The guard had a mission order with him he handed to Moa. With the regulatory header, it was written that he had to send a mission order to Moa. So the guard handed another paper, as regulatory as precedent, where Moa could read that he had to go to the third floor, section E, in the movie theater.
This hall, pompously named cinema hall, was a large room inside the building. It occupied a significant part of section E on the third floor.
At the time of its construction, the cultural center did not have a cinema hall. The architect was not a film buff and a movie theater was not an easy place to build. A cinema hall required good three-dimensional projection capacity to arrive at final plans which would make the space usable and also required to follow a whole bunch of standards the architect did not want to bother with.
Also, section E of the third floor was occupied by a library. The architect had thought on the great scale and he hoped to create vocations for adolescents exposed to masterpieces of literature. In addition, he ended up running out of ideas as to how to occupy the spaces in the building so the room was disproportionate.
In use, everyone realized that the space was too large to house the few dozen books graciously offered by kind souls who had preferred to make room on their shelves in this way than by a traditional auto-da-fé.
The teenagers did not frequent the library and they seemed much more interested in the seventh art than they were in the literature. It was at least what emerged from a poll carried out on order of the politicians on a panel representative of young people not having the right to vote because it was not bad to get a taste of the spirit of the times of the new generations who would end up voting in the future.
Based on this work, the rehabilitation of the library into a movie theater had been decided.
Then the rehabilitation could not lead to the perfect screening room: the seats were not arranged in level because otherwise, after a few rows, they would have touched the ceiling, the screen was a sheet remained almost white despite many traces of unknown origins stretched stapled on the wall and the projection material, which had been acquired during a garage sale, only accepted super-eight films, limiting the distribution of modern works.
Among the teenagers attending the cultural center, there were not many movie buffs who loved classics and memories of holidays from strangers the age of their grandparents.
Finally, the cinema had never found its audience but it undoubtedly remained the most voluminous room in the building, thus offering the most important air reserve to accept the presence of Moa within the same four walls without being inconvenienced by too much promiscuity.
Moa did not know that this choice owed nothing to chance. The other officers had spent several minutes debating the meeting place. Even if he knew, that wouldn't have changed anything, he had received an order again and that order led him to the movie theater. On the sixth floor, he would not have to descend to the first floor to go up to the eighth floor; he would only have to stop on the third, which shortened the journey somewhat.
He knew, however, that something was wrong.
It was not the small evil voice of Audacity in his head, the voice that made him ignore his propriety and commit acts he should not. Neither was it a little angelic voice of Killjoy, the one that advised him to always respect his conscience and explained every time that if it had to give him reminders, it was for his own good.
Moa frequently encountered voices. In the Middle-Ages, it would have earned him the stake but times had changed. Today, it was considered natural to be harassed by its internal debates, even the psychiatric hospitals had so decided.
We had to take whatever worked out for us, leave out the remarks that didn't make sense. When we used to, we no longer lingered on these voices, considering them as a part of ourselves. A presence that was even beneficial because they could lead a conversation in a moment of solitude.
This voice, namely, was an inner voice he did not hear often. Usually, it did not express, this voice was stingy with its words. So when it appeared, it would directly call to mind. Here, it was telling him: think a little, you do not realize that there is something fishy going on; if you go up now, there is a high probability you not know how you come back down.
This voice, Moa called it Doubt. It had a schizophrenic personality, a mixture of survival instinct, analytical ability and a spirit of contradiction, more or less well balanced, depending of the day. The speech of this voice was often a bit chaotic but it had already saved his life in the past.
Moa had a small voice he called Curiosity. It had somewhat childish voice and had an overwhelming need to learn, to try new things. It often came and asked Moa to go and check various things.
In the region Moa originated from, there were festivals at the end of the years. They corresponded to the old pagan festivals of the winter solstice the different religions had taken up on their own to drum up business by making cock-and-bull stories. These festivals were said to be of the nativity, even if no one knew who had the misfortune to be born at a time of the year when survival was more difficult for a newborn and in addition had his birthday coinciding with the festival when it was customary to offer gifts to children.
This is not the story, what mattered was the decorum accompanying these festivities. At a remote time while the peasants were in search of cultivable grounds, great campaigns of deforestation had been carried out. Not knowing what to do with coniferous species because the outlet in the building was insufficient and this kind of wood crackled in the chimneys when it burned, one or some of the woodcutters had the idea of establishing a new tradition: everyone would keep a fir-tree in their living room which they would decorate as they wished to brighten the atmosphere in the middle of winter and gifts for children would be placed underneath.
The decision had been made like that, on the corner of a table following a meal heavily boozed and another tradition was born after drinking the digestive, a big guy would come to bring the gifts, like that if they did not reach the children's expectations, it was no longer the parents who had to face the criticism.
The big guy could have knocked on the door but a legend needed fantasy to prevail so it was decided that he had to go through the chimney flue.
Some parents were alarmed at the promotion of night visits by a perfect stranger, while children slept quietly, which might give ideas to men of faith.
Finally, after verification made by the insurance companies which hoped to be able to invoice a new risk against theft to increase their insurance premiums, an adult even anorexic could not pass by a chimney flue.
Insurers had increased their premiums, parents had accepted the idea, children had not been surveyed, religions had proclaimed the authorship of the idea; like this a tradition was born.
So as the winter solstice approached, Moa's parents did like everyone else and placed a fir-tree in their living room, while the child patiently waited for the big guy to bring his gifts.
A few days before the fateful date, he had seen a film presenting the scene and Curiosity had appeared, wondering the same thing as the insurance companies of years earlier, how did he do when it was so difficult to push even a very ripe pear through the neck of a bottle of liquor?
