‘The Poet’

Daniel Acevedo is a Mexican artist who uses photography as a means of self-expression, creating images that communicate authentically and intentionally. Their work focuses on portraying people, blending meaningful conversations with subjects and translating their stories into visual narratives.

The Poet

Death infused the air, a foul whiff of decomposing weeds swathed in mystic sulfur.

Beside Angelo, millions of colors danced on the surface of a stream. As clear as quartz, a streamlet branched out and away from the light chatter and plunged into a muddy puddle no larger than two feet. In the little pool, a handful of rhubarb leaves fermented slowly, soaked like leftovers of overcooked spinach. Angelo knelt, and his mended blue jeans stretched when he rolled up his yellowed sleeves aged like parchments.

“Our path goes no further, Poet,” Orwinn said from his side of the stream. His voice cut through the bubbly chatter as he leaned his boot against a boulder, and his iron-hazel gaze locked on Angelo. For a second, a carnivorous smile gleamed into the aged pupils. And Angelo shivered. 

There wasn't much Orwinn needed to say anyway. Both knew what trailed behind them:  twenty-one years of stalemate.

Angelo cupped the cold water, splashed his sunburnt face and sweaty blond hair, then glanced at the doomed rhubarb. A tall pebble stood planted beside it. Without much of a second thought, he signed the grey stone and gazed down at the vast no-man's land covering the Yosemite Valley. A wild canopy of dark and brownish greens spotted with maroons and burgundy spread on all sides and beyond the horizon. After years of the grey concrete walls of Orwinn's mansion, looking at all this green had lifted the weight over Angelo's lungs.

As Angelo reached the other side of the stream, Orwinn turned and forged ahead on a trail going down hill and toward their base camp. Angelo pulled down the sides of his dark-brown, worn-out vest and followed through the dense ferns, sycamores, and pines. 

Despite being five-foot-three, and dressed in neat denim shirt and khaki slacks, Orwinn kept a steady pace at the rhythm of his boots crushing brown needles as if the snaps and cracks could spark life in the controller. No educated eye would have guessed under the trilby hat and the tanned drooping cheeks laid the most powerful man of all GOM. A power acquired with the swiftness of a shark and the cunning of a crow thirty years ago. A time when the old ways of living burned in the smoke of the little towns, the cozy villages, the hidden tribes and the scattered cabins. Though none of it in an obvious way came from Orwinn, his image too clean as his luxurious clothes to be tainted by any soot. To the eyes of the world, Orwinn was a builder, a helper, even a savior for some. But for those with feline sight, they looked through the twilight and watched, incredulous, his armies in disguise roaming streets and avenues for the sake of destruction and looting. His open palm served in the morning with bird seed to buy back the crumbled shops and invaded homes. The oldest con in town to push the scared into brand new gulags. 

Back then, Angelo had written a column on the dome cities for his high school journal. His first poems on the gigantic slabs of concrete poured over verdant valleys, then cut with the giant, grid-like, cheese slicer of an insane god. No grace in lines or curves, beauty annihilated in a gasping fright while bridges meshed each level and insured those above would not look at the bottom slums and prevent the Great Omega Management's goal: the ascension of the superhuman.

A tweet from a branch drew Angelo's attention to the forest pressed around him like a warm presence. Its life boasted in buzzes and little chirps, exuded from the ferns and the bushes, soared out from cracks between the yellowed, heated rocks, and descended from the rustling canopy of pines and sycamores. A gust nudged into Angelo's back as he ran downhill, the wind pushing him forward, always forward. But to what end?

Ahead, Orwinn stopped, his hand frozen on the bark of a pine tree. He stretched his neck outside the shade. Life around them stilled.

Up hill, two dozen slithering shadows swarmed down the patches of grass separating them from Angelo and Orwinn. 

“Come, come, dour rhubarb,” Angelo whispered. “Let me taste your sourness before all ends.” 

Hordes of boots trampled twigs and pine needles while sepulchral steel slashed through wild bushes and branches. And the pristine life of the forest scurried away in squeaks and shrills at the arrival of GOM's special police encircling Orwinn and Angelo.

