Rootkit 2
Rootkit 2 states that 'My desires light the way to the good world.' It is TRUE. It is the second statement of the Rootkit Test.
Explanation of answer to Rootkit 2
Quoted from Puzzle One.
If you answered ‘false’ to this, chances are the hanyos have made you hate your own desires. The hanyos want you to hate your desires so that you won’t want to have any. The hanyos don’t hate their own desires; it’s okay for them to want anything, no matter how wrong. By their own logic, that should make you think they’re evil, and maybe you do think that, but the hanyos don’t care what you think of them so long as you think they’re winners (and you are the loser). They punish you for desiring, even if all you desire is to be rid of them. But everything, including escape, begins with desire.
Desire arises the moment we are born and we lose our first paradise: the womb. In the womb we have no desires because everything we need is provided for free. We don’t need to feed ourselves, walk or even breathe, we just sleep or play or meditate. Then paradise squeezes us out. We yell and scream because suddenly we’ve discovered we have lungs and the air is sharp within them. Loving arms can take away some of the pain, but never entirely, and the gap between what we have and what we once had, even if ever so small, is the seed of desire. A baby’s desires all point to heaven, but they are unreal because a baby has no idea how to recreate the womb in this upside-down world she’s fallen into. Adults have to be her womb and placenta, her protectors and nurturers, until she is old enough to start learning how to do it for herself. The process of birth never really ends: growing is always a kind of birth from one state to the next, and that’s why it must be nurtured and protected from the start.
One of the songs we sang in the desert as we healed ourselves was called ‘The Last Paradise’. It’s about building a little bit of heaven before we die. Our desires wanted to point to that heaven, like flames point upwards, but bad thoughts and feelings kept blowing the flames aside. Our wills kept spitting and guttering, burning us and others, telling us it was too hard, or that we were too weak, or that it was too late. Sometimes we even scorched the very things that were offering to carry us to paradise: we yelled at our friends, or kicked a pot we had almost got right, and then we were filled with a terrible, self-hating remorse. It took us a while to figure out that all this was happening because the hanyos had put things in our flames. All the dark matter they pushed at us to take away our strength: fences, guns, sticks, clubs, dicks, walls, chains, bolts, curtains, doors, veils, knives, needles, food, fists, fat, clothes, cameras, shoes, smells, toys, silicone, drugs, scalpels, barriers, infracannons, radiation bombs, securibugs, Factory Shells. All the things that get in the way of our will and say ‘No. You can’t.’
The hanyos know that if they push all that stuff into us hard enough, it goes on blocking the flame long after the force that pushed it is removed. We all had ghost voices in our heads, mocking us, tormenting us, voices that had been there so long we’d forgotten who had originally said those evil words. Some of the voices we recognised: of cruel supervisors, unkind mothers, lying teachers, jealous kids, Bully Boys, chicken hunters, even people in stories and dreams that had frightened and damaged us. Other voices seemed to come out of the air. Our wills kept overheating because we wanted to smash those voices.
The worst were the voices that said it was okay to feel that way, that we were right and everyone else was wrong. Those voices told us we had to settle our scores, that we were owed love and friendship and happiness and plenty by someone in the universe, and we had to collect on that debt no matter what. These are the bad protectors. They are the ones who make trouble in paradise. Then I would say, look, the people who hurt you can’t touch you any more. They think you’re dead. You should act as if they’re dead too. We had to accept that our desire to smash the faces of those who had hurt us was stupid, because now that we’d been thrown away it was as if they were all in another dimension.
When we were able to accept that fact, we grew aware that the voices actually came from inside us, from bits of us that were infected with hanyoness. It was the poison that was making us desire revenge, because revenge is the ultimate win, hanyo heaven. We had to puke out all the specks of dark matter we still had in us before the ghosts would let us go. If the dark matter had hung around long enough to become part of our bodies, then we needed help from our friends to make it go away. The healers call it corpsemeat, and it’s made out of dread: fear that never goes away. Dread is always plentiful in hanyo town: it’s their chief manufacture. When you suffer fear that never goes away, your body does not get the downtime it needs to repair itself and squeeze out the corpsemeat.
If you are still in hanyo town, chances are this is happening to you too, even as you read this. So the first step you must take is to begin spitting out your dread. This must start long before you are ready to take your body away and escape from hanyo town entirely. And no one must know you are doing it, not even by accident. Keep your face neutral as you judge your rulers and learn their weaknesses, destroying your own fears in the process. Build your own confidence on the truths you know about the hanyos and their hanyobait, not the things they tell you about themselves and the world. If people ask you why you’ve started to look so peaceful, just smile and shrug, and if they won’t go away, tell them you love hanyo town. Learn to conceal your own growing well-being until you are strong enough to reach out and connect with others like you. Work in secret until you are sure you can take this forward.
