"Do you know who I've always admired?" he said one day, as he looked up at the video screen
He was a talker by nature. The old men said that he loved to hear himself talk. His speeches were nothing but exercises in a sort of vocabulary masturbation.
This was one of the few areas in which the old men were right. Much of his speech was unnecessary and rather over dramatic.
What they failed to realize were two things.
The first was that he was completely aware of this and did it intentionally. The second was that there was a subtle change in his tone when he was saying something that actually should be listened to.
I know this because I am a listener by nature.
I carefully bookmarked my place and ascended the steps.
"Mother Teresa," he explained, gesturing to her picture on the screen.
"Such a force for peace?" the other one said as he walked in from his laboratory. "You surprise me."
"It is not her goals I admire, it is her means. After all, are we not a group whose goals justify our means? I admire her tenacity, I admire her ability to stand up to anything, and I admire her ability to do so much with so little."
He smirked. "It is as our enemy would say. A true human. How does her little saying go?"
I coughed to clear my throat, sore and cracked from disuse.
"We, the unwilling, led by the unknowing, are doing the impossible for the ungrateful. We have done so much, for so long, with so little, we are now qualified to do anything with nothing."
They turned to me smiling.
"That's exactly it," he said. "We have waited and we have planned and we have built up for so long with so little, for those who do not even know of our existence. We were lead unwillingly by one who unknowingly had created something the world could not even comprehend at the time."
"Is it time?" the other asked.
He nodded as he returned his attention to the video screen. "Contact the Brothers. Order an instant into Northern Ireland. It is time that we start doing anything we want. For all of us, is it not true that we are non-existant? That we are nothing? Then… as the good mother says… we shall now do everything."