An excerpt from Chapter 19:"A strong battle cry resounds into the world. The music subsides. Coming out of the blur, two feeble arms escape from under the lid of a cold blue sheet, reaching to share a first and last touch. Two bouquets of delicate fingers grasp once into thin air, aiming for the cries, and collapse for good as the veil settles over them.A brief moment before she surrenders her hands, a Most Holy Mother and Child descend from above. The Empress inquires in firm, gentle voice if she would receive the one true Orthodox faith. Her face is covered, to the world she is dead, but underneath the sheet, she accepts with one last nod of the head. There is no need to uncover the veil of death for the eyes of the soul to witness their grace. The Baptism of desire opens the gates. The Child blesses, and all three ascend, leaving behind the blind and the dead. They carry on with their tasks. They have long sealed their paths.A departing gurney hovers her body away on a bright corridor. The ceiling fixtures turn into suns. An immaterial light that has never graced the sewers overwhelms even its most darkest corners. The filth dissolves under its intense purity, and soon the tubes, the landfill and the world are redeemed from the immaculate canvas of life.Fade to white. The beginning ends. White settles."
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An excerpt from Chapter 14:“See? You’re not the only one who knows big words. Let me tell you something. If you want to live in a moral world, you have to have the power to enforce your morals. That’s why you failed.”“Enforced good is anything but good. I’d say it’s the opposite of morality. I don’t think anyone should get to decide what’s good or bad.”“Ha-ha-ha. And why is that?”“Because no one knows what good actually is.”“And you do?”“No...”“So you don’t get to decide either. So why don’t you shut up?”“I refuse to believe that there is no absolute truth!” revolted Case, short of slamming his fist on the table.“Well, good luck finding it. And keep it down before you find something you won’t like.”“I may not know what good is, but I know what it isn’t. And it’s not this. One thing I’m dead certain about: I did not come into this world to be anyone’s slave or to waste my potential. I don’t want to work the job they want me to work, I don’t want to learn what they teach me, I don’t want to eat what they feed me, I don’t want to take their drugs. I will not be what they want me to be.“If someone’s morality is crushing another man, then it is not morality. Good is not something anyone can bend as they please. It’s pretty obvious where that leads to. Good must be something built into our nature that no one can change to suit their agenda. Something universal, a value system people would choose to live by freely because it leads to happiness. And if so happens that, some day, I might decide to abandon it, and suffer, then what will come my way, will, be, my, doing. But misery cannot be my only option. I am denied the right to happiness? I’ll make it my right. If I want to pursue morality, I will pursue it. And if I don’t, ultimately, unequivocally, the choice to be miserable should belong to me, me, and only me.” He drew a long breath and concluded with choked resentment. “It must be there, somewhere. So why are we blind?”“What? What are you smoking, kid? I can’t even follow this nonsense anymore. People can’t choose. That’s why we have experts, to do the choosing for them. What people need is to enjoy life to the fullest, not worry about decisions. Who are you to say your morals are better than mine? Only force can decide that,” decided Tryo, raising a puffy fist to illustrate.”
A quote from Chapter 16:“Globalitarism also took off on the wrong foot. Those cretins had a decent chance. The masses were ignorant enough, scared enough, decadent enough. All they had to do was play their cards right, but when things started to go wrong, they fell back on oppression. Old habits... Granted, they were sailing in uncharted waters, but with enough vigilance, they could have pulled it off. They got cocky, and they failed miserably. And now they are manure."
A quote from Chapter 6:Case was nearing the border. He felt exhausted even if the object he carried was more bulky than heavy. The tunnel he walked led to no dead ends. Those were the scariest, the ones that didn’t have them stare into another wall. Case seemed to travel across a giant spyglass. In front of him, a round cutout of the sky was growing larger and larger as he went up the slope. The moonshine bled into its frame, radiating restless beams. Veils of clouds told a leaden story on the sewer stage. It was the eerie ballet of life that scared them. The tip of his shoe scraped the rim. Everybody stopped there. The end of the world. They dumped the trash over its edge and fell back. The boy knelt, contemplating the ground that stretched widely before him. The endless mass of minced garbage with its irregular landforms displayed an uncanny spectacle of tonalities in the moonlight.
A quote from Chapter 8:Despair, the lost man’s trusted companion. Conscience, the primordial battleground, lacking exercise, atrophied by the same passiveness that had dominated her entire existence, remained an empty arena. Since the border between right and wrong was hazy, diluting their incessant clash into a stalemate, all that persisted within her conscience was a battle of fears.The captivating terror of an imminent danger, paralyzing body and mind, leaving no time for reflection, reaction, awareness versus the perpetual helplessness lurking on the horizon. Its languid nature nourished agony and left the prey at the mercy of a barren future. Always intangible, subduing softly merely by taunting, a cunning tactic that sharpened reason beyond endurance. Fear of death versus fear of life.