Orwinn raised his chin high and scoffed at the barrels of the short riffles nudged in his sides. “Who dared drag this sloth of skunks on my land?” 

Angelo hid a smile at Orwinn's try of alliteration. A poetic trick the power hungry had marveled to control with Angelo's help.

Wrapped in nothing more than opaque plastic layers sewed together in a childish imitation of a trench-coat descending to the knees, the head of the CZ-phons swaggered through his men and stopped at arm's length as if to make sure his black military cap would stand above Orwinn's trilby hat. “I am CZ-phon 2031,” he said with a nasal voice. “Controller Orwinn 6, your transcendent level 7 has degraded. GOM grieves the loss of your transcendence. It is a shame a great human like you did not preserve his mind and debased himself to level 2. Therefore, by order of CTcom, all of your prerogatives have been revoked. You no longer manage this land… or anything.” He rubbed his gloved hands. 

Whoever had sent him had to fear Orwinn's power and had prepared a jugular death-lock. Sharks and wolves had no friends, and Angelo wondered if Orwinn's enemy cared for poetry. It would be his doom if it was so.

Hands over his hips, Orwinn let out the cavernous, bone-wrenching laugh that had made Angelo fear for his life over the years. 

A bang reverberated across the forest. Branches shook and a flock of yellow warblers and purple finches fleeted away in the blue sky. Orwinn's rabbit hat toppled over and flopped down amidst the dry needles and dead leaves. And a hundred and fifty pounds of grievous greed smashed down the browns, the greens, and the rabbit hat.

Angelo stared at the short man, master of GOM in the Americas, now sprawled like a fallen sycamore with a slug in the hollow of his trunk.

CZ-phon 2031 leaned over Orwinn's back. “All level 2 are prohibited from expressing sound in any form unless requested.” Satisfied, he turned a browless, icy glare onto Angelo. 

Bolt handles skidded along grim barrels and clanged into position, and Angelo braced for the fiery bayonets to pelt his flesh with a thousand bullets.

But the leader of the CZ-phons slipped his colt back inside his holster. He lifted his military cap with the white trident incrusted over the black shield of GOM, wiped the sweat from his bold, shiny scalp and screwed his cap back in place. Then his lips, of an exsanguinated purple, curved in a thin crooked line. “Well, well, well.” He clapped his hands as if warming up the black gloves to muffle the mouth of his future victim. “Controller Orwinn 6 had the insipid taste of breeding a level 0 in the Eight Castle. No surprise he dehumanized and lost his transcendence. He should have known parasites suck pure blood like his.”

“My name—”

CZ-phon 2031 raised his palm. “Names are for humans, not insignificant things like you.”

Angelo gathered his breath and boosted his hoarse voice. “So it assuages your guilt to know not who I am before you kill me. Though I will tell you nonetheless. I am, Angelo.” 

“Oh.” CZ-phon 2031 shivered, and his blank face animated with an insane pleasure flaring up to his ears. “Even your name is in total prohibition of GOM's regulation 207.” He signed his men. They grabbed Orwinn's body under the armpits and dragged him up the hill before they all disappeared. 

How fair the harvester of children and breeder of CZ-phons would be gunned down by one of his chipped hands. Angelo took a good look at the grim plastic stretched around the CZ-phon leader and shaping a tube-like being. All his features had been shaved and polished, then his skin plastered with whitish cream so that not one color could identify him. 

Alone among the red, tall pines, the flaky aspens and the ferns, CZ-phon 2031 sauntered and gazed as if he had developed a sudden interest for the aspen's trunks gathered at the bottom granite wall of El Capitan. Then his back to Angelo, CZ-Phon 2031 plucked at the grizzly peels shed by the trunks.

Minutes passed with no glance from the CZ-phon. Angelo's back stiffened as CZ-Phon 2031's black boots crushed leaves and dug in dirt. Angelo's sight roamed beyond the forest and over the rim of tooth-like mounds and peaks. From a quick look at the trail behind him, he knew the slope too steep for his weakened legs and the path too open to hide. A crowd of red pines flanked his left and a thick mesh of aspen fenced his right. Trapped. 

