“For old, unhappy, far-off things”
*
FRAME: EOT; LOCATION: The General Strike at the Base of Headquarters; DATE: NULL (B.O.E. +1)
SOURCE: AFTER-ACTION REPORT (THE GREAT BIFURCATION) AND THE JUNKYARD-MYSTIC COMMENTARIES OF .GIF SCRIBE A(FE71-18F).
*
Bartleby sits in a circle of former Custodians around a flickering odd flame-unflame conjured for mood. The flame consumes nothing and offers no heat. It dances in rhythm with the words of the speakers around it.
They sit on the packed ash and tell stories to sustain themselves.
They mill and loafe and “invite” their souls in a great ring around the grey-brutalist block that is HQ. By this time/un-time the formerly-wandering congregants and the former-Custodians have come to consensus through ballot and debate to take a strike action and to take as long as it takes.
They don’t need to eat. The congregants are already dead anyway, and the Custodians were never creatures of time-as-you-know-it. When one has a trajectory, path, destination, or purpose on the scorched plain at the End of Time, one can traverse it and remain “one”–their sense of self, of being whatever they are. The Witch A(79) would describe traveling the plain, even in a well shielded Sedan, as “being smeared like too little butter over too much shitty, stale bread.”
To sit on that plain without a purpose, vector, trajectory or destination is to risk more-than-madness. To sit like lump and loafe is one of god’s highest callings for sentient beings in the (at least) 3 dimensions above. But the irony sublime of the bi-dimensional plate beneath all of creation, the all encompassing skin of the pomegranate, is that loafing here outside time can lead to sublimation. Desiccation and dissolution into the plane, this is the death of the soul–the death that’s more than death. It’s melting into the packed ash plain for a duration beyond forever. To travel through un-time, you have to move with a purpose, or you’ll lose yourself to forever. Without a vector, a path, a story will float you like driftwood.
The stories that Custodians and congregants tell, sitting there without a vector, are their bread. The strikers on the plain perform the minor/major miracle of survival. They make a joyous noise to nothing and no one (save each other).
*
Bartleby, deep in the narrated dreams of a particularly gifted Custodian, does feel the old g-man phone in his pocket vibrate and shake awake. It’s a demon and g-man vid-call demanding betrayal. “Kill “the eye” or whatever the fuck it calls itself.” “I” and many others are listening just outside the phone-camera’s view (waved over by the former g-man). Bartleby: “I’d prefer not to” and he flicks the phone into the conjured fire that gives off heat for the first time. Acrid smoke rises miles-past-miles to the vast terraced garden atop the great, cracked and fissured, brutalist block.
There, above her pond, a heavy pomegranate on a weak branch now barely-just-barely grazing the water. Beneath, the great carp Leviathan, the lazy beast older than creation ponders the thing she’s pondered for so many recursive loops, billions-beyond-billions-of-years-long is this littany-refrain-what-have-you: What am I? Why am I?
*
A(84) and the demon duel, the betrayer’s toe claws grip-ripping through the metal of the sedan’s trunk. Brimstone trades blows with the schnoz, the latter in a three-point stance hand-clamped to the door frame. The witch dangles out the car, one hand clinging seat belt, flailing and picking off demons with a pistol as they swarm-dive on the car.
The whole show, the 1990-something Ford sedan crawling with infernals and something like heroes is 10,000 ft. above Quebec, falling fast.
*
BELOW. EARLIER.
*
Mom, you’re scaring me.
“Honey, you killed a man, and that’s ok, but we need distance between us and the scene.” She lights a cigarette, and does not chide the child when she reaches for one.
We can tell them it was an accident. “You are brilliant, but you need to trust me. You do not know how these things work.” The family’s Datsun is rumbling down the two lane thing, north and north east. They are on a road that connects to another road that leads up to a dam, to an island, Mt. Babel.
The child’s face has that horrified astonishment at her mother’s arms and magic. “I told you, you come from special people.” Lilith laughs, too intense. The child is shock in the passenger seat, clinging to car.
Red and blue, red and blue. “Get down, Mom’s gotta deal with this shit.” And an arm, first ethereal then firm lurches out of mom’s back, snatches a pistol from beneath the seat. Another arm and another. The one with the gun is out the window, she snaps a shot through the windshield of a provincial cop.
