The Curse of the Order

Charlie tries to mind his own business, but an old man's suicide draws him down the rabbit hole.

​Charlie Poole stood in front of a massive skyscraper in the driving rain shivering in the low streetlight. He had nowhere left to go, no one he could turn to, nothing left to lose. His dark eyes slowly scanned the looming structure from its base all the way up, past the lazily swirling spotlights, to the bright speck that glimmered where it tapered to a peak. This was the moment that he had spent the last two weeks to achieve. His mind drifted to the genesis of his quest.
​It started with the man who lived across the way from his small apartment. His face was always bright and friendly, but still, in an indefinable way, there was darkness. Charlie kept irregular hours, working as a baggage handler at the airport, yet he always saw him walking through the hallway to his apartment in random, yet regular frequency. The lines in his face were more like cracks and fissures than the gentle foldings of age. His bright eyes twinkled under his tan beret. His gnarled hands clutching tightly to a thick red journal desperately.
​One day, as Charlie exited his apartment to go to work, he saw the old man simply standing in the hallway. Thick tears dropped from his face. His bright eyes turned towards him and as his hands raised to his face as he slumped to the ground. The thick red book slipped from his fingers and crashed to the floor, loose scraps of paper wafting in the air. Charlie rushed to him.
​He tried to console the man, but all he could get from him was howling sobs.
​“Please,” Charlie said, “Please tell me what’s wrong.”
​Finally, the old man composed himself. Fat tears rolling down his face, the lines of his face now acting as canals. His head slowly shook from side to side and he made no further sound. He stood slowly, a twisted smile forming on his face. He brushed past Charlie in slow geriatric steps towards his apartment door, opened it and stepped inside. Charlie stood in the hallway alone in the pregnant silence. Suddenly the bright orange earmuffs he wore around his neck felt like they were strangling him. He pulled them off roughly and took deep breaths. The thick red journal caught his eye. He stared at it. He felt it tugging at him.
​The crack of a gunshot ripped through the stillness.
​Charlie ran into the old man’s small apartment and stopped as the sight of scattered brains dripping down the wall. An old woman screamed and doorways were being thrown open. Charlie retreated to the hallway, hyperventilating.
​People were shouting, Charlie could feel the quickening of panic. He ran down the hallway, stopped, ran his hands through his hair, double backed, scooped up the journal and sprinted down the hallway, leaving scraps of paper wafting behind him.
​He called out sick for work and went to a diner. He ordered a coffee and sipped it, the thick book under one hand, his leg shaking under the table. After an hour the waitress checked on him, then left him alone. He cracked open the book:


​To whoever finds this collection:

​Within these pages lay the account of my search for the answers to the greatest question in human history. The question pertains to the origin, breadth, and future of a secret collective of powerful individuals who single handedly run the extent of the known human world. These individuals, while existing on the fringes of society, are able to manipulate the core propulsions of civilization from the protective shroud of anonymity. To ignore them is to assure their power, to defy them is to guarantee your death.


​Charlie slammed the book shut, drained his coffee and left the diner. He could feel eyes upon him as he drifted down the street. Finally, after a few hours of mindless wandering, after the feeling the effects of sheer exhaustion he decided to return to his apartment.
​He was greeted to the sight of bright orange flames pouring out of the windows of his building.
​He stumbled stupefied into the crowd of onlookers and watched his home burn. The feeling of eyes on him returned and he turned his head to scan the crowd. Mostly he saw the slack-jawed faces of shock, but peppered throughout were dark faces turned toward him shrouded in flickering shadows. He lowered his head and slinked from the crowd. He stripped his reflective vest and flung it into a dumpster, retreating to the darkness once more.
​He spent the night in a homeless shelter after a few hours of zigzagging through the streets, doing his best to determine he wasn’t being followed. A few hours till sunset, he was spent. He dared not enter a hotel, for fear of being tracked somehow. The buzzing light of the shelter caught his eye, he collapsed on a cot in the middle of a large room full of the stink of unwashed bodies. He curled up, clutching the journal tightly to his chest and dimly slept.