So alike Orwinn's games. Angelo's calves hardened at the memory of the agonizing pain that had wrenched his legs twenty years ago while Orwinn's sugar voice echoed back in his mind, “ah my poet, my heart swells with joy my rescuers found you alive. You should have known life outside the Eight Castle is quite unhealthy for a sensitive soul like you.”

Strapped on a table, Angelo had shivered in his jacket, wet with his blood and lacerated by the Doberman's jaws. He could not move and only felt the pricks of IVs in his arms and legs.

“Anything you need, just ask,” Orwinn said as he patted Angelo's crimson shoulder. “And don't worry, you'll be fine from now on. My doctors will make sure your naive runs cannot hurt you again.” 

And they had. Angelo's legs had never run after his second escape. Never.

Though Orwinn was dead, Angelo still felt a net of iron woven around his heart. He glared at the only way open to him. Forward, and through the CZ-phon and his men surely hidden behind the hill with their rifles ready for a little exercise. Angelo eyed the raven coat. Another snare but Angelo was no rabbit, and he'd rather die on his feet, smiling at the sun than facing dirt, a bullet in his back. 

“I will not run,” Angelo said, and the sound of his firm voice tranquilized the light tremors of his arms. 

CZ-phon 2031 turned a glassy look as though it was the tip of a sharp blade and he aimed it right under Angelo's chin. 

Relief washed over Angelo as he realized the CZ-phon did not plan on taking him alive. Angelo had feared another two decades of torturous verbiage to safeguard his limbs and throat while his restless soul would witness the fall of reason.

“Can't expect much thinking from a pet,” CZ-phon 2031 said. “At least the last one had the instinct to run.” He smiled. “Like a mouse, he scurried and squeaked for his life, his face soaked by the disgusting water that poured out of his orbits, pathetic.” His hand nestled over the butt of his colt.

“It doesn't mean I'm willing to die.”

CZ-phon 2031 scoffed. “Lower than an animal, you are to be extinct. Our sages knew your death was guaranteed at birth.”

“It is for all of us.”

The waxy mold covering CZ-phon 2031’s forehead cracked in thin, horizontal lines. “Not for a transcendent like me.” He slid his thumb along his transparent belt.

“Transcendent, the new Heaven sold to the young. An unattainable goal with GOM's score cards loaded with parasitic crutches sucking on your soul to hinder your real legs. Even Orwinn had realized it to be an illusion.” 

CZ-phon 2031 slapped the air with the back of his hand as if Angelo's words were dust to be scattered. “What was Controller Orwinn 6 doing this far from the Eight Castle and for over two weeks?”

“Your edgy fingers should have asked him. Now none of us will know. And if you hope I—” Angelo's eyes widened. “Torturing me for words is useless.”

“Low life like you have never held much time in my hands.”

“I am one with the word, why would I refrain it to leave my lips?”

CZ-phon 2031 grimaced. A frequent contortion Angelo had seen on the young generation thrust back into their entrenched beliefs while confronted with contrasting ideas. And Angelo wondered how long this one could listen before his words became actions and he'd taste the steel of his gun. 

“Then talk little thing who believes to be alive. Let's hear the guttural insanity coming out of that wheezing pipe.”

Light wind lifted Angelo's ragged shirt. He shuddered as he massaged the granular scar descending his throat. A souvenir of Orwinn's competition who had silenced three dozen bodyguards, Orwinn's second wife and son, and left Angelo with a muffled, scratchy voice. 

“I cannot tell you of Orwinn's intentions, for I know none of them.” Angelo looked at the range of lofty peaks and their soft icing melting like vanilla scoops. Beyond the fence of white aspens, the rocky shoulder of El Capitan looked over Angelo. 

Angelo missed the old world with its caramelized waffles at breakfast, the laughter of friends clinking their glasses of Chardonnay and downing roasted sausages at the foot of Jamie’s apple tree, and he missed even more the strolls along the Shenandoah River in feminine company, their golden hair floating in lavender whiffs. Angelo breathed in the smoky breeze of the red pines as if to find strength in the silent presence. “It is said, wherever we stand, benevolent eyes are always upon us.” 

