0's and 1's: Bk2- Web of Conceit - 1. Prologue: Conversations with the Author

0’s and 1’s Book 2: Web of Conceit

Prologue

A Conversation with the Writer

By WL

 

 

Writer: Hello Kevin, how are you doing this fine Morning?

 

Kevin (dazed and confused): Umm…I thought I was just shot…Are you a doctor?

 

Writer: No, I don’t practice medicine. I do know a lot of doctors and medical specialists.

 

Kevin: Then, who are you?

 

Writer: Well, I am your writer

 

Kevin: What do you mean, you are my writer? Is this a joke? I don’t even like that kind of “meta” crap

 

Writer: Seriously, dude, I am your writer, which is kind of “meta” if you think about it. You can also think of me as God, but if other people in my reality read that, I would be called a blasphemous heretic or an egomaniac to compare myself to God. But whatever, to you I am God

 

Kevin: So, I am dead

 

Writer: That is still to be determined by my readers and me

 

Kevin: What the fuck?

 

Writer: Yeah, I know it’s kind of fucked up, but seriously, I just want us to have a conversation

 

Kevin (onfused): So I still don’t understand the writer stuff, but if you are God, am I in heaven?

 

Writer: No, I just want to review what happened to you before I decide your fate with my readers. Some of them like tragedy and your death scene would make for great plot point.

 

Kevin: You fucking had me shot, are about to kill me, and you want to talk? Why should I even speak to you?

 

Writer: Well, for starters, your friends are still alive at least at this point in the story

 

Kevin: You fucked up motherfucker, what gives you the right to decide who lives and who dies?

 

Writer: Well, I don’t decide that technically. I let you guys follow your natural paths and just write an outcome I feel to be proper for it

 

Kevin: That’s not an excuse

 

Writer: No, I doubt it’s even a good excuse for my God either, but it’s just how the world works. Remember you said that in your head a while back.

 

Kevin (thinking back): Yeah, but like you could do so much more for us, like why not make it easy to win? Unless you are some homophobic prick, who is dreaming all this shit up as some sick joke to get back at all the gay guys in the world.

 

Writer: Nope, I am 100% gay and love my gay men. Besides, everyone else writes really nice stories where gay guys win easily and where the world is black and white, gay vs. homophobes/religious assholes. I want to make my story a little different by letting the bad guys win as well and making sure the world is more complex.

 

Kevin: Fuck you! Why can everyone have it easy except for us?

 

Writer: The real world is not easy and I don’t want gay teens or gay men to be misled into a sense of false security. I love all of you guys and my LGBT friends in real life and online, but I know in my heart we should not hide behind fantasy. There are monsters being awakened in the world that this generation is not equipped to face if it relies merely on easy victories or simple solutions. We’ve been lucky, but you can’t rely on luck forever.

 

Kevin: And you think you can show them where these monsters might be coming from and how they would attack by torturing me and my friends?

 

Writer: Not entirely, I’ve spent years working with people that liberals would call religious zealots and right wing fanatics, because I shared some of their common beliefs.

 

Kevin: So you’re one of those “reformed” closet cases?

 

Writer: Nope, gay rights weren’t my chief issue. I never hid the fact I was gay, nor openly endorsed it. I was more focused on the ideals of small government and anti-abortion issues. I believe all people deserve a chance to live their lives as they want and not be denied the chance to live at all.

 

Kevin: Just great, my writer is a Christian Republican idiot

 

Writer: Technically, I have an IQ of 138, but yeah, I am a Republican leaning and somewhat Christian, not fully into any single Church. I think God himself probably has his issues on this too, if he is writing my reality’s story like I am doing yours.

 

Kevin: How can you support some of the Republican’s positions? Unless, they’re completely different in your world versus mine

 

Writer: Nope, they’re the same sadly. I know there’s a bunch of problems, especially in the “heartland” of America, but they have good points too that are lost in translation.

 

Kevin: Name one point

 

Writer: How about the refugee and immigration issue? Despite the insanity surrounding immigration policy with people like Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Ben Carson, there is a legitimate problem with opening up the country to Syrians and other displaced middle-eastern peoples. I am not racist, but there is no way to determine their place of origin or their prior affiliations due to their war-torn nations. We could be letting in terrorists and other elements that could do harm to other Americans.

 

Kevin: That’s bullshit isolationist crap. You sound like you’re smart enough to understand the big issues, but you don’t get the real issues.

 

Writer: Alright, enlighten me. Bear in mind your world is a reflection of mine and everything you know I know

 

Kevin: Awesome, it makes my point easier. Let me ask you, why does terrorism happen?

