NewU Pt. 38

"And what principles are those?"

"Those of evolutionary supremacy." One of the other men, an Evo, replied.

He looked like he was about to say more, but the man sitting at the very head of the table, clearly the one in charge and also an Inquisitor, held his hand up to stop him. "I think we are getting a little ahead of ourselves. Perhaps introductions should be made first."

All five men looked at me from their end of the table. "We all know you know who I am," I said flatly. I was trying to strike a balance in my tone between a renewed, if diminished, sense of resistance and genuine curiosity while also making it clear that I knew where I was and what had just happened to me. I couldn't imagine that anyone in the group staring me down thought that I was a keen and enthusiastic acolyte, but I didn't want them to think this was going to be too hard either. I wanted them to feel hope that I would join the cause, but not quite stretching as far as optimism.

The man in the middle nodded. "My name is Tiberius. I am the Prefect in charge of Regnum Bospori; these are my Tribunes."

"Is that the name of this... place?" I arched an eyebrow.

"Regnum Bospori is the region we are in," he replied. "Our order does not recognize modern state boundaries, so we acknowledge neither Ukraine nor Russia."

"But... you are based in Russia."

The slightest hint of a smile curled at his lips. "I see you have done your homework. Our history is long and complicated, but I will try to explain. The Praetorian guard left Rome with the last legitimate Western Emperor after the city was sacked by the Usurper in the year 475; we found our way to Constantinople and pledged our services to the Eastern Emperor. As you may know, our Order is made up of Demi-gods, sons, and daughters of Jupiter himself, blessed with divine powers, what you know today as Evos and Inquisitors. Evos were the offensive arm of the Praetorians, able to invade and break the minds of men, to bend them to our will, to imbue themselves with great powers that made them perfect soldiers. The Inquisitors were the defensive arm, able to resist even the strongest of manipulations, blessed with exceptional martial prowess, we could fend off any attack against the Emperor and his domain. Two arms, the sword and shield."

Wait, this was Pre-Maria. Before the founding of the Conclave. Do they mean that Evos and Inquisitors worked together before that?

I said nothing and just listened.

"Over the years, however, we came to realize that Evos and Inquisitors were appearing in places never touched by Jupiter's light. Places you now know as Northern Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and the Russian steppe. In the year 1215, the same year as news of England's Magna Carta reached us, we sent out two emissaries, Maria, an Evo, and Stephen, an Inquisitor, tasked with finding as many of our brethren as they could and bringing them to us. Maria, as you know, found a measure of success. She was an exceptionally powerful woman, able to leave parts of herself at fixed locations so that any Evos in the area could contact her. It took her centuries for her to travel the enormous distances she did by foot. The Conclave, as you know it now, was officially founded in 1324, but its first iterations started life more than a century before that as a means for Maria to maintain communication over the vast distances that she traveled. Once she had found all of the Evos, she was going to lead them here.

So that is the power source I felt when I visited the British Museum, but she would have been dead when it was built. Maybe that is why the museum was built in that specific location... interesting.

"Stephen wasn't as successful. We are not exactly sure how, but he was captured by the fledgling Catholic Church and taken to the Vatican. Under torture, he revealed to his captors the survival of our order and the existence of Evos and Inquisitors. With a reach vastly wider than our own, they started to hunt down any Inquisitors they could find and convert them into warriors of their faith. Inquisitors are, by their nature, unwaveringly loyal to the cause to which they are sworn, and once they had joined, the zeal with which they carried out the orders of the church was nothing short of fanatical. The Pope, however, saw the threat that unchecked Evos posed. They saw them as a threat to every doctrine they had been preaching. Men with the power of God. There could only be one God, and the Inquisitors were the only ones who could combat that power. After a few years of deliberation, the extermination of the Evos was given a Papal decree, and the war began.

