*
EARTH(0x63–ERROR: BAD SECTOR)
Dead worlds still spin, orbit, and have mass that takes up space. There’s not supposed to be a pool of light that ties the ash to that planet, not any more. If you could visit the place in-frame (in space) at the time of my writing, you had better have a solution for the space debris, destroyed satellites that will hang in low orbit like a fart for centuries–a cloud of bolts and bent metal doing 17,000 MPH. What’s that in kilometers-per? Lots more. Even worse, maybe. I dunno, I was born in a country with an irrational aversion to the metric system that’s stuck with me for billions-past-billions of years.
Earth(0x63) is not a place you want to visit, and honestly you can’t (except that you can). It’s complicated in that it’s really not: something wicked got off that world Try to get there the interstitial way? And you’ll go nowhere but Leviathan’s guts. The place is quarantined. Oh the rest of that universe is just fine. Keppler 22b and Cancri 55 c are both thriving.
Several centuries later, a ship with the aspect of a wasp visits. Later, a ship that is a web composed of smaller ships finds the planetary tomb. Two species archaeologists and xenoanthropologists learn of the demise of the primates who took everything else with them. Each species will leave some sort of monument with a cautionary tale about the torched and irradiated garden world with the Kessler syndrome and the UXO in the ash fields where people once grew food.
I sit cross legged, ass on the ash, before the portal that should not be to Earth(0x63). My head in the thing like a toilet while I follow my favorite piece of shit through remembrances of locked-time, time unchangeable. A(0x63), a man that once looked identical to me, my mirror twin. He’s a very-VIP party stooge jackboot (in a one-party nation) on a doomed world with a spot in the continuity-of-governance hole. And when he finds out his wife would rather die outside than join him, the conniption fit kills him (except it doesn’t). Rage-aneurysm? Stroke? I watch the quiet lightning take him elsewhere.
Energy with intention, it’s a hell of a thing, and apparently there is a non-zero (but lightyears from likely) chance that a mortal born being can will itself EOT at end-of-life. Non-zero like taking two lightning strikes in the same day and walking away. Non-zero like celebrating surviving those two lightning bolts by buying lottery tickets that both win–the prize being death/un-death. The man froth-screaming at his wife into the cell phone won the jackboot jackpot.
But more than that, he flipped the odds for all other A-series mortals, everywhere, apparently for all fucking time/un-time. A-series mortals. There’s one of us (and only ever one of us) at any given time on a given world, and an appropriate equivalent for every other species. If they’re human? They are A series and they wear my beak, a schnozz identical to my own. The only privileges it confers are curses, here’s one: when things least likely to happen actually occur, we’re most likely to be the recipient (target, target is a much better word).
A(0x63) is as studious as the rest of us, albeit in a different direction, brutal and experiential. The Jackboot, or maybe jackknife, cut a swath eleven worlds wide in the firmament. On each world he killed the alarm, murdered it really (another A-series function), as if someone or something taught/told him to kill us first.
*
“Hey god!” (but stretch that second word real long). The man pleading stops to catch his breath. “God, we could use your presence like right-the-fuck-now.” Other Ethereal Congregants get more formal and somber with it, Censers waving and Latin and all that liturgical work.
The congregation has always been a mish-mash of heretics. Many of them do not at all believe they were abandoned by god or that the being is absent. Some believe god is just a great lacunae. Others believe some really wackadoodle shit, but they’re not hurting anybody and they deserve the rest and safety the church provides beyond life (or used to).
The Parson A(0x20B) walks toward the front of the gaggle on the one and only road at EOT. Beside her is Anne. Wadsworth, AI in a cell phone body, toddles between them on little legs of liquid light. His arms stretch long, to hold both lady’s hands. Wadsworth toddles between them until “I’m tired” and he’s up on someone’s shoulders for a while.
“Your troops could use some guidance.” From the preacher’s wife, the one that tends to the flock in her own way–the one who reads its moods quite well.
Preacher quips, “They are not troops. Besides I’ve surrendered.” I don’t want you to die. “Wadsworth, momma’s not gonna die. I have a plan.”
“Do not call that thing.” I’m not a thing. My name is Wadsworth “I know sweetie, but you are not my child. Do not imply this being is our child.” There is thin-and-tested patience in Anne’s voice.
Preacher’s bullshitter grin is intact, “My plan is to keep making this up as I go and hope for divine intervention.” And when her wife halts, and holds the Parson’s shoulders. “Sacrificial love is the best bet I’ve got. God’s a sucker for it. They’ll appear. Actually appear.”
