Dawn of Tears - Prologue. Prologue

The signs were all there, really, and history has shown just how clear they were.

Henry Jacobs died yesterday. No one told me he died; no one has yet to bring me the sad news. My nurse probably fears to do so, thinking it will send me into my own death. What my nurse doesn't know is that long before her Great-Great-Grandmother was born, I could always feel Henry's heart beat, and that no matter where he was when he died, I would have known the instant it happened, just as I did last night at precisely Nine Twenty-Nine p.m. It was twenty-nine minutes after my lover kissed me good night and I was sound asleep, when I felt the shock, and felt Henry's dying gasp, and his final farewell brushed across my soul. Since then, I’ve lain awake and pondering many things. Watching the passing night out of our window, knowing that Henry was gone, and only his flesh remained behind several thousand miles away.

Who is, no was, Henry Jacobs you ask? That's a question I can't answer in a few words, or even a few thousand. What I can tell you is that his death will change what you once thought of as history, because what you know already is only the smallest portion of the gory truth.

I still remember the first time I met Henry Jacobs, one hundred and twenty-eight years ago. It's as clear in my mind now as it was on that bright, sunny day when the sun flashed off his golden hair and his scream of happiness began what was a friendship, a brotherhood that would last me for more years than I had ever imagined possible.

What? You're already tempted to stop reading because you think this is a fiction story? Sorry, my dear reader, but it isn't. As I lay here in this huge bed, listening to my lover's soft breathing as he sleeps, I can feel the tears streaking down my aged, wrinkled face as I remember that day so long ago. You know who I am, you have whispered about me, about my lover, about Henry and his wife Mary for decades now.

You've pondered where our estates might be hidden, how you might slip past our sentries, our guards, and our medical staffs so you can gaze upon our aged faces and whisper into our ears the question parents and grandparents also demanded to know:

What really happened?

For generations, the stories have been told about us, and the legends of our deeds and misdeeds grew and grew, filling the minds of the young with images of great, gallant heroes that fought evil, and of brooding sinister evil that killed the innocent. Our names where whispered, not those we were born with, or even the names that we were known by when everything happened, but rather the names of forty people rumored to be old beyond old, living in the pastoral countryside, hidden behind barriers of the most advanced guardian sentries, the most sensitive alarms, and servants who see to our every whim, controlled by our very thoughts.

Like good children of centuries past and centuries yet to be, you've read your history books, memorizing names, events and places. Some of you studied more than that surface dribble of facts and figures and asked 'why?' and you debate with others about those who created the world you live in through their actions and inactions. The Great Mystery soon attracted many of you.

You wondered who were those that were called 'Restorers' and 'Preservers', and did they really do the deeds that are attributed to them. You also wondered if the stories of the Forty were really true. You wondered if we really stood on the mountaintop of some forgotten city and forged the pact that brought about the world you now live in, out of the dark ages of the post-apocalyptic world that was the twenty-first century.

Most of all you wondered if we had really been alive when the Great Oil Crisis started, and had we really survived the Great Reformation that followed it years later. You wondered how we really had managed to halt the tremendous forces of the Reformation and wondered what mistakes we'd made that led to the Great War that followed. Had we really survived all that and still re-emerged to lead the Great Awakening?

People have waited for over one hundred years for that answer, and here it is: Yes

There, now your question has been satisfied, hasn't it?

Of course it hasn't, because you are a human being, and human beings are very rarely ever truly satisfied. That's why Gluttony is one of the deadly sins, hell that's why all sins are deadly sins, because their excess is what causes us to destroy everything that we love. In one hundred and forty years of life, I have learned only one really important lesson.

Unfortunately, I learned that lesson far too late in my life, and it nearly destroyed me when I did. The only reason I didn't end my life at that point was Henry. Not even my love sleeping next to me was able to stop me and we've been in love for well over a century. No, it was Henry that stopped me from ending my miserable existence and to work with him on changing things again.

Did you know that from the moment you take your first breath in life, you are dying?

No, it's not a morbid thought from a man who feels the end of his life right around the corner after living for so long. It's a fact of the universe that as everything is born, so it begins its journey to death. Everything ends at one point or another. Whether it is a story, a song, or your life, it will end eventually. That's why the ending isn't what's important, or the beginning for that matter. Rather it is the journey from that beginning and to that end that is important, that is valuable, that is the treasure we call life.

Ah, I can see the first golden rays of the sun coming over the mountaintops, tinting their snow-capped peaks a golden red. It is dawn, again. I can taste the salt of my tears, again. Did you know I was born at dawn? Of course you didn't, you don't even know the name I use in this mountain hideaway, or the name of my lover still asleep at my side. You may never know that name, but if you're pretty clever you might one day find a record of two old people being buried together on a mountainside in an unmarked grave. It is our final wish, and we'll die together because that is the way we always die, the forty of us who were born and called human and yet have always been more than human.

