RECORD RECOVERED: THUS BEGINS THE TRUE SECOND ARC
*
LOCATION: Custodial Closet (Pocket Dimension) ‘to the side’ of Pittsburgh, PA
DATE: 2020-2022(REPEATING)
*
“I got ‘Amantillado-ed’ by that fuggin prick” The man with the big beak speaks to three mice, sitting on their hind legs. One cocks its head to the side, seeming confused. “You don’t know Poe? The cask? Dude straight buries his enemy alive in a wine cellar.”
Squeeks of shock.
“I know, Michael. Poe’s a twisted bastard, you should read him.” A(84) takes an enormous hit from a conjured joint, blows yet another smoke cloud over the mice. He leans back against the cement wall, looks up to the heavy box full of cleaning shit precariously shelved, grabs his broom.
“Michael, Christopher, Jim.” Solemn goodbye for each friend mouse. “We’ll meet again” and thrusts the broomstick up and into the frail top shelf.
Crack, crash and the tired shelf groans and too-many pounds of cleaning fluid in a sad box fall from the relieved wood. The weight of the box crushes A(84)’s skull, killing him quite quickly, there in a pocket dimension off to the side of the bus station in Pittsburgh, PA.
*
Date: NULL
Location: EOT (End of Time)
Document: ‘A’ Series Mortal Maintenance Guide (Commentaries and Apocrypha)
*
Station to station; start to stop and back again.
It’s all happening and happened and yet to be. I don’t know your name or your series of mortal, your letter, even your lot number or location in the pomegranate.
I’m an expert on the ‘A’ series. A’s do divine ‘scut’, shit-work short-straw kind of stuff that leads to short, shit lives. In particularly grim times or frames of reference (worlds), that life is often ended by the ‘A’ itself.
A few iterations (A(99)) are defective, but most A’s–be we witches, she-Rambos, or fuck-up men–are like litmus-test, zeitgeist-shibboleth, divine canaries in the holy-mine for their time and place. Which is another way of saying they get soul sick when the world is sick in a way that draws the divine machinery toward intervention.
Which time and place? All of them. Everything here is happening from creation to crushing-cold heat death and re-creation and so on again again and then some more. Amen.
*
FRAGMENT:-0x45
FRAME: Pittsburgh, PA
SUBJECT(S): Mark Schmidt; Woland; PP-PD
DATE: 1/1/2020; EOT (End of Time)
*
Pretty much everybody in the bus station got out. Pretty much everybody. Flying cars and swordfights. So the police say, ‘establish a perimeter and wait it out’. Besides, just about everybody got out. But uh-oh ruh-roh. A bullet fired by a dying fascist flew the length of a bus station, through a glass door, and deflected down-and-into the tire of a cop car.
And away we go.
The cops went in. What did they find before their firing line? Mark Schmidt broken nosed and bloodied. Trying to surrender. Hands up. They shot him. A lot. A lot a lot. Again and again again. Amen. I guess.
And no, not everyone got out of the bus station.
But the cops riddled Mark Schmidt, and everything behind him. And I guess Mark Schmidt deserved it. Problem is, the bus driver hiding way down at the end of the concourse behind a potted plant didn’t. No. The bus driver didn’t deserve the stray bullet he caught. Not one bit.
*
FRAME: EOT (End of Time)
TIME: NULL-
*
The church under the dead tree, beneath the scorched plain at the end of time, is still there. It’s a hand dug and shaped and bent and willed-vast thing that swells to encompass the host–the still-growing congregation.
The Parson preaches, baked of course. Sometimes she is successful, and others she ‘strikes out’ and stares at her ebbing and flowing hands or the fireflies in the tangle of roots falling and the lurch of fungus climbing–lights strumming in and out of time between.
The congregants don’t mind, they imbibe (or don’t), they mingle (or stand aside), they occupy themselves until it’s properly preaching time. Sometimes the wait is quite long–days long.
*
“God did tempt Abraham” The Parson speaks, lips days parched, voice harsh-at-first. Someone brings the levitating woman bread, water, a packed bowl. The congregation calms and listens (or doesn’t) as the chamber’s sublime geometry, the curving contractions of the space-itself, carry her voice to those that want or need to hear it.
