Matthew re-enters the central cavern, fresh from throwing the planetformer in jail to rot in good health. As he walks the thoroughfare past the bars, shops and brothels, he notices three distinct things. People that smile and want to shake his hand as they pass him, people that nervously avert their eyes and give a very wide berth as he passes, and people that do nothing and just simply pass him as he passes them.
He notices Sequoia sitting under a tree and has the wisdom to recognize the thoughts that dwell behind the look on her face.
The old man takes a seat at the base of her tree, making a point to sit opposite of her. She, facing north and he facing south.
A few minutes pass in silence before Banger breaks it.
"Nature truly is a beautiful thing isn't it?"
Sequoia understood that the question was a rhetorical statement of fact and it didn't require a response.
Another minute or so passes before the man spoke again.
"I was alot like you when I was your age you know." He said.
"When I was finally old enough to begin University back in 759, I started to attend many of the student protests on the quad primarily as a tool to meet people. It didn't matter to me what they were protesting about, it's just, at the time, that's what people did. I had a pretty average and very sheltered upper-middle class upbringing, so back then, I really had nothing to be truly angry about because I've never really experienced what true injustice felt like in any of its forms. I simply feigned anger and protested in the attempts to discover what kind of man it was that I wanted to become, and which people I could relate to most."
Matthew pulls a joint rolled from his latest test crop of 'organic synthweed' lights it, and takes a long hit before continuing:
"The Gaian protests were my favorites though. Not because I cared anything of what they were about honestly, but really only because Gaian protests drew the hottest, most hedonistic women. Ultimately, the bottom line is, it was my johnson that eventually led me here to Edinburgh."
"I was a player though, I knew all the right things to say and all the right times to say them. I mean, as a kid, I can remember all the times my dad turning on the media wall in the 40's and watching the news reports on the couch with him of Gaian attacks against the BMM over the Cobalt on Gaia and the violence of the Gaian blood riots on New London. Anyway, college chicks tend to get moist around dudes that can tell them what they want to hear, and I preferred to moisten the pro-Gaian girls more than the rest."
"Eventually, within a few years I started to truly sympathize with their cause to the point where I was leading the protests instead of just attending them. That put me in a position to begin actually meeting real Edinburgh Gaians. I was approached one day by a Green Front representative and that led to my making weekly trips here to Islay, well away from the prying eyes of the government to coordinate the public face of the movement on the Cambridge campus."
Banger takes another long draw of smoke.
"So, getting to the part where I say 'In other words' My preconceptions of what the Gaians were before I ever met one was almost completely different than what they actually were in reality. I really had to admire the Green Front's skill at media manipulation, because back in the day, they were true masters at it in every sense of the word.
I was eventually blacklisted by the government for my publicly pro-Gaian stance. I was expelled from school, I couldn't rent an apartment, I couldn't get a job, and hell, I couldn't even legally leave Planet Cambridge for a fresh start in another House because the crown invalidated my passport. I was trapped on the breadbasket of Bretonia and I began to starve to death, homeless and alone. I was malnourished, I was desperate, and the Gaians saved my life by smuggling me off-world and bringing me here."
"I forever owe them an unpayable debt."
"Anyway, as I was saying, back in the 60's, actual Gaians were far removed from the Green Front-media created romantic myth popular with a naive young subculture searching for idealistic heroes to emulate."
"In reality, they were many things. Mostly though, they were an uncompromising people willing to take life for their cause just as equally as they were willing to give up their own for it."
"In my many moons of drawing breath, I've seen untold hundreds of disillusioned recruits with dreams and aspirations of heroic valor, vaporize in the pragmatic brutality of the life they were grossly unprepared to face."
"Now, If I may: Your fatal flaw, sweetheart, is that you, like so many others before you, willingly fall into the myth-trap. You and people like you seem to treat this life as if it were some sort of game where good can triumph over evil, wrongs can be righted with words and slogans, and the boy can ride off into the sunset with the girl and live happily ever after."
"Trust me...choosing this life as a Gaian is not a game by any stretch of the imagination."
"The reality is that you are blinded to the very nature of Nature. While you're preoccupied with the panoramic beauty of it and Utopian fantasies based upon it, you've yet to recognize the true beauty of it. The true beauty lies within the absolute perfect balance of it. A predator that kills to eat in the veldt is equally as beautiful as a sunset."
"Good and evil do not exist
Right and wrong does not exist
Heroes and villains do not exist
Gods and devils do not exist
These are simply constructs of the limited human mind."
"In Nature, the only thing that truly exists is balance and imbalance. Those that fail to understand that, fail to survive past their youth and are returned early to the ash."
"You may not like to hear the reality of all this right now, but if you do not internalize this absolute truth, your sentience will be wasted when Nature calls to claim your life."