​The shock continued over the next three days. He lived off of fast food and in a scrambling state of constant motion. The fear of being still gripped him and dragged him through the streets, the red book clutched in his hand. His panic subsided enough on the fourth day to crack the book open again and read further. It was a tangled web of symbols and connections to arcane history. The more he read the deeper he was drawn in. Each factoid led to multiple strings of probabilities and striking conclusions. He spent the rest of the week in a library checking references and facts, then when he began to draw his own conclusions and adding his scribblings and footnotes, he realized he was dropping deep down the rabbit hole.
​The book was his driver, the roots of the mystery his master. The thin claws of obsession sank deeper and deeper. The twisted cycle of mystery, evidence, truth, mystery pulled at his sanity, like being on a merry-go-round that spun faster and faster. The fabric of his reality was fraying and restructuring at a rapid rate. The more the book opened his eyes to the more he had to abandon things he held as fact, and as a result he could fully believe or trust nothing. He read on:
​

​While The Order has a large military component, they are largely an economic presence. They are a conglomerate of conglomerates. They hold a monopoly on oligopolies. In this way, by massively complicated funneling of monies, they can control everything from butter to bullets…

​In 1979 The Order launched a secret war in Bolivia to eliminate the head of a large multinational mining corporation that was the de facto despot of the country. Under the guise of a cultural revolution, agents of The Order eliminated the CEO inflicting a legitimate civil war in the country. As a consequence copper prices skyrocketed as the corporation was restructured and distributed and cannibalized by the various factions and mining operations shut down. Before and during the coup The Order placed themselves in position to take advantage of the new copper market, thus inflating their war chest threefold. These funds are evidenced by the massive transfers of funds as listed below…

​The internet was the dawning of new age for mankind. However, it was a secret tool of The Order since the early thirties. The handheld devices we take for granted are dinosaurs compared to the biotech implants now in use by agents of The Order. You can see the pattern in the companies who hold the patents for these devices by viewing the following government websites listed below…

​The rectangle holds a massive symbolic importance to The Order. It simultaneously represents both the cradle, representing our birth, as well as a coffin, death. The simplicity of the rectangle as a symbol of a worldwide organization of global influence leads many to disbelief, but this is also by design. It allows the symbol to be hidden in plain sight, for all the world to see. Agents of The Order can use it to communicate and display safehouses and bases of operation with greater efficiency. If you find yourself in the presence of an individual of dark nature, and he hands you a blank business card, self defense should immediately be at the forefront of your mind. Every brick of a building, every doorway or block of sidewalk cement, every book, is a subliminal message. Proof of the breadth of The Order’s reach is the fact that all flags of internationally recognized countries are rectangles.


​These accusations were wild and disorganized, but when Charlie rented a hotel room and strung out a timeline with lines of red yarn, the web became clear. Thus he came to the end of the trail. The last entry of the book was a detailed description of a series of mathematical equations and a matrix of value sets that took Charlie the remainder of the second week to decode. The numbers were garnered from historical dates and names of important figures. The final result was a series of map coordinates that led, with pinpoint accuracy, to a large skyscraper downtown.
​So standing there on the street corner, Charlie took a final look at the building. He realized that the structure that had seemed to be tapered was actually just a series of increasingly smaller rectangles stretching towards the sky. He crossed the street.
​The lobby of the building was incredibly bright. White lights seared his eyes and he had to squint until they adjusted. The filthy clothes had been living in contrasted starkly to his pristine surroundings. Soft music draped the air. The sound of water trickling down a large rectangle slab of black marble added to a feeling of peace and serenity. The woman sitting behind the desk was as strikingly perfect as his surroundings.
​She peered at Charlie as he crossed the room through black rimmed lenses, rectrangle frames. Her long blonde hair draped over her shoulder. She sat motionless as he stopped before the desk. He swallowed. She made no motion, her face like a porcelain mask. Charlie reached into his pocket and removed a folded piece of yellow lined paper. He slid it across the shimmering marble desk with dirty hands. She waited until Charlie’s hand had returned to his side before reaching with a delicate thin fingers. She unfolded the scrap of paper and continued to have no expression as she stared at the crudely drawn shape that was scrawled on it.
​Across the room an elevator binged, and its doors slid open.

