Short Life - Short Memory

Extract from Mission HOMO LIBERATUS: The Beginnign, Chapter 3

In the morning silence, a solitary metallic chime echoed across the field, resonating with a cold shiver in my shoulders and forming a burning lump in my throat. I remembered trudging barefoot along the dusty village street as a three-year-old, holding the hand of my beautiful mother. I remembered the living hedges, the warm log houses, and the endless fences where neighbours hung their blankets to air out…

On that day, the wooden houses and hedges burned to the ground, leaving only brick chimneys standing above the ashes, as if the outstretched arms of peaceful villagers had frozen while reaching from beneath the earth in desperate prayer.

For twenty-six years, the chimneys had remained untouched. Then an architect replaced them with twenty-six slender granite columns topped with small bells. These columns rose above twenty-six stone-paved rectangles symbolising the twenty-six burned houses. Black plaques on the columns listed the names of the residents who were driven from their homes that day and burned alive in that barn. Every five minutes, the mournful sound of a single bell tolled, spreading a chilling echo through the silent, wooded surroundings… To ensure the tragedy was never forgotten, people had built a memorial complex on the site of the vampire-destroyed Khatyn <...>

...Without having been on the battlefield, it’s hard to judge the loudness of cannon fire. And who cares about the sound of a shot fired before you were even born? Few homo sapiens live to be a hundred, which is why their truths are so short-lived.

In the human world, reality turns into stories after about forty years. Since homo sapiens lack the ability to telepathically transmit experience, as soon as most eyewitnesses die, no living soul can vouch for the truth of history. The reality of recent witnesses is too quickly overgrown with speculation. The life of Jesus is a prime example.

The long-lived Lemurians, who have secretly coexisted with humanity since its time in the cradle, have observed for far too long the tricks a short memory plays on homo sapiens...

The most astonishing thing is how, in homo sapiens’ stories, heroes and villains easily switch places, depending on the narrator’s intent. Heroes are sometimes branded as criminals and villains are sometimes exalted. Defenders are renamed into invaders by their own descendants. And new homo sapiens, unaware of prospective wounds and scars, march off to fight evil that was recently considered good. The human world would be much calmer and more balanced if they lived at least two hundred years. But what if, in another forty years, the people of Khatyn, burned alive by vampires, completely disappeared from the memory of their descendants? What if the war that had taken my mother’s life was entirely forgotten? And what if people started calling the vampires — the murderers of Khatyn — heroes, and the partisans who attacked the Nazis from the depths of the Belorussian forests tormentors and bandits?

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