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I - Heresy
"In the Beginning," shouted the obese High Priest, "the Divine One created the Cafeteria. Then He made the Forty Rooms and called them Classrooms. Then He created, in His own image, the Exhaust Fan, His Watcher and His Messenger. From the modeling clay in the Playroom He fashioned the People, and gave unto all He had created the name School."
The Gathered took ritual Notes of the Litany, scribbling in their Holy Notebooks, their eyes glazed over in their trance-like Lecture Fervor.
"From the Cafeteria do we get the Sacred Slop without which our bodies should waste away, from the Computers in the Classrooms do we get the Divine Knowledge without which our minds should waste away. From the Exhaust Fan do we get the Blessed Exhalations of the Divine One without which we should Choke ... er, choke and die. Our people live and flourish within the Forty Rooms, Forty-Four including the Restrooms - have done so since the dawn of history, since the Great Initial Occurrence. Here are they conceived, here are they born, here do the Righteous spend their lives studying the Blessed Green Grammar Book. When, finally, their mortal sparks are extinguished, when, finally, they are freed from `this carnal prison' (The Eternal Dollops of Wisdom of the HairGod, song 25, line 1), here do the Righteous give up their eternal immaculate Souls which are transported on Ethereal Elevators up to the Exhaust Fan from whence they are drawn out into Heaven beyond, that holiest of holy places unapproachable to Mortals tainted by the Flesh."
The High Priest gazed fiercely down at the blissful faces of the Gathered. He loved the way they greedily drank in his every word. Now he would ask them to Donate, in the name of the Divine One, and in the name of the Exhaust Fan. Later he would use the money collected to buy cans of Pepsi from the Vending Machines in the Recreational Center. He smiled behind his 'Fervent Religious Leader' expression and thought how much he loved his job.
There was a movement in the back of the hall. A tall, thin, earnest-looking young man dressed in a suit of anonymous gray was making his way through the Gathered towards the exit. This was intolerable - one of the Gathered leaving without Donating!
"Halt!" roared the High Priest, red-faced at having his authority so rudely spurned, the multiple layers of fat on his body trembling at this insufferable breach of tradition. The heads of the Gathered jerked up in surprise at the unexpected bellow. The High Priest ignored them, keeping his furious glare on the offender. "Have you no reverence for the Litany? Have you no regard for the Divine Words? Have you no respect for..."
"No." the man dressed in gray said shortly.
"What?!" yelled the High Priest, his colour ripening to an apoplectic purple at this public insult. "Who are you to ... to ...." he stopped, at a loss for words.
"My name is Eryudyte Herretikke," said the well-dressed malefactor. "And you are Pompus Hippocritte, High Priest. So now that we are introduced, I shall take my leave--I have better
ways to waste my time. If you are worried about my Donation towards your Pepsi fund, here you are," he tossed a couple of coins on the floor and continued on his way through the crowd.
"Are you an Unbeliever, then?" asked the High Priest, spitting out this ultimate accusation with carnivorous pleasure.
Herretikke stopped. The High Priest smiled triumphantly.
"By your definition," said Herretikke finally, "I suppose I am. I don't believe there is anything beyond the exhaust fan except what remains of Old Earth."
An angry murmur rippled through the crowd. The High Priest's malicious grin faded slowly. He knew he now had a problem on his hands. His canny politician's mind realized with commendable perception that such a scene could seriously undermine his position and denigrate his image in the eyes of the Gathered. His only option was to act immediately and decisively. He would have to force a confrontation--challenge this incendiary, browbeat him into backing down.
"This is blasphemy, Sir!" he screamed, his face the very picture of moral outrage. The assemblage hissed its agreement. Good. He had the crowd behind him. He gestured reverently with his podgy hand at the gigantic Exhaust Fan high above. "Are you saying that you deny the divinity of the Exhaust Fan? Do you mean to tell me that you are one of those infidels who believe in "old earth" and the "Greater Universe"? Old earth is a legend, no more, do you hear? A myth much favoured by old ladies for getting difficult grandchildren to sleep. The Holocaust never happened. There is no greater universe beyond the School. How can you deny what has been written over a thousand years ago on the Computers by our forefathers? The Holy Words are available to all for a minimal charge. //HolyWords/ is the most accessed address on the Intranet. Who are you to call the Holy Words false?"