​The elevator was dark yet filled with warmth. The back wall was glass and behind a pane of glass was a renaissance period painting of a beam of white light bursting through the clouds and burning a line of fire through a landscape of darkness. Huddling figures cowered from the devastation. There were no buttons to select a floor and when the doors closed, the elevator sprang to life with disturbing swiftness. When the disorientation of acceleration dissipated Charlie nervously ran his fingers over his dirty clothes and composed himself. He looked out the glass wall and saw the expanse of the city. The speed of his assent created the illusion of the vast metropolis fleeing from him.
​Within minutes, the box he was riding in began to slow and his journey to the top of the sky was complete. A flat pleasant tone sounded and the doors swung silently open. Terror swept his body.
​He stepped forward. The room was vast. To either side of him were ruined statues of a forgotten age. The figures were soldiers donning war helmets and holding large rectangular shields. Their blank stone eyes stared into him, the features of the face ravaged by erosion. Lining the walls of the long wide room were rich oil paintings of battles fought before recorded time depicting soldiers dressed as the stone sentries beside him.
​The floor was dark wood and seamless, set into it was a silver border of an elongated rectangle that started at the entrance of the elevator and ran a hundred feet to the base of desk across the room. Sitting behind the desk was an old man in a dark suit, his hair shock white. He sat motionless, his hands folded under his chin, his expression blank. Behind the figure were large windows, filled with the night sky. He stepped into the outlined shape and started walking. His tattered sneakers squeaked loudly in the silence.
​His hands dug desperately onto the thick red book, held slightly in front of him like a talisman. His jaw grit against itself, all sources of moisture left his mouth.
​The desk the man was sitting behind was sleek and dark and shimmering, seeming to rise seamlessly from the dark floor. The surface of the desk was bare and as Charlie approached he could see it was a large illuminecent screen. Images flickered across it to faster than Charlie’s mind could process. He could now see the old man behind the desk was about sixty years old, and in excellent shape. He sat motionless, his eyes closed, his hands folded neatly over his mouth, his elbows resting on the desk. Soft light from the desk strobed across his features. Charlie stopped just short of the desk, the man’s cologne filled his nose.
​The man’s eyes snapped open, grey and sad. The images on the desk blinked out. Charlie’s heart slammed to a stop.
​“Have a seat.” The man said. His voice sounded like a frosty glass of water. His hand slowly extended. Behind Charlie a chair similarly fashioned as the desk rose silently from the floor.
​Charlie sat, his arms wrapped around the red book now as if it were a life preserver.
​The desk reactivated, scattered documents winked to life on its surface. The man inhaled deeply and let it out slowly. He calmly arranged the digital documents across his desk, deliberately taking his time. When he was satisfied he looked up again at Charlie, who was waiting with the patience of the terrified.
​“Poole, Charlie. Twenty-seven years old. Airport baggage handler. Criminal history, clean. Mental history, clear. Physical condition, strong. Slight allergy to peanuts.”
​Charlie fidgeted.
​“It says here that you are an avid bowler.”
​Charlie nodded.
​“Well mister Poole, how can I help you?”
​Charlie wondered that himself. This display of power had made an impression, and it was clear that this had been a paltry display. Charlie’s mind blanked, what the f**k am I doing here? He wondered.
​The man sat patiently leaning on one elbow his other arm extended, long fingers wrapped across the edge of the table.
​“I found this book.” Charlie said. “It belonged to the man who lived across the hall from me.”
​“Yes, his name was Bernie Winters. He was a remarkable man.”
​“He’s dead.”
​“Yes.”
​“Did he work for you?”
​“No.”
​Charlie nodded. “Is it real, the things that are written in here? Is this book accurate?”
​“Ninety-percent.”
​Charlie leaned back in shock. “You, you belong to a secret society called ‘The Order’?”
​“Yes.”
​“Your group rules the world?”
​“We provide a firm hand of guidance.”
​Charlie’s thoughts stumbled, “How…but…”
​“You’ve read Mr. Winter’s account.”
​“Yes.”
​“Then you are aware of our methods.”
​“Yeah, but, but…”
​“Mr. Poole, I am incredibly busy.”
​“How do you do it? These things, your methods?”
​“They are necessary to preserve order”
​“But you’ve destroyed so many lives. You’ve collapsed entire countries. You start wars.”
​“Order is paramount above all things. Unfortunately, the price of order is extraordinarily high.”
​Charlie could feel his fear subside as he eased into the absurdity of the situation and their conversation. He began to get angry at the man sitting across from him. Angry at the calmness of his confessions.