Moa was happy to help curiosity so he directly went to garden shed. Seeing him transporting a ladder towards the front of the house, his father, Enthy, was delighted that his son discovered a sudden passion for DIY. His mother, Arkisée, was more distraught than happy.
She asked her son to explain what he wanted to do because the roof had just been repaired a few months before and Moa had to obey to his mother's panic orders and he threats of reprisals. He told her his story. His mother had stopped him in time and explained to him that there were snakes in the chimney flue so that he wouldn't on approach.
The question bothered Curiosity for years but each time, Moa approached a ladder, he was reminded by his mother about the snakes.
He had waited for years to have an opportunity to answer the question. It was during his year at the training camp. With winter, the temperature inside the barracks was dropping each day and their management had installed a wood stove. Curiosity wanted Moa to check and answer its lasting question. The barracks were brand new, the wood stove had been installed for only a few weeks and the surrounding ecosystem was unfavorable to the proliferation of snakes.
Finally, Doubt planted the idea in his head: his ear to the word, explaining that there was no fir-tree in the barracks and indeed, real fir-trees, not those in plastic, had become consumer products very hard to find with the war that had already been going on for a few months at that time.
Moa had to agree with Doubt and he vilified Curiosity. If he had followed it, he would have been stuck with one foot in the chimney flue. Maybe the grace was not a life-saving one because Moa was not foolish enough to try the experiment while the stove was on. However, it had at least saved him from being found on the roof of the building in an embarrassing situation.
So when Doubt spoke, Moa listened to it.
And to think about it was not normal for him to be summoned him like this.
His advices had no interest in regard to strategic decision. They would have been a prerequisite if the meeting had been between simple soldiers as Moa would have been the most senior, but for a briefing involving only his own senior officers, those did not need his intervention and even if they did, they would not have asked.
Besides, he was not welcome. As dense as he was when it came to understanding allusions, when those allusions became first degree speech, he eventually understood.
So the question that bothered him was: what did they want with him?
Patience, it was not the name he gave to one of his inner voices, would give him the answer but Curiosity got involved, annoying him with its "I-want-to-know" repeated ad lib.
On the way to the fourth floor, Curiosity was joined by Doubt again. It was verbose today, sign of the incongruousness of the situation. The best hypothesis Doubt could come with, because all the time it was thinking, something had to do the job in this messy brain, was that there must have been a problem with the story Moa had told them. Doubt expertise was contradiction and a medical diagnosis could depend of the specialty of a doctor, so it thought the others had found a contradictory element, an inconsistency in the construction of the narrative appeared, maybe led by the misuse of a technical term, an adjective poorly matched in gender and number, or they had simply realized that the story was a continuation of nonsense.
With his memory, Moa reiterated the story he had told a few minutes earlier, to the great displeasure of Curiosity who preferred the new to the old. The advantage of a narrative that unfolded in thought was that it was not limited by the speed of speech and therefore it went faster. The downside was that it was very difficult to put things into perspective.
When asked if Moa had told the truth, the answer was more complex and less Manichean than a simple yes or no. The truth was the story based on the interpretation that the brain made of reality. It depended on many factors: from the point of view, the state of knowledge at a given time, how the brain was blocking the holes to make the situation believable. All of these meant that there was an inherent difference in their definitions between reality and truth. So if a truth had some arrangements in relation to a reality, it was not something that Moa could be blamed for. There were as many truths as many people saying it. When the truth was entrusted to men, the arrangements became part of it and what ultimately differentiated it from a fantasy was the intensity of the arrangements.
It was without having found an answer to satisfy Curiosity's thirst for knowledge that Moa finally arrived on the third floor, in front of the entrance to the cinema hall.
The movie theater was not a place where people went frequently. On the one hand, the room was large but the comfort was Spartan, on the other hand the super-eight projector did not work anymore.
If the adolescents of the time of the cultural center were not amateurs of old movies, certain officers had tried to set up a club to project their old movies of holidays, birthday celebrations or the amateur productions of a parent acted as an experimental film director when a camera was put into his hands. If the artistic character was neither mastered nor obvious, it was sometimes the pride of a family that was symbolized in a shivering traveling camera movement from the top of a cliff on the coast.
The fact remained that no one was able to operate the equipment and it had been declared that it had broken down. As on the one hand the repairers of this kind of material had long been retired if they were still alive, and on the other hand the army was not there to satisfy the expensive hobbies of the officers, the projector had never been repaired. Some even thought that it had never worked, as an old projector found at a good price during a garage sale, it would not have been the first time that an unfortunate was scammed to buy a defective electrical appliance without warranty.
At the entrance, a camping table and a chair served as a desk. On the table was a metal box acting as a cash register, broken for a long time, it was empty.
There was no one to stand guard; just an old popcorn machine right next to it. There was no indication whether it worked or not. Corn kernels could be kept for a long time, but only under controlled temperature and humidity conditions. It was not a good idea to try, the levels of aflatoxin an analysis would reveal might produce a cancer faster than an irradiation after a nuclear disaster.
Moa put his ear against the front door to try to find out a little ahead of time what was going on in the room.
However, there was no sound. Libraries, the primary purpose of the space behind the door, had specific security standards so that people inside could not run away when they noticed that they had inadvertently entered a library. The door was lockable from the inside and reinforced so that only someone really strong and desperate could push it in. It had a significant soundproofing so that the cries of people wanting to go out did not disturb those outside.
Moa couldn't hear anything. Curiosity was as impatient as always while Doubt was as fearful as when it faced a situation there was not enough information about.