord cornered a group of guardswomen in a meeting room. They all looked alike. The trained hunters held their spears in their right hand behind their back and held their left hand near the front of the shaft. They leaped, one after the other, and, using both hands, thrust their sharp-tipped weapons forward, ramming them through the guards' hearts. The incompetent called for more assistance.

Forseti, Vithar, and the men under their command teamed up. They held the stairwells near the elevator areas to prevent guards from trying to reach the scene of battle while Wulf, Tyr, Bragi, and Heimdall plowed through the central offices. They were filled with Council Ministers, Senators, social engineers, and politicians of all kinds. The offices were filled with the world's most sickening scumbags. These most manipulative men and most mischievous women found themselves trapped on the top floors of the Citadella. No one was going to make it out alive.

The politicians cried, the Senators sobbed, the Ministers shrieked. No one cared for their high-pitched whimpering and moaning. Bragi was as brutal as Tyr was unforgiving. Heads rolled. With their swords, they cut guards clean in half right above their hips. Guards were fainting in horror, only to be killed off by wild men's spears ready to pick up the trash.

An attractive woman, a social engineer in charge of the transgender program, tried to seduce Heimdall. Her researchers hated the fact men's sperm determined a child's birth sex. A sperm cell carried an X or a Y chromosome; X made for a girl, Y, for a boy. To overturn the genetic patriarchy, radical feminists had looked for and found a way to transfer this power from the father to the mother.

A most insidious deception had taken hold of people. With the support of the media, radical feminist propaganda convinced the world that a child's gender was fluid and could, therefore, be changed with words. By calling a boy a girl, he would become a girl. Society deceived millions of innocent boys, unable to fight back, into thinking they were born as girls trapped in the wrong bodies.

In reality, feminists had wanted to grant mothers the power to decide their child's gender—after its birth—by denying the reality of the father's spermatozoic determinant. Spiteful mothers, disappointed by their child's sex, were now legally permitted to brainwash their children into adopting the desired sex.

The media hailed such transitions as the pinnacle of progressive liberalism. Media told the public these children had chosen their new sex themselves, ignoring their parents' blackmail. Society put the blame on children. Supposedly, boys-turned-girls had been "born that way." As many fathers witnessed the deception but took no action to protect their sons. When radical feminists perpetrated a holocaust against millions of boys, fathers let them.

Tonight, divine providence arrived to avenge the masses of mutilated men condemned to suffer a life of humiliation. The Minister of Transgenderism leaned against the wall and unbuttoned her top. She tried to smile and flirt. Heimdall watched her awkward act. When she presented her bosom, he approached the whore and slit her throat in cold blood.

Some of Wulf's men discovered the Ministry of Truth. They alarmed their brethren. In these offices, the scheme to erase all religions had been conceived. The Ministry's engineers had seen to it that all holy books had been burned. Every Bible, every Quran, every copy of the Talmud, every Vedic text, every runic inscription, and all of Confucius' Analects had been lost in fires. The Ministry of Truth and its militias had hunted down and erased humankind's most enduring myths in favor of soulless, heartless scientism.

Tonight, the murderers of mythology faced divine retribution. The scientific formulae they worshiped couldn't save them. Heimdall stormed in, followed by a hundred of the strongest men, captivated by an insatiable bloodlust. They kicked in every door of the Truth Ministry's offices and found the cowards hiding under their desks. The suppressors of mankind ran, fled, and begged for mercy, but the wild men would not hear them. Foaming from their mouths, with pure hatred in their eyes, Wulf's men went for the kill.

Some of the Ministry's saddest creatures had memorized knowledge of the scriptures. In despair, begging for their lives, they cited Christ and Confucius, they murmured the wisdom of Heraclitus and Kaczynski, they recalled the works of Caesar and Wagner. They sang of Boudica, Thusnelda, and Scheherazade—to no avail. With each verse the cowards produced, the barbarians felled another tree in the forest of godless men.