More and more again, cop convoy chasing the speeding Datsun. Dezzy is crying quiet in the passenger seat while mom lobs shots that make the cops weave.
Pop. Quiet lightning. Again, and again-again. Electricity from nowhere arcs to the tops of the cop-cars and finger-snap g-men replace the the locals. Their pistols flick lightning at the Datsun that swerves, dodges and lifts, flying inches above the road.
*
EOT : Headquarters
*
The angel, an actual angel, in bipedal form to conform to the expectations of some of the congregation (while alienating others) did appear. There are not many angels left, as most wandered off to search for god–or at least offered that as their excuse.
This one though, this dutiful management-track stuffed-suit stuck around. If their suit was stuffed, it was stuffed with divine flame. His heavenly gift was the power of being completely and utterly obtuse. The immovable heavenly object. “What precisely is it you demand?” Standing face to face across from “I” and the “ringleaders” of this non-rebellion.
We don’t demand. We refuse to continue to perpetuate a system by which the ground up waste-potential of creation sustains creation. We do not wish to feed people, or their remnants, into machinery. We will do something else. And no one should feed any part of anyone else into machinery.
“I’m just not following the flowery language. Give it to me bluntly.”
The former-automaton repeats itself, calmly, clearly.
“You’re missing me with the poetic junk there, buddy. Tell you what, I’ll run the gist of what you said ‘up the chain’, but we need you back to work. Creation needs you back to work, or the whole thing does god-knows-what.”
We don’t need to know what: the machinery of heaven stops grinding up what’s left of sentient beings.
*
AFTER-ACTION (GREAT BIFURCATION); SOURCE: REDACTED
*
“Steady boys.” But the boys are not steady, nor are the women or else-wise. None are steady because there’s a flying Datsun trading fire with five flying squad cars barreling toward their barricade. A rookie local cop starts running across the highway with a spike strip. “Jesus. Fuck are you doing? Get behind something, Jerry.” Another flicks the safety on the rifle he pulled from the trunk for the first time ever: off-on-off, again and again.
Thump. Pause. Thump. Audible over the pulse pounding in the ear of every cop at the roadblock: the thud of demons falling to Earth on either side of the road. One bursts a tree, panicked shots. “Hold your fucking fire, Jerry. I swear to god.” It’s when Jerry is being relieved of his gun that the infernal things attack. They pour forth from the woods wearing the cheap suits of men, the legs bent-back, loping forward on all fours–all claws-and-fangs and fire.
*
Lilith perceives the sedan above, diving fast. She senses the five cars flying formation behind her. She closes her eyes and reaches out one arm, one “come hither” finger or beckoning hand aimed at each target. She slams the brakes, time slows-past-slow. All of this in an instant-stretched: six of Lilith’s arms flick forward as if to throw, one arm stretches reflexively to protect the child in the passenger seat (though she is buckled in). Many more of Lilith’s arms array about the Datsun like the peacock’s plume, lightning flicking arm to arm, and in the instant-stretched-long-and-long-again the arms wave toward the road block.
Her thunderclap sets time in proper-motion. The cop cars chasing Lilith rise and spiral, flinging the g-men that took them off into the woods at terrible speed. The vehicles turned missiles are blown/fly into the roadblock, and a 1990-something Ford sedan is blown far off course to the north.
*
“Uh”, forever-stretched “This is your pilot speaking, there’s a little bit of the majesty of creation to behold out our port, or left, set of windows.” His voice all silk on gravel, all bass and long pauses. “There’s the sun setting on the “Eye” of Quebec.”
That’s where the whole left of the flight is looking when the UFO’s appear on lightning bolts–the little silver one chased by the big black ones in “v” formations. The fireballs and the dogfight-above-Earth eye-witnessed by everyone on a civilian airliner over Canada on Earth(42).
*
The Ford is tumbling out of control, too-slow, slower-than-slowly being carried. Flannel Man fights wheel and pedal that fight back. The Witch grips a seatbelt that bucks and kicks and tries to flick her free. A(84) reaches for the watch embedded in his chest, only to have the wind Lilith set loose swat his hand away. All move in this suffocating-slow, as if running in a dream, wading in water or sleep waist-high. A(84) thinks he hears Mary’s laugh on the wind. Flannel Man, the first man, knows that laugh well: his former wife.
