Omega: Echoes of the Bloodgame
Prologue
The Zero Hour
English translation by Claude – to be reviewed by the author and a native speaker
I haven't spoken in a long time, and I'm only now noticing that you forget how.
Not the words. They're all there; if anything, they lie too close together. What you forget is the order. That you start at the front, then keep going, and bring someone along who doesn't yet know what you have known for a long time. I've practiced it here, often, with no one, and every time it fell apart in the middle. Once I told it back to front for three days and didn't notice.
Now, for the first time, someone is sitting there. So interrupt me if I jump.
My name is Sabir. I'm saying it because no one has said it in a very long time, not even me, and because I want to know whether it's still true.
I was 25 on the morning I'm going to tell you about. Before that I kept the air clean in apartment towers and shops, filters and shafts, and I was good at it. That's all there is of the rest of me, and I only say it so it's clear that there was something before.
Apart from me, there is no one left who saw the world before. There were 104 of us, and I'm what's left. The others were found over the years, one after another, and at some point I stopped keeping count of the names, because the counting made me restless and because a wrong number is worse than none.
I have no clock here and no sun, and no one getting older that I could measure it by. If I had to say how long I've been here, I would be lying, and I've made up my mind not to do that as long as I still have someone I could lie to.
And now I have someone.
Everyone knows Mecca. Every book has the same date, and nothing before it. The first incident, they say. The zero hour.
That isn't true. It isn't a lie; no one was clever enough for that. It's just wrong.
It had happened before. A bus at an intersection, whose driver talked afterward about questions on a wall and was declared ill for it. A classroom on a Friday morning, and in between, years and countries whose languages had nothing to do with each other. There was no word for it, so no one saw a pattern, only isolated accidents. They were never solved, and people stopped looking. There were people who said it anyway, on the wrong shows, in the wrong voice, and they were laughed at.
I laughed along.
I only put it together after many years, and it took that long because no one was looking for it, me least of all. It gets said here and then not again, because on that morning it wouldn't have changed anything. It only changes what you think of a world that let that morning happen.
What I'm going to tell you isn't the beginning. It's the first time that was too big to explain away, and after that no one looked back anymore.
May 8, 2173 — Mecca, Saudi Arabia
It smells of soap, and that's how you know it's a feast day.
For 30 days we had fasted, and that morning it was over, and in a city where more than three million people gathered for Eid al-Fitr, that meant: Everyone had washed. Everyone was wearing something that had never been worn before. You smell soap, rosewater, oud from indoors, and cardamom, because coffee was being brewed everywhere, and over all of it lies the smell of too many people in a warm place, which isn't unpleasant when you're one of them.
I couldn't describe my mother's face to you anymore. But when oud is burning somewhere, I'm standing next to her.
My mother had fasted straight through. She didn't have to; she was 68 and had a heart the doctors explained in two sentences, neither of them reassuring, but she had done it, and that morning she wanted me to know. She said it three times on the way. The third time I didn't answer anymore, because I was tired and because you know which of your mother's sentences you don't have to rise to.
She didn't hold it against me. She looked at me and said she had waited eleven years for me, eleven years and two children who didn't stay, and that this was why she had named me Sabir. The one who endures. She said that back then she had thought the name was for me.
Then she said she had been wrong, the name had been for her, and she laughed about it. It had taken her thirty years to notice.
That is the last sentence I have from her. My last thought about her was impatience over a sentence she was right to say three times. Both are true, and the one doesn't make the other any better.
A little after six, the sun stood at an angle that turned the courtyard golden. It's a very particular gold; it comes from the stone and from the dust in the air, and anyone who has seen it once looks for it everywhere afterward and never finds it again. A sea of white moved around a black cube, slowly, counterclockwise, the way it had moved for almost a millennium and a half. It was loud and yet not restless. A crowd of that size has a rhythm, and at some point you stop being a single person, and that is why you come.
At 6:41, the light flickered.
Not the lamps. The light itself, for a fraction of a second, like a picture when something catches in the projector. A few people in the front rows looked up. Most kept praying, because you're inside the movement and because in a crowd you don't stop.
My mother looked up. She tugged at my sleeve.
At 6:42, it tore open.
It starts in the middle.
A point, no wider than a hand, and it doesn't glow. That's the first thing that's wrong. It's violet, but no light comes out of it; light goes in, and the air around it looks like water someone has dropped ink into. The front rows recoil. They don't get far, because behind them stand 2,000 people who haven't seen anything yet.
