Cassius and the Witch: 4

“World of balance, world of ruin, and Babel in between”

*

FRAME: St. Ignatius

*

Lucretia/Cassius leaves the goons at the edge of the clearing. All over, and ankle deep, there grows a Clover that reeks of menthol, another Ignatian oddity. It is the only thing that grows in the clearing around the remnants of the mission with the half burnt chapel. Cassius makes Lucretia death grip the briefcase device till she’s there on her knees and quaking at the heart of some square outline. The rigid lines barely visible beneath the dirt, the choking clover, and the weight of time. Every stone here is being ground back to dust, every stone except those that compose the half-scorched chapel.

The little lonely thing, half burnt lists left or right depending on the angle from which you see it and the light and time of day and if your brain can handle being on Ignatius (let alone so close to the chapel).

Lucretia considers it, wonders at it’s presence here. She fixates on it. This is what she’s doing when her ancestor manipulates her hands and activates the briefcase device–cut’s the chord that runs behind the heavens and sends this bird-shit covered group of islands snapping back.

It’s as if a great web without a spider, some spring that held nothing to nothing (but held it well) sighed and fell to rest. Some fiber stretched-taut tying St. Ignatius on every Earth together gave way like a faulty solder joint. The island(s) flew away from that Earth and did collide with itself (across iterations).

What’s left? One Earth (0x7DD) quite completely cut off from the narrative network crafted by some born mortals and HVAC’s civil defense division. St. Ignatius on any Earth is tied to St. Ignatius on every Earth that has a St. Ignatius, or at least it was. Earth (0x7DD) is isolated.

Out on the scorched plain at the End of Time a lonely liminal, some broken down bus station with 1957 signage snap-crumbles to dust. A mighty wind from nowhere to nowhere takes the remains of the liminal and exposes the pale pool of light beneath: Earth (0x7DD).

Elsewhere, in the bowels of some bunker Woland watches and applauds. Somewhere out in the fractal, the weird sisters see. The Red Star sniffs it out–something in the new cosmology has changed.

*.

Earth(0x7DD)->Earth(0x53)

*

A man and a woman, both unremarkable, begin their respective mornings. It is the DMV– metro Washington DC. The season is the late fall, the kind that might as well be winter. Each subject casually admires the self in the mirror. Each has a bland and expectedly respectable haircut. Each wears a long salary man’s winter coat. Her pantsuit, his salary drone suit, both exquisitely boring. They arrive via bus at points East on the Orange and Blue lines respectively. Both walk past “increased police presence” onto their respective platforms with the untroubled and unexamined ease of the respectable. Both are prime and pristine examples of salary people at play (or more accurately perpetual work).

The following happens twice: the forgettable person dons ear buds and starts a soulless playlist–music that’s never meant anything to anyone. They read an e-book on a mobile. Which one? “I did and you can too” flavored self-help or something psuedo-scientific-psych. They carry the day on their back from one end of the transit system to another: lunch in pyrex or plastic, comfort and style clothes, gym clothes and the personal computer and the work computer and ibuprofen and a weed vape and some Adderall if they have to stay late.

Brake screech. Same point on different lines, and like a 1990-something television commercial that screams at you, she’s on their headphones: the old robotic Stasi lady and the number station past the gongs. Their inner ears and eyes get in a fight and right-side up is wrong ways until they’re corkscrewed and wrung-out. In them, all the human is gone, and all that remains is a vector–a path laid in chain of numbers that leads toward a location at a constant bearing and decreasing range. A collision course.

Anything that’s left of who they were is elsewhere, dreaming of quitting their 9-to-5 to entrepreneurialize or some other bland-opium dream. The bodies of our forgettable man and woman arrive on Earth(0x53) and find payloads prepared for them by other forgettable men and women. They ditch their bags, belongings that belong to people they no longer recall. They follow the shrieking numbers toward their destinations–like migratory birds or beasts with fever, like the last rotting half of a bug with mushrooms for brains.