Wulf's rage knew no boundaries, nor did Forseti's bloodthirst. The men killed and crushed the servants of a corrupt government, these unholy maggots. With their swords, they tore open chests and stomachs, the wolf's bite. With their hammers and axes, limbs dropped, and skulls cracked. No one was ever going to clean this mess up. No one would ever set foot here again. No one would ever erase the fate of the erasers.

Hodr and his men found the Ministry of Finance. In the center of the gold-plated lobby stood a statue of the transgender goat god, Baphomet. So, the rumor was true. The world had fallen to the superstition of a globalist sect whose pseudo-religion entailed the corruption, enslavement, and eternal exploitation of humankind.

It had been the globalists' idea to huddle the masses into the Europolis. It had been their sole intent to herd the human species into the walled confines of a global prison. They had purposefully collapsed the economies of India, China, the African, and the Arab nations, as well as the nations of the Americas, to force the world's population to flee into the tentacles of the world octopus, the Europolis they owned.

— Hodr touched the statue of Baphomet and responded with disgust, "Once, I was blind, but now I can see... Men, kill the vermin crawling on these floors!"

Hodr and his men hollered their battle cries. Not one administrator, no official, no secretary, no paperboy escaped the wrath of the wolfmen. The bespectacled worms begged and offered bribes, but the barbarians did not fall for such offerings. The wild men laughed at the crooks' excuses. The moneymen appealed to enlightened values of profit and progress, but the warriors weren't interested in such empty ideals. They charged.

Having subdued the security guards coming up and down the stairwells, the men defending them joined the others, desiring a piece of the action. They barged into the Ministry of Population Control, where ministers were hard at work to keep the urban population ignorant of Wulf's invasion of the Citadel. From these offices, the Council operated its media empire. On the office walls, employees had tried out different slogans. "Diversity is strength," read one. "Homogeny is death," said another. "Obey and consume" was the media's favorite. "Work hard and pay taxes" had done its job well.

As the barbarians seized the media control centers, the astonished Ministers of Population Control discovered their lies and propaganda had had no effect on the unspoiled minds of the invaders. Tyr swung his hammer. Vithar tried his ironclad fists on the meek. Their flailing arms proved too weak to resist the demigod's blows. Today was a day of reckoning. A race of freemen, willing and able to resist the self-proclaimed shepherds of mankind, fought a race of slaves, conditioned to obedience and servitude.

Inside the media control rooms, the men found the equipment to hijack all of the world's news channels. If they wished, they could broadcast their version of the truth across the planet. The Æsir convened. They quarreled about what message to broadcast to the world. Wulf, however, was tired of speaking. He knew not what to say anymore. What words should one speak to an ignorant herd of seventy billion if one had the chance?

The suggestion that broke the deadlock came from Freyr, the son of the North. The Æsir listened carefully:

— "If I may suggest an approach... The problem with mainstream media is not so much that it, left and right, pays homage to the same globalist worldview. The problem isn't that it doesn't leave room for dissent, either. The problem is the very notion of mass media. By transmitting the same shows to every household, mass media posits that there is only one truth and that it is universal.

"Human beings have conditioned themselves to believe that screens flashing commercials somehow never lie to them. The only way to awaken the people to the truth is by shutting mass media down altogether.

"If we pull the plugs and cause a blackout, people will be forced to start talking to each other again. People will be forced to venture out into their world and discover, using their own senses, what is or isn't true. I know the first thing people will discover is that there is more than one truth. They will discover that what they call reality consists of a fusion of many different realities, each with its own logic."

Father Njord was beaming with pleasure, proud of his son's wisdom. It was decided to pull the plugs. The global media blackout sent a shockwave through the Europolis. For the first time since time immemorial, people were forced to think for themselves. All of a sudden, men wondered why they were wasting their time in front of a screen. Women went knocking on neighbors' doors to find people to talk to. Some met for the first time despite having lived on the same floor for decades.

* * *

Wulf and his soldiers continued the search for the Office of the Programmer. They found the staircases leading up to the Council's main conference hall, above which lay only one more level where the Programmer lived and work. The men hasted their way up and, for a moment, stood in awe at the size of the conference hall. With ceilings higher than a fifty-story building, the masters of mankind had built their own heaven here. Silver chairs stood around a gold-plated roundtable that seated over three-thousand Senators, Ministers, and social engineers.

