Oz had heard the same lectures as the rest of us all of these years. His father was an Elder, for Pete’s sake. What did they know that the rest of us didn’t?
I swiped the search results away, pecking with my fingertips through files on the development of weapons, unsure what exactly I was looking for until I found an early reflection by Minnie Gatling. For the first time, I realized she and her sister descended from the Gatlings, a family instrumental in the development of guns in America. My instinct insisted that information and Oz’s travels might be connected, but my feeble human brain struggled to connect the dots.
Minnie wrote this particular reflection after visiting a shooting in a Colorado movie theater—it was a trip we no longer took as apprentices because the spray of bullets was unpredictable and hard to map. A Historian overseer had been shot during an observation trip about twenty years ago, and though he hadn’t died, we now observed either a shooting at a Columbine high school, in an Australian shopping center, or on the Gaza strip for our lesson on weaponry in the hands of civilians.
Young Minnie’s reflection made it clear why she’d been chosen to oversee—the writing was concise, the scene laid out with a keen eye—but her reflections came off perfunctory. She wasn’t the ideal reflector, being unwilling to delve beneath the surface the way Oz loved to do.
“It is an interesting development that weapons meant for military defense and armed militia have found their way into the hands of private citizens, and in a world that no longer requires one to regularly defend their person, family, or nation. So many wish to blame the machinery itself, which I think is incorrect. My own ancestor was instrumental in the development of the Gatling gun, and some of our contemporaries have hated me on his behalf, but it’s not the weapons that pose a threat. It is, and always has been, the nature of humanity that’s at fault.”
Hated her? Hate didn’t happen in Genesis. Did it?
I paused and looked over my shoulder, sure one of the Elders would show up any second, ready to hand out a sanction for snooping. No one came, though, and I remembered that I was a Historian, too. Maybe just an apprentice, and maybe off on a tangent that had nothing to do with today’s assignment, but our Elders encouraged exploration and knowledge. We could spend as much free time in the Archives as we could stomach. Oz practically lived in here, a fact that would have inspired annoyance a week ago. Now, I was thinking he had reasons for holing up that went beyond taking the nerd recluse lifestyle to the extreme. Feeling more confident, I returned to Minnie’s reflection, interested to see where her argument was headed.
“The original settlers of Genesis were right to leave all weapons behind on Earth Before, and to ban their manufacture in the System, with the exception of necessities for defense in the unlikely case of an attack by an unknown foe. Though I believe my ancestor, Richard Gatling, did not create something inherently evil, humanity is constantly challenged to fight the evil inside of us. We cannot trust ourselves or others with machinery that can take a life in a matter of seconds.
“In conclusion, I do not agree with previous reflections that deem the men who created killing machines partially responsible for the collapse of society on Earth Before. As with all of our assignments that revolve around understanding the reason for our exile to Genesis, I believe the nature of humanity responsible for our greatest losses. And as I’ve stated, I am part of a small contingent of believers that this will happen again, despite the efforts of Zeke and his followers to ensure that it doesn’t. We cannot change what we are.”
Zeke and his followers? The Gatlings were Elders, too, and I’d never guessed at a rift between any of them. Perhaps I’d read too much into her words. Plenty of us had differing opinions regarding the fall of Earth Before, the events that led up to it, and even with seemingly insignificant reflections we often disagreed about the potential repercussions or positive benefits.
Other pieces of Minnie’s reflection stood out to me as off, too, pricking suspicion. Mostly the words she used, like “exile to Genesis” instead of “relocation to Genesis” or “evacuation to Genesis” as we were taught. Her reflection also seemed to suggest that prior classes of apprentices had a specific assignment to determine what could have been changed on Earth Before to prevent our leaving.
Which was very different from what I’d been taught during my time here—focus on what we could learn, lessons we could apply, that would make Genesis viable going forward.
The development of sophisticated weaponry had been determined to be a factor in the collapse of society, and that had to be what drew Oz to those three specific places. But it didn’t explain why he was so interested, or why he’d pushed Elira into James Puckle and essentially stopped him from creating that gun, or why he was traveling unsupervised in the first place.
Everything I knew about Oz made it hard to believe he’d commit all of those infractions on his own, yet there was no reason to suspect the Elders or anyone else had sent him.
Except Jonah’s warning.