Oh how Henry would scream at me for the arrogance of that last clause. He always did hate that I accepted the fact that we, born of humans were always more than the humans around us. In part, that's why even Henry always acknowledged me the first of what you called the 'Restorers'. Your history credits us, these mysterious, unknown people with saving the Human Race, and restoring it to civilization and freedom.

That concept was and is total, unadulterated bullshit.

Still, as we stood on this very place where our small home sits now, we decided that this story would never be told so long as we lived. We made this decision because we knew that so long as we lived, if you knew the truth, we would never be able to rest, would never be able to enjoy the last days of our lives with those we loved.

Our births were a great mistake, greater even than the mistake that unleashed the Nuclear War when we were young. Very few people ever knew the truth of our birth, how we came to be, and what we learned as we learned of our birthright. Fortune, fate, or, as both Henry and I would say, God, brought together a set of circumstances, people, and opportunities that propelled us into the annals of histories under names we have long since left behind.

Names you will hear once again and wonder if it could possibly be true that we still lived into this day and age, if we really had seen the world that existed long ago.

I imagine it would be like me having learned that Abraham Lincoln was still alive while I was still in school and telling what really happened on the train ride to deliver the Gettysburg Address. Not that I should ever compare myself to Abraham Lincoln, and all you students thinking you can now write an essay proving how unlike Abraham Lincoln I am can put down your pens and keyboards because I will be the first to admit he was a better human being than I.

After all, I'm not really human.

I'm stalling again, not really wanting to tell this story. I just want to tease you with hints and allegories, titillate your fantasies. I really didn't want this story told, but by the promise we made on this spot one hundred and four years ago, we agreed that it would be told one day, when the last of us sat watching the dawn of a new day, so that as the day ended you could read it and ponder the truths of history.

I'm not going to lie to you here, I'm not going to exaggerate, and I'm not going to coddle your sensibilities. You're going to read cursing, you're going to read sex, and you're going to read about death, and blood, and cold-blooded murder. I will promise you this though, you won't read about every time I ever had sex in my life, or every time I killed.

Believe me, every time I ever enjoyed the flesh of another human or took another human life isn't that important in the sum totals of history (unless you were the person I fucked or the person I killed). Just as I was the first of us to admit what we were, and to accept the plan God had for us, so now I am the last and it is up to me to tell you what really happened.

You will meet Henry, and you will meet Mary, and many, many others (including my lover who just snorted and rolled over, going back to sleep). You'll meet others whose names you memorized in grade school and until now were just bits of facts you had to know to move to the next grade. You'll see them as I saw them, hear them as I knew them, and see how history compares with my memories of them.

When you hear the name I was born with, and the name I was later known by, you will search the computer networks, and you will find a lot of information on me in them. You'll see me as a young boy performing feats that left the world gasping in shock, and see me as a grown man crying amidst the ruin of my dreams. My advice, don't look. Read this first and then look, and see how they compare, how the history you read about and the history I lived compare and contrast.

I may see another dawn; I may not. All I do know is that we're the last, and I know in my heart that my lover's heart will stop a few seconds before my own stops forever. I was the first, and I am doomed to be the last. I wish I'd never been born, because then I wouldn't have to tell you the truth, and ruin the pretty ‘world view’ you have, looking through rose-tinted glasses.

I will not promise to live long enough to finish this work. I cannot make that promise and it is up to God for that to happen. I will promise what is in my power though. I promise to tell you the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. I will tell you what I thought when I thought it, and how I reasoned with myself as I did the things that I did, and when I realized my mistakes, I will share with you what I felt, and when I felt that first joyous touch of love, you'll know it as I knew it. Yes, you will see death and sex, and many other things here, but they are not here for your pleasure, or even my occasionally perverted fantasy. They are here for you to understand those most fundamental questions, 'Why' and 'How'. You already can find most of the 'Who', 'What', 'When', and 'Where'. Those answers are recorded mostly accurate in the existing history. The other two though, could never be answered, except by those who lived it, and who knew the terrible secrets we knew.

We were the only of our kind, and we pray that we will be the last. Whatever it was that made us, did not enable it to be passed onto those children some of us had. If it had been passed on to those children, they would have been killed at birth. A Twentieth Century madman named Adolph Hitler convinced an entire country that they were the master race and that they should rule the world.

He was wrong, they weren't.

I know who the true master race was though, and it was the forty of us who cut the strings they had tied around the world, making all of humanity dance to their merest whim. It was not pretty, what happened when we realized those strings existed. It became uglier when we realized that only we could cut them, and it was worst when we did cut them.

If you read this, you will see humanity at its worst, and occasionally at its best. You will see the truth that led to you existing and being here to read this, and you will read the price that was paid for the actions of so few.

Read, if you dare.