Graduation Ceremony
You will awaken early
on that day, and you will dress in the formal parade robes of a
probationary agent of the Stasis for the last time ever. You have
worn these robes many times over the past twenty years, and you are
no longer the frightened teenager whose hands held the knife of the
aspirant and whose ears accepted their ruthless first order. Had
you declined the call, were you still in the era of your birth, you
would already be approaching early middle age, the great plague of
senescence digging its claws deep beneath your skin; and as it is,
even though the medical treatments of the Stasis have given you the
appearance of a twenty-five-year-old, your eyes are windows onto
the soul of an ancient.
Your mind will be
honed as sharp and purposeful as a razor blade, for you will have
spent six months preparing for this morning; six months of lonesome
despair following Torque’s explanation of your predicament, spent
in training on the roof of the world, obsessively focused on your
final studies. You have completed your internship and your
probationary assignments, worked alone and unsupervised in perilous
times: now you will present yourself to the examiners to undergo
their final and most severe examination, in hope of being accepted
at last as an agent of Stasis. As a full agent, you will no longer
be limited in your access to the Library: nor will your license to
summon timegates be restricted. You will be a trustee, a key-holder
in the jailhouse of history, able to rummage through lives on a
whim, free to search for what you have lost (or have had taken from
you: as yet you are unsure whether it was malice or negligence that
destroyed your private life).
You will dress in a
saffron robe bound with the black belt of your current rank, and
place on your head the beret of an agent-aspirant. Elsewhere in the
complex, a dozen other probationers are similarly preparing
themselves. You will hang on your belt the dagger that you honed to
lethal sharpness the night before, obsessively polishing the symbol
of your calling. Before the sun reaches the day’s zenith, it will
have taken a life: it is your duty to ensure that the victim dies
swiftly, painlessly.
Out on the
time-weathered flagstones, beneath the deep blue dome of a sky
bisected by a glittering torque of orbital-momentum-transfer
bodies, you will stand in a row before your teachers and tyrants.
Not for the first time, you will find yourself asking if it was all
worth it. They will stare down at you and your classmates, ready to
pronounce judgment—ready perhaps to admit you to their number as a
peer, or to anathematize and cauterize, to unmake and consign into
unhistory those who are unworthy. They outnumber your fellow
trainees three to one, for they take the training of new eumortals
very seriously indeed. They are the eternal guardians of
historicity, the arbiters of what really happened. And for no
reason you can clearly comprehend, they offered you, you in
particular out of a field of a billion contenders, an
opportunity.
And there will be
speeches. And more speeches. And then Superintendent-of-Scholars
Manson will utter a sermon, along exactly the lines one would
expect on such an occasion. “This momentous and solemn occasion
marks the end of your formal training, but not the end of your
studies and your search for excellence. You entered this academy as
orphans and strangers, and you shall leave it as agents of the
Stasis, sworn to serve our great cause—the total history of the
human species.” He’s going to go on in like vein for nearly an
hour, you realize: one homily after another, orthodox ideology
personified. Theory before praxis.
“We accept you as you
are, human aspirants with human weaknesses and human strengths. We
are all human; that is our weakness and
strength, for we are the agency of human destiny, charged with the
holy duty of preserving our species from the triple threat of
extinction, transcendental obsolescence, and a cosmos fated to
unwind in darkness—notwithstanding your weaknesses, you brother
Chee Yun with your obsessive exploration of the extremes of pain,
you sister Gretz with your enthusiasm for the fruit of the dream
poppy, you brother Pierce with your palimpsest family hobby—we
understand all your little vices, and we accept you as you are,
despite your weaknesses, despite knowing that only through service
to the Stasis will you achieve all that you are destined
for—”
You will not bridle
angrily when Superintendent-of-Scholars Manson tramples on the
grave of your family’s unhistory, even though the scars are still
raw and weeping, because you know that this is how the ritual
unfolds. You will have reviewed the recording delivered in the
internal post some days before, heard the breathy rasp of your own
voice wavering on the razor edge of horror as he explains the
graduation ritual to you-in-the-present. Your fingers will whiten
on the sweat-stained leather hilt of your dagger as you await the
signal. Though outwardly you remain at peace, inside you will be in
turmoil, wondering if you can go through with it. Slaying your
grandfather, cutting yourself free from the fabric of history, was
one thing; this is something else.
“Stasis demands
eternal vigilance, brothers and sisters. It is easier to shape by
destruction than to force creation on the boughs of historicity,
but we must stand vigilant and ready, if necessary, to intervene
even against ourselves should our hands stray from the straightest
of strokes. Every time we step from a timegate, we are born anew as
information entering the universe from a singularity: we must not
allow our hands to be stilled by fear of personal
continuity—”
You will realize then
that Manson is on track, that he really is going to give the order your older self
described with shaking voice, and you tense in readiness as you
call up a channel to Control, requesting the gate through which you
must graduate.
“Weakness is
forgivable in one’s personal life, but not in the great work. We
humans are weak, and sooner or later many of us stray, led into
confusion and solipsism by our human grief and hubris. But it is
our glory and our privilege that we can change ourselves. We do not have to accept a false version
of our selves which have fallen into the errors of wrong thought or
despair! Shortly you will be called on to undertake the first of
your autosurveillance duties, monitoring your own future self for
signs of deviation. Keep a clear head, remember your principles,
and be firm in your determination to destroy your own errors: that
is all it takes to serve the Stasis well. We are our own best
police force, for we can keep track of our own other selves far
better than any eternal invigilator.” Manson will clap his hands.
And then, without further ado, he will add: “You have all been told
what it is that you must do in order to graduate. Do it. Prove to
me that you have what it takes to be a stalwart pillar of the
Stasis. Do it now.”
You will draw your
dagger as your phone sends out the request for a timegate two
seconds back in time and a meter behind you. Con trol acknowledges
your request, and you begin to step toward the opening hole in
front of you, but as you do so you will sense wrongness, and as you
draw breath you will begin to turn, raising your knife to block
with a scream forming in the back of your mind: No! Not me! But you will be too late. The stranger
with your face stepping out of the singularity behind you will
tighten his grip on your shoulders, and as you twist your neck to
look around, he will use your momentum to aid the edge of the knife
you so keenly sharpened. It will whisper through your carotid
artery and your trachea, bringing your life to a gurgling, airless
fadeout.
The graduation
ceremony always concludes this way, with the newly created agents
slaughtering their Buddha nature on the stony road beneath the
aging stars. It is a pity that you won’t be alive to see it in
person; it is one of the most profoundly revealing rituals of the
time travelers, cutting right to the heart of their existence. But
you needn’t worry about your imminent death—the other you, born
bloody from the singularity that opened behind your back, will
regret it as fervently as you ever could.