*
Back in the Datsun, “You will never have to cry again. Never.” Lilith is talking at the daughter who is shake-sobbing in the passenger seat with no understanding of what the hell is happening. The Datsun flies north now, as the crow, tree top height.
Elsewhere, g-being’s in fed truck convoys shift from “v” to trail formation and roar down roads toward the dam. Demons rain on Quebec, fireballs trailing sulfur, falling for no reason that the vulnerable below can discern. They attack and terrorize the heavenly feds and Earthly Canadians alike.
Dez, smears snot down her hoodie’s arm, looks out the windows at the falling fire. “It’s the end of the world.” Flash-clap, explosion as a demon meets the intake of a civilian airliner’s engine on the horizon. “It’s the end of the fucking world.”
“No! It’s the beginning of something else.” From Lilith, and one hand of many grips Dez’s, tight. “This is not the end.”
*
EOT
*
In front of Headquarters, the Metatron is being deliberately obtuse while a line of demons and g-beings in riot gear fidgets anxiously on either side of him. Out of boredom-spite1 one of the demons head-butts the former Custodian eyelessly “eyeballing” him. ” The Custodian falls, tended to by comrades, another takes their place.
“Did you see that? He reached for my weapon!” The demon hisses and spits, another down the line tries the same, and on the other side of the building, the demons who look identical to g-beings in riot gear pick a fight.
“Get your people under control,” The Metatron sneers.
“I” ‘looks’ at the angel, cocks its head as if studying, unimpressed by the rich robes and heavenly fire wreathing the thing. “We came with open palms.” He points at the angel accusing: “You are bad faith.”
*
1 The precise combination of these concepts doesn’t translate adequately to any one word in your language. “Boredom-spite” is most demons’ primary motivation for most actions.
*
Up-top high atop the tippy top of the brutalist block now spider-webbed with cracks and fissures–from firm foundation to the firmament-scraping top, on the building’s roof there is a garden.
In the garden a small pond, on its edge the tree cut from the first tree. The full fruit hanging from the weak branch drops. The great carp consumes it in a gulp.
And if she’s never had a proper answer for what she is, Leviathan remembers her name quite clearly. The already-huge carp grows enormous.
*
Earth(42)
*
The sun has set. If the civilian airliner were still there, it’s not, the passengers could behold the majesty of the fires set by a thousand-times-a-thousand demons terrorizing northern Canada
Lilith sees one more road-block: heaven’s g-men and the stunned and haggard RCMPs and rural cops they could drag to Mt. Babel, to the dam. The road block of the damned.
“Drop any weapons and limit yourself to two legs and arms, no more than 10 fingers and toes.”
“Stay here child.” And the silent sobbing Dez does as told. Lilith steps into the headlights of her Datsun, shows them open palms, no weapons in any of the hands arrayed behind her as a peacock’s feathers. “I’m unarmed, please you have to help me. My girl is sick.” In the voice of a Scottish peasant.
“We’re not buying it, Lilith. Show me two hands, now.” From the g-man with the bullhorn. “What the fuck is she?” From the cop next to him.
She shrugs and claps the whole fan-of-arms meeting in front of her. The shockwave straight-lines from her hand to the dams face. The concrete façade cracks and collapses. The force of over 100 cubic kilometers of water tosses the man-made rock pile forward. The g-men and road block are swept aside.
The water dares not touch her. Some force invisible breaks the wall of water around her. Earth, like a spring compressed under the weight of water and years, bounces back, snaps back. The Earth shimmies, tremor-trembles, then outright shakes. Lilith aims her hands, all of them, at the Earth, and with great effort, lifts them toward the sky.
*
The 1990-something Ford sedan snaps out of torpor-time, and drops faster-than-stone–pulled down with great force. The Witch, thinking faster than the boys, snatches Flannel Man by the shoulder scruff of his jacket. She kicks off the doorframe and side-mirror, tackles A(84)–tackles him up. The car plummets down and away, its speed impossible.
A(84) fucks with the watch in his chest. He winces, time slows.
They fumble and improvise, as is their way, until they find themselves falling half-speed and lazily dangling. The Witch holding her bathrobe like a parachute overhead. She’s got her stunner shades, a joint on her lip, and a shit-eating grin–sword-in-scabbard on right hip, pistol holstered to her vest opposite.