 

Writer: Well, it’s a complex issue of social, religious, and political factors that influence a terrorist to act. Sometimes, terrorism can be a direct response to prior terrorist actions, sort of like a “precedent” that leads to the present. In your world for example, I wanted to flesh out the issue as an extension of extremism that transcends creeds and religious boundaries as the issue escalate and grows.

 

Kevin: Don’t people have principles and ideals that would prevent them from going too far or committing mass murder?

 

Writer: Yes most people do have those innate ideals, but no one is willing to sacrifice their own lives or the lives of loved ones in the name of principles that by and large are not capable of dealing with terrorism’s extremist roots. It’s a catch-22, the same elements that prevent most people from going too far, also prevents them frm stopping the spread of terrorism.

 

Kevin: Then hasn’t terrorism already won?

 

Writer: What do you mean?

 

Kevin: The goal of terrorism is ultimately to create an environment, where people with good ideals and principles will not act or make sacrifices to prevent future acts of terror.

 

Writer: There are still people who act against terrorism, but it usually comes too late and does little to stem the extremism on either side. On rare occasions, some people actually do succeed and make valiant sacrifices too, but how many saints are there compared to normal human beings?

 

Kevin: If I am not mistaken, it would be more appropriate to call that “reaction” rather than a preventative action. I think you are looking at this wrong, you aren’t trying to prevent extremism from rising into terrorism, and instead you are trying to fight the outcome from happening.

 

Writer: The outcome is terrorist attacks and counter attacks by our own people, who become just as radicalized over time. Your world is seeing it happen subversively, while no one in my world has a clue it is happening around them, because no one wants to talk about “bleed-thru” effect. People are trying and failing.

 

Kevin: You might be God, but you don’t know everything. The root to extremism is what must be fought, not just in other cultures or other religious ideologies, but in our society as well. Even if it means, we stand alone, those principles cannot be abandoned. We can’t just react to the world, we must do something.

 

Writer: How would you do that?

 

Kevin: By presenting our principles openly without holding back, fight against the extremist and point them out immediately. Prevention is a wide-scale change of human nature from reactionary emotion that is more based on our primitive evolutionary nature.

 

Writer: What you are advocating is a form of Transhumanism far beyond my own world and yours for that matter. Rationalism over Naturalism, but it’s a pipe dream. Human beings can’t escape our emotions. We can only fight their effects. Ask the pharmaceutical industry how much they have made on anti-depression medication.

 

Kevin: Why not? You can see the sense in what I am saying at least.

 

Writer: I can see what you mean, but look Kevin I am not sure how well people will take your point of view. They have lived a long time under a certain system of emotion based ideologies. Even your point of view is based around emotionalism, because your friends have died as a result of Cyber-attacks, engineered by a Christian Fundamentalist, who was radicalized after he lost members of his family in Islamic extremist terrorist attacks. You see what I mean by how fucked up the web of hatred extends in your world as well as mine. Emotions dominate thought, not reason or rationalism.

 

Kevin: It doesn’t matter where I got my principles, if we keep being led down this extremist path of attack, retaliation, and attack, what would be left of the world? Maybe I will die today from this gunshot wound, or die from another extremist attack from a terrorist that wants to bomb one of our soccer games, but in the end, I want to live in a world where I tried to make a difference by stopping a vicious cycle.

 

Writer: You’re a good kid, Kevin, and you are extremely smart for a 16 year old

 

Kevin: Well, I just get these bursts, you know, of shit

 

Writer: I used to have those “bursts” myself

 

Kevin: When was the last time you checked your IQ?

 

Writer: When I was 10, they tested me to skip me from 3^rd grade to 5^th

 

Kevin: You should have been in 4^th grade at 10 years old, what happened?

 

Writer: I was in Special Education classes

 

Kevin: Oh, are you like retarded or something? Sorry, I mean like…

 

Writer: No, I am physically disabled, blind in one eye and limited in the other eye. Special education classes held me back for one year, but I took a placement test in third grade to get myself back to normal. I just hit a homerun and skipped a grade.

 

Kevin: You do know that IQ usually increases with development, why haven’t you looked into testing again?

 

Writer: I was fine with my placement and it gave me equal footing with my peers. I didn’t want to be out of place again. It just happened out of other reasons in my life.

 

Kevin: Don’t want to sound like a psychologist or anything, but what made you create me and my world? I am kind of your complete opposite. Like you’re a lukewarm Republican conservative, who hides his own intelligence to fit in, and I am a hot headed liberal, who says what’s on his mind. I’d think you’d want an ideal world to expound your propaganda. Maybe have gay marriage and stuff too, but you are allowing people like me to be openly opposed to your ideals.

 

Writer: What if I told you I wanted to explore myself through you guys? I wanted to learn more about me and the world I lived in by reflecting it across my psyche. In the case of you Kevin, you were actually born first of all my characters, including Hunter.

 

Kevin: How was I created?

