The Complete Men School. Herlander Elias

of his hands.

      — Because there are no written records on any one that attended The School and thus chosen to exit from the bond established with ourselves. Once the challenge is accepted, you the apprentices have no point of return. What you learn from us is something taught nowhere else. And besides, no one is obliged to stay in The School, but the fact is that everybody still remains here, nobody quits. — the Master announced super-sure of his words, as he added a visionary look, steady and stiff, rare.

      — What is it that drives you seriously into believing in that? — the same young man asked, now feeling more secure in questioning the Master.

      — Our results speak for ourselves. — the Master answered back, showing white sparkling teeth and an inspiring gaze sided by wrinkles.

      — What is for sure is that you will need an alibi in your reality. You will have to establish a contract with the Real. Grab the pulse of life, feel it. The main goal will be reached by you over the course of the Operations in The Schools. You will know things before learning them, by making solely good use of your perception. You will be at the top, knowing thy selves on the edge. That I will guarantee to you. Otherwise, you will never become Complete Men. Grow up and think towards new levels. After everything, the process shall be terminated.

      — You will surely forgive me, but I did not understand why you said we will have an alibi, and also, how we will know things without reaching them? — another student highlighted, John, as equally puzzled as Mark asked.

      — Our students are integrated in society, in the common everyday life, but they are just doing their jobs; disguised while they fulfill the goals of the Operations of The Schools. Your alibi is the subject-matter how you get to live in both worlds simultaneously while you perfect yourselves as people in our Schools. We did not choose this path. Please keep in mind that the path chooses us. As you intervene in people’s reality, you will develop intuition and you will be usefully wise, so that your assignments become effective.

      — Are you saying we will be changing our reality? — another potential student asked, boldly. — Reality happens no more, it is cultivated, produced, it is a scene sketched up; it flows, and it convinces people, it lies within a map, it is integrated on the screens. These Schools are a response to that inversion. — the Master clarified with a discrete thrill in his voice.

      — What do you mean by saying these Schools are a response to such inversion? — the same man asked.

      — My dear friend, if the State, society and the citizens in themselves would perform rightfully, we would not exist. We would be relieved of our command; our presence would be excused. It is a paradox, but the truth is that we fill the voids of contemporaneity’s voids in the consumeristic consciousness and in technocracy. We are diplomats, professors, businesspeople, fighters and social workers. We are true soldiers of dialogue.

      The Master was happy to answer the doubts. He knew his figure would set up a vision, that above all it would drive a crowd into rapture with his rightful and instantaneous answers. His image represented an envied power. It would not surely be a blinding power. This would be a power to be persuasive, seductive, for what it was in itself, not for what it had to be.

      All the candidates willing to become students in The Schools of the Complete ones were thinking about getting in, and so they kept debating issues with the Master. They aspired to switch impressions and solve classic riddles; the bottom line is that the goal was for people to learn how to change their lives, and in effect, people would change the others’ lives due to a civic responsibility. There was no conspiracy in the sense of a criminal organization or traffic of influences. Before anything else, it was an organization deprived of paranoia and fights for power among its groups.

      At the Schools of Complete ones, the hierarchy is symbolic and it all could be resumed to a process. A process that in that moment had its inception date for the rookies who aspired to complete themselves as men.

      — How can you describe the students that finish this course? The ones that finish the best way possible the Operation at The Schools and thus become Complete Men? — asked one of the most avid candidates, eager for an answer. The Master did not say what they wanted to hear. Even though, they enjoyed what they heard.

      — The Complete Men seem to be normal humans, yet they are not. They stand in advantage before the ordinary people. They need that edge to go further beyond what is expected out of the most mortals. They seem like mainstream human beings, but they are better, more human, carriers of an astonishing humanity, so much atrocious and dearest that it could be understood as a threat to those ordinary crazy ones who stand in power.

      BZRCCCRTTTTFFFTTTT!!!

      Without knowing exactly what was wrong with the tape, Rafael rushed to retrieve it and then inserted it back in the MiniDV player; it was this or the tape being “chewed” by the head of the reading gear. He had never seen something so interesting and as mysterious, too. His curiosity was fed each time the movie was cast on the screen and the answers came out of the figure leading the speech in the recording. Now things were making sense. Rafael knew now that Roberta Wagner was not so smart by giving him all this information. He knew he had in his possession something of a higher value. He could write an excellent report or a research article, and so he was already thinking about showing it up on television. However, it was a bit early to get into major conclusions. The tape had a lot for all to begin. Rafael kept watching the tape after re-inserting it back on the player and so he saved his reflections for later.

      Somebody must have the chance to try to make serious journalistic work on these Complete Men, but perhaps enough courage was missing to display it on the public sphere, in the media, the Network. “Was it Roberta herself?”— Rafael thought. He immediately silenced his mind from the moment one could hear in the recording a voice over referring in the first person, much as a storyteller that:

      — It all began with the creation of a School of perfect men. There was no time to think in trivialities. After all, we had been designed to fight ignorance. So, we managed to study the universe in a cross-disciplinary form — the Circumverse —, given that the best way to fight ignorance back is to circumvent it with knowledge coming from every area and perspectives.

      The voice came added to images of groups of people standing in formation, with civilian clothing standing sober and upright, usually in dark hues. A smart uniformization defines these subjects, in schools, laboratories, libraries and digital document archives. The video recording carried on:

      —The Complete ones had been raised by the best to not give a chance to the worst. The legion was a single body, a collective-mind body, a way to respond to the forgotten Renaissance, and also a real tribute to the thinkers of the Lights.

      Many groups of apprentices were ready with determination for the both physical and mental school exams, holding books on the hands while following their masters excitedly.

      — When the Schools began reality was of another kind. The world had ceased to be a stage for action to become instead a stage for manipulated interests, a mise-en-scéne. It has been a while since science quit in explaining everything to everybody. The discourse of reality, the knowledge about the world, became complex in such a way that an aversion to science arose.

      One could tell that the visual indications of the epoch belonged to the sixties (haircuts, dress codes, advertising and cars) where groups of young college men were typing political statutes and outlining intervention maps of underground operations in Paris, London, Stockholm and New York — and the voice continued:

      — The Complete ones, before the other men, they argue with a classy posture, perfectly relaxed, yet still serious, all the problems the talkers share with them. Their words seem to cast utopias, democratic well-being and healthy group diplomacy. What they do is, basically, to export to third parties the logic that united them in loco. They apply a simple methodology: most of the times they argue the issues without mentioning per sefacts and names. Moreover, they do not disclose the conclusions they managed to achieve. The process in itself represents precisely the cure. They seem to wander, yet in reality they are saving lives, and far from playing with words, their focus was about real problems, politics, society and