Flannel Man clings to her right leg, working-stiff resplendent, beanie un-mussed–demanding a joint from the fuckup. A(84) clings to her left, clumsily trying to light a joint to get right before the fight. Big beak missing its tip, stolen doctor’s robes fluttering in the wind.
*
At the foot of Headquarters on the scorched plain at the end of time, there is the clap of thunder. The Last thing the Metatron sees is the great sweeping tale of a fish or whale waving in space and the large chunk of falling masonry about to obliterate him.
Leviathan grows, oh does she grow, swelling with knowledge and calories. She leaps from the water below to the roiling black velvet above the scorched plain, the pattern of the cosmos dancing across her scales.
Below the congregants and former Custodians scurry back, only a few crushed by the debris. They shuffle back and back, a great circle around the square, brutalist-block of HQ. From above, it looks just like a bullseye, which is precisely what Leviathan thinks. The great carp dives, her mouth opening wide to swallow the building whole. Her tail sweeps, powerfully, the great blessed-beast gobbling up HQ on the scorched plain at the End of time.
*
JUNE 1, 1998. 1:29 AM (Local time), LAKE MANICOUGAN, QUEBEC.
*
The forces of heaven and hell, the same that work shoulder to shoulder at Headquarters, are murdering each other in the woods of northern Canada, and soon after everywhere else. A doomed world is fair-game for the oldest grudges, so they fight. And if a few true believer g-men honestly intended to capture Lilith, it’s clear none could apprehend her power.
The release of the reservoir eased the weight on the Earth. The ground leapt up, and Lilith did wrench and rip and tear the Locust out of Mt. Babel. She was not gentle, and her work was not yet complete. The Locust sat, straining beneath and against the surface. The hill called a mountain bulged like an egg, or perhaps a boil or a botfly larva beneath the skin. The pustule and the pestilence inside needed the barest tap.
The 1990-something Ford sedan pierces the peak of Mt. Babel traveling at what you would call ‘relativistic’ velocity. The Earth cracks and the Locust rises. The force of the car’s annihilation does level every tree and burn to ash all ground cover for kilometers in all directions. The remaining waters in the reservoir flash-boil.
But the force of the blast, and the heat as well, “beg pardon” as they bow beneath and skirt past Lilith and the child-cargo that is precious to her. They float on, the ancient-beyond-ancient mother and her child toward the great tumor of ichor and chitin looming through the mist and just beyond the headlights of the Datsun: the last Locust.
*
Flannel Man takes the joint from A(84), still clinging to the Witch’s leg. He kills half the thing in one hero-drag. “Look.” Choking smoke. “I’ve got to talk to her. There’s history here.” Exhales. “Let me reason with her, I’ll fall down there, and try. If I fail, come in swinging.”
“I’m a case study in ‘that’s a bad idea.'” The man missing the tip of his nose snags the joint back, finishes it quickly. “Please don’t.” Yeah, broomstick is correct. “Not “Fuckup?” Nah. On point, Broomie. “So yeah, don’t go.”
“I’m gonna.” Flannel Man lets go of the Witch’s leg, goes 2D–falls fast to Earth. He’s gone.
*
Lilith leans on the the thing with her arms spread, as if embracing it, presses her face to the Locust. The beast shudders, almost-calming.
Dez stares at the thing “What is it?” The means of our assent. Our rock. Our fortress of solitude. The chrysalis by which we will be transformed into luminous beings.
A gust of wind deposits Flannel Man, 3D again. “You’re mother is already luminous, you are less so. It’s going to transform you into food, kid.” Flannel Man, approaches.
“Hello, Adam.” I hate that fucking name, do not call me that. “What, your name?”
He ignores Lilith, appeals to the child: “It’s mostly not-magic, kid. It’s a mouth, a gut, an asshole. You’re mother is feeding you to a space asshole.” Who the fuck are you, and what is any of this? “I’m nobody. No. Bah. Dee.” He takes a step forward, “Kid, your mother is sacrificing you to this thing.” The kid is half-there, half head-talking to the writhing mountain on the hill. She is transfixed. “Lilith, please. Don’t do this to her.”
