The Last Temptation – A Game Show

Cem Akaş

I.

You will be the one driving the vehicle; the five of you will go far out of the bounds of the Main Settlement. A long enough time will have passed since the first day you visited the Church – no one will be suspicious, no one will make the connection; this will be a journey with a mission, you will be on duty to make a new recording of the Basic Image Unit of an amphitheater, the previous BIU of which you had destroyed for the specific purpose of re-shooting it. You will turn out the cruise monitor, switch to auto-pilot, disengage the security system; you will all jump out before the vehicle hits the electric curtain, the vehicle will start to burn, go off the road and tumble down the steep slope, hitting the bottom with a huge explosion; you will have approximately ten minutes to escape before the control patrols arrive.

You will start a secret return journey to the ancient center of the Main Settlement, to the forbidden zone known as İst, to the Church.

II.

You will realize by coincidence that you are not alone. The preparations for the hundred and forty-sixth installment of the Universal Games will be going on, and you will be responsible for putting together the teaser, you and a guy you don’t know from Color Composition - this is a man with difficult eyes, and he will try to measure you up, asking whether you can do something different than what has been done for the last fifteen years. You will be furious; you will say this is exactly your intention, but that perhaps you should look for a better qualified assistant. There are no assistants here, he will say with a glitter; we are working together, is all. To escape his unwavering stare, you will propose to go down to the Archives.

The two of you will spend hours to pick out the shots to be juxtaposed; this will be a more pleasant thing to do than either of you will have hoped for. On the second day, while browsing through the oldest shots in the Archives, you will come across something unexpected: a four-second fragment from 1981, apparently recorded on a chemical-based film, going by the image quality: a woman, eyes shut, her hand in a man’s hair, pressing his lips against hers. You will continue browsing as if nothing has happened, but your skin will burn, you will become uneasy, confused, and you will try to hide this. What you have just seen must become unseen: all similar recordings will have been purged years ago in keeping with the Third Vital Law. You will have no idea how this one was looked over; you will want to go back to it, thinking you thought you saw something that wasn’t there because you were tired; your fingertips will be all pins and needles, and when you turn around you will see him looking at you.

III.

The fact that they sent you to the Church to shoot its Basic Image Unit will attest to the trust they put in you at the Broadcasting Center despite your young age: after the Big Earthquake, only this part of the city, the original Centrum, was left untouched, in ruins; the rest was totally demolished to re-build the city from scratch, and the prohibition to enter this zone turned into a deadly taboo. The BIU of the Church will be used for a new game show in preparation, top secret, and even you will not be privy to the full details. Once the BIU is handed over to the Graphic Extrapolation Unit, it will be possible to create the most intricate images of the Church. This is the method: deriving virtuality from a kernel of reality. The incredible magnitude of the Archives will usually make such re-shoots unnecessary, but in very exceptional cases when the BIU is totally unusable, the most dependable employees of the Broadcasting Center will be sent off on duty under strict secrecy.

You will make up your mind after you enter the courtyard of the Church, walking under the arch-passage overhead which has survived intact except for a column or two: this is the place where you ought to live. You will shoot the tower-like structures with balconies on both sides of the entrance, the Church itself with its marble steps now covered with weed, the huge, wooden doors darkened but not rotten with the wear of time, the inside of the Church, the partly collapsed ceiling, the altar, and what’s left of the benches. Your decision is final: you simply have to find a way and move in here. Going out with haste to tell the others about your discovery, you will think you saw an old man, and will simultaneously note the existence of the hut now on your left. Upon entering the hut you will find a robed man in front of you; he is indeed very old - he will be standing beneath a big, gilded sign on the wall, and will exhibit no surprise when he sees you.

You will remember the stories of your childhood: a sect called the Children of E, with only a cursed handful of members worshipping Entropy and Energy. When you remember the name of this underground religion which would be mentioned only to install fear in children, a religion which explained the existence and the order of the universe by the dialectics of entropy and energy, and which strangely succeeded in averting extermination through the ages, you will smile to yourself, for reasons unknown. The old man who looks like a priest to you will also smile.

IV.

In a world where human sexuality is almost totally replaced by mandatory pills, artificial insemination, professional parenting, work ethics, games, competitions, and images and experiences created by personal virtuality gadgets, you will have been scared by your impulses which you know no one else feels, no one but the terminally ill. During the last few years, however, you will have learned to secretly live at peace with what you call your “sickness”; what’s more, you will think there must be others with your condition, and plan with great detail how you will recognize them and what you will do when you run into them. Your wetness will not be a source of shame.

