Sibyl’s blending

I considered myself a pious man, and one whose piety was multiplied by reason. I believed that one could arrive at goodness without faith, on a path carved only by logos. Because of this, despite my deep conviction, I held myself apart from the Church, and the law.

My attraction to the Facility, then, was natural; they were the doubting Thomas of institutions, trusted but never affiliated, never compromised by oath, dedicated nonetheless to the confirmation of sanctity. I felt that I was among brothers, no longer forced to hide my reverence beneath a calculated veneer, nor to condescend to my intelligence with the pretense of blind faith. Together, we would build a virtuous science.

The Facility had established its reputation through the rigorous examination of relics, though at the time of my employment its mission had broadened to include, and in fact prioritize, the financing of myriad theological projects, whose dual basis in the material and sublime rendered them unpalatable to academia and ministry alike. During my tenure I followed countless investigations into the chemical properties of holy water, into the fibres of shrouds and saintly veils, into monastic neuroscience; frankly, after decades, these themes grew tiresome. The results were always in favor of belief; yet we remained passengers aboard a skeptic's treadmill. I found myself troubled by the mountains of sin accumulating because of our apparent need to continually re-prove God's existence. When would our authority, our libraries of evidence, quench the birthright uncertainty of every human child?

Encouraged by upper Management, my interest shifted to generative research. I observed four neural nets, each trained upon an author of the New Testament, debate scriptural inconsistencies. A large underground installation recorded the effects of prayer in different languages on neutrino detection. Topologists devised and manufactured an infinite rosary, whose strangely shaped beads slid backwards through fingers. This led to a small scandal, the near death by dehydration of a nun recruited to test the product.

Patents were occasionally advanced, and the Church continued to subsidize the study of relics. However, an expanding portion of our budget was sourced from famously wealthy patrons, whose discreet contributions occupied a liminal ontology between donation and blackmail. I know little of how these donors were courted, or coerced; in fact, I was only privy to such knowledge because my own department, that of biology, was responsible for the Facility's most ambitious project, one which the entire organization was twisted to accommodate.

From the stagnation of success Management derived conviction, and secure in their conviction, they began to philosophize. They believed in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth; they believed in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, born of the Virgin. They believed in the Holy Spirit, the Holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, and the forgiveness of sins -- but I suspect they believed in forgiveness least, and believed in sin most of all.

All of humanity exists as an extension of the Holy Families; their debts and graces are our patrimony, and all our future is cupped by their symbol. Eve cast us from the garden into the furnace; Mary bore a Son to calm the fire. From condemned to redeemed -- and yet, our doom was still to spawn and writhe in filth, abased as the default. To claw and grovel to Heaven.

Thus, Management conceived of a new holy family, one to free us from the humiliation of repentance. To make us animal again, but more than beast; to marry innocence and knowledge. To harrow the Commandments, our limitations, as Hell had been harrowed; to void the concept of sin. In the lab they set to the synthesis and the gestation of a contrived divine couple. The woman was to be Eve-Mary (EM) and the man was to be Adam-Joseph (AJ). They would live with purity and without celibacy and their son Cain-Abel-Jesus would unlock the gates of Eden, and build a city there.

I do not know the specifics of their creation or surrogacy, but the Facility certainly had the necessary resources to engineer life. Decades of extracting DNA from relics, of studying the artifacts of miracles, and of measuring the skulls of popes culminated in an act of test tube fruitfulness. The infants were well-formed; beautiful, even. As a bachelor, I was surprised to discover in myself a spark of paternal love towards these two children. I believe that many in my department quietly felt the same, though Management was of course too removed to grow attached. 

Their nursery was a garden, and they were to be raised with minimal human interference. Their wet-nurse, a disgraced Poor Clare the Facility had rescued from further dissolution, was instructed to remain masked and silent while feeding them. At first she donned a dark burlap sack, changed sometime during their second year to a stylized wolf mask, of the kind that myself and the other researchers would be expected to wear when entering their sacred space.

We did not speak to them, sing to them, or play with them, and as they grew from infants to children, they were saved from becoming feral only by each other. Stranded, the only two of their species in a capsule world; yet they seemed content, and loneliness never occurred to them. They discovered language independently, and chattered in an idiolect that many linguists were hired to study. Em was especially fluent, lively and cheerful, the complement to Aj's quieter nature. Their love and consideration for each other was obvious before they learned to walk; they were, at three years old, the most lovely people I had ever known.

As the twilight of their infancy wound close, our involvement increased, though the bulk of my duties remained observational. The children had met their developmental milestones with ease, surprising those who had expected them to lag without adult support. Explicit evaluations were now conducted, and they were rated of average intelligence, though I detected in their responses to the puzzles a joyful creativity and thoughtfulness of deeper significance than IQ. At this point, for the boy, they provided primitive carpentry tools, which were to increase in complexity as he aged. 

