Kort Explores conundrums of the human condition

Jason wasn't surprised when the bus lurched to a sudden unexpected stop and the driver announced through the crackling distortion of the intercom, "Break down! Everybody off!" He'd already figured out from the the sounds of tortured metal radiating from the engine compartment that the bus wouldn't be going much further any time soon. He gathered up his things and joined his grandfather and the other passengers filing resignedly out onto the cracked and litter strewn sidewalk.

Everyday life seemed to have become an endless chain of such disappointments and complications. It would only have been surprising if the bus had gotten them to their destination without breaking down.

The rest of the passengers headed as one down the next side street, hoping to find a bus still running on a parallel route. As a rebellious teenager, Jason slouched reluctantly behind the rest, cultivating the illusion of independence from the mob even as reality obliged him to follow their lead.

As usual, Granddad was right in the middle of the crowd, nondescript almost to invisibility in the way he blended into the flowing mass of humanity. Even Jason had to make a conscious effort to see the old man as an individual instead of just a name-less, face-less component of the crowd.

It was typical of his whole family, thought Jason in frustration. They were all so dull, bland, almost compulsively devoid of any distinguishing characteristics. He was determined to be different, to be somebody in the world - to be somebody people would notice. He tried not to think about his own reluctance to push his teenage rebellion much beyond the superficial revolt of adopting the latest "different just to be different" teen fashions and jargon. The whole jargon thing had been a particularly disappointing form of rebellion, since the one common ground he had to admit he shared with the rest of his family was a fascination with languages - especially how they changed and adapted over time.

As Jason shuffled along, the passing street scenes confirmed yet again the all too familiar feeling that the world around him was falling apart. It seemed like every day more things broke down, and it took longer to get them working again. He often wondered where the old stuff came from, but none of the answers he was offered made much sense. According to the growing numbers of "believers", the old stuff was left from a time when technogods roamed the earth building wondrous things for their human followers. The believers held rallies in the hope that the technogods would return if they could just assemble enough followers chanting just the right prayer with just enough fervent passion. While Jason had a hard time accepting the idea of technogods, he had to admit that the rallies of the believers were drawing ever larger crowds as desperate people were drawn to any cult leader who promised them control over a world that was increasingly beyond their understanding.

Jason's well practiced show of bored indifference while his grandfather ran through his usual rant about how much better people were at doing things back in the good old days, had become a regular routine at holiday family gatherings. But much as he hated to admit to finding any value in the wisdom of his elders, it was getting increasingly difficult to avoid seeing a disturbing amount of sense in his grandfather's often repeated assessment of the world.

He'd heard the rant so many times he knew the words by heart. "Reason everything's broke down these days is 'cause most people don't know what they're doing anymore. Things don't get made right in the first place. Then people don't take care of 'em right. Then nobody knows how to fix 'em right when they break down, so it ain't long 'fore they're broke down again. Now, back in my day they made things to last! An' when ya' did take somethin' to get fixed, ya' got it back workin' better than new."

To hear Granddad tell it, back in the good old days practically every kid had his own set of wrenches - and knew how to use them. A neighborhood repair shop could keep something working for a lifetime, but people often bought new things anyway because the new ones were actually better than the old ones.

What little new stuff there was these days never seemed to work as well as old stuff it was supposed to replace. Even his little brother knew better than to trade something old that still worked for something new. No one wanted anything new if there was any possibility of fixing the old, but the guys who could keep the old stuff working were mostly old-timers, and always in short supply. His dad was always going on about how hard it was to find anybody who knew how things worked these days.

It seemed obvious to Jason that giving the job of doing something to the people who were the best at doing it, would result in better stuff getting done. But he'd learned long ago that actually voicing such observations was not a good idea. "Everyone is the same, and everyone can do what anyone else can do" was the mantra of the day. It was a serious crime to admit that, what had started out as a seemingly noble desire to create an egalitarian society, had only resulted in a sad equality of incompetence - and the progressive breakdown of the infrastructure that made civilized life possible. He could picture a day after the last old-timer was gone, when everything would break down at once, and they'd all just sit there in the dark waiting forever for someone to fix the world.