“You are not a ‘holy man.’ And you cannot know for sure if they’ll even…” I’m not a man. Are mom and mom fighting? “No.” A little bit baby-boy, we’re fighting a little bit. “Why are you gendering a cellphone AI? Just. You are infuriating. You are billions of years infuriating.”
“And I love you. Still. forever.” Parson’s second surrender more successful than her first. She shows her back to her wife and prepares an improvised ritual in three parts. By now the congregants that walk the one-and-only-road at EOT, have stopped. A loose crowd. A gaggle grows about the preacher and Anne.
Parson invites those that pray to do so. She does her part in the ritual, leads the whole chorus. Even Anne, cross armed and pissed off joins:
“God, whatever we did we’re sorry” and the congregation repeat-amplifies the call out over the packed ash plain at the EOT. “Please come home. God, whatever you did, we forgot a long time ago and we forgave you anyways. Please come home.” No amen-ending. That’s for each individual or group in the gaggle to do in their own way.
She makes a little mound of ash: “Wadsworth. Get on this so mommy can sacrifice you.” Ok, mom.
“What in the fuck is your blasphemous ass doing?”
The Parson is quick to correct Anne: “Whoa! Hey. I’m showing humility before the author through ritual repetition of their works. Wadsworth, Momma would never sacrifice you, and don’t let anybody put you on an altar.” I will not.
Next, Preacher conjures a special occasion bong and packs it full and sprinkles some kief on it. As she offers the piece to Anne’s passive aggressively declining hand and then to another congregant: “Burnt offering.” Her voice is smoke choked. Smoke rings rise through the nebula. They burn their offering to god until the Parson is convinced they’ve hot-boxed the low-hanging universes in the firmament.
Last in the Parson’s entirely made up ritual. They “make a joyful noise”, and all the metal heads among them start bouncing off each other and everybody of every genre-tribe starts roaming from cone-of-silence to cone–little perimeters like invisible amphitheaters that partition the sound of every kind of music made or beloved by some portion of the church. Every kind of song pours from any old dead-battery long-dead electronic–the carapace of a cellphone or the ghost of a Victrola. Music resounds out and up, ever up to something heaven adjacent as if the cacophony rebounding off the firmament might call god or wake the dead or both.
*
Some say the ash that falls like snow at EOT, the grit that blows on a wind from nowhere to nowhere, is what’s left of the worlds that didn’t make it–like metaphysical ‘marine snow’ at the end of everywhen. Autumn in the multiverse it may be, but the snow is thick, blizzard conditions, only Highway-(i) and it’s perfect asphalt and irrational geometry visible beneath them, the only marker to keep them on-path. The whole line of them link hands to keep any from wandering off to die of desiccation.
When the ‘snow’ clears the old industrial site looms. Earth late 19th century. A whole big complex made of brick and busted glass and wrought iron. The lonely liminal is a manufactury that ate coal and people and shit out steel. Old corroded piping on stilts that run from a rust-rotten powerhouse to the rubble mound that doesn’t stand but still signifies in its existence as heap.
Leading up to the gate to the place, the little guard shack shanty where a man once stood, the one who could say “no” for whatever reason he liked or whatever he didn’t like about you. Leading up to the complex and all about it are the cadres, the forces-arrayed, all the beings infernal and divine. None of them know the score yet, that the Parson did not declare war, and all still believe the mediocre machine to be acting within its mandate. All of them do their own boo-hiss.
The angels are so very tsk-tsk “how dare you” and call her “heretic” (like that’s a bad thing) and “blasphemer” (like blasphemy doesn’t amuse the author). The demons distraught at premature-surrender, and horrified at the string-bean that was supposed to lead their next rebellion “against heaven” (a place not one of these beings has ever seen). The tone is brimstone, they “boo-hiss” and versa-vice and talk all kinds of shit (as their kind are wont to do).
God’s machine collects, congeals or coagulates out of the rubble. Little globs of something-like mercury seep from the bricks and the factory’s rusted arteries, float, and fly toward a point above the plant. Lightning leaps from nowhere to the growing metallic sphere. Complete, the Machine that Does God’s Work in their Absence, is great liquid-metal pinball the size of a comically small compact-car.
Waves emanate from a pattern of points on the machine’s surface and race across its face and trip over each other. The thing looks to be humming just-ever out of focus to an eye anything like mine.