“And they’re always tempting in the Old Testament” a firefly or psychadelic-fae-flame or little hallucination lands on her hand, evaporates.
Someone shouts “Samson!” She thinks it’s Bartleby. “Ok, wasn’t calling for answers, but great example.” Soon as the serpent slithers onto the page we’re in temptation territory. The book has a lot of hissed whispers, some gripped sheets between some pretty harsh law and the bouts of hellfire and smiting, at least the Old T.
Abraham and Isaac. Why was he so goddamn eager to sacrifice his son?
*
The A series matter because they don’t. They’re meant to accumulate the angst of the times, live their (relatively short) lives and return to carry data back to management for analysis–like an ice core or the rings of a felled tree.
Creation is not all organs in a church or a beautiful fresco. Its more organs crammed hastily into sausage casing stapled to a skeleton. These days, it’s an algorithm made manifest–the firmament the screen, god’s machine a projector. Don’t think it an art film, it’s something more procedural.
Here is one very minor character in one tiny film titled Earth. There are many like them. Reader, there was a man named ‘Dirt’ who ate an apple and was cast out of the garden; much later, another ‘Dirt’ poisoned her husband, failed at farming, fucked up a Landlord, and had to ‘boogie’ from Ireland to the United States; soon after (1938) it’s another named ‘Dirt’, a pregnant wife and a forming-family flees calamity (but in Prague); and in 1969 a hippy named ‘Dirt’ does something real stupid trying to ‘boogie’ to Canada to dodge the draft because he does not want to die (and that’s how he ends up on the hook for life); then there’s the fuckup who fell through the wall down Virginia-way, precipitator of crises.
Is there an A series in every iteration of Earth? The role is filled by some set of beings in every place and time.
*
Fragment: 0x20b.1 ; Frame: ‘Earth 0x20B’
Date: 1/7/2030 ; LOC CALL NUMBER: KFD 523 .A6 20B 2027 (TRUTH AND RECONCILLIATION)
*
Isaac followed his father, carrying a bindle of sticks.
The father walked ahead carrying a torch and a naked knife, the sheath empty on his hip the whole trek out.
He knew why, “God said so.” Did he though? Did he really dad?
Curt affirmative nods . “Yes Lord” after long contemplations.
But “contemplative” is not in Abraham-man-of-action’s word cloud.
“Dad hears voices.” Mom slapped the shit out of me.
Never said another word about it.
I, dutiful son of Abraham, said
not one word, made not one peep, dared-not-utter-a-damned-thing
He walked close behind me, bare blade in his hand, the whole day and much of the night.
*
“Isaac, stand here.” Did as told, stone silent.
He had me make camp, called the fire an altar.
He stood in front of me two-hand holding the knife high.
Hours and hours more we stood.
Dad. Damocles. Death. I met my father’s gaze
I’d tried before and been hit hard for it,
But he held.
*
The A series is unremarkably remarkable in that, fuckup or fantastic success, they waste a lot of time and potential. And when the metaphysical residue of a being is ground up and reprocessed a lot of what you might call “raw probability” is dispersed like compost into the garden of creation–thus increasing the odds of anything interesting happening at all, anywhere, to anyone.
*
Hours passed then
hours passed and we walked
him ahead, a whole day home.
My father sang and muttered and yelled
Empty hands raised to the sky, I had to urge him pressing
the water skin to his chest to remind him to drink.
“Blessings! Great blessings!” exaltation, screaming wild at heaven
howling
but he did not exclaim to me.
he was in constant conversation with a voice only he heard
*
LOCUST/L*VOS/VINAATH/SABATHA/NZIGE/PLAGA
LOCUST INFESTATION: A REPORT
FRAME: Earth (0x4). DATE: 65,000,000 BCE (in-frame); 2092. LOCUST LITTER: 3. CASUALTIES: 8 Billion.
FRAME: Earth(0X8). DATE: 10,000 BCE; 1997 CE. LOCUST LITTER: 6. CASUALTIES: 2.5 Billion.
