After the Truth (Book Two)

Four

One billion: A horrific number. Comparisons to anything in history have no meaning anymore. Trying to imagine the scope of the number is near impossible. Any visions of the size get lost in a maze of zeros. No true picture could ever be comprehended.

But. On billion dead. Does it need any further context? Yet it is a number those of us left alive must come to terms with.

Six years it has taken to scale the terrifying height of that mountain of death. Across the face of the Earth one in seven people are now dead. I, like so many others, never imagined the death toll could reach such staggering losses.

Why is the truth so hard?

Despite all the death, I am the happiest I have been for many years.

I have no home and I never stay in the same country for more than six months. My writing this journal is well known, I do not keep it a secret anymore. Still, I only have a small and exclusive readership. With each new location I am moved to, another couple of intelligence members are added to my readership. There are rules to what I can write, and each country repeats them when I arrive.

I am not allowed to say where I am living. I am not allowed to name those who help and shelter me. I am a begrudged refugee.

Why am I tolerated? I have become a myth, but a myth that can be seen and touched. I was there at the beginning of everything. People cling desperately to the idea I hold a secret that might, somehow, one day, bring an end to this horror.

Believe me, I have no messianic delusions. All I have is a simple message that continually falls on deaf ears: truth or oblivion.

How few people will be left alive before we realise lying has been killing us?

Amongst the chaos, a few structures of hope have withstood the battering storm. The young, and sufferers of some mental illnesses do not succumb to the effects of knowing the Word. It is easy to see why. When we are young, we do not know the significance between truth and lying. It is the same for some mentally ill as well. However, children grow up and the difference between truth and lies becomes known. So far, the youngest victims of the effects of the Word have been fifteen.

Jeremiah will be sixteen now and Samuel is fourteen today. Last week I cried for over an hour when I finally got a photo of them. Isabel had sent the picture on Jeremiah's sixteenth birthday. It took six months to reach me.

They have both changed so much. So many years I have missed. So many birthdays, memories, highs and lows I will never know. A growing part of me hates Isabel for what she took from me. I try to temper my hatred with realisation that had she and my sons been in the house when Niko Wycek broke in, it might so easily have been one of them hit by bullets. And my life in isolation since that day is no life for growing children.

They are all better off where they are. But Isabel being the right side of fate does not help my feelings for her. One in seven people have died, but my family have survived.

A true moment of joy happened earlier today. For twenty wonderful minutes, lies and truth and global death were far from my mind. For those twenty minutes I spoke with Samuel via video call. Continually fighting back tears I was able to wish him a happy birthday for three days' time and talk about goings on his life. He has been asking to speak to me for two years and had finally managed, without his mother's help, to track me down. To be fair, Samuel admitted that once Isabel learned what he was doing she did not stand in his way. I asked Samuel to thank her for that.

Samuel is scared of the plague, but apparently Jeremiah says he isn't. To help Samuel, just as I have said to so many other people, I told him he had nothing to be afraid of in telling the truth. The truth won't kill, only lying will. Whatever future world lays ahead, everyone will eventually come to know the importance of the truth.

I thought back to Sir Robert's words when I was still in England. Maybe the young can learn to grow up building their lives on a bedrock of truth. Will the truth become normal for the next generation?

Samuel wants to speak again, and I told him I will make it happen.

Even the news I read after our call has done little to dent my happy mood.

Over the last few years, everyone has been looking for a ray of hope, something good to cling onto in these dark times. Sport is the part of humanity where we push ourselves forward as a species. Faster, Higher, Stronger is the Olympic motto. Yet today, we have seen the lies that can lurk beneath those words.

Evgeniy Borodin has been a beacon of light for many years now. His story of being born to a poor family in a town outside Smolensk and rising to the top of his sport has, through all the global fear, became a symbol of what we are capable of. And how far we might still rise in the future.

He had always been a staunch opponent of doping in sport and was also outspoken on those that died from lying. He had echoed my own speech that telling the truth was the only way to survive this human catastrophe. His seeking out the Word even though it was illegal in his homeland meant people saw him leading by example in demonstrating the importance of the truth as the only vaccine against the Word.

Evgeniy had not, it turned out, learnt the Word. Also, it was revealed he had achieved so many of his records using an undetectable growth hormone.

The real truth was forced upon him after an unguarded conversation with a competitor. The young fellow runner had followed Evgeniy's supposed example and he too had deliberately learnt the Word. As he talked with Evgeniy before a race he spoke the Word quietly since he thought they both knew it.

Evgeniy went on to run the race. He did not give any press conferences afterwards. He did not even attend the medal ceremony. He disappeared for two days before a reporter tracked him down at the local airport. The reporter was good. He had learnt of the conversation with the fellow athlete, and he had heard rumours of secret growth hormones. Live on air he confronted Evgeniy about knowing the Word, and whether the rumours were true. His violent reaction, the punch and spittle spraying as he declared his angry innocence at the reporter has been played over and over again on news broadcasts.

The contrast of, moments later, his lifeless body lying on the airport terminal floor is haunting.

He has now become a much-quotedexample, by those opposed to the Movement of Truth, as to the danger of nothaving the freedom to lie.