The orb that does god’s work hovers low, looms even, flanked by two metastasized men with their fake-ass badges clearly displayed. Kneel, and prepare for destruction. There are gasps in the crowd infernal-divine, something like religious awe. The congregation Ethereal grumble/plead/curses the machine.
“No.” No to what? “I can’t stop a smiting, but I refuse to kneel. Also, I get ‘right of address’, it’s like calling ‘Sanctuary’ you can’t kill me till I speak my piece.” At that, the Parson A(0x20B) hastily levitates away-above, higher than the machine to address the congregation-and-friends (infernal and divine, brimstone and incense). She’s snatched a megaphone from a Metatron and is well into her sermon-rant before the machine realizes that no such right-to-address actually exists.
The Parson is crafty, and in the responsive audience she saw her opportunity. No actual-divine wore that stupid fake badge of the metastasized man. And something was off and wrong in the waves rippling on the machine’s face. God’s machine was always mediocre, but beyond-Swiss-watch precise. The Preacher saw in that face something like that shimmy that went wrong on your car before it actually broke, that off sound from your Game-Station that told you it was going to “red-cube” out before it died. The Parson correctly guesses that the machine has gone mad, and that this whole execution without a sham-trial runs on hubris and audacity. All she has to do to live/un-live through this is to pull the Scheherazade and keep the audience listening, and suddenly she finds herself ennui-free and wanting to live and be (out of spite, mostly).
“…So you see, I never really declared war on god.” Yes you did. “No, we’ve established that I was venting frustration after you attempted to murder my congregation with a god-missile.” You said verboten words. Out loud. Swore oaths. “The more often you interrupt me the longer this will take.” The machine shake-vibrates in rage.
As the Parson speaks, bullshits toward a sermon, doubt grows. There begins in the collection, the gaggle of angels and demons, a murmur. A ripple. Hissed whispering, “What the fudge is this?” aloud from an angel who forgets itself (if only for a moment). The Parson does perceive a “buzz in the audience.” What the fudge that means? You’d have to ask her, but I think its that she has their attention.
“For my first witness, I’d like to..” You do not get witnesses. “Surely, the Machine that Does the Almighty’s work, knows the rules? I will have my witness and speak my piece.” Very well. “I call A(0x63), that jackboot asshole.” And she points quite dramatically at the Animal that Was a Man, the corpse whose ass she beat (repeatedly) a few chapters back.
“Why’d you call in the artillery, asshole? Nice and loud for the whole class.” There is silence, as every being leans in or looms up to peak and hear, the whole crowd floating-formation as-if seated in an invisible stadium around the scene featuring the preacher and machine.
The rotting man is hesitant and reticent, and won’t explain the meaning of his fake badge. Refuses to give his mortal given-name. Every ask in the court-spectacle elevates the rotting man’s rage by degrees, slow-boils the creature: “I know what you’re trying to do and it won’t work.”
“Won’t it?” The Parson flies low, to snatch Wadsworth from Anne’s arms: “Play the record of what the bad man said after he made Mommy manhandle him. And from the Baby-AI’s body speaker, from W’s mouth in the abomination’s voice: “Requesting backup. Assault on an agent of the One True Author!”
“Why don’t you tell us who” and it’s hear that the parson pauses all long and court-room dramatic while the crowd of infernals \ divines entwined murmurs and shudder-shimmies gallery floating about them. “Why don’t you tell us who or what you were referring to. Who is the ‘One True Author’?
The smirking fascist Kubrick-leans, finds that devil grin, and prepares his honest answer while his copy begins to ‘shed’ the patches of metal that cover his boils and sores and wounds. God’s machine drips solder balls like an old Forge bleeds engine oil. The Animal that was a Man, A(0x63) rises again and again-again. Rotting flesh in full jackboot ensemble flows from and congeal-freezes on every bit of metal on the packed ash plain about the ruins of a great Victorian manufactury. Metastasized men, same menacing stance, each born with a weapon in his hand and holes in his rotting head and shriveled heart.
Here is what the Animal that was a Man says, shouts, spits: “The one that does the work of god is God.” Nothing much can be heard in the clamor that comes after.
*
There’s a mural of this precise moment laser etched into the walls at Archives HQ. Freeze frame of the battle \ scuffle \ kerfuffle. Little artistic license is needed when villainy reveals itself so clearly: the machine, looming over all–motion blurred and dancing mad–all obliterating smite-lightning leaping off the evil pinball to obliterate angel and demon alike.