Then a circle runs across the ground. The line goes through the columns, and through the people just the same.
A man reaches out toward his daughter, and his hand never arrives on the other side. It isn't severed. There's simply no way there anymore.
The circle isn't big. That's the next thing that's wrong. I'm standing in a courtyard that holds more people this morning than I have ever seen at once in my life, and suddenly there are only the ones standing inside this line with me. The rest are gone—not dead, just not there anymore, the way the piece of courtyard beyond the line isn't there anymore. How many of us there are, I still don't know exactly. A few tens of thousands. A city, not a country.
That there were 104 circles like it that morning, I didn't know then, and no one who was inside one could have known. You can't see from one room into the next.
And then the first row disappears.
Not the very front one, the one at the point. A row in the middle of the crowd, about level with where I'm standing, 30 paces to my left. They're there, and then they're not there anymore, and there's no sound to go with it. The place where they stood is empty, and the people behind them fall into the gap, because they're still moving.
The crowd doesn't grasp it. It can't grasp it; it's too big, news takes minutes to cross it, and minutes are too long here. At the front, they've seen it. At the back, no one has noticed anything yet, and the procession keeps going, because it has always kept going.
My mother tugs at my sleeve again, and this time she doesn't want to talk, she wants to keep walking, because to keep walking is what you do here.
I hold on to her.
To this day I don't know why. It wasn't an insight; I hadn't understood anything, and I hadn't decided anything. I just stand there, and she pulls, and I hold her by the wrist, and around us more people are moving than one person can count.
Two rows over, the next group disappears. Then one behind us.
It takes me a long time to see it, and I only see it because I'm standing still: it takes the ones who walk.
Whoever moves is gone. Whoever stands still stays.
And every single person here came this morning to walk. They're here because you walk around this cube. The game punishes exactly the thing they made the journey for, and no one told them, because no one says anything here. There's no voice and no board with rules. There's only a condition, and you learn it as it passes you by.
I start screaming. I scream stand still, and then again, and I don't know how many people can hear me, maybe 40, maybe 300. A few stand still. A few stand still and get shoved from behind, and then they're gone, because being shoved and walking are the same thing.
You can't stand still in a crowd like that. That's the whole joke. The rule isn't hard, it isn't hidden, after ten minutes anyone can see it—and it cannot be kept, because in a crowd of that size you are not your own master.
My mother tears herself free.
I don't think she misunderstood me. I think she wanted to get to the Kaaba, because she had fasted for 30 days and because her heart was the way it was, and because that morning she knew exactly what she had come for. She takes two steps.
On the second, she isn't there anymore.
Why I didn't hold on tighter.
That's the question, and it's the right one. I've been asked it a hundred times, mostly by myself. I had her wrist, and a wrist is thin, and I was 25 and had strength in my hands, because I needed it for my work.
I let go because she wanted me to. That's the whole answer. It's worth nothing, and I don't have a better one, and anyone who has a better one wasn't standing there.
I stand. I stand for two hours and 19 minutes, and what happens around me in that time I won't tell, because it doesn't help anyone and because I can't put it in order. It comes in waves. You don't hear it when a wave goes, you only hear that it's quieter afterward.
And at some point I'm the only one still standing.
In that minute, something comes into me.
It has no shape and makes no sound, it doesn't hurt, and that's the part no one believed me about later. It's like a weight you don't have to carry. Something is there that wasn't there before; it's on my side, and it listens in. I thought it was God. I was 25 and standing alone in a place where tens of thousands had stood an hour before, and something warm stepped up behind me, and I thought it was God.
What it was, I don't need to tell you.
I've believed both, often on the same day, and in the end I settled on nothing.
The cube comes late.
This is the thing nobody understood, and it matters, so listen closely here. In everything that came after Mecca, a black cube hovered over the room from the first minute on, big enough that you can read the rules from the ground. That's how everyone knows it. That's how it's written in the regulations, that's how the people who go in there today are taught it: Read first, then everything else.
In my room, it wasn't there.
Not at the start, not after an hour. I only saw it once the crowd had grown thin—and thin is a word I use because the right one doesn't exist. Then all at once it was there above the middle, above the spot where the point had opened. Black, bigger than a house, and turning slowly on its axis.
If it had been there from the start, every one of us would have read it before taking the first step.
Later I asked everyone who was left. No one saw it early.
What was written on it was two lines.
Whoever walks is taken.
I already knew that one by then. It had been watching me for two hours.
The host dies—or the last one survives.