 

Writer: Well, outside the natural process of being born to two loving parents, you were a voice in my head that warned me to stop and listen to my own thoughts. When Donald Trump was being interrupted by Ramos, an Univision reporter, during one of his press releases, Trump kicked the guy out. I jumped out of my seat and pumped my fists in the air, because I was happy to see someone actually take on the Press for being so outrageous. I felt like this was a guy, who can do stuff and fight against all the PC crap. Then I heard a voice in my head say, “Stop, think about what he just did and what you are supporting?” I thought it through and I realized I was being carried away like a zealot at a Nazi rally from the 1930’s. I do not want 11 million men, women, and children to be forcibly kicked out of the US, but I had just so easily supported a symbolic expulsion of a Mexican reporter defending his own people from that fate. You were my voice of reason Kevin, the angry Liberal voice that I never cared to listen to until you hit my pressure point. After that, you began to speak to me and I created your character.

 

Kevin: I think you joined the wrong political party and have the wrong ideological alignment. Maybe a part of you knows all the bullshit is nuts, but you are just too afraid to get out of your comfort zone.

 

Writer: Maybe I am just too far gone to change.

 

Kevin: Bullshit, you can fix it right now. Why not help people realize what you figured out? There’s a real problem in the hearts and minds of Americans. You might not be their creator like you are mine, but you are at least willing to change your views and willing to see reason before it becomes too late. If other people could have stopped and thought about Adolf Hitler before he and his political movement became a dominant part of Germany in the 1930’s, millions of Jews, Slavic people, and Gays would not have died in the holocaust that followed. You have it in you to make a stand against that fucked up kind of mentality.

 

Writer: You know as well as I do that even back in the 1930’s reporters and famous scholars were writing about how wrong Hitler was about Jews and other groups, but few listened. You and I both know that despite people like Magnus Hirschfield, who tried to convince the German people along with the rest of Europe that gays were normal people too, we ended in the same concentration camps as the Jews. The LGBT community didn’t see the dangers posed by this kind of “populist” rhetoric until it was too late, despite the ominous Paragraph 175 that hung over them. To add insult to injury, the few survivors of those camps were sent to prison for being gay as well. We didn’t come together to form a nation or even a movement, because no one wept for dead fags.

 

Kevin: You know that wouldn’t be true today. There are too many of us and too many people, who know us to not care. Even Latinos have strong supporters among conservatives, too.

 

Writer: Unlike your world Kevin, I don’t think we have Hunter or even a person like you in our community, who can speak out and fight off the injustices that can be created by extremism if it takes off and mutates. There are dozens of evangelical aligned Latino groups in the conservative spectrum too, but they fear the southern and heartland conservatives, who dominate the rhetoric. Even they don’t realize the heart of the issue is in the extreme messaging. As long as there is victory, it doesn’t matter how many other people need to be dragged down into the mud. Even if it’s only rhetoric, it leads to somewhere ugly.

 

Kevin: How about you, why don’t you speak up about what’s wrong?

 

Writer: I am a “nobody”, a simple numbers guy, who gave up a middle manager position in Corporate America to live a simpler life as a non-profit accountant. I haven’t set foot at any Republican Party event in a few years, ever since the Tea Party movement began to gain traction, and stopped volunteering after my pro-gay rights Republican governor got elected with an anti-gay Lt. Governor. I am disengaged from the world of politics and events

 

Kevin: You’re not really disengaged. Disappointed maybe, but you still do care.

 

Writer: I care too much about the reality of living rather than the goal of winning. That’s another thing few other people, liberal or conservative, Christian or Muslim, and Gay or Straight talk about much anymore. No one really asks why we should live our lives to the fullest rather than win an ideological or political victory. Is winning so important?

 

Kevin: I guess, like playing soccer, it does feel good to win and it feels like crap to lose. Especially if the margins of victory are just in one decision or one bad pass, it can haunt players for a long time. I prefer shouting and cussing it out right there, and then think about the next game. People need to relax and let it go.

 

Writer: Yet, the price of failure grows bigger every time, because there might never be another game afterwards for either side

 

Kevin: Then why is anyone playing if the risks are so high? If extremism is reaching a point it could turn into something so ugly as mass murder and genocide, people should see the reason to stop themselves.

 

Writer: The trigger is a throwback mindset from the Cold War, when no one is willing to back down, only double down on the fight. Few people really think about the historic origins of modern extremist ideology, but much of it can be traced to the cold war brinksmanship. Islamic Terrorism, Christian Evangelism, and even Sexual Progressivism all came during this period of history along with many other movements and ideas that operate in opposition. I guess we stopped really caring about the risks to ourselves and our society after the nuclear threat of annihilation was gone. The last generation thought “if we could stop nuclear war, then everything else must be easy”.