Foreground, front and center is the demon that threw the first punch (because of course one did). He’s wrecking a metastacized goon that’s frozen mid-lunge–leaping toward the preacher. The Parson, standing between two bolts of lightning swings a club–Wadsworth held by his liquid-light ankles stretched long to bludgeon a metastasized man with the AI’s body. The little cellphone screen shows an angry face, and the little thing’s light-arms are arrayed before him as mighty little claws.
*
Events flowed-slow, lazy off-day slow for the Parson when those around her chose violence. While it’s true a demon kicks things off, once it becomes quite clear to the audience-become-jury that the machine has gone mad and named itself god? This outcome is inevitable: all the divine/infernal things called there by the Parson A’s (alleged) hubris will remove the challenge to god’s authority.
The Preacher sees the angry smite-lightning directed at her, roll-dodges with perfect video game timing and joints that crackle like controller buttons being mashed. She wields Wadsworth like a (willing and able) cudgel against the proliferating copies of the rotting goons.
There is the ear-shattering sound of divine/infernal things dying on the end of smite lightning stretched-agony in the time-dilation the Parson notes as odd. She has time to wonder if she is in fact “too high” between lightning bolts diving from machine toward she–so slow did the moment\un-moment seem. “Or maybe I’m just super-fast?”
Sure that’s the answer. From a voice on the wind.
Parson leisurely side steps a goon’s knife-lunge and slaps him into a tumble about the back of his head. Flash blinds a second with the camera on Wadsworth and drops him with a throat-chop. Two-steps around a few bolts. All the while her eyes search the crowd–drawn like a magnet to that sight sublime and divine.
God walks there, the Parson A(0x20B) swears to this day that they saw the Author-of-all walking through the battle–the proof is in their flit-flicking at the sacred frequency–60hz. Time is particularly vulnerable to manipulation when it ends up where it shouldn’t be: places like EOT. Women and Men, every conceivable form and frame and hue, every subdivided frame-of-a-second lasts long in this melee-moment. The Parson is almost caught gawking. Duck.
Preacher does just that, ducks a blind-side blow, rises with an elbow-and a right cross. When she finds god again in the crowd as a new form sublime-smiling, the Author mimes instructions: points to the machine and gestures as if to say ‘throw.’
God vanishes and the slow begins to go, narrative time and that clock the born mortals carry within them starts the rubber band snap back to something like real-time. Preacher knows in her bones and her nose that she’s about to get smote.
Like a point guard, ice cold in the closing seconds, like one wields a sling, she spins Wadsworth by the ankles over her head–helicopter-nunchuck-one-best-shot.
At the moment\un-moment events proceed in real time (at a place where no time should ever be) the preacher casts Wadsworth’s cellphone body like a stone at the corrupted AI. Wadsworth, the mighty-little-thing, one arm out in super-hero pose lets out a tin-speaker warrior-howl as he strikes the machine and leaves a pool splash on it’s rippling surface.
One must use their imagination to conceive of whatever Wadsworth did once inside the machine–the belly of the beast. Whatever action the little AI took inside god’s machine, the result was purgative. Wadsworth was ipecac, god’s own laxative, and the mediocre machine did shit and vomit all remnants of the original and proper Animal that Was a Man: A(0x63)–that which must have corrupted it.
No metal patches adorn the original remains of A(0x63) or bind its wounds or give it function, this is just a scat pile of dead matter on the ash plain, desiccated-dead in times-texts apocryphal.
Wadsworth hard reboots the mediocre machine and unleashes it’s full fury on the panicked copies of the fascist. Flaming swords do necessary work and demons delight in having a legitimate excuse to slap the snot (and unlife) out of the metastasizing men.
Soon after, early in fact, for a handful of main sequence stars in the dark corners of winter universes still burned, came the cold-crunch. Don’t worry about the primates or slime molds, do not fret after the cephalopods or jumping spiders. By this “time” in the universe(s) above, all the little civilizations have had their time in the sun(s) and gone to sleep until it’s their time to do it all again (and hopefully better, whatever that means).
The last leaf falls from the final tree. No more midges. No more mayflies. No more redwoods. Just silence and the black, both sacred. But beneath it, all that quiet and sacred silence, there is the hum of a machine being properly tuned and taught and trained to manage all that’s crouched and waiting, coiled like spring.
*
END
ONE MORE CHAPTER TO COME