Herretikke remained silent for some time in the face of the mob's virulent antagonism. The Gathered were enjoying themselves tremendously. This was far better entertainment than they could
have hoped for. Herretikke was to be thrown to the wolves today and boy, were the wolves having fun. Life was so boring...
"You put a lot of stock in what the computers say," said the sacrificial lamb finally. "You can find all the evidence of Old Earth you want in the archives of these same computers. A lot of the files have been erased--we know that because there are references in some of the non-deletable files to addresses which are no longer in use. But even from the scraps which remain, it is evident that the Universe is larger than the school, perhaps even several times larger. You can find a lot of these so-called blasphemous files through the keywords 'history' and 'geography'. For no charge. Their authenticity is beyond question. These files were put there by the people who built the computers over two thousand years ago."
"Sacrilegious rubbish," the High Priest dismissed this with a contemptuous wave of his pudgy hand. "The Divine One made the Computers, not any normal people. People making Computers! The very idea! One might as well say lions and tigers and other such fantastic creatures actually existed. Outside the fevered mind of our infidel friend over here, that is." The crowd snickered appreciatively. The troublemaker stood silent, unmoving, a vulnerable object of derision.
By now the corpulent High Priest was feeling quite confident. A little malevolent ridicule had proved Herretikke to be a weak-willed loser with rubber vertebrae. A direct, public challenge now would completely break the man. In a way this incident was a good thing--Hippocritte's victory would earn him a large Donation and Herretikke's humiliation would prove a deterrent to any future anarchists.
"You believe in old earth, do you?" said the High Priest sneeringly, deciding to throw down the glove and destroy Herretikke. "Well, how would you like to prove its existence to me? How would you like to show to us FANatics what fools we have been, how wrong we were to believe there to be no 'greater universe' beyond the blades of the Exhaust Fan, only an eternally blissful Heaven created by a mythical Divine One?"
Herretikke looked at him thoughtfully while the Gathered booed and jeered. "Do you know, I think that is a good idea. I think I will do just that. You believe that anyone violating the hallowed grounds of 'Heaven' will be struck down by a gigantic spear of static electricity or something? We'll see."
The huge blades of the Exhaust Fan swung ominously above them all.
II - REWIND
The day the Holocaust finally happened, almost two thousand years ago, the school was ready for it.
The school, in accordance with government directives issued as Cold War II became progressively warmer, had been constructed deep underground using an enormous amount of plastoconcrete and, if ever push came to shove, was capable of becoming completely self-sufficient.
Push came to shove.
Safety devices in the school sealed it off from the outside world. Radiation shields went up all around the surface section of the school, tiny though it was. The incredibly bountiful miniature IR "farm" began to produce huge quantities of growth-accelerated cereals and vegetables. The meat vats began to spawn soft-tissue cultures--psuedo-lamb, syntho-beef, ersatz-pork, phony-phish, and notreally-chicken. With AI sadism, the automated cafeteria continued to ruthlessly inflict breakfast, lunch, and dinner on the isolated students and staff. The enormous and now entirely decorative exhaust fan, equipped with its own radiation shield, never paused in the execution of its assigned task. Classes continued with a fair degree of normalcy. Life went on.
The intermittent garbled reports that filtered through the earth and the plastoconcrete told of rapidly deteriorating situations topside. The broadcasters attempted to inject a positive tone into their reports and their listeners grabbed at this optimism. When the transmissions finally stopped they left behind only this false hopefulness.