Here, at the center of urban power, the masters of mankind had plotted and ratified their crimes against humanity. It was going to be a bloodbath.

— "Excuse me," said the Speaker of the Council. "Who... Who are you?"

— Wulf spoke in a loud voice, "I shall say to the City that I have come to change the old order, for I am the strongest here."

— "But, but," the Speaker stammered, "you have no right, you have no right to do that. Please leave!"

The barbarian horde rained its spears down on the corrupt and their henchmen. Stumbling over one another in their futile search for safety, hundreds of criminals trampled their colleagues to death, to the sheer amusement of Wulf and his men. The Council's crooks huddled together around the central column standing in the middle of the roundtable, seeking safety in their number. The barefoot barbarians encircled them. The wolfmen peeled away layer after layer of the herd, thinning the weaklings until all lay bleeding on the floor.

When the screams came to an end, Wulf was wading through a pool of blood, waist-deep. There was only one place left to go—up, to the Office of the Programmer. On the side of the central column, a ladder led all the way up to a hatch in the ceiling. There, the Programmer lived and worked all year round. Since his election, he hadn't come down once. Wulf scaled the ladder without looking back. He was going to meet his maker.

With each step Wulf took, urban life fell into progressive disarray. The underlings came out of their lairs and flooded the streets of the urban heart. Chaos ensued. Traffic came to a halt. The economy's pulse flatlined. Confused employees ran from their shops and offices. Shit shovelers stopped shoveling shit.

The hatch atop the ladder opened easily. Wulf climbed through. He had struggled and emerged stronger.

Up there, Wulf discovered a room full of electrical wires, computers, and screens of all sizes flashing code and imagery. In the middle of the room sat a creature barely recognizable as a man. He was sitting in a lounge chair that was leaning backward. A tube stuck in his throat appeared to feed him; a diaper appeared to take care of his waste. A visor covered the man's eyes. His hands were glued to a keyboard. Only the Programmer's gurgling sounds interrupted the rattling of his fingers across the keyboard.

Wulf swung the lounge chair around to face the man. In a trance, the figure was too lobotomized to respond.

— "Father?" said Wulf.

The Programmer didn't respond. Wulf removed the visor from the man's face and the tube from his throat. Wulf took two steps back. He recognized himself in the man's face. Indeed, undeniably, the Programmer was his father. All of a sudden, the Programmer woke up.

— His fingers typing in empty space, Mortimer uttered, "Twelve point twelve equals the magic constant. If e-squared reaches the threshold, run the third subroutine. For all instances of alpha_beta, alternatingly replace them with alpha and beta."

— "Father!" Wulf repeated. "Is it you?"

The Programmer rubbed his eyes. He attempted to lift his weakened torso from the chair to which he had been glued since his election.

— "Huh, huh, who, what? I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I haven't seen without a visor for a while. Oh... It's you."

The Programmer took a better look at the strongman standing before him.

— "What took you so long?" the Programmer said.

— "What took me so long?" Wulf said.

Mortimer Bilderberg tried to get up from his chair but almost fell over. His legs hadn't carried his weight in months. Frail and weak, Wulf's father was quite a bit shorter than his son.

— Wulf stared his father in the eye and said, "What have you done to the world? Of all the things you could have programmed, why didn't you give people more freedom?"

— "More freedom? That's a relative concept. People have plenty of freedoms, social freedoms, sexual freedoms. People can do pretty much whatever they like."

— "There's no freedom from globalization. There's no right to live free from usury and taxation. Women can't have the children they want with the men they love because they're not diverse enough. They have to watch their children develop in a plastic bag! This is called freedom? There's not even a right for children to a mother and a father. What kind of society is that? I have your report—you and your people erased the belief in God from humanity's psyche! How could you?"

