Photo: Lucie Bluebird-Lexington
Sometimes it’s all in the genre…
Obligatory Forward
Three thousand years have passed since the dawn of the current age. Yet we have not exited the Renaissance, and the entire world got to the Renaissance at the exact same time. In another three thousand years, historians will know when the unraveling began, where the excesses of the moment grew too much and the Great Balancer of the world, lion, the Fates, (the synonym for some kind of God figure that’s never going to be expressly mentioned), will place his fulcrum and tip everything the other way. All to be unwound, unlearned, unknown. Like a seesaw, but epic.
But we do not know yet where that fulcrum will go, and whether the boy, for it is always a boy, fated to move the very lever of time itself, will succeed. Because it’s always fated and never just something some woman somewhere just gets done.
The “Random” Beginning
On this day, a boy named Patrick, who in the way of his clan, took as a surname the occupation of his grandfather’s grandfather‘s grandfather‘s grandfather, Smith, is graduating from the school of the protectors.
Gone, long gone, are the days of justice by combat, where wrongs were righted by the might of one sword arm, and punishment was doled out to only those who could buy the strength of that arm.
Since that time, a league of protectors arose in many a country. First, they arose as the arm of kings on a small island in the northern ocean whose fingers circled the globe. They swiftly followed across the pond where Patrick’s ancestors were so hopeful for their descendants. Where the protectors started mainly as a force to corral runaway slaves, but we don’t talk about that.
Not to be confused with soldiers traveling to other lands to, um, also protect. For the ocean island, the soldiers wore scarlet and the protectors wore blue, making for an entirely different creature. Soldiers wore scarlet because that dye was the cheapest they could find and nobody else who wanted it, while the police wore blue because they had slightly better funding with huge collars to prevent garroting. An ocean away, the protectors and soldiers both wore blue because the protectors grew mighty in force after a great Civil War and they had a lot of leftover fabric.
Even when the kings were toppled and the slaves freed (mostly), the swords remained. And now, when those swords gave way to projectile weapons, they yet patrol the streets. Some say their protection is not worth the cost of their violence, and some say they are not the embodiment of justice but its opposite and shadow. And some say without protectors, neither justice nor injustice is possible, but only the might of a sword arm. This is but one question that may change the placement of the fulcrum that this 1000-page tome won’t weigh in on, because this is a fake world.
The reasons for their founding and for their colors have been lost to time, and even those now wearing their uniforms forget their antecedents. Including Patrick, son of son of son of son of a son of son of a random Smith, who is donning this uniform for the first time before a looking glass. He affixes his hat upon his golden curls and admires his bronze skin of ambiguous origins, or perhaps just a mysterious substance known as Spray Tan. He winks at himself in the glass with his piercing blue eyes, because they are always blue. And always pierce.
Then he marches out with the indistinguishable masses in identical uniforms and mostly identical origins, though the state would press hard for the fairer sex to join the ranks.(The fairer sex were rather more likely to find injustice than justice at their joining and so did so in far fewer numbers.) He has no inkling and no forewarning of the part he will play in the battle for the balance of the world.
His childhood best friend waves to Patrick as they enter the auditorium and says, “Yo, Smitty.”
The best friend, whose name we will not learn for another three episodes, is a descendent of the slaves who built this land, but that history will not show on his face, filled as it is with a perpetual smile and perpetual jokes solely dedicated to supporting his friend, except for one future episode during sweeps (where two female recruits will also randomly kiss each other) when he will lose his temper and be weirdly regretful for another two months.
The fulcrum of the world, the linchpin of the final battle, the key to whether all of humanity gets a future or not, looks back at his best friend and says, “What’s up?”
“Is Mona coming?” the best friend asks.
Mona is fair of face and the third childhood best friend, improbably still in touch well into their twenties, who, when they were six, married Patrick in a Central Park ceremony with an illegally plucked daisy bouquet. And is still in his life to ensure Smith is tempted away from his mission repeatedly, and potentially brings about the destruction of humanity.
They will rekindle and then torch a relationship that really ran its course in high school. But they will not figure that out for two more years until the on-again-off-again relationship with a forensic scientist is far more interesting because she is far fairer of face. And taller. And Mona will die in a fiery explosion, ensuring Patrick can Feel Things, and be set properly forth on his quest. For now, she is a source of simple pain to Patrick Smith, for they are indeed off again.
He answers, “She’s not coming.”
He is shushed by an usher as he walks into the artificially flickering bright lights of the auditorium, a technology that will be lost to time no matter where the fulcrum is placed, and greets his destiny, this ceremony being the first in an inevitable series of events leading to the final confrontation with the destroyer of worlds.