 

Kevin: It’s not the same thing. The last generation is still fighting battles that should never have started in the first place. People do not need to be superior or inferior to live side by side with one another, if Christians didn’t bother LGBT people, we could live in peace. If Muslims do not try to bomb civilians and kill Christians, there would be no real desire to enter the Middle East with military force. If the CIA and the Russian or the Chinese do not try to destabilize the region, there wouldn’t be terrorists at all.

 

Writer: That’s the world we live in though. It’s why I remain a conservative who lives in reality and why you are a liberal that has dreams of peace in spite of the odds

 

Kevin: You still won’t switch sides

 

Writer: No, I like you Kevin, but I can’t commit to your ideals. Part of me wants to, but I know it’s too early

 

Kevin: Give us a chance, we can prove you wrong

 

Writer: I won’t be easy on you guys and this recent shooting is only the beginning of escalations. You don’t even know who was behind the event.

 

Kevin: I don’t care if it’s C.I.S.S or Jesse Heron, Hunter, Benji, and I can handle it.

 

Writer: Let me give you some cliff notes, C.I.S.S operates methodically and even if Mason was their front man, they would never arm him due to exactly what would happen now. Public outrage and outcry would nullify any gains they might have made. As for Jesse Heron, despite his desire to seek revenge for Hunter, he tries to minimize the damage in his own way. He is a more “measured” version of extremism. He wants the same things you do, but he will go further than you or your friends. There’s other players in the game, not all of whom you know, do you still want to change your world without the benefit of knowledge?

 

Kevin: Not only my world, but your world can benefit too. The longer you write in my reality, the more I hope you will see there is still hope for peace.

 

(Hunter’s Voice: Wake Up! Wake Up! Damn it, Kevin, why the fuck won’t you wake up?)

 

Writer: Sounds like Hunter is trying to wake you up, I’ll let you get back to him, just because I am sap for sentimental stories. My readers may not like it, but you are an interesting person to keep around for a few more chapters.

 

Kevin: Well, since I did spend all this time talking to you, can I ask you a few questions? Like, what chance will I get to ask questions from God, unless I am dead?

 

Writer: Sure, I’ll answer 3 questions

Kevin: Does he love me?

 

Writer: Yes he loves you as much as he loved Ryan, but I wouldn’t go too fast. After the stunt you pulled, I doubt you have any reservations about starting a relationship with him, but he will feel your injury was his fault.

 

Kevin: Fuck no. I made that choice because I love him

 

Writer: Another fact about my style of writing, I don’t like to make it easy for two guys to form a relationship, especially if it is going to last. If you and he do survive the coming conflict, you might not like each other anymore due to the issues you both have to face.

 

Kevin: If I can wait for him for so many years and risk my life for him, what else do you think I won’t accept from him?

 

Writer: What if he loses his way, become what he has beheld? What if he kills someone?

 

Kevin: I’ll hold him back. I’ll be by his side, whether or not he wants me there.

 

Writer: I won’t hold you to that. You are a fun character to write. Now, you have 2 more questions

 

Kevin: Will we win this fight? I know you said a lot of this is determined by you and your readers, but you probably already have an idea on where this is leading.

 

Writer: I hate spoilers, but the future has been written. In the year 2215, a museum will be constructed to chronicle these events. Your group along with several others, who will join you, will be featured prominently in exhibits.

 

Kevin: So we won and are heroes in the future

 

Writer: That’s not determined yet, you must remember museums can be made for both positive purposes and derogatory ones. Do you think the exhibits on the Confederate States of America or Nazi Regime was positive in museums? Or, the legacy of Lyndon Johnson highlights the near bankruptcy of his welfare programs in our current world?

 

Kevin: I hate you for so many different reasons, but I also can’t help admiring your audacity. You’re not like any other writer of Gay fiction I’ve ever read before, nor any conservative I’ve heard about

 

Writer: Alright, don’t need to kiss my feet. One more question, then you go back. I’ll let you keep these memories too, so it would be canon in your universe. Sort of my way of playing against the 4^th wall, another fun little touch delivered from me to readers.

 

Kevin: Fuck, there are so many things to ask, can I ask for more questions?

 

Writer: Nope, and now you used up all your questions

 

Kevin: No fair, I didn’t ask a question, I just uh…hypothesized out loud

 

Writer: I told you I wouldn’t make it easy on you

 

Kevin: Are you sure you are not the Devil?

 

Writer: Nah, I prefer a cooler locale and I don’t want to fuck guys with pitchforks

 

Kevin: Come on, just another chance

 

Writer: You’ll get it later, I really like you guys and wish you success despite what I think will happen. I will give you one more revelation. Someone will die with a major legacy for you all to carry on.

 

Kevin: What?

 

Writer: Bye Kevin, good luck