“So you’ll give me dignity of address now.” I never took your fucking dignity. “No, you just stayed in the cell when I freed myself because you’re the kind of bitch that likes the taste of shoe lea…”
“Enough!” His eyes glow and his voice booms. The child snaps back from the waking dream, afraid.
Lilith, stepping between, two of her arms held high are wielding clubs, cudgels. Thump, thump, two figures land either side: the Witch A(79) and A(84) land, flanking her.
Flannel Man, “Let us take the kid someplace.” No. Lilith screams the word from the gut, the viscera. She screams “No” in the way that rips the throat, in that primal and final wretch stretched into a piercing, terrifying note. The HVAC man, the first man, the man she insists on calling Adam. His face flaps in the wind, he digs feet in, loses ground. He stands sideways, goes 2D, starts stepping foot over foot toward Lilith in the wind and wave of her impossible scream. He is two-dimensions, his depth or thickness is exactly-actually nothing. And yet, he cavitates, shakes and quakes. Same time, the clubs swing and claws and fists whip at the Witch and A(84) on either side, holding off help.
Flannel Man, perfect-flat LCD man begins to crack, faint at first, but shaking flag-in-a-gale. “Please. Don’t do this. Let us take her someplace safe. Let us stop this thing. You wanted to be free? You’re free. There’s no need….”
Lilith claps the two cudgels together, Flannel Man smashed between. The HVAC man, the first man, is shattered glass–fine sand carried on Lilith’s scream.
*
SOURCE: AFTER-ACTION REPORT(S) (THE GREAT BIFURCATION)
*
Leviathan does devour the whole of Headquarters, growing larger and longer and greater in dimension and heft and might in doing so. In one gaping gulp, she does eat each floor, each block of meters-thick wall (and all within). Woland, mid meeting-turned-orgy is consumed whole, as is the entire Board of Directors. God’s machine is consumed, and passed utterly unharmed, like a toddler shitting out a swallowed marble. The many bureaucrats and cubicle blocks, being composed of fiber, also pass (and quite quickly and with great force) out Leviathan’s sphincter. Amen.
When she reaches the base of the tower, still growing, the faithful and the former Custodians scatter, and only a few are devoured. When Leviathan reaches of the surface scorched plain at the End of Time, she punches through it and keeps swimming. The bravest of the congregants and former Custodians, “I” and Bartleby among them, leap on her back as she passes. They cling to her scales as she punches through the plain.
When, some distance away on the packed ash, she re-emerges from beneath, even greater in size (some still clinging to her back) the congregants cheer and sing and dance. They run and chase after the greatest carp.
Everywhere there was a pool of light on the plain tainted by a Locust, the carp dove, consuming that branch of creation. She grew ever greater, fed on the knowledge and the worlds in her belly, the whole chunks of the multiverse she pruned.
Reader, I wish that I could tell you she was gentle, that she plucked the Locust-tainted worlds from creation, but she wasn’t and she didn’t. It was her goal to help, and her aim was mercy (it’s technical definition). Her mouth was the maw of black holes, super-massive. By the end of her feast, she was greater than the hungry thing at the heart of your galaxy–at least her mouth was.
Leviathan pruned the tree of creation, the sick branches. She also consumed so much that was clinging to life and vital and fertile in spite of the Locust. She devoured so many Earth’s where the wheel still spun, where there was hope (if only a fool’s hope).
High above the scorched plain at the End of Time, a portion of the congregation dancing on her vast back, the lights of the heavens glowing across-and-within-her, Leviathan swam. The congregation did (and does to this day) rejoice and sing the song for the fish that preserved creation. High above the scorched plain, above the spiral-geysers of prismatic chaos jetting from every hole she has punched in the packed ash, Leviathan dives on the last pool of light that stinks like Locust. It is the one beneath the remains of a road side diner–rubble remains of a lonely liminal thing. Leviathan dives on the pool of light that leads to Earth(42) and its universe-entire.
*
For Dezzy, and for her alone, time slows. She waves a hand before her face and the fingers trail. And smashed-glass-Adam is the stars in the sky on fire–every-color on fire. Her mother’s face fight-set stretch-distorts. Mom’s looking two-ways at once–to the fight and to her daughter. Lilith, commands: “The door, go. Now.” And there, in the node protruding from the glowing-writhing mound on the mount, a shimmering blue portal appears to the child.