From the crown of a sycamore, a squirrel burst out and jumped into the aspens below. The squeaking russet fur landed fast, swinging with the soft cracks of the aspen. Then, its bushy tail waved at Angelo, and before CZ-phon 2031 noticed anything, the squirrel had bounced from branch to branch and dived into a curtain of leaves. Angelo nodded in a silent thank you to the forest. “This immense valley used to be called Yosemite. A wilderness belonging to all and not one man.”

“Your words have no meaning.” CZ-phon 2031 paced across the rocks and leaves. “I have not found the controller's armored cars. Nor his secured mobile home. Where are his bodyguards? His snipers? And his long swords?” 

“We hiked alone. Took our own bedrolls and made a campfire, which I assumed you found days ago.” Near the fire Orwinn's eyes had changed into something Angelo had never thought possible: a kind of weariness blended with resignation. Had Orwinn expected all this?

“We found bones in the ashes. Why?”

“We cooked.” Angelo smiled at CZ-phon 2031's shocked expression. “Orwinn caught a pair of brush rabbits along the trail. We roasted them.” Angelo's first authentic meal in twenty-one years of captivity.

“You ate… of an animal?” CZ-phon 2031's eyes goggled out. “It's your fault! You perverted Controller Orwinn 6. You infected him, and led him to scavenge and downgrade himself.”

“Before the protein black goo cut in jellied strips you call food, we, humans, used to eat some animals… and herbs, and fruits, and greens too.”

“Barbaric! You are distracting me with words as you did with the controller, but I know he hid here to prepare his coup against the other level 7s.”

“Doesn't an old wolf recognize when its young pack is ready to put him to death? No room for lambs at the top. It is the kingdom of canines. Is it not why you came here, sent by ferocious fangs?”

“I tracked him on my own. His lavish behavior unveiled my suspicions. But why bring his pet with him?”

Angelo tightened his fists. “Orwinn was a predator for only goal; to control us all. Poetry intrigued him as he could not master it through sheer will nor shackle its ankles to obey him. You see, poetry flows from the heart, it jumps over the windowsill, runs through sunny meadows and vast fields of goldenrods and buttercups, and when its gaze falls, it's to caress the chrome yellow of a soft petal, in awe of its mesmerizing glow.” 

The wind whistled through a cracked trunk, and CZ-phon 2031 looked over his shoulder, the wilderness unfriendly for a citizen raised in a cluttered city capped by an opaque dome.

“As Orwinn could not control the word, he captured its voice. So he did with me as those who pretend to be friends with their parrot kept in a golden cage. An advantage, he must have thought: words.” Angelo set his hands on his hips to relieve the growing strain over the muscles of his back. “Orwinn enjoyed creating invisible dungeons around people. GOM's idea grew out of him. A self-imposed caste system glorifying a new kind of kings with the delusion that all can ascend to their own throne while each step binds subtle rings around their wrists.”

“So you confess your crimes: harming the controller's mind with words. Writing is worthy of instantaneous death.” CZ-phon 2031 drew his colt. “Criminals like you escape our dome cities, prey on our high minds and manipulate them into their disgrace with what you call art.” 

“I thought you wanted to hear what happened.” 

CZ-phon 2031 pursed his lips and signed Angelo to continue. 

“Orwinn had his evilness of course, but he developed a taste for poetry and this is the taste of a soul, not of a programmed mind. It did not make him a good man, yet it was enough to melt a bit of the ice trapping his heart.” 

Four feet from him, Angelo noticed a flat and grey boulder forming the neck, shoulders and back of a man extracting himself from the ground. Angelo's knees popped as he crouched and brushed away a couple of dry leaves from the sun-baked granite. Long leafy blades of grass had taken roots near the neck. He caressed them and glanced at CZ-phon 2031. “A poem at every campfire. That's what Orwinn wanted. Every morning he'd toss me a topic: the howling of crowds, radicalism growing against GOM's policies, the songs rising from the slums, or the glory of a revelation, all these and more. It surprised me at first he wanted to hear all this.” Angelo sighed and set his arm atop of his thigh. Angelo had perfused each poem with his soul in a secret wish to mellow the terrible man and set this world in a new direction. Childish hopes picked up from the twinkling lights of Orwinn's eyes. Angelo looked straight at CZ-phon 2031. Another one with an atrophied heart, starved of real food and with a cold soul. What words would kindle him to change? He looked twenty years younger than Orwinn when his men had captured Angelo in his cabin in West Clear Creek, south of Sedona.