The nursery was large, an indoor arena, its rows of skylights giving way to a sloped roof, which met with greenhouse walls on three of four sides. The fourth wall, which abutted the laboratory complexes, was designed from the interior to resemble rough stone, complete with rivulets and ivy. The space was populated by fruit trees, ferns, and wildflowers, and the temperature was comfortable, though cooler at night. The children were unashamed of their nudity, though they would at times decorate each other in leaves and petals, tangle vines in their hair, or bury themselves in the soft clay, laughing. The plain linen sheet we granted them for sleep was otherwise unused, except as an occasional prop in their strange games. Beyond the windows, there was more forest, and somewhere out of sight an electric fence prevented trespassing. 

One morning I arrived at the surveillance station to find Em staring intensely through the glass, at a seemingly empty spot beyond the treeline. She remained there for several hours, then sought out Aj, interrupting his woodworking to bring him to where she had been watching the seemingly placid woods. They babbled a while in their private tongue, then sat unmoving together, facing outside, for the remainder of the day.

I was awakened that night by an urgent call from the Facility. The children, apparently, had begun attacking the glass, attempting to break through with their stones, tools, and fists. The structure, of course, was resilient to the aggression of seven year olds, but the attendants were concerned they would injure themselves, such was their passion. I recommended at first that we let them play, as their destructive urges would surely soon be spent; but after five or so hours of increasing violence, they were sedated. We reviewed what footage we had of the woods, but never found what had first captured Em's interest. It may have been as little as a face in the leaves, or a small darting animal; regardless, outdoor security was heightened. The escape attempts ceased after a couple of months, due I believe to resignation on the part of the children. Even so, they had proven deeply troubling to Management. Would man never be happy in his garden? It was clear they considered Em at fault for the incident, which likely colored their later treatment of her. 

For many years, though, life was blissful. Aj whittled, and his simple gifts were received by Em with reverence and delight. He carved sinuous, nonsensical shapes into the wood, and cut weird silhouettes from the planks we gave him. Em climbed the trees and hid her treasures in little holes. She propped up the silhouettes throughout the nursery, such that their long shadows fluttered in the light. They picked flowers and danced, and sung ballads in their nasally cant; and for nearly as long as I knew them, at sunset they would pause and gaze mournfully into the world beyond the glass.

The children knew no evil, no malice. While I found our lupine masks sinister, they received me as a playmate, not a predator. They knew not what it meant to be threatened; because of this, Management's plan for Em was especially cruel. I protested, of course, but I had little authority over what had been set in motion, a decades old programme whose implementation was accelerated in response to the window incident.

Every Sunday, Em was to be removed from the nursery for private therapy. This was at first a source of excitement, much like our periodic intelligence exams had been during the children's youth. She would return and murmur energetically to Aj, but her enthusiasm was soon to be tainted.

The purpose of the sessions was, in short, to inculcate in her a fear of serpents. They began innocently enough, with flashcards and limited, pre-verbal communication; as years passed, they would become inverted exposure therapy of the most violent strain. It was filmed, and I watched, as it was my duty to do so, but I do not wish to speak of it. It was revolting, and it seemed to me that the attempt to create an aversion to the totem of darkness had only introduced it. Em was remarkably resilient, but one evening I heard her wake screaming from a nightmare, and my heart sank.

In concert with this maltreatment, Em's pining for the outside became a terror of it, and she soon ceased exiting the nursery's densely treed center. Aj seemed confused; whatever wonder she had first planted in him could not be extinguished. He wanted dearly to understand, but he had not known pain or fear as she had, and in his innocence he could not conceive of them. He continued to watch the sunset, now alone. The children sorrowed, and Management was deaf, for their work proceeded apace. Em's pregnancy was greeted with elation.

The fanfare was short lived, however. A prenatal blood test confirmed that the fetus was female, and not the holy son they'd waited for. Its life was discreetly snuffed out, an act that surprised me at the time; but sin was no barrier on the path to abolishing sin. By Em's sixteenth birthday, three daughters had been aborted.

Aj hammered at the trees. If he had had a concept of enmity, he may have attacked the attendants who removed Em for her weekly torments; but he simply could not impute the intent to harm. His ministrations towards her increased in compassion, while her mind frayed. Each pregnancy exacerbated the condition. We told ourselves she couldn't know the loss, but either by grief or by hormonal flux, the oppression of the serpent was ratcheting. She cowered at twigs, and at imagined undulations, and her night terrors were ceaseless. Despite the obvious success of their indoctrination, Management continued to plunge her into deeper, more horrifying pits. 