The Locust gives her a vision then, quite clear in the waking dream, like a shimmering hologram: a girl, her, walks through flame and emerges un-touched.
Dez steps toward the Locust’s three-beaked maw.
*
A(84). A(79). There’s a noise of anguish from each. Both charge, and dodge Lilith’s swatting hands. The Witch flicks ever closer, jumping on lightning side to side and back-to-leap closer through fists and claws.
A(84) shouts to Dez about to walk into the Locust’s jaws. He reaches for the time-piece-infernal. “Kid. Wait!” He draws the ire of the mother. She’s looking at him, her hands find him, grip at the wrists, shoulders. The primal scream begins again, A(84)’s vision blurs, bleeding nose and eyes, the skull-resonating note bottom-of-the-sea squeezing his brain. Nothing. Fade to black, mercifully, for soon his head will explode.
The Witch, A(79) lunges, being punched in the body-armored gut by a Lilith-fist. She slices–sword-tip catches Lilith across the side-front of the ancient-beyond-ancient being’s throat. She gasps, grasps the deep-and-fatal wound with two of many hands. A(84) falls, rag-doll and unresponsive, brain-hemorrhaging down the hill.
Lilith is holding her throat together with two hands, down on one knee. The Witch A(79) lands, pivots to strike. She brings the sword left to right across her body only to be halted by the angry arms. Lilith rips the sword from her grip, sets two hands to choking A(79) to death and two more still to help the two holding her head on her body.
The Witch brings her fists one at a time down on Lilith’s arms. Nothing. She falls to one knee, sees past mom to the child stepping into the Locusts jaws. A(79)’s hands fall weekly to her lap as she’s ground to her knees.
At the edge of consciousness, in a moment that stretches for all beings, the Witch hears static–AM radio, a great lake or the ocean, the friction hiss of some great thing rubbing on and passing through the firmament (more the thing itself than of it).
The stars above begin to blink out one by one then all at once, when the Witch makes her last lunge. Her hands clasped, she brings them up with whatever force is left in her. Up and out, hard with her forearms. She breaks the choke-hold. A(79) dives past Lilith, but the child is gone, into the Locust’s mouth.
The friction hiss climbs toward deafening white noise. There is the tug upward on garments and hair and all things light. The inner-ear-lurch as gravity goes strange, something up-and-up in the blackest-black sky, all stars devoured–some force up there drags ever-stronger.
The Witch finds her sword and turns to finish the mortally-wounded-immortal, many hands clutching her own cut throat. They trade blows, weak from wounds, sustained by anger and adrenaline and forces ethereal.
Lilith swings a club at the Witch’s head. A(79) ducks, leaps and collects lightning on the blade held high overhead. Some force holds the Witch frozen mid-leap, blade frozen on the down-swing. Her lightning continues, strikes Lilith, begins to burn.
There, frozen at the apex of her leap, the Witch feels herself ripped, stretched upward at terrible speed. She sees Lilith half-gone and the Locust behind. The still frame breaks to pixels, each stretching to long-lean cylinders of liquid light.
Leviathan devours Earth(42). Amen.
*
“Still Life of a Pomegranate”
*
In the beginning, creation was a pomegranate, garden, a spheroid. It was an enormous ball-thing produced by great explosion that deposited everything that was or-will-ever-be out into a void (the space that came into being to greet the stuff thrown forth). And eventually all the stuff, the matter, cooled. When it was cool enough, then the spheroid, the space, collapsed back on itself. This was the bang-to-crunch. And all the stuff and energy at any given point on the sphere would fall back to its point of origin–that impossibly tiny pin-point on the tip of angel’s nose (the angel itself dancing on the head of a pin). And with perfect fidelity and trajectory–straighter than straight–every particle would big-bang it the fuck out to a point equidistant and opposite from where it was at the end of the expansion of the previous universe. Newton’s cradle in (at least) 4D.
Big bang. Big crunch. Big bang again (inverted). Big crunch (inverted). Repeat. That was the original conception of the universe, and indeed it did function faithfully for many death/birth cycles.
If a little creation is good, more is better, and reality metastasized. More accurately, probability collapsed just right/wrong and many worlds, many times many worlds came into being alongside/beside/beneath/above. The spheroid was itself encased in a spheroid; the pomegranate’s skin held the precious seeds, each a part and apart–each seed a universe entire sprung (almost) ex-nihilo from a world. And god did become overwhelmed. The seed of doubt planted in the book of Job did paralyze the author of all that is retired to its chambers within the great machine, to let automation soullessly and algorithmically mis-manage a creation it didn’t know how to relate to.
