THE LAST ARK

CHAPTER 29: SCARS OF WAR

Bahrain Freighter, Red Sea T h ree Days Before Temple Ceremony

Mark Twain once said that the man who does not read has no advantage over the man who can’t read. Twain referred to the poorly educated masses, taught barely enough to be useful but not enough to question authority with any true intelligence or credibility. T h ey understand little of the world beyond the work of their hands. Th ey are useful only for those capitalists with the grand world vision of empire. For the f i rst time in his life, Nelson realizes he may share in that tradition of willful ignorance regarding much of the real world outside of his data lab. To his utter horror, what Nelson had imagined would be at least a moderately sized yacht, suitable to Taylor’s typical luxury accommodations, turned out to be a rusted livestock freighter with an Emirate and Bahraini crew. Roughly thirty meters long, derelict to the point of borderline seaworthy, the cargo comprises several containers of baying sheep headed for the West Bank. Nelson’s fellow passengers are a few dozen refugees from the Yemeni civil war and g******e. Except for the captain, a man named Adri, no one on board speaks English, nor has he ever heard about artificial intelligence. Nelson pulls the Taser from his bag to keep handy in his pocket, then grips hold of the bag for dear life. “How much farther?” he questions the captain. They left port under darkness, which unnerves him from the lack of landmarks to judge location or direction. Waves come out of the dark void with no warning. With no place to sleep or rest, the ship smells of manure and vomit, and the sheep bay incessantly, disturbed by the ship’s movement. T he bone-thin captain in his fifties points to a glow on the distant horizon. “Israeli Port of Eilat. Not long.” “Is that your home?” Nelson asks. A humble, but sad man, Adri lowers his eyes and shakes his head. “My wife and daughter died when I was at sea.” He points to the deck. “Home now.” “I’m sorry to hear that, Captain, I truly am.” Raised by a distant and strict father, Nelson feels uncomfortable with deep emotions and changes the subject. “Who will I meet in Eilat?” he questions. The instructions sent by Taylor were sparse. Adri grins a partially toothless grin. “No, you ride with sheep to Bethlehem; meet Mr. Taylor at Church of Nativity.” Shocked but unwilling to offend his host, the whole idea sounds dreadful, foul, and humiliating. He’s a world-renowned scientist, software innovator, inventor, and lecturer and Taylor has him sneaking across borders like a third world terrorist. Adri laughs. “No worry, sheep don’t bite.” Nelson cringes, thinking more of his pride. Adri was his interpreter during the voyage and conveyed the stories of each of the young men, women, and children fleeing Saudi air raids or ethnic cleansing. Starvation thin and sickly, Adri fed them from his own meager ship rations of rice and beans, risking his own life to offer them passage to Egypt or Jordan. One young man lost his arm in the struggle; another his foot at the ankle. The militias r***d each of the women multiple times. The children are skeletal and unsmiling, with empty, traumatized eyes that stare at Nelson with suspicious terror. Perhaps they’ve never seen a white man before or a plump one. Wounded bodies and souls split between the warring factions of the ruling Sunni and the rebel minority Houthi movement of Zadi Shia, similar to the sect of the Ayatollah in Iran. Considered a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran, the people of Yemen bear all the scars becoming the shadows of war. Adri points to one of the skeletal boys, age fifteen, although he looks younger from malnutrition. “Nadim says that after the locust plague of 2020 destroyed most of the crops in North Africa and Arabia, many died of hunger. Waves of COVID ravaged the survivors, who were now buried in mass graves. No one knows how many have died. No one cared to count. To bring more misery, militias came to destroy their water system.” Adri interprets the heartrending tales. “What about his parents?” “He doesn’t remember them,” Adri relays, his eyes wet with tears. On so many levels, Nelson simply has no frame of reference to these stories; his own life experience like a fairy tale by comparison. The beneficiary of exceptional education, Nelson has read near-constantly since his youth. Nurturing a lifelong disdain for the banality of television, sports, and other forms of narcotic entertainment, he has favored a life of continuous self improvement and seeking knowledge. At no point during his abundant life of intellectual pursuits has he ever once considered that his studies were so narrow, so finely curated that he may as well be illiterate to the real world. Of course, he read the classics at university: Homer, Shakespeare, Faust, Tolstoy, Byron, Poe, Hemmingway, and others. Yet nothing has prepared him for the raw truth he reads within the hollow eyes who share a rusted deck with him. If innocence died within him at the death of Salem, then perhaps enlightenment germinates through the tragic lives who share his voyage. Nelson may be one of the world’s foremost minds, yet he is tragically out of touch with humanity. Taylor once argued that the world has the technology, the science, and the physical resources to resolve nearly every major global crisis facing humanity, and yet, we don’t. Why? Taylor would say that we lack the collective spiritual will or ability to set aside our tribal differences or quarterly profit goals. We lack the moral center to care beyond our family, our walls, our border, or our bonus check. A collective sense of our own impending catastrophe spreads throughout the world, yet the concrete actions to address them are too few and too late. Perhaps the excuses are too many. Nelson hates to admit it, but Taylor may be correct. Nelson searches the eyes of the victims of western indifference for an ember of joy or hope. Sadly, he finds only the fragile remains of dark, shattered lives desperately clinging to one more day. How many hundreds of millions more will suffer in the decades ahead as climate change combines with population growth and income disparity to exacerbate basic housing, water, and food shortages? Nelson’s hubris, pride, and resentment toward Taylor erode. The entire horrid trip has held up a harsh mirror for his own life of privilege and chronic narcissism. As they approach the port, Nelson remembers the unused bribe money, placing it discreetly in the hands of the humble captain. “For your kindness,” he says. Adri’s eyes fill with tears as he hugs Nelson with fierce gratitude. For the f irst time since his mother’s death, Nelson’s throat tightens, and a tear tracks down his own cheek. Perhaps decades at DARPA have not entirely scorched his humanity after all.