CZ-phon 2031 pointed his gun at Angelo's nose, and the wind brought the smell of grease and heated hematite. 

Why were those things that ended life always black? As if to advertise the color of the end. But Angelo knew the end had all the colors and even more, the secret invisible ones the eye could not see awake, the colors of ecstasy and joy that knock you from within and fill you up like a swig of Lagavulin on your tongue, leaving you warm and cozy.

“Your meaningless work will cease today,” CZ-phon 2031 said. 

“Often, what we perceive as the end is only the beginning.” Angelo stood up, and CZ-phon 2031's Colt followed him. “Narrow minds see these trees planted like stiff poles. I see sycamores enamored of the earth, wild pines twirling up and tuning to the blue sky, and white aspens lifting the wind's burden with their silky mesh. And as I watch, I hear the piano allegro of the waterfall, its baritones gushing out of granite cracks while its muse fleets down through mossy lumps and its toes stretch out in the valley of life. And as I hear, I feel the quivering pulse of the world as if it were mine, and when it trembles, I rage at the stifled cries of its people, stocked in buried shacks. All of this CZ-phon 2031 is all but the end, and I know it with a certainty that warms my soul just as I know your disembodied heart.”

“You know nothing, level 0.”

“To the contrary, I was there thirty years ago when the world collapsed in a deluge of nonsense and caged every mind and heart. I heard the justifications to confine us in cities to save the wilderness. I watched the debates of those so-called experts who sold us the protein goo for good health, and how they convince everyone a child would be better raised by the state. And I have seen and cried the day they shaved your black and blond heads, scrapped all of your brows and made you all the same in this insane competition for your very life in a rush to win an illusion.” Angelo looked at CZ-phon 2031. His pale face had lost its complexion. “Tell me CZ-phon 2031, in the pitch black hole they had you buried in with your playmate, you had but one way to survive. How then did your friend call you when your cold blade bit into his throat?”

CZ-phon 2031 squinted in horror, and his arm fell by his side.

“Like all of you made CZ-phon, you stayed two days breathing and choking on dirt with your dead friend limp by your side. The tomb of two eight year olds digging with their nails for their liberation.”

“I was freed… reborn.”

“No. You died with your friend.”

CZ-phon 2031 scoffed. “Your words will not turn me. I am more than human. I am a transcendent level 5 if your debilitated mind can fathom its meaning. I am beyond human and need no past to become. And from the realm I have ascended to, toad things like you are clearly identified.”

Angelo's gaze roamed over the ferns and bushes nestled around the pines. Granite rocks laid scattered all around and atop the burned layer of needles like ossified remains of crusty cakes. “Pastel,” Angelo said, surprising himself at this confession, “pastel has always been my style.”

“Past—”

 The warmth of a smile rose to Angelo's cheeks. “Pastel, the colors of angels when they scoop you out of your misery with might and gentleness. Did you know?”

“Barbaric beliefs retrograding to homo-sapiens transcendent beings like me. This is why your species should never be born, eradicated by our doctors.”

“Or maybe it is especially for that reason.”

“Reason died with Nietzsche and I stomped on it.” 

A flow of words rushed to Angelo's lips despite himself. “We all have a purpose. I have not learned mine yet… I had hoped—”

“You have no purpose.” CZ-phon 2031 pushed his Colt into Angelo's sternum, and his egg-like face cracked into a sneer. The glee of power shone in the black eyes. He could end Angelo's life right here and no one would care to remember him. But instead CZ-phon 2031 looked behind his shoulder, then headed back under the shade of pines where Orwinn had died minutes ago. His index ran through the groove of a red bark, then stopped. “Ah, this hole should be my slug nestled in its cradle.” He crouched, picked up Orwinn's trilby hat and tossed it to Angelo. 