— "Well, well, let's not overreact," said Mortimer. "You've got it all backward. The economy has to grow by two to three percent per year, or we'll slip back into a recession. A belief in God doesn't make money. It makes people unwilling and resistant. Maintaining a belief in God would have cost the economy half a percent in turnover and one percent in profits. Moreover, religion made people apprehensive of technological progress. So, we were forced to do something about it. We decided on the Big Reset and started over. A belief in God just made people less productive."

— Wulf opened his eyes in wide amazement and said, "Less productive? You mean less profitable. You mean people who believe in God won't allow themselves to be exploited by their usurers so easily."

— Mortimer, frustrated, shook his head, "A belief in God made people more conservative and patriarchal. We couldn't allow that. To make world peace possible, we had to abolish the patriarchy. We had to establish a single global matriarchy."

— "A what?"

— "Oh, come on. We needed to streamline human behavior. How else were tens of billions of people going to live together in such a small continent?"

— "You mean you had to domesticate the human species at the expense of their humanity, at the expense of Erda. You've been chasing progress for progress's sake. It's an illusion. What you call progress means nothing other than the maximization of the human population size. You call anything rational that adds more consumers to your market. To what end? What's the purpose of having seventy billion people living simultaneously if they all have to live in two-hundred-square-feet concrete boxes, glued to their TV sets?"

— "You don't understand. We had no choice," Mortimer said.

— Wulf squinted his eyes in confusion and said, "Who is this 'we' you keep talking about?"

— "The owners of mankind, of course. They're the Zocharians."

— "The Zocharians? I've never heard of them. Who are they?"

— "They don't live in the Europolis. They live in luxury resorts on the islands, for example, on Madagascar, Bermuda, Barbados, the Maldives, Hawaii, French Polynesia, and so on."

— "How can this be? Are you telling me the Europolis solely exists to exploit seventy billion people so these Zocharians can live rich lives free of worry in some tropical paradise?"

— "Yes, of course. Look, err, Wulf, there's so much you don't understand. Have a seat and let me explain to you how the world came to be this way."

* * *

Mortimer and Wulf sat down for a talk.

— "You're right about one thing," the Programmer said. "We created urban civilization to maximize humanity's economic output. You see, urban civilization is really a meta-civilization. It cuts through all other civilizations. Cities are our colonies, and once the cities gained a foothold all over the world, the invention of democracy helped us secure power. Since democracy gives every citizen one vote, all we had to do was absorb a region's growing populations to put ourselves in power.

"Once the majority of the world's populations were living in cities, democracy guaranteed us they'd vote for urban interests—our interests. By the early twenty-first century, in the old time, we had reached the tipping point. Half the global population was living in cities. We had the people where we wanted them. We knew we could do whatever we wanted.

"It's taken us nearly seven thousand years to get to where we are today. We started in ancient Mesopotamia. We tried our hand at herding rural and nomadic peoples living around the earliest cities, such as Uruk and Babylon. People lived as members of small tribes. They spoke hundreds of different languages and even more dialects. There was no way we could manage them all. Their beliefs were too different. Conflicts among the tribes were great. We were forced to start rewriting people's beliefs.

"The invention of writing systems advanced our cause. The power of a writing system is that you can make unaltered copies of an original text and distribute them across a vast region. That way, our urban rulers, our kings, and princes, could draft up a religious pantheon that served our interests. We authored our version of the truth and disseminated hundreds of copies. This allowed us to hijack people's religions.

"We'd send our best performers to visit the tribes. Oftentimes, we'd teach the primitives how to read for themselves. In some cases, we infiltrated the tribes or bribed some of their members to disseminate our stories.

"Thanks to the cuneiform writing systems of the day, our actors were able to perform the same stories before very diverse audiences. If we could get illiterates to watch our performances, we could make them all believe in our version of reality.

"We cooked up a story about a god named Marduk. He was our invention. We invented a story claiming Marduk had fought, defeated, and subdued some six-hundred other gods, the ones the many Mesopotamian tribes believed in. We unified their polytheistic beliefs into a monotheistic belief in Marduk.

"We successfully united the tribes living around Babylon to accept the idea that our god was their god and that Babylon was the seat of Marduk's power. We made cities, not communities, the seat of religious power. The faithful now had to come to our cities to worship the gods we had invented for them. Later, the Vatican and Mecca would fulfill a similar purpose. To us, religion was a marketing tool to lure new customers into our businesses.