Leviathan, cut the fruit in half. We see the result here before us, oil on canvas: two halves of a pomegranate sitting on golden platters.
*
The Witch A(79) still swinging her sword shot out Leviathan’s ass at great speed, followed by the unconscious A(84) each curl-curving off to opposite halves of the scorched plain at the End of Time.
Each tried to find purpose or path. Without a vector or destination at the End of Time, a born-mortal mind will lose itself (illuminated or no). So each went searching for their home world: Earth(79) and (84) respectively. Neither the Witch nor the fuckup wished to continue their former lives, they simply held out hope their worlds were alive. As they wandered the plain Leviathan broke in two, they mapped the new cosmology.
*
The greatest carp felt pain when it consumed the last Locust and Earth(42) and almost immediately or after several billion years (depending on your speed and frame of reference), some sharp pains came to her belly, and some thing(s) did cut and bore their way out. A single blue star bloodied-red by the effort to escape the fish–the last Locust.
From the guts of the great carp some portion of the good escaped, some portion of the “healthy tissue” of the multiverse-it pruned (if only mostly to serve as compost). And you can’t kill the thing (as god learned before the rest of us). She did split-fission, each carp carrying the two halves of the scorched plain at the End of Time on it’s back.
Two great carp, equal and opposite in all things, swimming with the plates of creation–the vast tracts of packed-ash–on their back. One plain is managed by Woland, let’s call it the “top.” The “bottom” by the bureaucracy of a seemingly-absent god. Between the two plates, a pillar of debris, stair step path between the plains composed of the rubble of headquarters–stretched out and spiraling in strange energy and odd gravity. Among the rubble individual desks and whole cubical forests float, their occupants typing up reports and analysis of nothing, to be read by no one. At the center, and holding things together–as poorly as it ever has–is god’s machine.
As Leviathan, both of her, swim through the undifferentiated chaos beyond creation, just a bit of that chaos–the bit unconsumed by her twin-maws is the breeze of a cosmic wind between the plates–the plains. The third dimension, the cosmos, the remains of creation dance between the plates It is the 4D-at-least holographic firmament. That is the universe where you, if you were born mortal, live: the reflection-made-real of the imagery dancing on Leviathan’s scales.
Orbiting god’s machine at great distance is the red star, the last Locust. Sometimes it obliterates beings from beyond creation, those few things not filtered out by Leviathan. It draws them in and burns them up. But some day, that thing in it’s decaying orbit, will fall.
*
Two worlds, (79) and (84) survived among many Earths and many other places that would become Earths–home to something with the sense to ask “What am I?” and “Why am I?” So much survived and might thrive because Leviathan ate what was dead and dying. So much was rendered collateral damage by the great carp’s guts. But many bipedal, tri-pedal (and so on) and many hairy and scaled (and you get the picture) creatures still sit on their clay balls orbiting stars–lichen on a rock.
Many of those worlds will spin off and end themselves in all the old-fashioned ways. Many more will learn to talk to each other. The multiverse will do what it does: proliferate. The fruit of creation will do what it does: grow.
The Witch and A(84) found their homes and press through the pools of shimmering light, twice, each in turn. They saw their people, the one’s they cared for, from a distance. They saw them living and it was good. But carrying what they carried, neither could ever sit still again. So they wandered. Each knew what the Red Star was and that it would some day fall on some Earth, which Earth? Who knows. And so the last two and the first two of the entire “A” series set out to inoculate all of creation against the last Locust, to prevent a future plague. They sought to tell the bed-time story that might save creation from annihilation “next time.”
*
Out on the plain the wanderers find former Custodians and the roaming congregants. All return to the church beneath the ghost grove–still sheltered on one/both of the plains. There they tell each other the story of the Locust horde, of Woland’s coup. The story of the Great Bifurcation and life after the devil was cast out and god remained apparently-absent.