Their forced isolation being a temporary (and obviously necessary) arrangement, the students and staff in the school accepted it stoically if not ecstatically... Until something went wrong. A zero in the computer responsible for opening up the school again changed to a one. The doors refused to open. Consternation in the school at this indefinitely extended isolation rapidly bloomed into full-blown panic which ultimately smoldered down to resignation. All things required for a passably decent life were available inside the school, after all. When things improved topside, people would remember the school and release those trapped inside it.
Surely, they would, wouldn't they?
Topside, the residual radiation from the multiple nuclear strikes took more lives everyday. The city on whose outskirts the school had been built had been pulverized by the repeated explosions. The few living survivors had abandoned the city for the comparative safety of the marshes and the woods. These last remnants of civilization on the continent reverted to a miserable hunter-gatherer lifestyle. The existence of a few hundred perfectly healthy survivors trapped in bunkers under the rubble went completely unnoticed.
Centuries passed. The automated school took good care of its schoolpeople, becoming a microcosmic world for them. Births occurred. Deaths, too. Those who remembered the world as it once used to be dwindled and died. People began to hate and fear their exotic, alluring past. World history and geography became taboo subjects, for they told of a bewitching but entirely unattainable world. Historical information corrupted in time to legend which passed into oblivion, existing only in the immutable memories of the computers, which continued with their jobs of teaching people. Intra-school microcivilizations rose and fell. Histories were written of the rise and fall of the empire of room F103. Amazingly detailed maps were made of the basketball courts. Scholars produced calendars based on the regularity with which the cafeteria produced its meals. A caste hierarchy took shape with the computer science classes being the ruling castes. The Twenty Five Year War was fought between the Science and the Commerce sections resulting in much bloodshed...
Finally, almost two thousand years after the Holocaust, a criminally paranoid cult of religious maniacs called the FANatics began to gain prominence. They had little difficulty in snatching power and coercing the malleable schoolpeople into converting to FANaticism. The exhaust fan became the Exhaust Fan, the cafeteria, the Cafeteria, and the computers, the Computers. They ruled by force and fear and were bothered only by a small group of academics who believed in Old Earth, the Greater Universe.
III - BEYOND
Flash forward: the year one thousand nine hundred seventy seven After the Great Initial Occurrence. A lone academic creates a furore by publicly challenging the beliefs of the FANatics. The High Priest responds by challenging him to prove his own beliefs....
Herretikke gave the rope a final tug. Hippocritte winced, not at the desecration of the Exhaust Fan but at what effect this desecration would have on the respect the Gathered had for him--he had after all authorized it, in a manner of speaking, when he challenged Herretikke to prove the existence of Old Earth.
Herretikke turned to the High Priest and said quietly, "I'm ready."
The High Priest curled a lip at him with a supercilious confidence that he did not quite feel. The Exhaust Fan loomed silently in the shadows fifteen meters above him. It had been turned off for the first time in years so that Herretikke could climb through, and this appalling violation of the Deity obviously bothered many of the Gathered.
Herretikke glanced at the congregation. Hostility and barely restrained violence glared coldly back at him. He looked away hurriedly. This overt venom unnerved him. Why did these people fall for this hocus-pocus? Why did they allow themselves to be handled like puppets on strings, manipulated like chessmen?
He began to climb the rope. The exhaust fan looked oddly enigmatic in the semi-darkness above. Cryptic. And dangerous. Silence surrounded him.
The fan didn't perform any real function in the circulation or purification of the air in the school--the CO2-O2 plant and the AC grid took care of that. Two thousand years before it had served to circulate air between the school and the surface. Even then it had been more of a decoration, a redundant piece of antique machinery to relieve the Spartan functionality of the school, an enormous gothic motif in this ultra-modern bunker put in by the builders primarily as a joke. When the nukes were dropped, the air on the surface was no longer safe. The air shaft was instantly and mechanically blocked by a radiation shield and the CO2-O2 plant took over. Two thousand years later the exhaust fan was still there, a relic of the past, of a past long forgotten.