​“You’re a monster. You’re human filth. You sit in this ivory tower and rule over humanity like we’re insects. How can you be so callous? You claim to preserve order, yet your order consists of orchestrating wars and famine and the destruction of countless lives. You are the personification of human misery. You’re a f*****g parasite.”
​“Did you come all this way to simply brow beat me Mr. Poole?”
​A stark realization struck Charlie. “I’m not going to leave here alive am I?”
​“On the contrary, you will leave here and lead a long, long life.”
​“But the things I know. The complete inner workings of your organization. The information in this book can prove it. If I’m free to leave, why did you burn down my apartment?”
​“Firstly, an alcoholic woman with a bad habit of falling asleep while smoking destroyed your home.
​“Secondly, yes, it is true that our existence can be proved with the information you hold. However, you never stopped to think about how that information was correlated. You have had this information provided to you in a single lump, you did nothing but confirm it. You existed with it totally in a whirlwind of fourteen days, but you never stopped to think of how Mr. Winters came upon it himself. The answer is that this information is provided to anyone with the inclination and persistence to find it.
​“This is by design. The vast majority of people in this world are blinded by life’s trivialities, soaring ambition or crippling apathy. The people who are inclined to find the trail of breadcrumbs are those who have a sharp sense of intuition but cannot function in common society. They have rejected society and in turn are rejected. Thus when they correlate enough facts and attempt to spread their message, they are largely ignored. We hide in the open.
​“Compounding this, we have people in the television and film production industries who using material based on fact further stretch the character of the conspiracy theorist into a more ridiculous figure.”
​“No,” Charlie said, “People will listen, they have to. You and your people have to be stopped.”
​“As I have said, you are more than welcome to try, using any method at your disposal.”
​Charlie fidgeted. “Maybe I could just kill you. Here and now.”
​For the first time the man’s face showed emotion, excitement. “You would?”
​Fear washed over Charlie once again. “This is a trick.”
​With the veneer broken the man’s poise faltered. “I know how my situation looks. I understand that you see the large building, the unchecked influence, the unimaginable power and you see a nothing but a positive situation. You see my world as one of bottomless wealth and Roman decadence. The reality, Mr. Poole, is brutal disparity.”
​Charlie snorted.
​“How old do you think I am Mr. Poole?”
​“I would say Fifty-five, sixty.”
​“I am two hundred years old.”
​Initially, with the darkness of the vast room and the intensity of their conversation Charlie had been unable to see the man’s face for how he truly appeared. Deep lines etched his face and large bags sagged under his eyes. The skin on his face was drooping. He looked like every miserable old man he had ever seen. Yet despite this, he did not have the ravages of age that being two hundred year old man would bring to mind.
​“We have been genetically designed through careful breeding and technological efforts to age at one-eighth the rate of a regular person. We are as near immortal as a human being could possibly achieve. Think about that Mr. Poole, honestly realize the implications of this fact. I have been at the seat of power for nine generations. I have seen and experienced near everything that a human is able to experience. If it weren’t for the intergalactic restrictions on interplanetary travel, my compatriots and I would have left this world years and years ago. This shiny blue ball is barren to me. I live only to serve.
​“Have you any idea the complexity of my work, the amount of hours it takes to accomplish my goals. Plans involving the recent population surges in Asia, necessary to fuel the future wars, necessary to cement the emerging global economy, necessary to handle the influx of dramatically advanced new technology, necessary for the eventual increase of global quality of life by 1%, have been shattered by the sudden evolution of a new type of fungus that infects wheat, which threatens to lower global food supplies to levels which in turn could trigger these controlled future wars years ahead of schedule. I have not slept in the past three days, tirelessly working on a solution with my compatriots.
​“You came here to find the truth, to see the mighty rulers of your domain. Well look! See the truth!”
​The surrounding dimness was suddenly blasted away by glaring brightness. The paintings, the walls, the view of the night sky were gone. There was just Charlie, the man and his desk, sitting in the middle of a giant empty space. Instead of the dark hardwood floor there were four walls, floor, and ceiling of water stained cement.
