Free The Celestial Instructi0n by Grady Ward

will be
told when you need it.” She turned and walked back to her desk in the tightest
and most graceful flecked gabardine trousers that Joex had ever seen. Or at
least recently.
    Distracted by Serena, but also by the rude
statement that he would be “told” to use the bathroom, Joex settled down to the
touch screen labeled INTRODUCTION and swiped the box marked “Begin.” In
contradiction to Serena’s assertion of the membership of the International Church
of the Crux, the room had no other people in it.

Chapter 21
     
    The presentation was surprisingly well done. Hours
passed quickly in front of the screen. First a short feature video on the
history and public rites of the church concentrating on the super-human
abilities promised to members who finished the program of intellectual
perfection (though to Joex the path to Crux salvation seemed mostly to be paying
steeply increasing fees for fewer and fewer hours of access.) The video showed
the happy and fulfilled Parich and parichoners, the kindly and benign Angelic
Choirs and Church hierarchy, a lengthy biopic of the life of the Supernals with
most time spent celebrating the gifted life of First Celestial Michael Voide.
The screen directed “Jim” to get up and stretch in a certain manner then to
windmill his arms and stomp his feet “as if he were crushing grapes.” The Games
Machine terminal sensed his motion, heartbeat and respiration and instructed
him to stop after a few minutes. It then directed him to the toilet. No matter
what Joex did, the screen froze in its instruction to him until he actually
went to the toilet, urinated, washed his hands and returned to the desk. Joex
wasn’t sure of the Games Machine was regulating his comfort, or was testing the
enforcement of its mechanical will.
    He could see Serena at a distance looking away from
him. He suspected that she could watch him through the surveillance cameras
hidden in their tinted spheres that he could see when he glanced at the low
ceiling of the training room or “scriptorium” as the video lecture described.
    Now was the interactive portion of the introduction
to the Church. The elementary course of puzzles began to demonstrate the “progress
to perfection.” It began with a quote from someone name Ludwig Wittgenstein:
“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must pass over in silence.” Joex had no
idea how that quote applied to what he was doing.
    The format of the course was a statement, axiom, quip,
theorem, quote, lemma, or aphorism followed by multiple-choice questions, as if
he were taking some kind of University entrance exam. The first statement was
“Distinctions exist.” It was followed by the line:
     
    1 ≠ 0
     
    Then what appeared to be elementary arithmetic
propositions about commutativity, associativity, and distributivity. Joex
remembered learning about these properties somewhere in early elementary
school. Joex as “Jim” breezed easily through the first presentation followed by
questions about what he had read. Questions were  presented; the few that Joex
chose the wrong response were followed by new fact and a fresh question of
similar difficulty. Questions that he got right were followed by new topical facts
or relationships of something new, compared to the previous material. A new
question of increasing subtlety or difficulty followed. Within a score of
correct answers, Joex was quickly pacing himself through elementary,
intermediate, and advanced amalgam of arithmetic, geometry, logic, paradox and contradiction;
there were diagrams the led him to consider novel aspects of figure/ground and
positive/negative space. The pace was persistent and accelerating. Joex noted
that the vocabulary and sentence structure within the propositions and their
questions was increasing along with the difficulty of their content. From
simple declarative sentences, then compound, then complex, then
compound/complex with subordinating conjunctions. Then the mixed area where