"By this time, the Roman Catholic branch of Christianity had separated from the Eastern Orthodox Church, and there were, effectively, two popes in Europe. The Eastern Pope was not only in Constantinople but was guarded by our order, so when the Vatican demanded the immediate destruction of the Praetorian Guard, the arrest and transportation to Rome of all Inquisitors, and the execution of all Evos, our Pope refused. But we couldn't stay in the city. The Byzantine Empire was under threat from Muslim forces to the east and relied on Rome for support. To save the city, our Emperor, and our Pope, we left Constantinople willingly, first traveling north through what you would call Bulgaria and Romania, then through modern Ukraine and into Russia. We hid amongst the population and allowed the Vatican and the Conclave to forget about us. In the meantime, the war waged on.

"Pockets of Evos, even ones not affiliated with the Conclave, banded together for protection against the relentless attacks from the church. One group of Evos, for example, had formed an alliance in the city of Edirne, seizing power and growing their influence until they had an army at their backs. A century later, in 1453, one of their descendants, a Sultan named Mehmet II laid siege to Constantinople and captured the city. His publicly declared aim was to spread the Muslim faith, but in reality, he was targeting Rome to destroy the threat to his kind. He was an Evo, and like all Evos, he knew perfectly well the source of the threat against him."

"So you guys are the real home of the world's Evos and Inquisitors," I deadpanned. I suppose there was an element of sense in Tiberius's monologue, but he wasn't actually explaining anything. "And that is why you killed every Evo and Inquisitor not aligned with you in Russia."

"Did we?" Tiberius held my eyes in a way that not many people did these days. "Or did we take them, do to them what we have done to you, break their bonds of loyalty with the Conclave or the Inquisition, and then pull the wool from their eyes, tell them the truth, and they joined us of their own free will."

I opened my mouth to reply but felt a frown furrowing my brow. Olena's words in Horlivka echoed through my memory.

"The Inquisitors that your friend is looking for are alive. They have been taken to Russia. We don't know where, exactly, but we know that they are alive."

"The Inquisitors from Ukraine, you are converting them, aren't you."

"Converted, past tense," Tiberius nodded. "It took significantly longer to break your loyalties than theirs."

My loyalties? Did these people know nothing? How deluded did Marco have to be to genuinely think that I was loyal to the Conclave, or anyone else for that matter, and tell them that?

I sighed deeply and rolled my neck. "So what's the plan then? To reunite all Evos and Inquisitors under a single banner, your banner?"

"A little bit of an oversimplification, but yes."

"Is it an oversimplification? How?"

Tiberius looked to Tribune on his right, the Evo who had spoken when I first entered the room. "Our goal is to dismantle the institutions that have grown to separate our brethren," the second man said after clearing his throat; he had been left conspicuously unintroduced, as had all the other people in the room. "It must be remembered that both the conclave and the Inquisition are older than many of the countries they operate in, and their influence has spread, in a lot of cases, to the very foundations of those national governing structures. They are ingrained into the way those nations function. The British House of Lords, for example, may be free of Evo influence now, but when it was founded, they were almost all members of the Conclave. The Spanish Cortes Generales and the Dutch Staten Generaal have been Inquisition Bastions for centuries and still are. The French Parliament has changed more times than most people can count; the Germans were governed by humans for almost all of its existence as a state, but Evos made a strong play for control in the latter part of the nineteenth century, which led to two world wars."

"Wait, I was told the Inquisition was responsible for the holocaust."

There were a few glances around the room before the second man spoke again. "It is a complicated subject. But essentially, Hitler didn't start the Nazi party; he just became their figurehead and then, later, their leader. The men who did start it were convinced by Inquisitors that there was a secret effort to control the fate of Germany and they were the ones responsible for Germany losing the Great War, which was true, except their raging, blinding, psychotic anti-Semitism twisted that warning to focus on Jews instead of Evos, and instead of a few hundred Evos being killed, around 8 million Jews and other minorities were made to suffer instead. This is why institutions like the Conclave and Inquisition can not be allowed to exist."