​“Behold the truth Mr. Poole! See what you came to see! This impressively sparse lair you believed us to be in was nothing more than an illusion controlled by the vast biomechanical implants that litter my body. They connect me to every known source of information on and surrounding the planet. Every theft, assault, rape, and murder is funneled in directly to my mind. There is no dark place for me to hide. No comforting blanket of ignorance to shield me from the naked savagery our race inflicts upon itself. I see the creatures of our race as they truly are and understand how flimsy the illusion of civilization is.”
​Charlie blinked. The man’s face turned bright red for a brief second and then flushed back to his natural pale. The man continued his tirade.
​“You common people think of us as leeches, parasites on your precious civilization, which by the way we gave you.” The room winked back into its previous darkness, behind the man and over his head was displayed a painting of a white clad soldiers and scholars emanating from all corners of the world exchanging gifts such as steel, ocean navigation, mathematics, and standardized currency.
​“We are the ones who hold all power and influence. We do assume a certain level of privilege. What you people fail to see is that we are also as much a slave to this system as you are.”
​At this Charlie finally broke the tenseness of the man’s furious whirlwind with a scoff.
​The man stiffened. “Oh yes Mr. Poole, we feel the strain of this situation just as you do. Your insolence is understandable you have never felt the force of true power. There is no turning back once you have tasted the fruits of never-ending frenetic orgies. I have changed the economic plight of billions of people with a simple pen stroke. How can a person leave his position when he was started wars that rage across a planet? Yet, while I can stay at this position until death, it can still be taken from me. Global collapse would seal my doom as well as yours. Or worse, slight global decline, removing hard gained privilege from new innovations, or the wait of forecasted privilege by the delay of technology.
​“Yes Mr. Poole. How else do you account for the meteoric rise of technology in the past few decades? It was because we are bored.”
​“Even after all I have seen and been exposed to tonight and in the past few weeks sir, I find it hard that you see yourself as a victim.” Charlie said.
​“Still you doubt.” The man said, pressing his face into his hands.
​Above the man’s head a live video feed burst to life. It showed a man with a similarly weathered face staring ahead blankly. “Hello Carl. Found yourself another conspiracy theorist have we?” The floating picture said.
​The man did not turn to greet the floating face behind him. “Yes Franz, except he has been having a hard time understand the fineries of our situation.”
​Franz’s sad eyes, magnified by the size of his digital manifestation, turned to Charlie and were there admitted as evidence of their own. “I envy you Mr. Poole,” the face said. “I envy you and pity you. Your ignorance sir, you blessed gift of not knowing, to you the world can still be a beautiful place. I highly advise you to turn and walk out of here now, while your blessed fog of unknowledge is still intact.”
​Charlie’s face scrimped as he leaned back into his chair.
​The man turned his head ever so slightly. “Thank you Franz,” he said. “Now how can I help you?
​“In finding a solution to this wheat situation, I may need to start a small war in south east Europe.”
​“Yes, fine.”
​“Oh and Jean-Luc thinks he has located God.”
​The man let out a deep sigh. “It’s not headed this way is it?”
​Franz made the mildest of shrugs.
​“Thank you Franz.”
​The video feed winked out. Charlie swallowed.
​“Mr. Poole, I have no more desire to try to make you understand. This conversation is over. You can believe me or not, I no longer care. Please leave.”
​The man placed his face back into his hands. The desk winked back into the flickering pictures as it was when Charlie first entered. An intense need to leave washed over Charlie and he stood up from his chair. He turned and walked back down the long walkway. He turned as the elevator doors opened and took a final look at the strange old man lit only by the flickering light from his desk. He entered the elevator and stared out at the shining lights of the city as they rushed up to meet him.
​
​The next morning he woke up and checked in with his job. He was informed that he was no longer employed. He went to his bank to withdraw some money to pay for his hotel room and found that it was mysteriously brimming with money. The amount was nothing opulent, but over the years no matter how much he withdrew, the balance remained the same. With this new revelation, the desire to work left him totally and his obsession with The Order was enflamed.
​He filed his careful observance with the secret organization in the thick red journal, replacing old accounts with the new. With each revelation, a tiny bit of magic was removed from his life. Periodically, he would try to expose them, even going so far as to try to buy ad time on local radio stations. To the few people who knew him, he quickly became a joke. This continued unabated until one day, as an old man, Charlie felt his will to live begin to ebb…

Author's Note

If you liked this please comment. If you hated it, let me know what sucked.