The Youth Manifesto (part 1)
'It's 5:00 pm. It's almost time.'
His twitching knees, seizing as if with the intention of generating electricity, stopped, and he slowly raised his face from his twining arms. 'Go, then. Make the arrangements,' he said, pushing back from the table. He squeezed his eyelids and listened to the wet rubbing sound with some amusement.
His hands left his eyes blurry and went up, stretching him into a bodily yawn. He froze mid-motion and looked quizzically around the table at their hunched backs and concerned expressions. 'Is something wrong?' His elbows fell to the table surface, collapsing under their extinguished momentum, like a rubber band released.
'Step Z,' one of them volunteered, weary, voice shaking. He tapped a small notebook in front of him with his pencil. 'We've been through them all but one.' He shrugged, working the knots from his shoulders.
The first guy had his eyes fixed where the pencil landed, as though just noticing it. 'You're going to make sure those notes never existed, aren't you?' he said. They all looked at the offending article. 'We agreed that all communication or information will be limited to our own app. Never be seen using it in public. Never be heard talking about it in public (for now). And don't write anything down.'
He searched the gathering left and right; they were all nodding. A grandfather clock was ticking across the room, knocking ominously between their ears. The long brass pendulum, deftly tended by a temporal Charon, stroked this way and that like an oar, sweeping the old dead moments away. He smiled at the resemblance. A worn rush mat covered the floor of that room, short of the rest of the tiny flat. The walls were bare, stained, some cracked, fault-lines revealing the rough greyness of cement that once bound them united. In the street outside, by way of the open balcony, the play and shouting of kids could be heard.
'Yes, but Step Z?' the guy insisted, checking his watch. 'Come on, man. We're losing time now.'
'No, we're not.' He got up, prompting them to do the same, and did a couple of fractional squatting movements to smooth down his jeans. 'Leave that one to me.' He smiled. 'And relax a little, you look like shit.'
'An hour from now then.' The one nearest the door said, opening the old chapped wooden thing and gesturing them through to a dark stairwell. It was his late grandfather's flat, so he stayed behind, along with our guy, whom they called by the nickname Maxim, the brain behind the most of it.
'We've hatched a plan to overthrow the elders from inside one of their apartments,' he said, joining his friend Maxim at the head of the table.
'Everything is theirs, and that's the whole issue. Property, money, narrative.' He picked up his soda and drained the last of it. 'Life itself. We would only have a whack at living when they were all dead and we had inherited their wealth and shook off their influence, unless we did what we are about to do.'
'Why does this feel so easy, though? Almost like another multiplayer online game.' He punched him in the shoulder, not too hard. 'And you're the boss.'
'Nah, some of them were stressed as hell; you're just the maniac.' Maxim rubbed the site of the blow. 'Don't call me boss, Amir; we're all brothers and sisters in this. Maxim is fine; it was my online gaming name as well.'
'See, that's the problem. I told you, and I still think, they'll try to spin it as communism to the people in order to justify dismissing it. That's all they need to do to band every one of theirs against us, by showing them how we threaten the flowers on their manacles. Not them, mind you—there would be nothing new to most citizens having a lowly status if that was our campaign—but the promises of a reward bonus life to recompense them for the one they wasted,' Amir said. He leaned lightly against the table and shrugged. 'If you so much as feint an attempt to lift that veil of deluded consolation, you'll invite people to leap off the ground and tear you to pieces. It's nowhere near our purpose to take away anyone's faith, but that's what they'll make it look like.' He looked at his friend staring stoically in the direction of the balcony. 'Your name, meaning "the greatest", isn't helping either. Hell, my name means prince and it might compound our trouble!' He shook his head, and tapped his fingers on the edge of the table. 'You know how they peddle their propaganda, and those are all the pieces they would need. And we're simply handing them over.'
'Not simply; you would first have to be caught for them to know your name; and my nickname should easily remain a secret,' Maxim said, heading over to the balcony. 'We'll confuse the shit out of them because we won't be offering leaders that can be struck down and smeared. Instead, we're presenting a new process, a mechanism for change, with enough leverage to make it happen, or at least to make a bang with a tenacious, lasting effect on the discourse. For every person who adopts or considers our ideas, a tiny Maxim and Amir will be born in their mind. That's how we replicate. That's how we go viral. And before they know it, they will have Maxims and Amirs everywhere to contend with. In every house and family, every company and small business, every university.' He put his arm high up on one of the open doors and rested his forehead on it, looking outside. 'If the short-term, acute change doesn't work, we still win the long-term battle, as the natural turn-over of generations happen.'
Amir came up beside him, folding his arms. 'The genie is out of the bottle.'
'Most of our poor generation are only following the obsolete narrative of the elders because they haven't heard of any other alternatives. But this... this will spark a curious overturn of the table.'
They stood there, peeking over the guardrail of the small, decrepit balcony from within the aridly furnished flat. The bad design of the poor neighborhood had the ugly red-brick-walled back of another tenement facing them, blocking out any view of sky and sun. On both sides of that, the row of housing continued in motley—some of them facing the right way round, windows and sun-shaded balconies with laundry lines hanging their slack charges in windless evening, and others devoted to the next street, interrupting the austerely dull glimmers of life—like a line of morse code.
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