Six AM

"Six was when I first realized. Maybe realized is the wrong word. 

 Six was when I was first afraid it could be true. 

Seven was when I knew for sure, when I first truly believed."

The sun shone through the darkness of night as the earliest morning rays of light penetrated into the darkened world of Ardu Paumé.

Squinting open one eye awkwardly against the brightness to see what had brought him from his deep slumber into consciousness, Ardu reached up to wipe the fog of sleep away. Looking up at the table near his bedside, he saw that the old style red letter digital alarm clock read 6:00 AM precisely. Odd he thought, he hadn't set an alarm in over nine years. Not since... since he retired.

Normally Ardu was awakened by the first buses to work projects at 6:30 AM. Sometimes his father woke him earlier brewing a pot of coffee and starting breakfast. Ardu reached up to his eyes again, this time not to wipe away sleep, but tears. His father couldn't have woke him up today. He said softly as if to his father, "Père, tu es mort."

It had only been six days since the death of Croyant Paumé. He had died quietly in his sleep during his regular afternoon nap on the front porch. Thinking about the last week, Ardu stretched out his back and neck, still softly crying. His father's last words before heading out to the porch to sit were, "Maintenant, seigneur, tu laisses ton serviteur s'en aller en paix."

It seemed a little odd at the time, for such a loving dad to call his son lord and say he was being released in peace. Ardu chalked it up to one of Croyant's attempts to be ironic since the old fella had just finished cleaning the lunch dishes. Ardu had waived his hand pompously as if he were the Grand Lord Chancellor Commander himself, stiffening up in his armchair as if it were the Imperious throne and saying very commandingly, "Be gone!" Not the way he'd always hoped to bid his father a final goodbye after all this time. He couldn't help but remember the lifetime of memories his father had shared with him as he grew up. Ardu lay in bed, replaying the story of his father's great journey, which so unceremoniously ended just six days before.

An absolute oddity, at 91 Croyant was the last survivor of the Third World War, having fought for France in the United European Army. He was only 14 when it began and he was drafted by a street marshal into service. Having survived the series of Great Economic Collapses before the war as a child alone on the streets of Paris, Croyant was never formally educated but he learned enough there to survive. In his travels as a soldier he learned English, German and somehow Mandarin along the way, but he always, always spoke French. He taught his younger son everything he knew, that's how Ardu eventually came to be at the service of the American Lord Chancellor Commander and perhaps how the old Croyant had been spared when so many like him had perished long ago.

Three years after the war ended, when order in Europe was fully restored by the initial military coup and the overthrow of all the petty governments was complete, Croyant was assigned to a field office in what was once Belgium. It was there at 25 years old he met Envie and a year later she became his wife and soon the mother of his children.

Fier, the lost son, was born first, seven months after Croyant and Envie were married by the odd battalion Chaplain. They still married people back then and then they still had Chaplains. Chaplain Commander Selig Schüler performed the short ceremony smiling widely the whole time.

Croyant went to find Selig after the wedding to ask him what all that awful smiling had been about, because he feared the man knew of the pregnancy. It might not go well for a man about to be promoted to command to have such a thing well known. Selig had asked Croyant if he had even heard any of the ceremony, any of the truth about who he was in this life in his creator's eyes. He told the kind old disciple that this harsh world just didn't have any room for believing in a god. Selig had replied, "That's ok, He believes in you."

Over the next few years, the two men became the closest friends. Drinking beer, arguing life, playing pool, talking about this supposed deity, telling war stories, and watching the military they served in seize more and more control of daily life. Selig guided Croyant in his career as a young commander and he was thankful, but Croyant just didn't believe Selig's stories about a god who loved this world and sent his son to die for it. He would listen to them politely, but only to be able to hear the other stories about the wars and being a great commander. Selig asked occasionally, do you believe or not and Croyant gave his standard answer - this harsh world just has no room for believing in any god. The more he heard Selig's stories the more he thought he was right rather than Selig.

Selig had been in the infantry and the special forces before he became a Chaplain. He fought in the early Arab Wars as a fresh faced officer and by the time the conflict blossomed into the Third World War, he was a battle hardened Battalion Head. He would have become a Field Commander and even a Chancellor Commander someday, but for some reason when the Mandarin Pax was won he just up and retired and went back to his hometown of Dresden to find this god he always talked about.

He always said it had something to do with the sight of the ash heaps from the Brems Bombs. He led the landing forces that cleared Beijing afterward. New Imperial China and her daughter nations of United Korea, Vietnam, Reclaimed Japan and others still had nearly 3 billion people left even after the early famines, the Collapses, and the conventional fighting in the Arab Wars. Even now history showed it was still better to have used the breakthrough Brems weapons that only killed living tissue and left buildings and roads in place. It was later found the Alliance Powers had been planning an all out conventional nuclear strike on United Sovereign America and United Europe.

The subsequent counter strike and nuclear winter would have likely ended all life on earth if not at least left most of the planet a fallout zone for hundreds of years. The rads from the Brems were clear in weeks.

In less than a week after that, Selig's mixed European force of under 2,000 commandos cleared the capital city of stragglers that had somehow survived the initial surprise blasts. Similar mop up operations were conducted throughout Russia by the United Sovereign American forces.