"So, everything Hitler said about there being an enemy within, undermining the country, was true?" I asked with raised eyebrows. Hitler being right, was not something you expected to hear in polite or sane company. "Except that it wasn't the Jews, it was the Evos? And in trying to stop that influence, the Inquisition basically put Hitler into power, which, in turn, caused the Holocaust?"

"That's about the extent of it, yes."

"Jesus..." I shook my head. This was new information and on a pretty serious level, too. "Okay, so all the Evos and Inquisitors getting together is better for everyone; the whole world gets to live in peace?"

The five men glanced at each other.

"Pete, our order has no interest in the plight of humans. We are the children of Jupiter," Tiberius answered this time. "That may be an archaic term, but it is true. Demi-gods, the next stage in human evolution, hell, call us the spawn of alien breeding; call us what you want; we are above humans on the evolutionary scale in every imaginable way. With no supreme Emperor to govern them, our place is not to care for humans but to rule them in the Emperor's stead."

And it was all going so well.

The casual ease with which the Prefect said these words took me aback a little. It was said with the same fervent belief as someone pointing out an apparently obvious fact. Like someone saying, "What do you mean, 'why does it quack?' Cause its a duck!" As if it were the most plain to see fact on earth and the concept that ruling over humans was one that should be an automatically held belief among all of our kind.

"It is a simple matter of nature," Tiberius went on. "I know you have felt it; all of us have. The feeling of dominance over humans, the elation we have all felt at vanquishing lesser beings, controlling them, displaying our powers. It is natural law that the dominant species, the superior race, subjugate the lesser ones. In the natural world, that usually means extinction for the lesser species, but for us, humans will be allowed to live in peace and under our protection."

"As long as they serve." I finished for him after he left that little detail out.

"We all serve." Tiberius countered. "The humans serve us, we serve the order, the order serves the greater good, and the greater good serves the planet. Just imagine it: all of the earth's population pulling together toward a single goal. An end to poverty and petty little wars, an end to political in-fighting and the hunger for power, politicians overlooking what is right in favor of what is expedient or popular, power resting in the hands of those capable of wielding it. Global warming and climate change would be a thing of the past, racial and religious tensions gone, and silly ideas like capitalism and democracy eradicated. People being granted position and privilege based on what they contribute to the whole. We could cure cancer in a few years with the influx of scientific minds focused on it. I know you gave yourself vast quantities of knowledge that you didn't otherwise have; all Evos do it. It's nothing to be ashamed of, but imagine if the collective intelligence of the Conclave was set to a task like medicine, education, or renewable energy. We could have achieved proper space flight within a decade, exploration within 50 years, and maybe even colonization within our lifetimes. The problem of an overcrowded earth could be solved before it ever begins. It will be paradise."

I had to admit there was a certain amount of logic in what the older man was saying. I could never really tell if my experiences were different from less powerful Evos, but I had causally downloaded and learned everything there was to know about computer programming and, in only a few short months, had built a system that had the potential to revolutionize information processing for a generation. It was a leap forward of at least a few decades, and I had done it in a few months, entirely alone. If I had turned that intent to something more globally beneficial, like medicine, for example, were there any limits to what I could achieve? And that was just me. What if the entire population of the Conclave and the Sect were set to the same task without the constant need to keep themselves hidden and their existence a secret?

There was also more than a grain of truth to what Tiberius had said about my feelings toward the humans I had fought, too. I couldn't ignore that spark of feeling that welled up inside me when I was dispatching the ambush in Donetsk. The feeling of overwhelming superiority. How effortless the expenditure of energy, how profound the results would be, a display of power that would have entire cultures bending the knee.

I could almost see them: the supplicating, fawning masses.

My experiences with the human race had not exactly been stellar. They may have been dead now, but my parents had shown me a degree of abuse and neglect that was nothing short of horrific, and aside from that single name, that one clue, I had no idea why.