*

SOURCE: AFTER ACTION REPORT (OR THE MAD RAMBLINGS OF THE SCRIBE A.GIF)

*

A spring snaps tight again. A rubber band sags to a heap. Every person on the islands feels it in the inner-ear. Pressure. The scream of a bad bearing behind an obsolete modem. The senses lie and say all points are up and all born-mortal on St. Ignatius fall unconscious.

This happens on many iterations of St. Ignatius. The island sits atop and overlapping and folded in on itself on a good day. This is not a good day. The seas are rough around the island, and around the two Earths entangled.

Offshore and on the edge of the event, sailors on the Enterprise and its attendant destroyer are groaning toward consciousness. Closer to the epicenter, in Port Town (all of them) and the villages. It will be some time before they wake, and many won’t wake at all.

On the island(s), the folded writhing things, the people slumber or brain bleed (depending on their luck). In the clearing, Lucretia’s retching breaks the silence. Her writhing musses the clover. From her eyes and mouth and ears and fresh stigmata flows the ichor that is her ancestor.

There on the clover before the chapel Cassius reconstitutes. Next to his half-consumed and brain burnt and barely alive kin–he congeals. And out of that puddle of shit forms-reforms the jagged joints and the angled face–melted and reformed, scarred by the battle with Lu (for Lu).

Cassius, the devil for the time being, stalks on toward Port Town, one iteration of it. The big one. The bustling one with the glass buildings. Every born-mortal being on the islands sleeps the shock-sleep unconscious. Every demon among Cassius goons is wide awake. And every demon calls every demon it knows, and that’s how a horde is made. They march toward Port Town and its gleaming towers like a procession of ants, Cassius alone sees the path and leads them along the folded Earth.

*

Mal watches the beige salary man on the tiny screen, she hears it–tinny in the one earphone held to her bad right ear–he’s muttering an endless string of numbers interspersed with customer reviews of random products. Feds unseen track the two with cameras and drones and microphones and by other means, as they navigate DC mass transit.

Up the escalator and out of the doors. When the beige man rounds a corner, heads under the old rail bridge by Union Station. When the hand that used-to-be his own reaches for a phone that is a detonator. Just then, he’s hit in the sternum with a perfect form tackle by a special agent named Stan (one with perfect bone structure). The phone clatters. A bomb in a bag makes its way, via hand to hand relay, to disposal.

Same-time. Elsewhere, a beige woman, in a small and mercifully empty DC park a mile from her target stops, the thing piloting her realizing its compromised. She says quite clearly: “3, 2, 1…” and uses the hand that once was hers to detonate the bomb strapped to her.

Over the following weeks, into winter and the new year, the quietest command center emerges, accretes, comes to be. A study in that brick house in Georgetown, situated in the corner of the first floor, located before the Kitchen but past the front door, becomes an odd sort of situation room. A dozen or more languages at a given time sending secure communications to friends and frienemies because every nation on Earth has the same beige and forgettable problem. Special agents skitter about Mal’s house (including one with exquisite bone structure, all pretending like he doesn’t know where she keeps the coffee).

DC, Berlin, London, Moscow. The forgettable step off trains and buses. Tokyo, Prague, Mexico City. They evoke no suspicion unless one knows the subtle set of cues taught to an old spy by an even older witch. And when the people who lay on hands in all the places above see the bombers coming? They stop them. They save people and places from shrapnel and fire. For a time. They do this with the help and guidance of the improvised command center in Georgetown. There in the corner, now ancient-beyond-ancient and eating edibles because the feds whined about their contact high, sits the witch A(79).

For a time, the governments of Earth(0x53) do prevent calamity. They do not prevent the panic and the speculation or the speculative panic. A great host, international in nature, does a great deal quietly and quickly whispering through microphones. They do a lot loudly tackling and disarming bombers. Amen.

*

“Come on. We gotta get you someplace that is not here.” Back on St. Ignatius, Ira woke quickly. In fact, she never slept. A safety-belt plus a ‘mom-arm’–some force unseen, some present absence took part of the blow when Cassius detonated the device. She watched, stunned in a half-stupor, while the human-scab of a man crawled out of that poor woman.