Jason trailed along as his grandfather led them on and off several more busses. When they couldn't go any further by bus, he shuffled along on foot as his grandfather led the way through blocks of crumbling buildings. He was about to protest about the exertion when his grandfather turned down the alley between the gutted shells of two burned out buildings. Only rubble and debris was visible from the street, but part way down the alley was a stairway leading down to a basement doorway. The stairway was incongruously free of litter, and the door at the bottom appeared exceptionally sturdy.

Granddad's knock was answered a few moments later when the crackly voice on the intercom along side the door demanded, "What do you want?"

"Got a boy here to take the test," replied Granddad.

Jason wasn't entirely clear on the whole concept of a test. Granddad's description of a test didn't sound like much fun, but on the positive side, at least it interrupted the deadly boredom of school. According to Granddad, kids had to take tests all the time back when he was in school. They didn't even allow the word to be used in schools these days. Hovering like a dark shadow over his thoughts was the fear that the test would expose the real Jason he kept hidden inside.

The test seemed simple enough at first - just picking the right answer out of several. But Jason quickly noticed another level in the test. He could sense a pattern in the types of questions and the way they were phrased. He began to notice that the answers offered for some questions differed only in nuance, with the right answer depending on the perspective from which the question was considered. His attention shifted from simply answering the questions to trying to figure out which answer he was expected to pick - fitting his performance to the expectations of the test. The test became a challenge to play the game just well enough, but not quite as well as most test takers would play.

One of the first lessons Jason learned in school was to hide in the crowd and avoid attracting attention. Being better than someone else, even by accident, was a form of competition. Competition was now considered a form of assault against the loser. It was an especially bad idea to compete with a teacher by pointing out the flaws in what he was teaching. Sullen reluctance and passive resistance were far more effective tactics than the lightning rod of open rebellion. Much better to just play along, taking the path of least resistance by appearing to be whoever they wanted him to be on the outside, while living his own life on the inside.

Jason also learned that there were advantages to pretending to be less capable than the rest. Those in the middle of the pack were largely ignored as long as they stayed on the approved path. The system hobbled those trying to race ahead of the pack with arbitrary obstacles and restrictions. But in order to preserve the fiction of egalitarianism, the system had to make life easy for those who would otherwise fail to keep up, smoothing out the challenges of life impeding the incompetent so that everyone else didn't get dragged down to quite as low a common denominator outcome. Perhaps the strongest attraction of intentional inferiority was that the less demanding his "outer life", the easier it was to maintain his external facade on autopilot, freeing more of his consciousness to retreat into the familiar comforts of his inner world.

It was several weeks later when Jason heard his grandfather calling the adults of the family together, to share what the nondescript stranger had whispered in his ear as they passed on the street. His first reaction to being included in the call was to wonder what he'd done wrong now.

The unusually festive demeanor of his grandfather put Jason immediately on guard. Such displays of good humor were almost always the result of the elders having figured out some new torment for their children. He tried to hover on the fringe of the assembled generations of his family, but was dragged reluctantly into the center by his grandfather. Jason considered being the focus of attention an ominous sign. Attracting attention was one thing, but actually becoming the focus of attention was another thing altogether - and rarely a good thing.

Jason's apprehension and confusion surged when the patriarch of the family announced, "It's official! Jason's one of us now!"

Before Jason could frame his reaction as either a question or protest, his grandfather continued, "I just got word that the committee accepted Jason's test scores!" Turning to Jason, he confided, "Couldn't tell ya' the family secret 'til we were sure."

The mention of a family secret piqued Jason's interest. What kind of secret could his dull boring family have? More importantly, how could they have hidden it from him all of his life? His mind became so intrigued by the possibilities that he absentmindedly allowed his facade of rebellious indifference to slip a bit. "What are you talking about? What family secret?" he questioned, a little too quickly for a sullenly disinterested teenager.

As usual, his grandfather's explanation took the long way around to the point, further aggravating the conflict between Jason's teenage obligation of hostility to any interaction with his elders, and the possibility that Granddad might eventually have something interesting to say. His attention snapped back to his grandfather's voice as he heard, "...you scored real high on the test. Test shows you got the family traits that make us good keepers of the keys."

Jason had to suddenly rethink his memory of taking the test. He'd been confident of "outfoxing" the test at the time, so it came as a shock to hear his grandfather going on as if he'd aced it.