You will regard yourself as the perhaps belated but definitely unpreventable revenge of this old, extraordinarily old city once called İst, this Mecca of sexuality which you learned about through old texts you collected risking every peril, a city where beautiful people once walked wearing little if any clothing, making love on street corners, with people rushing in from all over the world to let their sexuality flow, where festivities were held in its parks and on its shores, where everyone touched, rubbed against, and clang to everyone else all the time all over the place, where everyone walked holding hands, where everyone burned and the desire to make love governed everything and all relationships were set up accordingly, where all eyes glittered and making love was as natural as talking. You will be proud of your mission: to be yourself, to survive, and to find the others.

V.

There will eventually be five of you: he will bring two people, you will bring one. Three women and two men in total. After you succeed in landing the newcomers with jobs at the Broadcasting Center, you will be able to see each other all day and will be the first to know if something happens to any one of you; on the other hand, this will increase your risk of getting caught: it will be very difficult at times to act, in the company of other people, as if nothing is happening.

VI.

You will all collaborate in the project of collecting texts: you will read, on your own or as a group, the erotic and pornographic material that you have found as a result of undercover operations, and discuss them afterwards, trying to learn and understand: both yourselves and the extinguished, supplanted tradition of past millennia.

VII.

You will realize that there is only one way to eradicate distrust and suspicion: to make love, all together, in full view of all the others. Up until then, each of you had vowed to being “sick”, but none had been asked to prove it. Any informer working for the administration could have said as much. But when push comes to shove, so you will reason, no one will dare to commit such a crime if they are not really “sick”. They won’t be able to, either.

There you will encounter an obstacle: all those texts you have collected will of course have taught you many things, but how different is that, really, from learning how to swim by reading a book on swimming?

VIII.

You will personally be shocked when you will read a very old book entitled 1984, which one of you will vaguely remember was a novel: naturally many things will be different in your world, but the similarities concerning the regime of sexuality will be sufficient to make you think you are reading a prophetic book. You will be outraged at the thought that the administration knows about everything, that everything takes place under their control, and that perhaps you are being used as guinea pigs. The others will read the book, too, and the look in the eyes will change: it won’t be long before you comprehend that the greatest calamity for your group would be to start suspecting each other.

IX.

It won’t be that easy to work it out, but when you meet one night at your place, the halting conversation won’t last more than fifteen minutes: the five of you will sit on the floor and touch each other’s faces and bodies in the silence, you will be the first to undress, followed by the rest, all scents will mingle, you will smile, so much flesh!, and then you will start to talk quietly, all at once, with indistinct voices but clearly discernable meaning.

You will make love.

When you reach the conclusion that none of you is a traitor, you will want to go away, anywhere, as soon as possible. Every second you tarry will increase your risk of getting caught.

X.

After you jump out of the vehicle, the five of you will travel for days on foot, trying to find a way to enter İst without being discovered. Finally one morning, right after the break of dawn, the Church will rise before you. You will settle down in the left tower, and start making love in front of the priest without waiting for him to finish his long speech and his reading from the sacred pages; you will have shed the awkwardness and reticence of the first time; the priest will fall silent at one point and start watching you. He will then leave the room, go down the stairs, cross the courtyard into the Church building; when he passes the sacred sign and the miniature statue of a woman he will raise his arms, put down first his left knee and then his right and then get up, saying “Minelhakelhamd”; he will then go out and enter the adjacent hut.

XI.

The BIU of the Church will be used in the “Last Temptation”, one of the new generation mass competition-games. There will be a priest in the old church, the extrapolated image of which will have been created with utmost care, and this priest will wander from room to room, through alleys and buildings, trying to find a fifteen –year old, brunette boy and fuck him. Viewers will use various clues and try to track the priest down, find out where he is fucking the boy and kill him. To add further excitement and suspense to the game, some rooms of the church will be left dark at the beginning, to be included in the game at later stages. After a few unsuccessful contestants, one viewer will find out that the priest left one of these dark rooms, walked through the arch-passage, went down a tower with balcony, crossed a courtyard, entered and came out of the church and finally entered the little hut. He will score thousands of points and make his first shot: when he pushes the button, the virtual reality on the screen will show the hut where the priest is entangled with the boy go up in flames.

The game show host will congratulate the contestant with sincere exhilaration and announce that one of the dark rooms will now be lit up, that the audience is in for a big, thrilling surprise.

XII.

None of you will be able to make sense of the explosion you will hear.