Finding It Perfect

“Yes, what is it?” Chancellor Volte grumbled into the black screen of the vidcom as he slumped into his borovaesi skin recliner. His dark but thin eyebrows were tightly furrowed, producing a tripartite crease between his hawkish eyes. His scowl was meant to convey his displeasure at receiving a call this late in the evening but would go unseen by his interlocutor, who also chose to forgo the vid option of their telecommunication. Though vid-displays were officially mandated in the space telecoms portion of the imperial handbook, it had become standard operating procedure to keep them off. Starship commanders and their planet-bound superiors had re-discovered what their distant ancestors had learned during their great plague: video calls were just horrible. Audio-only coms, on the other hand, were tolerable, even if just barely.

“Come in, chancellor Volte. Come in, chancellor Volte. This is Starship Glaucon. Commander Emanuelo speaking” said the portly commander in an all too formal tone.

“Yes, yes, commander, I don’t need your sharescreen on for me to know it’s you. I’d recognize your sniveling voice anywhere. Now what in Mother Nature’s name is it? My hermelite told me you’re experiencing some EmErGeNcY? This had better be important, I was just sitting down to a plate of carukiidae. It’s not that blasted generator again, is it? I’ve told you a thousand times, buy a new one! Buy seven new ones! For Wallace sake, boy, money is no object here.”

“No sir, it’s not that” the commander said, nervously fingering the burgeoning bald spot on the back-most crest of his head, “It’s… well, it’s far worse. I don’t know how to say this sir… we’ve… we’ve found it.”

“You’ve found what, boy?” the mercurial Chancelor harrumphed.

“It, sir. We’ve literally found It.”

Sitting forward in his recliner, the Chancellor barked “Son, you know how I feel about you using ‘literally’ figuratively! I haven’t the foggiest what you’re blathering about. What is ‘it’? Is your coms shorting out, or what?”

“Sir, it’s it.”

“Out with it, boy! What ‘it’ have you found?” The chancellor asked with what little restraint he had left. He had little patience for telecom calls, and even less patience for commander Emanuelo—especially during a jellyfish dinner.

Emanuelo had dutifully rehearsed the best way to break the lamentable news to his superior, but under the duress of the moment he couldn’t remember which line he had decided would evoke the least amount of ire. Fumbling his way through abandoned thought patterns, he said “Sir, it’s… it’s a—no, it’s thee… uh... Sir, it’s our mission—our mission is… complete.”

The chancellor raised an incredulous brow, temporarily relieving that deep glabella crease formerly engraved there by his scowl. Of course, all of these non-verbal cues were moot since Emanuelo, like chancellor Volte, had his vidshare turned off.

Aborting several excessively pugnacious lines of thought, Volte took a deep breath, composed himself, and opted for a more matter of fact tone. Business like, yet forcefully, he spoke into the coms speaker, “Commander Emanuelo, your mission is a farce. A deliberate thumb in the eye to the C.C. You have not completed it. You cannot complete it. It is a pseudo-task. You have not found ‘it’.”

The servile commander, taking the base out of his voice, replied “Sir, I know my mission. I believe in your cause. I took the oath, I gave the chortle—hand on the Bible and all. You handpicked me for this mission. You know me, sir. You know that no one sneers at the Canterburian Cohanim better than me. But I’m telling you, sir, our mission… is complete. Sir.”

The chancellor, thoroughly frustrated now, closed his eyes, bowed his head, pinched the thumb and pointer finger of his right hand together, and place them on the bridge of his nose. He pressed the digits down over the bridge and spread them across his closed eyelids, letting out a labored groan. “Emanueloooo. Are you trying to tell me you’ve found IT? Like it it?”

“Sir, like I said: we found it. It exists. It’s here on EP285197. And it’s… well sir, it’s glorious, to be honest.”

“It can’t be, boy! It’s a… reductio ad absurdum. It’s barely even a thought experiment. It’s, it’s an ancient counter argument. It has no substance. It can have no substance. Do you understand? It’s an imponderable. It’s unrealizable, that’s the whole point of it! Do you hear me!? It’s uninstantiable, in principle, boy!”

“Sir, I’m no metaphysician. But I know what I’m looking at. It’s perfect” Emanuelo said with the first signs of indignation.

“Son, we haven’t even given you the criteria for adjudication. Do you have any idea why we haven’t given you the criteria?”

“Be—because there is none?”

“Because there is none!” the chancellor screamed. “There is no agreed upon set of necessary and sufficient conditions for what it would even be like! There could always be one more palm tree, one more piña colada, one more dancing hula girl—one more grain of sand, Emanuelo!”

Taking another deep breath, Volte tried to regain a semblance of the stolid demeanor he’d convinced himself was part of his personality. Breathing out, he said “you are simply mistaken, commander.”