"Urban civilization was just getting started. We wanted more. It took a few thousand years, but, eventually, the invention of radio, TV, and the internet handed us global power. Just as we had done in Mesopotamia, we used the inventions of mass media to perform our plays before people's eyes. It gave us the power to alter people's perception of reality. Using the media, we killed off their old heroes and introduced ours to take their place.

"With the help of soap operas and sitcoms—our most effective propaganda tools—we taught people how to behave and how not to behave. Soap operas gave us access to mostly female audiences. As we expected, women's minds were easier to influence than men's. Women are more susceptible to peer pressure. We also knew women would, in turn, pass on their changed behaviors to their sons and daughters.

"It was all done for profit. From the get-go, we realized the economic potential of herding humans into our cities. We called our politics socialism, as opposed to capitalism. The difference between the two is that capitalists wish to invest in better quality but fewer offspring, whereas socialists wish to spend their wealth on larger numbers of offspring regardless of quality.

"Socialism works in the exact same way. If hard-working, productive men are dumb enough to pay an income tax, we'll take their money, spend a little of our budget on girls, and fill our coffers with profits. Fidel Castro truly mastered the art of robbing a nation blind. He slept with a girl for lunch and another for dinner for four decades and got away with it with billions of dollars in his accounts.

"Socialism worked in the exact same way. If hard-working, productive men were dumb enough to pay an income tax, we'd take their money, spend a little of our budget on girls, and fill our coffers with profits. Fidel Castro truly mastered the art of robbing a nation blind. He slept with a girl for lunch and another for dinner for four decades and got away with it with billions of dollars in his accounts.

"To get women to vote socialist, we promised them whatever they wanted to hear. We gave women universal suffrage or some bullshit like that. We knew they would vote for our candidates. If the female population were generally young, we'd present them manly, fatherly candidates. If the population were generally old, we'd offer them candidates that could be their sons-in-law. Women's sexual fantasies took care of the rest.

"Naturally, women loved the idea of socialist redistribution. All women grew up envying the mothers who spent their father's wealth. Socialism was a daughter's revenge against her mother because it taxed her father and redistributed his wealth to herself. Redistribution also benefited single mothers and women who couldn't find a man. Of course, we didn't tell women our middlemen would strike up most of the profits—ha-ha!

"The only place we had trouble pulling our tricks was in the North. Those damn barbarians! Your people, you Germanics, you just wouldn't take a hint. We tried everything, but they fought back fiercely. They fought us at the Teutoburg Forest under Arminius or Siegfried. Under Alaric, they came down south to sack Rome.

"The problem with the Germanics was they didn't value economic progress as much as we did. They valued their ways of life more than money. We were stupefied. We'd never encountered a race so stubborn it wouldn't let us bind them a carrot on a stick.

"We got to work. We figured we had to deconstruct their religious beliefs. In Cologne, around the fourth century AD in their timeline, we tried out several cults to see which one could replace the Northerners' beliefs. We tried out an Osiris cult, a Mithras cult, anything. Nothing worked. After Christianity was declared the official doctrine of the Roman Empire, we were able to convert some of the Germanic tribes living southwest of the Rhine. They had grown accustomed to Roman rule and were more willing to adopt its policies.

"The Northerners, once again, put up a fight. They were the most stubborn bastards we had ever encountered. From the seventh century onwards, we sent our Catholic missionaries and their soldiers to the North to burn and erase the heathens' scrolls, their temples, and their Irminsuls. We burned many thousands of them at the stakes for their refusal to convert to Christianity. Good riddance, we thought. We hacked down their runestones and repurposed them to build Catholic churches.

"We hunted down their bards and scribes. If they wouldn't convert and wouldn't start spreading the new faith, we'd kill them. We promised the heathen kings greater wealth. If they adopted Christianity, we would give them access to our markets. Still, their rural subjects kept clinging to their old ways. Even by the twelfth century, the barbarians could be heard singing songs of the heroes who fought at the Teutoburg Forest.