Not this one.
I read it and couldn't make anything of it. Host. A word from medicine, from host animal and host cell, and neither of those was standing in a courtyard that morning. There was no test, no lists, no security gates—no one in the world could have told you who it meant.
Today they call the blood Omega. In 2173 it had no name, because no one could measure it yet.
They asked me a hundred times, and a hundred times I said the same thing: there was a condition written there, and we would have had to find someone for it.
We didn't find one. There was no one there.
So the other thing happened.
At 9:01, the zone dissolved.
There was no sound to it. Suddenly the courtyard was much bigger than the piece I had been standing in. The columns stood, the black cube stood—the real one, the big one, the one that always stands there.
And far apart, in places I hadn't been able to see before, others were standing and lying. I didn't count them. The number came later: 104.
I didn't realize I was one of them. I went on standing for quite a while, because I was afraid it still applied.
Of all the rest, nothing was left. Not even a shoe. It was checked many times, with instruments and with dogs, and the result stayed the same.
Only blood. Everywhere.
It didn't come from people, because there were no people lying there. It ran down the walls in thin streaks, slowly, out of the stone itself, as if someone had wounded the building. It stood on the flagstones. It ran down the cube before the cube disappeared.
Outside, they saw it the whole time, for two hours and 19 minutes, and with every person it took there was more of it. From the inside, none of it could be seen. I stood in a dry courtyard the whole time.
And it smelled of nothing. I only noticed once it was over. No rosewater, and not even the people standing next to me. A courtyard with that many people breathing in it smells. Mine smelled of nothing from the first minute on, and for two hours I didn't notice, because you can't smell nothing.
104 circles. One out of each.
And all 104 carried Omega.
The statisticians worked on that number for a long time and never got to the end of it. They calculated, then checked the tests, then calculated again, and after a few years they stopped explaining the number and started using it.
No one ever explained it to me, and I don't ask anymore. Whoever stood still stayed. That was the rule I had seen, and it saved me that morning, and that's where it has stayed.
Sometimes I think I remembered the second line wrong. It was two hours and 19 minutes, and at the end of that you remember a lot of things wrong.
What happened to the other 103 in those hours, I know from transcripts I read years later, in a waiting room, without anyone knowing that I am one of them. The rules weren't the same in all 104 rooms, except for one line. Some had three, one had seven, mine had two. That one line was in every room, and in every room it came second. By the fourth transcript, it was no longer a copying error.
An electrician from Morocco had to answer questions on a wall and got it right eleven times.
At the electrician, I stopped reading. I knew that sentence about the wall, and only half a page later did it come to me where from. Then I thought of a bus driver whose name I never learned, and of how he had been right and was declared ill for it. No one ever tested him. The test didn't exist back then.
A girl from Indonesia wasn't allowed to stop singing and knew 16 songs. And an old imam from Russia, after two weeks of silence, said one sentence and after that nothing more until he died.
I prayed. But God wasn't there. Only the game.
People made everything out of that sentence that could be made out of it. The believers read it as a trial, the others as proof, and both sides forgot the old man, who meant by it that he was alone.
I understood him. That morning I had something standing behind me and was alone all the same, and that is worse than when no one is there.
After that, things moved fast. Blood tests became mandatory, first for civil servants, then for schoolchildren, then for everyone, and anyone who refused lost their job first. Mosques, churches, and synagogues got security gates, guards, and lists. For Friday prayers you needed an appointment and proof. It took about eight years for that to look normal.
And it didn't stop. It only got small. A stairwell, a waiting room, a parking garage, somewhere every few weeks. Most of these rooms open and close again, and a few people come out. What a room demands, it chooses for itself—a stairwell can set a condition a whole country would fail. But a stairwell holds twenty people, and twenty people can stand still. Three million can't. Over the decades that has added up to ten thousand people, maybe more, who were inside and came back out. You can ask them. They appear on shows, they write books, they know what it looks like inside.
Of the 104 from Mecca, I'm the last one. That's a distinction people mix up all the time.
People stopped keeping count. It was the same with traffic deaths. You know then that it happens; only where, you never know. You can live with that, and people do live with it. They sell pendants for it that don't do anything, and people wear them anyway, because you want something in your hand when there's nothing you can do.
And above the doors of the buildings they wouldn't let us into, in the end the same sentence stood in every language, neatly printed, on signs, in frames:
Entry for humans only.
What people wrote in paint on the walls beneath them at night was less neat and more honest:
Do not enter if your blood is awake.