FRAME: Earth (0xF). DATE: 8,000; CE; 2020 CE. LOCUST LITTER: 7. CASUALTIES: 1.9 Billion.
FRAME: Earth (0x10). DATE: 1,000,000 BCE; 2119 CE. LOCUST LITTER: 3. CASUALTIES: 9.5 Billion.
FRAME: Earth (0x17) . DATE: 215,000,000 BCE; 1936 CE. LOCUST LITTER: 9. CASUALTIES: 1.5 Billion.
FRAME: Earth (0x2A). DATE: 214,000,000 BCE; 1962 CE. LOCUST LITTER: 13. CASUALTIES: 3.07 Billion.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Whether the Locust’s gestation period was long or short, it’s re-emergence wrought ecological devastation and mass casualties. Four of the above initial strikes were comparable to large asteroid impacts, triggering mass extinction events. The later re-emergence of the mature Locust is an objectively more destructive event. On the two worlds where the Locust’s re-emergence was slightly less severe: agriculture and industry are gone and human populations are shrinking rapidly.
At present(s), there is no means of predicting the length of Locust gestation in a planet, the size or number of its offspring (and how many will remain/be ejected in to space), or the attributes of its spawn. Moreover, exponential spread along multiple spatial and temporal vectors means that we have likely already lost containment (where containment is simply knowing ‘how many’ and ‘where/when’).
Locusts are not-of-creation, not of this time or space. Their geometry is not of the garden. It is profane. The threat they pose to the REDACTED is beyond this analyst’s capacity to quantify. Recommend/humbly request immediate intervention by the author.
*
RE: “LOCUST/L*VOS/VINAATH/SABATHA/NZIGE/PLAGA. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: LOCUST INFESTATION”
FROM: Management
TO: ANALYST
CC: ‘TIGER TEAM’
*
WE’VE COMMISSIONED A FACT FINDING MISSION TO GET TO THE BOTTOM OF THE LOCUST ‘INFESTATION.’ WE’VE REACHED OUT TO THE AUTHOR. WHILE WE AWAIT RESPONSE, AS PER PROTOCOL, WE’VE FED THIS INFORMATION INTO THE MACHINE. INTERVENTION IMMINENT.
*
FRAME: EOT(P.D.:D.E.M); TIME: NULL(-17(relative, much later)); SUBJECTS: A(84), Author
*
Inside the sphere, god’s machine, all is comforting and cool. Immense chamber, memory foam comforts piled around. Breeze from nowhere to some-nowhere is perfect–smells at once of spring and autumn. Contrast the divine presence at the center: their burning radiance, their divine form flashing a new visage at 60hz–sixty times per second shifting, changing, being a new face and body and voice wreathed in the fire divine.
God sits on the edge of a fountain, picking at a pomegranate.
“Please let me out of the hell closet. Perhaps, remove the bullet?” I point at my gut.
“Most who are born mortal exhibit at least a smidgeon of, I dare say, awe in our presence. Usually this happens before they ask for things, the “dear lord…” part of the prayer.”
I offer to grovel. “I’ll know you’re faking.” They heal my wounds. Sit me in front of the fountain.
Their voice is cold, comforting and confounding as it dances the scales sublime: “I brought you here, clever mud, because you cheated the death Woland bound you to. You cheated death. If we allow you to leave, death will follow. Relentlessly. Forever.”
“Let it follow.” 60 sets of raised eye brows in a second. “I’m certain. Let death follow.”
God chuckles, kisses this forehead, ‘boops’ this nose and I, A(84) fall through. Amen.
*
Crack, crash and the relieved shelf groans as a box of too-many pounds of cleaning fluids land on the floor in front of the fuckup. Same time, a carelessly placed box-cutter slips off the second shelf and takes the non-zero, not-likely-but-possible trajectory toward A(84)’s face, clips the tip of that beak off cleanly. “Ohhh. Fuck me. Why? Fuck” clutching his wounded face, laying on the floor.
There before him, the substantial lump of flesh that was the tip of his ample nose promptly sprouts legs, little nightmare-things of flesh and chitin. Shrieks of horror from the mice as the monstrosity, the nose, skitters off behind the same box the mice came from.