Once, as I inspected their enclosure, Em had an episode, likely triggered by the lanyard around my neck. Overcome with regret, I could not prevent myself from drawing her near, and rocking her until her breathing calmed. For this misdemeanor I was roundly condemned, though the only discipline I received was a lecture on non-invasive conduct. All I could think of was how these children, to whom I considered myself a father, would never see my face.

The remains of the banished daughters had been preserved, and sometime after the third termination, Management requested I analyse them. I believe their greatest fear was that Aj was somehow reproductively incompetent, perhaps due to an error in his synthesis. Professional advancement had made me a generalist, but many years before, I had been hired by the Facility for precisely this sort of work. Thus, for the first time in memory, I descended from the surveillance deck to the lab. 

At first, nothing in their genetics struck me as exceptional. They had been healthy, normative specimens, bereft of chromosomal abnormalities or any common markers of disease. I was so focused on individual vitality that for an embarrassing moment the pattern failed to resolve. Eventually, sensing something amiss, I compared the sisters; and in distress, I cried out, even as I searched for the error in my process. Em and Aj had conceived the exact same child, thrice. 

Management demanded I burn the evidence. Either the infant's existence, or their murder of her, was too great a humiliation. Aj was showered with carpentry gifts, tools he struggled to turn to the repair of his wilting bride, while Em's sessions were increased in frequency and intensity, as though a coiled snake could be driven from her womb. I tendered my resignation. In light of recent tensions, the Facility was happy to let me go, and generous in our parting. This abandonment of Em and Aj pained me, but my powerlessness and years of passivity were now soured, and had the stink of complicity. The evening I left was a rare silent night, and on the cusp of adulthood they lay holding each other, glowing like babes. 

The one indignity I could not abide was the anonymous cremation of Em's daughter. Secretly, I removed her remains from the laboratory, and buried them under a stone cross in the wooded depths of my property. I spent the following years in contemplation, private and ashamed. Eventually, I gathered the courage to return to church, to walk through blessed places with my head bowed, and confess. I prayed constantly for my poor captive children. At night, the coyotes sounded like wailing infants.

A while later, long after I presumed myself forgotten, a colleague reached out to report the death of Em. Her state had steadily worsened, until she could no longer stand the curvature of the branches or the trinkets Aj whittled for her, and she spent the majority of her days wrapped in linens. During a fit of screeching hysteria, Aj had taken a hammer to her skull, either in rage or as an act of mercy. The project was shuttered. They had not conceived again. It was claimed, my colleague said, that in the weeping wake of her euthanasia, Aj had spontaneously recited the Dies irae, and begun conversing in Latin, having instantaneously lost his mother tongue; but Management had taken him away, and these fanciful rumors may have been the products of their handlers’ grief.

I had aged rapidly in my years alone, and the hike out to the neglected grave was noticeably more difficult. The site had proven too sorrowful to visit, but now I brought flowers and a second stone cross, that mother and daughter might know some fraction of repose together. As I approached, I wondered whether I should also commemorate Aj, whose fate was so uncertain; thus, in my daydreams, I was especially unprepared for the carnage.

Bones and leathery bits of flesh were scattered across the grove; the grave was disturbed. Worst of all was the newly dead infant, and the pair of grackles pecking at its eyes. Horrified, I threw my coat over the corpse, and fled home, scattering petals.

Incubated in dirt, unearthed by some beast, maturing in incremental resurrections -- to die again and again, from weakness, suffocation; unloved, animal feed, savaged by scavengers. To feel the last frost of winter sap life from her unfinished body. To learn to breathe, and cry, unheard in the dark, knowing warmth only by the predatory maw. The child was the size of a newborn, barely at term. How many times had she descended to the dead, only to rise again, for a desolate and painful instant? Shaking, I drew water from the well to wash my hands and face. For years, she had clawed towards life, one mouthful of soil, of blood at a time. I pondered in terror what the Facility had wrought.

Who was this child, to suffer so much in the making? Why would God build a lamb out of agonies? At dawn, I know where I have to be. Deep in the forest, awaiting the first movements of a baby under the shroud; to salvage something of Em and Aj, and the holiness I played my hand in ruining. Perhaps I can redeem a parenthood spent condoning atrocities. I pray, let me be a good father. 

I pray, quiet the fears I have of my child; for who knows what, in our hubris, we called up. A prophetess, the Antichrist, the Whore of Babylon; yet all I hope for is a pious, simple life. I wonder what Providence has written; I wonder whether these paths are all alive in our future: dissolution or virtue, evil or charity, to be chosen in time by myself and my daughter in the woods.