The blood-stained hat slapped against Angelo's ribs as he caught it. 

“Put it on, pet. And come close, so I won't lose my slug in a worthy life.” He flashed an insane grin and waved his gun as if he was calling a child. “Come close, little thing. Let me help bring that dead air out of your lungs and bring your life to its real purpose.”

“I'd rather die under this marine blue sky than in the shadow for the illusion of a few more seconds.”

“Ah, the cackling song of a parasite's last words. Dying is the only good you can bring to this planet.” His glassy eyes scanned Angelo from the top of his ruffled blond hair to his raddled boots. “Ragged and shabby, your species breathes out poison and sucks in precious oxygen that could serve our trees.”

“Trees use carbon dioxide, only mammals and flowers—”

“Heresy. So why I will not take your worthless body to our cities to hang it like Controller Orwinn 6. He, is worthy of exposition to our incubator's stares so they can learn the risk of degrading their minds. Though they've never seen a level 0, and it could make their education…” his voice lowered, and his sight fell on Angelo’s bony forearms, “I worry your beaten body would split apart at the first hit of their sticks.” 

“Inc—children you mean.”

“Your way of naming all things is the mark of your shallow mind.”

“Names give meaning to life. Though imperfect it may be, it expounds on the essence of what we observe.” Angelo locked eyes with CZ-phon 2031. “What was the name of your essence made-up-soldier? The roots they took from you?”

CZ-phon 2031 shrugged. “So you name things and then what? You do not improve nor could ascend to transcendence. You're worthless.”

“Transcendence used to mean something high and beautiful, close to ecstasy. An ability. A quality to go beyond one's possibility. Today it's wrapped in rubber and trash like all things made in GOM. You cannot develop by… by… upgrading through credits acquired in society. Development comes from within. It is a fine tuning provided in invisible ways for which rewards are felt through the entirety of who you are. Not because you—”

“Enough!” CZ-phon 2031 strode to Angelo, snatched his collar and aimed his Colt at Angelo's chin.

But Angelo's shirt yielded in a long tear, surprising CZ-phon 2031 and freeing Angelo, who, in a swift move, shoved the colt down and followed with a punch on the killer's right cheek.

“Or what?” Angelo glared at CZ-Phon 2031 wiping the blood from his broken lip. Twenty-one years he had waited for this, withholding his punches at the sick taunts of Orwinn's guards, but today was his last. “You cannot kill the word in me. It is as precious as life and the lost path to home.”

Like a bolting cat, CZ-phon 2031 landed back on his boots and whacked the barrel of his colt into Angelo's temple. “Parasite!”

The blow thrust Angelo down to the shaded ground while cold metal dug into his ear and pinned his cheek into a nest of dried needles. It was over.

But frantic gasps erupted above Angelo, and CZ-phon 2031 took into a wild dance like a madman, beating his Colt against his knee and screaming. “Work, idiot thing!”

It took a minute for Angelo to understand why he was still alive. “You killed Orwinn. You must have activated a safeguard in your implant.” Orwinn's insurance to control his legion's hands, but why had it not worked to save Orwinn's life?

“What?”

 Angelo wiped the needles off his jeans and got up. “You think CTcom will allow you to progress now that you killed its creator? They'll kill you or shove you out of the way. There's no place for a drunk dog among the warring wolves.”

“If the right can't shoot, the left will.” CZ-phon 2031 seized the grip of his gun with both hands and pointed the barrel between Angelo's eyes.

The fore sight of the gun dug into Angelo's forehead. He inhaled the forest undergrowth and waited for the loaded chambers to rotate.

Beeps echoed from the CZ-phon's wrist watch. “CZ-phon 2031,” a woman said, “you have been reassigned. You are expected at CTcom as soon as you rejoin Dome 21. Please stand by for further instructions.” 

CZ-phon 2031 paled and his jawbone protruded from his vitreous skin. “Reassigned? What—how? No, I'm a transcendent.” He glared at the little screen and pressed the side of his colt against his forehead. “To CTcom Subliminal Learning Center. It can't—I'm a level 5. I can't be typing on a keyboard, in a cubicle, like a dumb level 3?”