A(84)’s nose, it’s tip transformed to eldritch horror, slips through a crack in Woland’s magic and out onto the concourse of a bus station in Pittsburgh, PA (a concourse that is an active crime scene).
*
“And as it’s written, or at least the way the preacher said it was written in his book, God rewards Abraham because he held nothing back, not even his son.”
The parson rotates slowly, levitating cross-legged at the center of the congregation.
“I will end with some questions for you all to discuss, argue, or whatever-as-you-wish.”
What’s the difference between devotion and fanaticism? Why didn’t Abraham offer himself instead of his son?
*
FRAME: Earth(0x8)
DATE: 2/28/1998 (Locust Re-emergence +220 days)
LOCATION: ALBERTA, CA (South of Calgary)
*
“Please, you have to help us.” The desperate whisper through a beat up door to someone else’s house. Mom risks the noise to rack the shotgun in response. Dad peeks out a boarded window, whisper-yells “This isn’t good shelter, and we don’t have enough, best you move on. No need for a commotion.”
Kid is huddled in one corner opposite the door. An apartment, two rooms overrun in the “shelter-in-place” days. Her parents hastily cleared and re-fortified the rooms as best they could. They are headed “North”, up the traffic jam of abandoned cars that choke Highway 22 and every other road away from the event. North. The desperate trajectory with no destination.
They’re still whisper negotiating at the door when one of them smashes through the bedroom window. The door shivers at each blow. It will not hold.
Mom wheels with the shotgun. The thing darts out of the bedroom. The thing is quick. It’s half a step from her when the buckshot tears through it. Momentum carries the creature forward into her. They fall in a writhing heap.
An ink smeared rotten hand punches through the door and grips Dad’s shoulder. He’s screaming, desperately clawing at that ink, the ichor that burns. Two more beat down the window in the main room. They dart toward the man. The torso half through the door holds him as they begin to consume him.
Kid is frozen. Mute. Shivering. 100 yard staring into a family photo. It’s on the wall across the room above the gore. It’s a familiar picture, down to the coordinated outfits: Mom, Dad and Kid.
Below, her mother is transforming, even as her father is being devoured. To get the ink on you is to die or worse to become horror, shambling or running about making new horrors and killing or warping all you touch. Do not let the black rain touch you. Do not let the monsters touch you. These are the first two rules of the apocalypse of Earth(8).
In the apartment stand three horrors, at least two of them still sentient, all of them malevolent and leaking whatever was in the black rain. The oil, ichor, ink that reeks of sulfur. A thing that was Mom rises to its feet, wretches, and vomits oil on the floor. It stalks toward Kid, it’s daughter, with no recognition in its eyes. The others follow.
A remarkable thing, miraculous even, happens next. Kid doesn’t see the beasts, and in her shattered unseeing she commands them. She’s been mouthing “no” since the first fiend tried to whisper it’s way inside. She silently repeated “no” all the way through the carnage. And now, some-way-some-how, her will overwhelms theirs. The child is present and elsewhere. Her mind fills the room, and pushes the monsters from it.
The beasts wander off and out of the remains of a sad-bastard apartment south of Calgary. The night is cold–false dawn fire over the horizon and ash in the air. The monsters wander toward the light, in a loose hunting pack headed North, on the trail of whomever is left.
Kid. The kid still in shock, shivering in the corner. This child is one in trillions. A person here or there on a given world doomed to die choking on Locust ichor may have the capacity to influence its spawn or the creatures it warps mentally (1 in 10 million roughly). These are the odds that exceptional people might well be sensitive to the telepathic link binding each abomination to the Locust, and can thus learn to act on it. There are, unfortunately for humanity, pretty high odds that a given individual will be instantly incinerated when the Locust re-emerges on their world. We’re talking about probability on a pitch and scale that not even Heaven feels comfortable contemplating. But in all of the many Locust strikes, soon to be millions that beget millions, this child is the only human to wield any kind of meaningful mental power over any of the Locust’s abominations.
She is a miracle.
*
END S&P PT.1
MORE TO COME