It took Herretikke a little more than a minute to reach the fan. He slipped between the huge blades and into darkness. The blackness gave up its secrets with a grudging reluctance as
Herretikke's eyes adjusted slowly to the lack of light. The fan made weird patterns of faint light and inky shadow on the wall in front of him. Above, the air shaft seemed to stretch to
ebon infinity. He was not ready for this. He did not know what he had expected to be beyond the exhaust fan, but now that he was here, he knew that this was not it. At a loss, he began to
feel about him and to his relief found metal rungs on one of the walls. Old Earth obviously lay far above, at the end of the shaft. He began to climb, more by feel than by sight.
Twenty minutes later Herretikke was still climbing when, without any warning, a light flashed on, making him jump.
A motion sensor, he thought weakly - a motion sensor had detected his movement and turned the light on. The light wasn't really as bright as he had thought--just enough to see by, in fact. By its light he saw that he had finally reached the end of the shaft.
And by its light he saw the blank wall that faced him. He stared up at it, shocked. A blank wall. A dead end. No Old Earth. He felt a slow sinking feeling. Everything he had believed in so confidently had suddenly come crashing down around his ears. How could it be? How could it be so?
And then he saw the switch. A large switch on the left wall. The words "MANUAL OVERRIDE" printed below it. He reached forward and gripped the handle. Adrenaline surged through him and he trembled with excitement as he slowly flipped the switch.
For a moment nothing happened. And then a part of the right wall slid open. His muscles tense with excitement, he stepped out.
Light! Light blinding him just as darkness had a few minutes ago. He squeezed his eyes shut tight, then opened them a crack. His first impression was one of green below and blue above. Slowly, the green resolved itself into masses of thin curved blades carpeting the ground. Grass. The word popped into Herretikke's head. He had read about it, seen pictures on the computers, but he had never imagined it could be so intricate, so beautiful. For a long moment he saw nothing but the grass at his feet. Then his eyes wandered upwards, to the horizon.
Space! So much space. Suddenly, a nameless fear clutched at him. He was afraid of this space, this openness. Never in his life had he seen a larger room than the hall for the Gathering. Now, suddenly, this incredible amount of room. He wanted nothing more than to be enclosed again in the comfortable security of four walls and a ceiling. His head began to swim. Nausea overtook him and he retched dryly, collapsing on the ground. A low moan escaped his lips as he caught sight of the sky. A ceiling so immensely high, as though it went on forever till the very end of Time! Whimpering, he managed to push himself to his feet and stagger back towards the shaft, but in his blind panic he tripped, tumbling straight into its open mouth. He managed to grab onto one of the rungs, but his grip was weak. He hung on for a few seconds and then his grip broke and he plunged downwards. On his way down, his falling body, limp in the inexorable grip of gravity, disrupted a light-circuit, and the heavy outer door slammed shut in a muffled CLANG!, sealing off the Greater Universe overhead...
Herretikke plummeted four hundred meters down the shaft before smashing into the exhaust fan from above. The huge fan shifted slightly under his weight and his broken, lifeless body slipped between the blades to land with a sickening thud at the feet of the shocked High Priest.
The silence in the hall was deafening. The High Priest quietly thanked the Divine One, in whose existence he hadn't really believed until now, now that he had heard the mighty CLANG!ING Sound of His Rage. He turned the crumpled body onto its back with his foot. Taking a deep breath, he turned to face the Gathered.
"The Unbeliever has been struck down. The Unbeliever lies dead for daring to enter Heaven while still a mortal and a sinner. The Unbeliever blasphemed and, behold, the Divine One punished
him for his sin. Behold! Let this serve as an example to all those who sin, and those who would blaspheme! Glory to the Exhaust Fan! Glory to the CLANG! Glory to the Divine One!"
The Gathered then sang praises of the Divine One, His Watcher and Messenger the Exhaust Fan, and the Sound of His Rage, The CLANG. It was very late before they all went home, tired but serenely reassured - confident once more that their little Universe really was as they had all along believed it to be...
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