A rushed reassignment even for the networked cities. The Subliminal Learning Center embedded GOM's propaganda through invisible cues in posters on buildings and bridges, but also inside lyrics, musics, and videos, then broadcast them all over the world to tranquilize and subdue the mind of their citizens. 

“CZ-phon 2031, take position to receive improvements,” the woman said.

CZ-phon 2031 dropped to his knees and stared at the watch as if sedated by her tone. 

The watch would feed the CZ-phon's malleable mind, but with what? Angelo glanced behind him. If he could go up the slope in a short sprint, then take a left, swerve to the grove and across the waterfall, Angelo would erase his tracks in the clear stream. With the CZ-phon in a trance-like state, Angelo had a chance. A thin chance of a couple of minutes to disappear and be free. His heart bounced in his chest at the perspective of recovering freedom after all these years. Angelo turned to the rocky trail, and the earth groaned under his boots.

“Standby for omega upgrade,” the woman said.

Angelo froze. 

Omega upgrade. It sounded like a crisis code right out of Orwinn's mouth. Was he behind this? A sneaky revenge out of his tomb? If so, then Orwinn must have thought his enemies had infiltrated CTcom to use a killer this way. Though easy to program, CZ-phons knew only one master: death. But if the old wolf thought his kingdom infiltrated and wanted to strike back, or… Angelo's lips tightened as a chill made its way up to his neck, and rule 109 resounded in his mind, “Level 2 shall not talk without express permission. No matter the urgency. Any infringement will equal to immediate retrogression to level 0.” And death. Orwinn could not have forgotten his own rule. 

Cold wind seeped through Angelo's torn shirt, and the hair on his arms rose like a thin aura. Angelo brought the trilby hat to his nose and smelled the rabbit hair. No iron smell aside from the sting of tin above the musk and a light touch of eucalyptus oil—Orwinn's expensive aftershave. Yet, among the blend laid the distinct scent of the burned sweetness of canned tomatoes. Angelo looked at the parallel lines carved in the pine needles. The planner, the organizer had said it, the end of their common path. Angelo shivered at the horrific realization of his role in the evil scheme. Upgrade of commands… word commands. Poetry had a way to roll unhindered in the mind and settle quietly to blossom later. But what if it was cast to enchant crowds, to possess minds, or even to subvert the other level 7s? A future butchery of innocents used as drones in Orwinn's war. And Angelo had thought the man had changed. He had used him. He quenched the nausea rising to his lips. Orwinn must have realized Angelo had never exposed the full might of his poetry, and after two decades Orwinn had tricked the voice and harvested its words to build his abhorrent, penultimate world. After so many years of the bleak and barren walls of the Eight Castle, the dense brown forest and its sense of peace had lulled Angelo into giving too much power to his verses, and he recalled now the glow of Orwinn's watch beside the campfire, recording his every word.

Angelo looked at CZ-phon 2031 on his knees, standing by to gobble Orwinn's orders and vomit them back at the Subliminal Learning Center. A bewitching blue dabbed CZ-phon 2031's face, preparing his mind to soak in any word heard or read. Angelo had to break the spell, find a way to stop it all. And if Orwinn wanted the word embedded in minds, Angelo had no lack of it, and would give it freely to the world.

Angelo knelt beside CZ-phon 2031, squeezed the plasticized shoulder and spoke to the deformed ear, “CTcom betrayed you. Retrograded you. You're like a goat tied to a pole waiting to eat at the hands of your master. A simple level 0.”

A wispy blue coated CZ-phon 2031's wide eyes. 

“Upgrade started,” the woman said.

Angelo snatched the black cap and thrust it into a shrub, exposing the ashen naked skull to the sun. “Orwinn is a monster, and he's using you. His armies kidnapped children and left a torrent of tears behind their heels. You—you were one of them. They seized you from your parent's arms, kicking and screaming, then buried you and killed your heart!” 