Ira found her feet and cleared the airway of the half-dead former-host. Ira carried the woman, weak but sure of her path to her grandmother’s little cabin just outside Port Town (another Port Town, their small sad home, the one half leveled by goons).

Ira, the strong woman, the pile of stones with the Puffin scarred ankles walks. She is cradling the barely breathing stranger with one blown pupil, putting one foot in front of the other along a path you or I or anyone we know could not see. She’s staggering steadily toward a portion of the island(s) of St. Ignatius that, under such ‘rough seas’, you or I could never find.

The thing most remarkable about the island(s) is the Ignatians. They pass from iteration to iteration, Earth to Earth, effortlessly through the multi-verse. It’s not a power or a skill so much as a capacity to see. It’s just an accurate mental map their home–of a place that can-be/is many places at once.

That’s the reality of it, why all the conquests and businesses and philantho-capitalist enterprises attempted on the island(s) of St. Ignatius fail: workers get bored and wander off until they fall through to another island on another Earth. Inventory gets shipped to an adjacent Earth. And every time you think you have the Puffin population under control? A wave comes from nowhere–it’s always Puffin breeding season somewhere in the multiverse.

*

“Stan-candy! Where’s the coffee?” Shouts the perpetually-stoned witch with the shades in the corner. She’s bored-fiddling with the sword in her lap. She’s yelling over the general of the command center that’s consumed the whole first floor of Mal’s home. “I wish you would stop saying that. And I have to make another pot.” Dude. “Get to it quicker, twelve cups at a time. First come. First serve.”

Several dozen who come and go from an old Cold War 1 tunnel in the basement at all hours. Several dozen who do the breath and retina scan and pass the temporarily stationed guards at the back.

Mal’s arguing through a translator. It’s heated. Something’s wrong. The wrinkle: the world stopped the first wave of Cassius’ forgettables. And then came the flood. The same scene repeats a bakers dozen times: arguments and abrupt silence. The death of cooperation. There’s a curse in Russian on the far end of a screen gone black. Mal pivots. “Where the fuck are they coming from?”

Static hiss, 56k scream, quiet lightning. The witch is gone. For three century long seconds after which the lights flicker and fade. Gentle lightning flicks off everything and everyone feels the barest bite static shock to re-deposit the witch, lit blunt in hand, amidst the group of stunned-silent feds.

She takes a long hit, choke speaks: “Serious fuggin problems” Exhales. Holds the cloud still and wills a hologram to be within it. Lights. A million winking worlds. “This is you, us I guess. And these” pointing over and over again and again again “are the source worlds of the most recent attacks. They’re coming from everywhere, and I can’t sense the one sending them.”

An old man at Mal’s shoulder: “God help us.”

“Gotta find god first.” What? “Forget about it.”

The doorbell rings ominously, another layer of dead silence. No one’s used the door, except for “keeping up appearances” in weeks. Business comes and goes, quietly and carefully, through the tunnel in the back.

The sound of pistols clearing their holsters, a dozen important people step behind a dozen people charged with guarding and assisting them. Stan, special agent man candy, is the first to he door. Two more flanking him ready to riddle what/whomever tries to force its way through.

Stan taps a code on the console by the entry. Security cam feed. It’s a young woman in winter gear. “Hello Ms., can I help you?”

She looks up to the source of the voice with big brown eyes. She smiles sweetly, waves once with her left hand, holds up a crude detonator in her right. “3, 2, 1” She’s still smiling when she detonates.

*

POCKET DIMENSION TO SIDE OF YPSILANTI/ST. IGNATIUS

*

I “take my waking slow” and always have. Aching joints anticipated my eventualities and inevitabilities when I was young. I have always had to coax myself back from firmament to the firm dirt, to my earthly vessel.