Sean

Even my grandparents had abandoned me to my fate. Opting for the easy choice over the right one. My school life, as a fully-fledged human, or at least as an unawakened Evo, wasn't much better. I never fit in, I wasn't bullied, I wasn't ignored, I just always felt like I was invisible. Even now, only a few years after leaving, I would have been astounded if any of them remembered my name. But looking back at that time now, it all just seemed so... unimportant. They seemed so unimportant. Not because my life had moved on and school was not a major part of my existence anymore, but because they were just humans

And I was above them.

"And what about the people who won't serve."

"Then they are an enemy of the people," Tiberius shrugged. "An enemy of progress, an enemy of the natural order." I held his eye for a moment. He seemed to realize what I was wordlessly asking before he had finished the sentence. "You are referring to Uri."

I wasn't. I was referring to all the people who had been killed, and I wasn't entirely willing to overlook the attempts made on my own life yet, either. But I nodded anyway.

"There will be a lot of Uris in the world. People who see righteousness in resistance, people who see nobility in the lost cause, and those who see value in the institutions that have existed for generations. The thing is, if you look at it properly, you will see that these people only value those institutions because they elevate them above their station. Uri, in any other walk of life, would have been nobody. It was only his powers and the position that they gave him within the Conclave that made him special. There was no noble goal to protect the Evos of the world; there was only a wish to protect the institution that made him unique and gave his life value. An institution that was never meant to exist in the first place beyond bringing people like him into our fold."

"So this little game you are playing to instigate a war between the Conclave and the Inquisition..." I already knew the answer before I asked the question.

"Necessary to weaken and distract both of them," came the predictable reply. "You must understand that as long as the real Inquisition is clueless about what is really going on, and the Evos think that they need to stay hidden, they aren't paying attention to the Praetorians moving our pieces into positions on the board."

"So tell me about the party and about Toussant. How did they fit into your plans?"

Tiberius looked confused for a moment as if he had no idea what I was talking about. His bewildered expression was so complete that, for a moment, I started to wonder if there was yet another force at play here. The other Inquisitor at the head of the table leaned over and whispered something into his ear. "Oh," Tiberius nodded and looked down at one of the pieces of paper in front of him. "I'm sorry, we conduct a large number of operations globally, and it is difficult to remember individual events. Let me see..."

He started reading through the sheets of paper. It was odd that the most life-changing moment of my brief time on Earth, the thing that had completely redirected the path I had been on, was of such little importance to someone else that they had to remind themselves of it right in front of me.

"Oh yes, the expedition run by Reinard Montreaux." Tiberius looked back up at me. "He was one of our Prefects, an exceptional member of our Order. Do I take it that you were the one who killed him? The man who spared his guards to deliver your message?"

"He attacked me first." It was my turn to hold the elder man's eyes.

Tiberius frowned and looked back down at the paper. "He was there to capture or kill Uri at the behest of Marco. What do you mean he attacked you first?"

"He attacked a peaceful gathering of Evos," I answered flatly. "He and the men helping him were indiscriminate in their violence. They killed more than forty of the people you say you want to be brought back into the fold. If the attempt was designed to target Uri, it was very poorly planned out."

Tiberius nodded. "You lost friends."

I hesitated for a moment but then just nodded.

"I am sorry for your loss, Pete. Collateral damage and unintentional losses are an unfortunate reality of war. Prefect Montreaux was a bit more... vigorous than most in his pursuit of his mission. His father, the former King Montreaux, is one of our Senators. He was not happy to hear of his son's death, but losses are expected on both sides."

"And Toussant?" I continued, swallowing hard on the anger that was stalking back and forth behind its walls. "He captured innocent humans and used them to draw me out."

Tiberius smiled and nodded... he actually fucking smiled. "Jean Pierre happens to be a friend of mine. His methods are unorthodox, but they are effective. I'm sure you will be working closely with him upon his return."

You have no idea.

"But," Tiberius continued, "if I know him well enough, I would say that he found your pressure points, as he would call them, and used them to draw you out. If they were killed in the process, well, they are only humans. It is a remarkable testament to your power that you were able to defeat his ambush and escape in one piece. I would be interested to know how you managed that."