Necromancer Retrograde
Prologue
From the unpublished memoir of Prof Dr Viktor Zobrin, PhD, DSc, titled ‘In Memoriam Mundi Perditi’, edited posthumously and published with commentary by the Krasnik Liberation Press under the title ‘Confessions of a Demented Old Fart’.
Some days, I wake up thinking that the past sixty years have only been a dream.
Those are the good days. Each morning, I emerge from sleep facing the foggy little window of my private sanatorium room.
My eyes land on the first light bleeding into the serene waters of the lake, the night fading away over the grey-capped peaks.
So stately, so unchangeable. So unlike the landscape of humanity.
My view here at the end of my days is exactly the same as it was at the beginning of my adult life. It’s so easy to let myself be lulled by the confusion. So easy to let myself think for a few moments that I have returned not only to a beautiful place but to a happier time, too.
When I was nineteen years old, my parents sent me here for the summer to “try working with my hands” at a hotel. Back then, such a thing was a normal part of a young person’s education. And much more recently, my peers have sent me back here to die in exile like the obsolete relic I have become.
It’s like my life has come full circle, like one end is simply the mirror of the other. By the same token, my concerns today are nothing but reverse reflections of what they were then.
Young men worry obsessively about the dent they might make in the world. Old men only ever worry about the dent they may have made. The young man I once was would have been shocked at what I have done. The old man I am today is horrified.
Today, my eyes don’t rest on the idyllic lake view. Today, my gaze doesn’t stray from the horrors unfolding on the television screen. Because, as of today, the dent that I have made in the world is a physical scar on the earth’s surface, visible even from space.
Earlier this morning, localised impact nuclear bombs were dropped on the Old Continent in a line running from the north to the south, tearing it in half, separating the technocratic Synechord on one side from the Dunnby Continuum—of which I am a long-forgotten forefather—on the other.
I, a man of human sciences and without ever meaning to, have set in motion a chain of events that led to nuclear bombs being used as an instrument of radical geological partition.
My mind recoils from what my eyes are telling me.
The nurse comes into view: a curly-haired gal of about forty with a heart-shaped mouth and small, deft hands. Her fingers are currently tracing the base of my throat with nimble care.
“There’s a lump there,” she says, speaking with a faded accent that I recognise as belonging to the same part of the world I am from. “I’ll have you checked by the doctor.”
I debate reacting in my old regional language as a token of solidarity. It is now an obsolete, unused language. Her generation will be the last to remember its words. I decide against it. If she knows who I am, she would likely see it as poor taste.
“Why?”
She gives me a look of bitter detachment, so typical of young people these days, so telling of the world we leave behind for them. Children today are already born with wrinkles on their souls.
“So that they can treat it if it’s something serious,” she explains indifferently.
“Why?” I repeat, more firmly. “So that I can live longer and keep watching?”
She turns to the screen briefly with a frown, soft features hardening. It takes her a long while to respond, something dark brewing in her eyes. She walks away, not letting me react to her words that keep echoing in my ears long after she is gone. “Perhaps that is what you deserve.”
And perhaps it is. Most probably it is.
Would anyone believe that it all started as a theoretical hypothesis I never dreamt of putting into practice? That the course of the world was forever altered by the PhD thesis of a clueless twenty-seven-year-old boy?
With Synechord already established next door, many called for a counter-union in our part of the continent. What better dissertation topic for an enthusiastic student?
In my work—nothing more than an academic exercise—I theorised that the main obstacle on our way to a lasting union was the fragmentation and diversity of our territories. I theorised that to succeed we had to be prepared to not only jettison our differences, but quite literally erase them.
Tear cities down to rebuild them in a unified architectural style.
Ban old customs and adopt new shared ones.
Keep only the global language, making all local languages illegal.
Sever all inconvenient ties to the past by gradually modifying historical records.
A thing less impossible than it sounds. With due diligence and the right measures in place, it takes no more than two generations to build a civilisation anew from its own ashes.
A task best left for a small group of leaders elected for life. The demand for popular support that accompanies frequent elections often favours short-sighted solutions at odds with true progress.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, my university not only rejected my dissertation but also expelled me from my programme for my “unorthodox views”.
I thought my career was finished before it even started. But a few years later, they came to ask for my thesis. The first Consuls: Volker Senior, Anton, and Gregor. Before I knew it, I became their policy adviser.
How could I not have questioned it, some might ask. The answer is simple. The young me dreaded what the old me covets dearly and can no longer have: being an inconsequential man.
They dazzled me—with the titles they offered, the pay, the renown, the beautiful women who suddenly clamoured after me.
It all unfolded like a spectacular nightmare.
Over the next decade, and through a few mostly legitimate political victories in key regions, the Dunnby Continuum was established with the Consular Triad at its helm.
But power only feels like power if it keeps growing.
It didn’t take long for us to justify invading the remaining independent nations in the region.
At the time, it seemed to be in everyone’s best interest. We grew by brute force, like cancer spreading through healthy tissue.
Until we started getting too close to Synechord, and they decided a cure was in order.
The result?
A wound that will never heal. A scar that will never fade.
I close my watering eyes and sink deeper into the pillow.
Most people are terrified of ageing, of losing the grasp on their faculties, of being abandoned by their own senses. I used to be, too, a long time ago. But no more.
Because today I realised that to go blind, deaf, and dumb in old age is perhaps the greatest mercy there is.