My name is dirt. This is a pocket-dimension to the side of Ypsilanti, MI. This a pocket dimension beneath Gibson, MO. This is a pocket dimension just slightly to the left of Evanston, IL. This is a memory foam mattress and a rehydrated soul in a congealed body.

I am so much fiberboard. Wood pulp and saw dust held together by the chemical horror-show of industrial adhesives and Tardigrade piss.

Raid the cupboards for the soup and the noodles and the peanut butter that all taste like pennies.

Rehydrate and remember my death: suffocation on the scorched plain at the End of Time, bottom of a dogpile.

Recall the last face I saw: my own.

Ready the Ford.

*

EOT (End of Time)

*

Aloft on light, prismatic cleansing luster, the synesthesia sublime tells Mal  it’s cool water on her skin. She sees the frozen horror of the whole foyer scene written on Stan’s face. Taught muscles and mouth forming to shout. Sad eyes. . 

Mal moves but cannot maneuver. She is running-in-sand-toward Stan, but being pulled farther and faster-far from the crater that was her home–high above until she’s fade-to-black. 

Mal comes to, comes back to consciousness or something like it, lying on her back on pool of light in an abandoned rural intersection. Nothing but packed ash and dunes forever-far on all sides. Above, a sky alight with more stars than she ever thought possible.

Quiet lighting deposits the witch with the shades. Mal pivots, pulls her pistol and aims at A(79).”Tell me why I shouldn’t.” Because I won’t let you. “Wrong answer.” Mal shoots over the witch’s shoulder. “Try again.” I know you’re hurting. “Not a heart to heart, an explanation.” I don’t see the fucking future with perfect clarity and I can’t always save everyone I want to.” Continue. 

The witch goes on, slowly raising her hands, open palms. “I don’t see the future or predict it. I guess well, and I cheat.” Elaborate. “What would you call this place?” I dunno, the end of everything? “Close enough. Look up.” The witch points to the luminous tangled blanket mess of stars and glowing things–of hot gas and cold rock and little precious boulders with worlds-entire clinging to them. “I can’t see everything everywhere up there. God couldn’t even do it. Still can’t. I watch what might be collapse to what will be, and if I’m lucky I get a glimpse.” 

Mal keeps the pistol pointed directly at the witch’s big nose. “You need to produce enough marijuana for that to make sense.” A(79) snaps, and a joint appears in the opposite hand. Mal pats her pockets with the left hand, never moving the pistol off the Witch. “Lighter too.” *snap* Pause. “Another joint.” The Witch holds the pile in the palm of her hand like a peace offering. “Place them on the ground and take about 10 steps back.” We’re back to this? She says dropping the weed and flame and backing off, hands raised. “We’re not ‘back’ anywhere. We’ve arrived at ‘I should have never trusted you.'” I tried to help you put a stop…”Or you played me into showing my hand and removed me from the game.” Mal lights a joint, hits it hard, pistol still raised.

“Let me call a friend,” A(79) reaches for the broken phone in her robe pocket. Slowly. “I’m reaching slowly. For fuck’s sake. You take my weed, but you’re still a suspicious tight-ass.” The witch moves in a blur, appears on Mal’s right hand side, still 10 paces away, phone in hand. “Just a phone. I do not want to harm you, Mal.”

I need you to meet some colleagues and contemporaries.

In five minutes or centuries, depending on your speed and location, the red-and-blue repeated from two heavenly fed-truck SUV’s replete with gaunt G-men. Bartleby steps from a passenger seat, buttons cheap-suit coat and approaches.

*

ST. IGNATIUS (GRAM-GRAM’S HOUSE); ST. IGNATIUS (PORT TOWN); EOT

*

Ira and the woman she carries make it to Gram-Gram’s house. One foot after the other, following a path no one but a local could perceive. There’s a route just off the road Cassius walked, just off the one to Port Town. Ira’s feet find it because they’re tied to it when she needs it, because it’s the particular portion of Ignatius tied to the the specific Earth she (most often) inhabits.