“But sir,” Emanuelo retorted “isn’t it possible that perfection, like, resists analysis?”

“Oh, don’t you dare start waxing eloquent now, you simpleton!” the chancellor screeched, relinquishing that sliver of hard-fought composure. “I chose you for this mission simply to add to the insult I intend against those Canteburian de-gens. To have one of their own apostate priests leading the expedition team, funded by the tithes they’ve collected—all because I petitioned the Emperor, mind you—was too delicious to pass on. But don’t overestimate your station. You are part of my affront. That is why I chose you, boy.”

Thoroughly chastised, the commander, with a renewed formality uttered “Be that as it may, sir, we’ve still found it. I don’t have any method for proving it is what it is. But it knew it when I saw it. And it is it.”

“Show me.” The chancellor said with a snide veneer meant to hide his growing trepidation.  

The commander tapped the reverse-view icon to switch from selfie mode to POV. He then tapped the ‘show-screen’ button on his monitor. Suddenly the chancellors black screen was transformed by millions of tiny cold cathode florescent lamps depicting commander Emanuelo’s point of view from the outlook deck of the Starship Gloucon. The ‘it’ was in full display.

“Oh, my God!” The chancellor exclaimed in what sounded more like a confession than a curse.

“Literally, sir.” Emanuelo added with a tinge of irony and relief.

“Shut the hell up, Emanuelo.” Volte reflexively snarled. “That… is…it. That is thee perfect island. I—I can’t explain it. I just know it to be perfect. It’s like that beautiful vision the C.C. are always yammering about. Its sublimity bypasses my judgment, or…or is it commending itself to my judgement and confirming its impeccability?”

Volte felt himself enraptured, drawn up out of his recliner toward the vidscreen. As he took a step, however, the toe of his slipper caught on the recently waxed floor of his coms chamber. The shock of his false step was enough to jolt him free of the allure of perfection represented on the vidscreen.

Volte’s eyes flashed over to the control panel station planted five feet over to his left. Squinting, he found the little red button sitting just beneath a tan strip of masking tape labeled “Gloucon”. He lunged for the button, hammer fisting it in rapid succession, though one relatively forceful press would have been sufficient to bring about the desired result.

Volte jerked his head back over his left shoulder to look at the vidscreen. The picture was still there. Nothing had changed. The perfect island sat there, still beckoning him to come partake of its splendor. It wasn’t right. It should be nothing but blackness. But nothing had changed.

“Commander Emanuelo, are you there?” Volte bellowed hoping his question would go unanswered. “Perhaps there’s a lag in the vidcom display” Volte desperately wished to himself.

“I’m here, chancellor” Emanuelo exclaimed, his confusion bleeding through in his tone.

“Commander, did… something happen to that small black box we had installed under the main generator last cycle when you brought the Gloucon in for maintenance?”

“Oh, yes sir, it was all in my last report. Petty officer White accidentally spilled gorpian acid while changing out the burst tubes during his last routine exchange. We had to scuttle that box along with several other tools and gears that were affected. That gorpian sludge is nasty, sir. Didn’t want to take any chances.”

“I understand.” Volte said with a nod of disingenuous understanding, hiding his dismay. “And I suppose the live-feed vidcomm stream to the C.C. Cathedral is still active?”

“Well, yes, of course, sir. You wanted all of our endeavors seen by the Canteburians so they could see how we “frittered away their ill-gotten god-money”.

“Ah, yes, of course.” What an idea, Volte muttered to himself.

“So, it’s also safe to assume they’ve heard our entire conversation, including my admission of perfection? And they’ve no doubt seen your sharescreen footage of the island as well?”

“That’s a safe assumption, yes, sir.”

 “Well, then it looks like your mission is accomplished, son. Come home and receive your commendation. This changes everything.”

“Sir, just because we’ve found the Perfect Island, doesn’t necessarily mean that He exists somewhere out there.”

“You don’t get it, Emanuelo. The perfect island objection was supposed to be it. The wrench in their a priori line of reasoning. We intended to ape their perfect being arguments. To show that their same arguments would necessitate something as preposterous as a perfect island. It was supposed to be impossible. Your wild-goose chase of a mission was meant to be just that. A galactic snipe hunt. But if it exists, then He certainly exists—and necessarily so! And who knows, there’s probably a perfect snipe running around out there somewhere too.”

“Sir, I don’t know what to say. I’ve never seen you like this. I… I was just doing my job.”

“I don’t blame you, Emanuelo. And even if I did, I suppose I’d have to forgive you anyways, now that I know He’s out there watching. Just pack it in, commander. Meet me at the Cathedral when you’re back planet-side. I’ll have an extra burlap sack and a handful of ashes for ya. We’ve got some repenting to do.”