"The Germanic peoples would not give up on their chief god. According to their custom, it was forbidden to call out His name in public. They considered it too dangerous to wake up the God of War. So, the Germanic peoples made up tons of alternative names to avoid having to speak his real one. They called him the Alfather, the High One, Father of Men, Attacking Rider, Lord of the Æsir, Flaming Eye, the Blind and the One-Eyed—for he had lost one eye—Spearman, Lord of the Undead, the Mighty One, Wise One, the One Who Is Many, the Ancient One, Deceiver, Riddler, the One in Gaping Frenzy, the Hooded, the Hanged One—for he had once been hanged for nine days—Commander of Leaders, Teacher of Gods, Grey Beard, Battle Wolf, Screamer and Roarer, the Protector, the God of Runes, Father of Victory, Sleep Bringer, the Thunderer, Swinger of Gungnir—his spear—the Wakeful, Chooser of the Slain, Stormer, Killer, the Smith of Battle, Terrible One, the Wayweary, and the Wanderer.

"We had to get rid of him, one way or another. Each year in late December, on the shortest day of the year, the Germanic peoples dressed up one of their elders as the Wanderer, an old fellow with a grey beard, a broad hat, and a cloak. He'd look like a man who'd spent too much time wandering about the woods. The figure would ride into town on his flying horse, a white roan, the eight-legged Sleipnir.

"To get rid of the German god, Catholic missionaries infiltrated each and every Germanic community. A Catholic priest would introduce a new character to the heathens' winter solstice festival, the Christian Bishop of Myra. The Bishop, played by a priest, would berate the Wanderer for being an irresponsible drunk who refused to repent and convert to Christianity. It worked. Once the heathens accepted this version of our play, we'd have the Wanderer die of a stroke. We murdered the heathens' chief god before their children's eyes.

"Over time, the Catholics phased out the memory of the Wanderer altogether, replacing him with the Bishop of Myra. Though we'd christened the heathen god, the transition proved to be a mere visual one. The Germanic peoples now worshipped the Bishop of Myra as their roving god. The Bishop, too, would wear a long grey beard, ride the Wanderer's roan. His staff still represented the Wanderer's spear.

"To make room for the worship of Christ, we moved the heathen winter solstice celebration to December sixth. The celebration of Christ could then take place during what became Christmas.

"By the sixteenth or seventieth century, Dutch Protestants fleeing Spain's Catholic armies arrived at the New World. With them, they brought along their Saint Nicholas—the Bishop of Myra still posing as the heathen god. The Europeans' Saint Nicholas became North America's Santa Claus. Guess what happened next? The Americans moved their Santa from December sixth back to the time of Christmas! Owing to the influence of American culture, the German god returned to Europe as Father Christmas. Europe's heathen god had risen from the dead!

"We were back at square one. Our efforts to erase the German god from his people's collective psyche had proven fruitless. This damn god refused to die. In a last-resort effort, we accused Santa Claus, an old white male, of being the poster child of white supremacism. It angered white people a lot, but we used the backlash as evidence of white people's malicious intent. That convinced our immigrant hordes that Santa Claus was really part of some vast white nationalist conspiracy designed to overtake the world.

"At last, we'd gotten rid of the German god. We abolished Saint Nicholas, both in North America and in Europe, by accusing the character of being 'racist'. Ha-ha! Then, there was nothing left standing in our way of establishing the Europolis. We poured our asphalt over a godless continent. We buried the memory of heathen times under tons of brick and concrete.

"The rest is history."

Wulf had been listening carefully to his father's story. When Mortimer finished talking, Wulf wished to know one more thing:

— "What was this German god's real name?" he asked.

— "Err, what does it matter. He's gone now. He will never be revived."

— "What was His name?"

— "I don't remember. Besides, let's not wake Him up," the Programmer said.

— A deep, forceful voice barked, "What was my name, snake?"

— The snake hissed, "Votan! Your name was Votan, the God of Poetry and War!"