The PMC goons can’t find it any more, the little village. It’s not more than a collection of little stucco homes, one or two rooms. Puffin-ravaged gardens. Residents trickling back from the hills, from the termite nest of mine tunnels. Some silent force, some intuition tells them for certain the goons are gone for good. When neighbors see her they are silent on the matter of handing Ira over to them. The townsfolk do a better-than-normal job of avoiding her–easy since she’s either caring for Lu or running into town, to other fragments of Ignatius–perhaps on other Earths–to fetch what she needs.

Ira is large. Not intimidating, or at least not intentionally. But when she knocks on doors in need of help for Lucretia? All it generally takes is a look, a the single raised eyebrow. The muscled arms crossed over the bruised frame. There is no need to bring up the unfortunate incident directly–the turn-over. There is passive aggression.

“Big of you to help a bird worshiper and all” for the nurse setting an IV to rehydrate Lu. And there is the rolling of eyes and the heavy sighs and all the lovely and humidity-heavy suffocating passive aggressive love of a community in (perpetual) crisis. Ira makes runs into Port Town (big port town, occupied Port Town) for supplies. The villagers tend to gardens and the sick guest–blissfully unaware that Lucretia was the vehicle/vessel for the greater-than-normal chaos on their island(s)

*

Babel Inc. is a subsidiary (twice removed) of one of Cassius’ other companies–the one that makes asthma inhalers and breast implants and cheap cell phones and industrial lubricants. There’s a tax-haven headquarters on the big island in the big city: Port Town. A million people living on top of one another, and a select few toward the tippy top of glass and concrete blocks live well. Fewer still live in luxury in penthouses atop the top-est tops. They flit over perpetual purgatory-traffic in private helicopters. Below it’s crowded and too damp. The weather roams and rages between sub-tropical and upper-American-midwestern depending on its moods. Some portion of the town is always coughing itself to death at the bottom, choking on smog and mildew. Some much smaller portion is always toasting to their good fortune toward the top.

The whole thing, crescent moon harbor and the city that creeps up the hill, has the appearance of a great toilet bowl or urinal.

The most populace iteration of St. Ignatius, we’ll call it Ignatius Prime or I-P, is also the most miserable—in terms of sheer volume of suffering. Here Cassius’ money did work in preparation for his coming. On the outskirts of town there is a skeletal thing, well on its way to being built–somewhere between the Eiffel Tower and one of Nikola’s dreams.

For all the failures and all the deaths and all the PMC incompetence of his goons, this was the goal: this particular Port Town, that specific antennae covered apparatus–the tower.

*

“Soup. So good. So fuggin good.” Dragging out the “ooo” like a child. Ira smiles and explains, again, that it’s just bullion, water, garlic from the garden. But to the half of Lu that remains? It’s rustic-magic. It is the taste of authenticity–of the real. It’s ambrosia.

She loves Ira. What’s left of Lu is not the vicious or the sadistic bits. No, her ancestor ate the sweet meat first. What’s left of the poor rich woman after her “possession” (possession is not a thing) is the “good stuff”: the part of her determined to live, the part of her that saw Cassius honestly and recoiled in horror.

That’s the Lucretia lying in the bed, struggling to re-learn to speak–fighting to keep soup in her mouth and to make the two halves of her body move in tandem. That’s the woman Ira and the villagers care for.

*

Back of the back of a Fed truck on the scorched plain at the end of time. The Witch with the schnoz levitates cross legged in a cloud of heavy Indica, eyes closed. Long moments between breaths, long drags from a spliff on her lip. She mutters to herself with every cloud, searching.

“What’s this shit?” Mal, with the gun in her lap, middle bench. She’s flanked by G-beings. “Ma’am I need you to part with the pistol, you’re safe here.” Not happening. Where are we headed? Bartleby turns in the passenger seat flashes his badge.

“Be not afraid.” He goes biblically accurate for a moment, showing off the promotion he previously had to hide. “We’re headed back to your world in a roundabout way. I need to swear you in so I can brief you. Please, put the pistol away.”