The coordinated detonation of a few hundred neutrino accelerators (Brems as they were called - short for Bremsstrahling or braking radiation) was sufficient to reduce the whole of Asia to a few hundred thousand people in the flash of an eye. In the life of us all it was a decision to remove the better majority of the population willing to kill the whole earth or all die in a final cataclysm of meaningless violence. Tough decisions about who lives and dies are never easy, but they must be made for the greater good or so we tell ourselves.

Selig always said the only casualty on his team in the mop-up operation to the Beijing Braking was his own soul. Many of his troops took grand trophies and great loot of ancient treasures. The only thing he took as a 'prize' was a red leather covered book from a little forbidden house church where he found the ash heaps of a hundred or so people gathered together in kneeling positions. The book was in French and Mandarin and told everything about the one true god or so Selig told Croyant.

When he got back to Dresden, Selig found a few people who knew something about the book and started spending time with them. With his natural leadership and keen intellehct, within two years he guided the group of a dozen or so to become a church of more than five hundred. This might seem remarkable that there were even five hundred people in all of Dresden who believed in such things at all, but in the time before order was restored many clung to faith just out of fear and desperation.

When the united military declared complete power and overthrew all the governments, they reactivated Selig thinking he might even become a Chancellor Commander over what used to be a country. He instead refused and simply filed a request to be assigned as a Chaplain citing pacifist objections - they obliged more out of fear for making him a martyr than for honor of his long service. Neither actually kept him safe all that long.

With the decimation of the African and Indian populations in the famines, the destruction of most of Australia's cities by the tidal bombs at the outset of the war, and the decline of Europe's population in the war. The only large population centers left were in the Americas, mainly in South America which was so increasingly poor, ungoverned and full of violence that migrants began to flow north until United Sovereign America finally sealed its borders at the end of zero year. South America would later be Brems'd in the first year for refusing to submit peacefully.

That was the same year that America chose to no longer be United Sovereign America, but become part of the world we know - the world of the Lord Chancellor Commander. It was a safe decision, a smart decision - the Brems would have destroyed all of the people, and left everything else for the Europeans. At least everyone in America lived, even if they are allowed to live only as the Lord Chancellor Commander allows. He commands those allowed to live, perhaps by the power of the Brems, more likely just because order is kept now as he commands.

The year Ardu was born, was the year the 1st Lord Chancellor Commander declared complete authority throughout Europe, this is the year of standard counting - zero year. It was also the year that Selig gave his life for his friend and the year Croyant, a man not quite thirty, claims he was reborn after his life and the world he knew would be forever destroyed. Sixty years and six Lord Chancellor Commanders, later Croyant finally lost his battle to keep the memory of Selig's god alive. So Ardu thought as the light flooded through the blinds that morning. "Silly papa, silly."

"La vie éternelle" his old father would drone on and on about - it seemed like eternity indeed to Ardu when he talked about it. These last nine years at home with him since retiring were the worst, Ardu thought. "He always pestered me about why I just quit," he said aloud. "None of your damnable business." he'd tell the old sweet man in response. That always ended it. He figured the old man must have thought he would die anyday and that's why he always talked about what came after death. Ardu rolled over in the bed as he heard the 6:30 buses leaving. Even on Saturday work must be done - the world must go on. So he told himself, commandingly.

Croyant had fled from the European Empire to United Sovereign America alone with Ardu in the early purges when he was only a baby. He told Ardu the stories of Selig often. Ardu appreciated the sacrifice of the man's life to save his father and him, but at this point he still agreed with his father's earlier thoughts in life. This harsh world just had no room for a god, even if a broken old man imagined that it did. His father had fled for nothing. Selig and his mother had died for nothing. His brother was left behind for nothing.

The world was now the Grand Lord Chancellor Commander's and people were just allowed to live in it until they weren't anymore, either because they ended their miserable existence or because the Grand Lord Chancellor Commander did. Rarely did anybody die from natural causes anymore. Ardu tried to dismiss any more thoughts of deities or hope or what might come after death, it was all too depressing. He got out of bed and wandered toward the kitchen past his father's empty room. "Someone must make the coffee!" he said very commandingly as he stood at attention.

He stopped and backed up to the open doorway of the room where his silly father he missed so much had slept these past sixty years. Standing in the doorway, filling the passageway with his massive frame, he stared at the simple bedside table and the red leather book sitting on it with only a pen and a red highlighter. His father loved that book, he loved to study and quote it. Ardu had left it open from when he was reading it just the night before. He stood for what must have been an eternity, unable to move, trying to gain the will against reading anymore. He wanted to forget the pain of his father, of his life, of this world. He wanted some sort of control in a world beyond his control. Perhaps today he would join his father in death he thought, he had nothing left but that. "I am a Commander!", he proclaimed commandingly.

Ardu walked over to close the book once and for all, but dropped it on the floor as he tried. When he picked it up he immediately noticed the words that looked recently highlighted, "Maintenant, Seigneur, tu laisses ton serviteur s'en aller en paix, conformément à ta promesse." He spoke in Standard aloud as he read, "Lord, now you let your servant go in peace, according to your promise."

Ardu sat down on the bed in tears and began to read.