Votan gritted his teeth. He wished to avenge the rape of Erda. He wished to avenge the fate of his orphaned people, the natives forced to live in hiding in the dungeons deep below urban civilization, waiting for salvation. Today, salvation came. The God of War leaped and grabbed the snake by its throat. He planted His fist on the snake's horrid face. During the first three blows, the snake moaned. After the second three, it lost consciousness. After the final three, the snake dropped dead on the ground.

For every blow Votan planted, the Nation of Men stationed around the city walls blasted one of the nine pipelines to pieces, severing the city from Erda's life-giving force.

The urban age had come to an end.
Epilogue

The actions of Wulf and his armies saved Erda, Mother Earth. With magnificent resilience, she healed her deepest wounds. The Earth digested man-made pollution. Europe's rivers flushed out the urban filth. The red seas turned blue again and were soon teeming with life. It did not take long before salmon found their way back up the Rhine. From coast to coast, forests flourished, wildlife returned, and in their wake, the forces of nature eroded the concrete Europolis.

On that day of reckoning, the people of the Europolis were awakened from a dark sleep. When the Nation of Men cut the urban octopus' tentacles, the machinations of a global empire ground to a halt. The media blackout forced people to start thinking for themselves again. The World State no longer told citizens what to do. As food supplies diminished and water stopped flowing from faucets, a collective panic broke out. Seventy billion people fled the city in droves, spreading out in every direction across the Earth's many continents.

The under-folk, Europe's natives, accustomed to hardship, were the last remaining people to live among the ruins of the World City. They worked diligently to restore their continent. Liana led a revivalist movement that embraced the belief in Votan. People took after her example.

The Nation of Men, encircling the burning city, waited patiently for its inhabitants to flee the city. Each soldier abducted one or two good-looking girls and dragged them to their vessels. Some welcomed the adventure, others kicked and screamed, all set sail for the North. There, the men established families of their own.

The elite warriors who had supported Wulf and the Æsir during their push for the Citadella joined the natives and their struggle. They chased the urban rabble out of Europe and led the reconquest of their ancestral lands.

After the successful siege, the Æsir generals, Tyr, Bragi, Vithar, Forseti, Njord, Freyr, Ullr, Heimdall, and Hodr returned to the Fiefdoms of the Foes. With the support of the chieftains, they established a New Europa, a Europe of tribes and nations, of hundreds if not thousands of kingdoms and princedoms of various sizes and powers. From now on, each tribe would cherish its linguistic and cultural differences.

A lone Wulf returned to the Valley of the Vagabonds. It was renamed to the Valley of the Vindicated. As Wulf marched home on his white roan, the fires of a burning continent behind him reached to the skies.

Upon his reunion with Inga, she greeted him with his son on her arm. Glowing with health, she had named him Ask. Inga and Wulf lived a long and healthy life together by their fishing lake in the quiet of the valley. For several summers, Wulf worked to construct a longhouse for his family. Inga bore a second child, a girl named Ambla. Ask and Ambla would have two more siblings, the twin brothers named Villi and Vé.

Decades later, on their deathbed, a decrepit Inga lay beside her Wulf. She was holding her man's hand. This time, they wished to journey together. As the light in their eyes began to flicker, Inga remembered the picture Wulf had made for her in prison. She had hung it on the wall across their bed. Now, she could see what the picture represented. It was a picture of Votan fighting the world snake.

Surrounded by their four children, Wulf spoke his last words:

— "Once, I know, there was a time when people believed in simple truths. From this day onward, such truths must forever guide our people's actions."

A child needs a mother,A wife a husband,A man his nation;With faith in God,The people shall live Free from usury and taxation.
About the author

Mathijs Koenraadt (1980) writes books about people's struggles with the collectives trying to assimilate them.

Publications

A Man Becomes His Self: A Novella for Lost Souls (2018)

Confusion: A Surrealistic Novella on the Struggle for Autonomy  (2018)

If Not Now, When? Writings in Defense of Europe (2018)

Return to Freedom: A Traveler's Thoughts on Life, Love,

and the Fate of the World (2015)

The Ignorant God: Thoughts about Time and Eternity (2017)
