Chapter Ten: The Wizard
Even if you weren’t on the autism spectrum, as medical records reveal almost all of those involved in PIST were, it was not immediately obvious that Alberto Ramirez was only fourteen years old. For one, his mustache was a dark and lustrous thing of beauty that added a decade to his tender age. For another, he wore a wizardly robe and carried a driftwood staff and these greatly distracted from his face. In addition, he spoke with an affected and hypnotizing deep British accent shared by no one else in his native Arizona that was so “cringe,” to use the parlance of the age, that most people couldn’t stand to be near him for too long. It served the additional purpose of hiding the pitch of his voice. For another, in the words of a colleague: “You had to be there, but he looked like what people expected a twenty-four thousand year old wizard to look like, even though no one had ever seen a twenty-four thousand year old wizard before.”
It was plain to anyone with eyes, however, that while he might be twenty-four thousand years old he was certainly not seventy-five as was his given age on the social security credentials he had borrowed from his aging grandfather in order to join PIST. It was only on his deathbed that Scott Gibbeck confessed to noticing the discrepancy.
“Of course, I noticed. You think I’m dumb? And no, I don’t feel guilty about lying. I even did my best to make sure no one else noticed. I never saw another person with that much potential since Melvin. I couldn’t just send him away. He didn’t have anybody except for a grandfather and he was the caretaker. What was he supposed to do? Go to college, scrape by taking care of a sick old man, so that one day I could give him permission to do what he was already capable of? You could see something growing in him. I had to give him the chance to let it out. Turning him away would have been a sin.”
While he wore a robe and carried a driftwood staff and spoke in a manner that made his peers distinctly uncomfortable, Alberto Ramirez’s enthusiasm and work ethic were undeniable. He hadn’t been able to answer most of the PIST application questions himself, but he’d known how to use various search engines to cobble answers together even if he hadn’t fully understood them. That was his particular genius. He did not expect himself to be a genius. He knew how to be effective and work around his own ignorance. Whereas most people got caught in circles of ego and demanded of themselves to know the answers to everything, he set the goal as the actual accomplishment and did whatever it took to get there. Still, at the end of six months, when he turned fifteen he knew a hundred times more than he had known when he’d first run away from home. Later, when asked why he’d run away to join PIST, Alberto Ramirez would only ever answer with two words: “The Quest.”
To understand the Quest you must first understand the degree to which Pre-Forum people refused to take accountability for or solve problems. Not in an arms-length academic sense, as we have demonstrated previously, but with a visceral and blood-soaked horror. To understand their utter refusal to be personally accountable for anything, you must understand the phenomenon of school shootings. As the culture of the nation began to degrade and nihilism took hold of the populace, young people on the cusp of adulthood began to succumb to what we now call “The Shadow of Davos” after the flowery description of Alberto Ramirez. The Shadow of Davos took on many forms. As young people listened to long lectures from their teachers that humanity was a virus, that we were killing the Earth, that it was too late to do anything and that everyone was doomed… the light in their eyes began to fade. As they listened to other lectures that explained that all of history was a struggle for one group to overpower and enslave another group their hearts began to wither. As they sought other meaning, they were met with too simplistic views of religion that told them there was no God and that they had no souls and no individuality, and all hope began to abandon them. What was stolen from them is hard to define, for it was nothing concrete, but Alberto Ramirez claimed it was nothing less than, “the theft of a future worth living for.” Some young people tried to replace that light with addiction, chasing one high after another even to their deaths. Some tried to fill the hole with cult-like political philosophies that tried to approximate the religions that had been destroyed by modernity, which as different as they all were, each posited a God that was a total moron. Others simply opened their veins or hung themselves to escape the ever-lengthening Shadow of Davos. Some tried to replace that light with vanity, and fell prey to eating disorders and other forms of dysmorphia. A final few, who had fled from the light to find true and utter darkness, decided it would be better to just kill everyone they knew.
Under the Shadow of Davos, the urge of young males to push against rules and confront authority twisted into something homicidal and evil. They did not, as we do in the present, indulge themselves with elaborate pranks like locking a half dozen emus in their principal’s office, but with murderous rampage. All across the nation the blood of children flowed from one school shooting after another and the adults? Their parents? They made no attempt to solve the problem. Instead, they fell prey to their basest emotions.
“What if there were just no guns anywhere?” Some shouted, with utter delusion that it was somehow possible to confiscate guns in a nation that had more guns than people. This allowed them to blame their political opponents for the problem. They took no accountability for the continuation of the problem. It was enough to blame others. They determined that if their specific means could not be granted then the end goal of saving children could not be worth the effort.
“What if the teachers had guns?” others wondered, ignoring the awful terrifying reality that there was something in their culture that was turning teenage boys into homicidal maniacs. They too took little to no ownership.
When Alberto Ramirez watched all of his friends die around him when he was only twelve years old, and took a bullet in the leg that would require him to use a cane -or a staff- for the rest of his life, he decided that he would do something about it. His parents had already been murdered, dead already in his earliest memories, and he had come within inches of a similar fate. As he re-learned to walk and listened to adults chatter meaningless phrases that would do nothing to drive back the shadow, he made a choice. If there were no adults in the world who would put an end to the madness, he would become the adult. He would become more of an adult than any adult could ever actually be. If everyone else would complain and stroke their own egos and hold up bloody corpses to serve their political agendas, so be it. He alone would find a way to defeat the Shadow of Davos even if he had to break his mind in half and convince himself that he was a twenty-four thousand year old wizard to do it.
To have survived a school shooting as he had, was to know a great and terrible secret. To have no parents was to know another secret. No matter how flowery or elegant the rules of their engagement, no matter how bright their vision, mankind was a violent animal. Lacking common culture and common cause, or a God to watch over them, they fell in and killed one another for dominance where they could not win fairly, and the only thing that made humans fight fair was the threat of a still greater violence. Because he had no parents, Alberto Ramirez also knew that no one was going to show up and do something about this problem except for him.
Alberto Ramirez knew these secrets as he knew the secret name of fire, and he knew that these secrets were known to almost no one else in the PIST offices. They were all too optimistic. He knew that he did not wish a world newly begun to end at the barrel of a gun. He knew that such guns were sure to come even before the PIST offices began to suspect this. He knew that the only person he could rely upon was himself and the only guide was the song of the Creator, who had created many mystical beings such as himself to guide the music of the Creation.
And so when at last he knew enough, for he had descended deep into the basements of the PIST Offices and there partaken in the powerful lore of machine learning from Bertrand the Moleman Muskowitz, Alberto the Wizard Ramirez began to order every single blue-light overhead projector that he could after having stolen several credit cards from select teammates. Every member of PIST whose parents had fled a collapsing government or whose family had been murdered in some Holocaust. Everyone, in short, who might understand his motives. When he was confronted about this only days later, he explained himself, and those from whom he had stolen the credit cards produced still more credit cards and still more blue-light overhead projectors were ordered as well as several thousand non-commercial drones. The Council of the Flame in the West convened there and in the secret basement of PIST they conspired to preserve the Forum and the Index by creation of Minerva.
Even as ignorant as they were, it is still astounding to realize that Pre-Forum people saw no need to restrict the ownership of class four blue-light lasers. Then again, if they had been capable of such foresight, Minerva would have never been born.