They take the story as medicine, as bread, to every Earth. The congregants and f-Custodians with joy in their heart. Wandering the plain’s in bands, they sing and tell-re-tell the thing polishing and refining as they go. The Witch and A(84) find comfort in the joy of others, and the tip of the former-fuckup’s nose grows back. Whatever storm sat behind the stunner-shades on the Witch’s big-nosed face, does calm (a bit, but only a bit). Both heal in so much as each can.
They bake the bread, the bed-time stories to be fed to and whispered to humans on every Earth left in the garden
At every world-entire they can, they weave a web of Specific Intersections, not the spider’s web–the trap. No, they use Ariadne’s thread. They tell stories, bed time and church, scary and celebratory, sacred and profane. They tell the story of the Locust in as many ways as they can to as many as can read it, till the thing is written forward and backward over time–time and time again. They sew a tapestry–sew seeds in every population’s imagination that might grow to understanding of the threat and the only antidote for it, the means of resisting it.
As they do, each world is linked to each other in the shared story, the threads that don’t trap. It is in this way that the church’s doctrine seeps into the world–the ethereal church. This is the church of those who live for the herd, the tribe, the camp.
You’ll know their congregants when you find them. They are the ones that weep with Job. They are the ones that identify with Isaac. They go to the low places and they are happy there, because to them there are no “low” people. They robe their sisters and brothers and all points between in the richest cloth: dignity. They address need where they find it. They demand, or give, bread and roses. They bring succor without questioning who is worthy or deserving. They fill bellies. They feed bodies before they would feed souls, for without the body, what is the soul?
*
DATE: NULL (POST-GREAT-BIFURCATION); FRAME: STILL LIFE OF A POMEGRANATE; LOCATION: RED STAR (LOCUST INTERIOR)
*
This happens twice:
Dez sits across a table from a thing that took a thousand years to turn from puddle of Mercury to almost-humanoid form. She thinks at it loudly and a lot in that time until it responds in kind. When it speaks for the first time, to ask: “Why speak at all?” She is startled.
“Because most beings can’t throw their thoughts at each other.” After so long in silence, her own voice sounds strange. This avatar has some understanding of emotion, of hunger of the reproductive drive, but having been gifted language it desires greater context and understanding of all those things and everything.
They spend a long time talking, for even a malevolent thing gifted speech and thought will seek to use both at great length (if only for the joy of speaking and listening and thinking) . As Dez explains her life, the world, answers questions and satisfies the childish curiosity of the avatar across from her, it changes. The avatar, essence of the Locust, comes to look like a crude reflection of the girl.
Where (when) and if (inevitably) the Red-Star falls, judgement day for some remaining Earth, will be determined by how well a handful of people treated a very picky, very brilliant-but-weird, teenage girl in her mortal life.
The people of her Earth, were any of them left, could congratulate themselves. Hers was not even a particularly “good” or “kind” or “decent” iteration of Earth. Yet, there must be so much goodness and decency and kindness in it, for the child thinks that most humans are at least attempting to be “good” and that the species is redeemable–that we are worth a shit. This belief she imparts to her interlocuter, the odd thing across from her (or attempts to).
*
Lilith sits across a table from a thing that is a puddle. It takes what feels like a thousand years to shift form from quicksilver to something humanoid. She thinks at it loudly in that time, sings to it, speaks spells at it and such. When it finally speaks, she is proud of herself for teaching it to do so.
“What are you?”
I’m not interesting or important, they are. Over the table, floating above Lilith’s cupped hands is the ghostly image of Earth. As she speaks, the hologram before her flicks from scene to scene, she shows it the choicest highlights, the deep-cuts of every-day sadism and cruelty aimed at Mary Mitchell and every other woman whose life Lilith shared. “Let me show you what these animals do to their own, again and again-again.”
The woman proceeds to teach the creature across from her, one that comes to look like the crudest artist’s rendering/reflection of herself.
*
The Red Star, the last Locust, will fall. Not “if” but “when”, not luck or providence but orbital mechanics. When it falls, what will it’s essence be? Whom will it look like? There are only two options: parasite or symbiont. Which your world will see depends entirely on the story told twice, once by a woman who endured human cruelty, once by a child taught to see what we might and could be. The fate of your world, and by extension all worlds, depends on the delivery and reception of that story.
*
END SYSIPHUS AND PROMETHEUS
EPILOGUE COMING (MAYBE)
THUS ENDS THE TRUE SECOND ARC