Jason's surprised confusion must have been obvious as his father chuckled knowingly, "thought you had it figured out, didn't you! Me too back when I took it. Well, the test wasn't what was in the test - it was about how you went about taking it. It was a test to see what kind of person you really are deep inside. It was a test to see if you're the right kind of person for a very special task.

Jason's surprise shifted to alarm as he realized both his father and grandfather had involved him in a criminal activity. He could be sent to a re-education camp for trying to be different. People as actively involved as his father and grandfather just disappeared and were never heard from again. For a moment he almost considered reporting his relatives to the cynically named Diversity Enforcement Agency, as he'd been taught to do during the countless Diversity Awareness and Resistance Elimination classes in school. But the impulse passed as quickly as it occurred. Lucky for his family he'd been playing his game of concealing passive resistance behind a facade of superficial cooperation in those classes as well.

"We're caretakers of knowledge," continued his father. "During most of a civilization's lifetime, it's those who use knowledge that get all the glory. And that's a good thing. That's how civilizations get built. But in the coming times, those who use knowledge will be consumed by a darkness that seeks to destroy all knowledge. Preserving knowledge during the coming times will require a different kind of person - someone who can possess it without being driven to use it. It will take generations of people like us to be caretakers of knowledge until it can be used again.

"Mankind has never figured out how to stay civilized," expanded his father, his passionate dedication to the cause becoming increasingly obvious as he laid out the grand vision. "You'd think people would want to get it figured out once and for all, then just keep doing it that way forever. But that isn't the way it works. Even the most enlightened civilization will eventually turn away from the wisdom of its founders, and decline into decadence and corruption. The higher the civilization at its peak, the deeper and longer the dark age that follows its collapse.

"We see the same pattern happening today. The world we see collapsing around us marked the highest peak of civilization mankind has ever achieved. The coming dark age will be much longer and deeper than the last one. The survivors will need all wisdom of the ancients we can preserve for them when they're ready to start over.

"After the collapse of the last great civilization, the common people turned against the old ways they could no longer understand. They burned all of the books they could find, and killed anyone who still remembered the prohibited knowledge. Just knowing how to read, or cure a common disease, could get you burned at the stake as a witch. The remains of ancient roads were thought to be the work of gods by peasants who had forgotten how their ancestors built them.

"But the book burners couldn't destroy all memory of the old ways. Hidden away in remote places were archives of forbidden books and manuscripts. The archives were preserved and protected by generations of caretakers who often had no idea what they were protecting, knowing only that they had a higher duty to keep the treasure hidden away until the day when it would again be safe to know what it contained.

"The Keepers are a secret society that has been monitoring the decline of our civilization, and preparing for its collapse. Serving as Keepers has been a tradition in our family going back generations.

"Our society is dedicated to preserving the accumulated knowledge of mankind during the dark age we see coming. We've hidden the knowledge in safe places, but simply preserving it isn't enough. The greatest challenge for the Keepers will be keeping the knowledge accessible over centuries of uncertainty. The ancient Egyptians tried to preserve their knowledge for all time by carving it into stone. But while many of the stones survived, the knowledge they contained was lost because the ability to read the language of the carvings was lost. The Rosetta Stone finally provided the key to unlocking the ancient knowledge of the Egyptians by providing a way to translate the ancient carvings into useful information.

"Our society faces an even greater problem than the Egyptians because of the vast amount of knowledge we need to preserve, and the length of time we must preserve it. There isn't enough stone on the planet to record it all in carvings, so we've had to use even less directly accessible means of recording knowledge. We face the paradox of having to store knowledge in ways that require knowledge to access.

"The solution chosen long ago was to establish a living Rosetta Stone dedicated to preserving the keys needed to unlock the vast stores of knowledge in the hidden archives. The Keepers are that living Rosetta Stone. Our members live discreetly, scattered among the general population, exposed to the dynamics of changing languages and cultures. We dedicate ourselves to being a living bridge between waves of change, continually retranslating the keys to the knowledge across language shifts, making sure that the keys remain usable for that day when, centuries from now at the close of the coming dark age, man is once again ready to restart civilization.

"These books contain the treasured knowledge we've sworn to preserve - the knowledge of how to access even greater knowledge. We call these books manuals..."