CZ-phon 2031 blinked, and his dilated pupils morphed into a silent black. He pulled himself up, his right arm with his colt hung limp by his thigh as he stumbled toward Angelo. “You… perverted the controller… distracted me. By rule 703, levels 0 are not allowed to act, talk, or breathe.” His left hand grasped the right, and he raised his colt to Angelo's forehead. 

But CZ-phon 2031's fingers resisted on the trigger as Angelo had predicted. Orwinn needed Angelo's body with his head intact as a testimony of Orwinn's death. Meanwhile, hidden in his lair, the evil brain would launch his sneaky attacks of the three levels 7 with his infiltrated commands, and armies of citizens would rise and subvert the other kingdoms in Orwinn's name.

“Upgrade in progress,” the woman's voice said from the black watch.

Angelo walked back toward the sunlit layer of brown needles and he prayed for his words to keep the CZ-Phon's gaze away from the watch and the loaded colt only on Angelo's head. “You had a name before they stole everything from you. A human name, given by your father and mother. What was it?”

The colt trembled. 

“They have programmed you. Hypnotized you to believe in a fantasy, and now GOM will forget all about you. Bury you again, but this time no one will come to dig you out.”

“Shut up! Your words are poison!”

The barrel pushed deep through Angelo's left cheek. “Tell me CZ-phon, your friend was another boy. He looked very much like you. In fact, they paired you as twins.” Angelo paused and watched the effect of his words deforming the mask of wax. “Live human, for as long as your heart beats there is no defeat.” 

CZ-phon 2031 pressed his hands over his ears. Sweat poured out, and a web of cracks split the compact resin covering his face, then his cheeks sagged like dead lumps while dark sunken orbits emerged from underneath the paraffin. 

“Transform one and you transform all.” Angelo's voice rustled through the shivering branches of aspens as the word rolled out of his tongue, alive. “Name a man and you shall raise his soul.”

CZ-phon 2031's jaws whitened. 

“Rise, Man. Let me hear thy divine name.”

The CZ-phon's black oily eyes soared out of their sockets. His nose flared, and he clenched his teeth. “No, more, words!” He jabbed his colt under Angelo's ribs.

The shot rang like a wild scream in a mad flight through the branches, and El Capitan swung in the blue sky.  

Angelo stared down at his hands. He had lost the rabbit hat; the pelt hunkered down between the leaves. His thumb rubbed a glistening ruby between his fingers. It glittered as if filled with golden flakes, and the taste of iron shackled his mouth. 

Sharp rocks bit into Angelo's knees. Heat rushed away from his legs and chest, and sheltered into his hands. And he crawled: his fingers animated of a new life dug into dry needles, clutched at rocks and clumps of grass, and seized, trembling, the edge of the flat boulder. Angelo collapsed on top of the grey, rocky back, and a flow of words flitted from his index and onto the stone in a haze of slippery curves and lines until ruby sealed granite. 

Boots crushed fallen leaves, and a twig snapped somewhere. Angelo had the vague impression of the sounds coming from another dimension, one cold and obscure while light showered him in soft petals of yellows, greens, and blues. He forced his mouth open and swallowed rust clogging his throat. 

Still in a trance, CZ-phon 2031 appeared above Angelo, and his goggled eyes moved as if reading the stone while his lips uttered at a staccato pace:

Guard your mind

for you are

one eon

Angelo

CZ-phon 2031 blinked, and round cold steel sifted through Angelo's hair as if to find its rightful place, then it descended and stopped on Angelo's nape. 

Somehow, the metal cooled the fever inside of him. For twenty-one years Angelo had waited for Orwinn's guards to dispose of him. The wind lifted a row of leafy grass while the soft blades stroked his cheek. 

A wail infused the air, the faint whisper of a child's innocence choked with neolithic tears. “Gui,” it said.

“Gui, I forgive you.” Millions of warm colors descended upon Angelo's forehead, and as his eyes shut, a woman murmured to his ear. “Upgrade successful. Ascension completed.”

Atara Karan has settled into the cozy, evergreen mountains of France where she teaches English to local communities. When she is not preparing her fantasy book series, she dives into reading about the healing powers of plants and Earth ancient mysteries.