I sit among the Prophets. The room we placed them in has come to be called The Temple. It used to be a recreation room, the walls surrounded by monitors and VR holo projectors long gone black and now decorated with drawings based upon the holy utterances. In places quotes that have passed the Prophets’ lips are written on the walls.
This room, these three holy people, are the repository of Truth.
Their beds are laid out in a triangle, and I sit in the exact center between them.
At the top—in the position of honor—lies Irdan, once a specialist in the use and maintenance of scientific equipment like microscopes and centrifuges. He was the first who was called. As the sacred presence of the universe slowly possessed his body, took his coordination, and began giving him visions, the initial Prophecies passed his lips.
Within days, Callista, young, dark, and insecure, was the second to be called. Her specialty was medical equipment: scanners, imaging machines, and diagnostic equipment. She’d started to stumble, her hands to twitch, as the universe took possession of her.
Not another week had passed before Guan Shi, a plumber by trade, began to drop things. Started to stumble in her walk. Her speech grew slurred, her train of thought inconsistent. By then, we knew the signs of the calling.
As the years have passed, the Prophets have fallen deeper and deeper into the universe. As they have, their voices have become more profound and ever more cryptic. I suppose this makes sense. Like newborn infants, we need to learn the language. A neonate does not immediately comprehend Shakespeare, Mak Shi, or Sophocles.
What worries me as I sit here is that as the Prophets fall deeper into the universe, their health is deteriorating. They have no control over their bodies and can barely swallow when food is placed on their tongues. But even more ominous, these days I can rarely understand their Prophecy. Statements like, “Waa wass glick faa faa,” which Callista has uttered as I sit here, have no meaning to me.
It begs the question: When the universe chooses a Prophet, does it inevitably suck them down and devour them, much in the same way as we consume the impure? Is their fate the most enviable of all? Or, is it that we—myself in particular—despite being the repository of so many lives and souls, are only capable of limited understanding? Perhaps I cannot learn the language past a certain level of comprehension, similar to a learning-impaired child whose linguistic abilities are forever capped at the age of five?
In the former case, we are reassured, for we have others now—Shimal Kastakourias in particular—who have begun to show the initial signs of incipient Prophesy.
If the latter—which is the nightmare that keeps me awake in the night—then I am unmanned by the possibility that I might not be capable of performing the daunting task for which I’ve been chosen.
Irdan’s legs twitch; his sunken eyes flicker sightlessly as he says something that sounds like, “Thaaweenaah.”
In that moment, I fear I am not only unworthy, but too stupid to comprehend the remarkable Truth that Irdan has just shared.
If that is the case, I am a failure.
I hang my head and weep.