*

The most believable theory in play regarding the absence of god is this: they’re off to visit the just–the 36 humans in a given generation on a given Earth that justify the existence of humanity to the author. If this is the case, it will be some time before god returns, as the number of just humans (those who perceive and receive the divine) is 36 X the total number of Earths in the multiverse (itself an exponentially expanding number).

*

Cassius looks like a healed scab covered in bronzer. He reeks of brimstone, booze, and the contents of a discreet adult diaper. An exquisitely tailored suit hangs all wrong off his jagged joints. The congealed man leans heavy on his elbows, rubbing both temples. He’s in his office at Babel Inc. on St. Ignatius (Prime). The CEO he evicted stands “offset” with his PMC lieutenants behind the camera. At his back, a corporate symbol with a stylized Roman Eagle with wicked eyes. Before him a camera linked to a quantum-computing-cube–a universal machine more powerful than any the Earth he would conquer has yet seen. Before him, the power to command a global audience.

At his command, the amalgam of Nikola’s genius and telecom ingenuity–the tower of Babel–would amplify and direct the efforts of the machine. The meter by meter cube. The infernal machine, universal in its application could seize control of communications–all of them. Satellite, radio, television–anything with a screen or microphone or one or the other. Anything that could make noise on Earth (0x7DD) would.

Cassius raps his fist and signet ring on the desk twice. The goons and corporate stooges hush and turn. He snaps his fingers, looks into the camera, begins:

“People of Earth, I am Gaius Cassius Longinus. I ordered every bombing, every attack. I am the source of your pain, and I offer the only source of relief.” He leans forward, looming, the shoulder pads in his suit bunch. He steeples his fingers. “Leaders of Earth, surrender to me, immediately and unconditionally. People of Earth, if your leaders do not hear me? Make them.”

*

Thus began the 72-hour war on Earth (0x7DD).

*

Off shore of Ignatius, some Ignatius, Big-E sits at anchor in rough seas. Most of the crew of both the carrier and the destroyer Occoquan are conscious again. Neither ship can find a GPS signal. Radios bigger than handsets don’t seem to work, and then no farther than a few football fields.

Signal lights, Morse code: “hold position, affect repairs” (or is it effect, the man on the lamp asks himself).

Something silver on the horizon. There is doubt about the object, the silver thing that is CBDR. It “appears to be” until the admiral confirms through binoculars: a 1990-something Ford sedan.

“What in the actual fuck?” from the admiral as the driver kicks each front door open and pops the trunk of the flying car like he’s putting down his flaps. A few miles out from the carrier in a controlled descent, the crew watches as the driver begins to flair the nose ever so slightly.

“This fucker’s trying to land on my ship.” Should we shoot it down? “You want me to give the order to shoot down an unarmed flying civilian automobile, is that what I’m hearing?” Silence, sweet silence from the annoying captain.

The admiral lowers the binoculars. There’s still dried blood on his earlobes. Stains on his collar from the aftermath of the incident that brought him and the ship here. His head is pounding, and every face on the bridge is looking to him. “Get somebody whose got a functioning brain on that damn deck to serve as LSO.” They scramble to relay his instructions. “Get me a handset. Get them a handset. I don’t care if it’s by semaphore, give me some way of talking to the asshole in the car.”

Tense minutes later, first attempt, the rear wheels of a 1990-something Ford sedan kiss an arrester wire on the deck of a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier. The car bounces once, and comes to a halt sideways on the deck fairly close to where it plopped. The driver shouts “perfect fucking landing” over the CCR blaring from the sound system as he steps out of a weed cloud. Aviators, long nose, scraggly beard on a too-skinny frame. Wearing a worn bathrobe, sword in scabbard in his left hand, spliff on his lip. Reeking of reefer and tardigrade piss. There, on the deck of the USS Enterprise, stands A(84).

Sailors greet him with weapons drawn.

*

END CASSIUS AND THE WITCH CHAPTER 4

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