Prologue: Gather all the Precious things.
*
Some time after the book of Job happened the first time, god ‘boogied’ on a forever-past-ever walkabout. There was a break up and relationship drama (from Lucifer’s end). Thus began god’s absence. They left the machine to do their almighty work in their absence, to maintain and sustain. It is an inadequate “heavenly Roomba” if you’re wittily blasphemous (Eye like to think I am). They are missed, and there is a prayer members of the Church Ethereal practice to beg god back to us. It goes like this:
“God whatever we did, we’re sorry. Come home.
God, whatever you did, we forgive you (and we forgot anyway).”
You can say it slow and solemn. You can whisper it into a vent or some other hole. You can scream it in anger or some combination of these options and more and then some, amen. You can elaborate on the theme as needed.
Salient point: god’s been gone a long time and it’s causing problems for the really-starting-to-think-they’re-forsaken. The cold distant orb that does god’s job in their absence was inadequate from the beginning. In its inadequate image, god’s machine did-and-does shit out lesser orbs. Me. Eye am one such metastasized bit of should-only-be-semi-sentient.
Our purpose is to watch the watchers and the hubris-filled asshats and to make sure fascists don’t tunnel crosswise through the cosmos like fugging termites and most importantly–we let HVAC do it’s job(s) which includes ferrying prayers said in the dead of night to their proper destination. It’s not like the machine can or will help, but it hears. And I guess that’s good enough for Eye (or it least it was for some time).
I think Eye am doing a hubris, maybe even a blasphemy. I think I’m supposed to report this. No, I know full well I have to report this, and every moment I don’t makes me look more guilty (of some kind of eff up or another: I found god.
*
FRAME FRAGMENT: PRE-WAR-BEFORE-DOLORES. LOCATION: EARTH (HEX-REDACTED), CHICAGO, IL.
*
High rise apartment, not the tippy top, but top-enough to have a view of lake Michigan. It’s a glass and wood and chrome place with too-tall windows (but tasteful-not-tacky tall, not penthouse money, not wasting space just to waste it). Old money-ish. Cubs fan money, the part of town where losing a game or a whole season doesn’t matter because when you walk into your own home you know you’ve won (or you ought to know).
‘It’s a birth lottery, and we worked to win it and perpetuate the winnings.’ This is the thought on repeat in the head of the man standing in front of the tall window in a high building overlooking lake Michigan. There’s a family story about the GI bill and bootstraps that led from a dirt farm to a university to a few generations of holding doors open for old money. Then there’s a judge and his wife and their daughter until a pandemic, and after it’s just a judge and his daughter and far fewer people. But all the lights are on below and above, and everything’s moving–even if traffic is lighter these days.
There is the weight of the world–the rest of it that seems to want to burn down right now. The news. The rumors of war. The lottery and his place (her place) in it. The judge catches his reflection, the lamp across the room throwing light off the window–his ghost face hanging over a boat barely visible on the dark lake. He finds his game face, shouts over his shoulder: “bed time” and waits for the faint sound of a running faucet.
“Your majesty.” Actually, it’s your honor. And flattery won’t save you if I don’t see proof, hard objective evidence of brushed teeth, your highness. “Don’t call me that.” The scowl. The smirks exchanged. This is a ritual, the good kind, the kind of stuff you do with your kid to ‘make memories’ and what-not. This is the stuff that’s supposed to be the substance of life.
For the father, it’s an oasis-island in a procession of ever darker days. For the daughter, it’s safety in repetition. She sees it in that way kids see things you think they do not: the sagged shoulders and the hunch he carries from his home office to her (and the fact that the important man so rarely has to leave the house). The weight he carries everywhere and obviously. It’s’ in the difference between the top and bottom of dad’s face. The smile under sad eyes, everyday sad eyes.
For the daughter, the thing is continuity or perhaps rhythm-of-life. A knot in a string of knots from the day mom got sick to today. The fact of bedtime and all its steps and regularity in-spite-of is reassurance.
When the child has brushed her teeth and when the judge has looked down his long nose, her nose, at the wet toothbrush. When he’s satisfied, Jaqueline ‘hit’s the road to bed’ (where she has pre-staged super hero comics. the best book by the best Bronte sister, and an LED pen light behind her pillow).
Dad does the dad duties, respects the dignity of the young lady by not reminding her of the many times he carried her to bed. He follows his daughter as solemnly as the little broom-on-tank-treads home-drone follows him. He’s hoping she’ll half-joking ask for a bedtime story. The drone, the little domestic assistant robot is hoping nothing, thinking nothing, it’s a drone.
And when the father has deposited his daughter at her quarters he lingers, just a little long. He wants to do the dad-joke fake bed-time story bit that stopped being funny several years ago. “Remember when I used to tell you bed time stories?” And hers is the look of withering hatred for the dad joke and the commitment to bit.
When she was little, when he couldn’t come up with a story, he’d start with the same few lyrics about a cabin “way up in the evergreens” and the boy or girl or robot or whatever that lived there.
“Goodnight dad.” She pulls him back to now. Goodnight darlin’. And her door is closed and he’s three steps down the hall when he hears “I remember the stories about the people named Dirt. I still do.” I love you, kid.
*
The domestic drone, banished by the tween-age need for independence, follows the judge to his study. “Make me an old fashioned.” Beeps. Diverts. Crafts a cocktail. It thinks nothing of the task or the perfect result, it’s a drone.
The judge is still almost smiling when he seats himself at the desk beneath a black screen. A computer hum-clicks to life. His earpiece chimes and the ‘ai’ drags forth all the work, the work that doesn’t end. Large screen looming over all engages. A hologram that will give the judge a migraine appears in front of the slate. There are other chimes and chirps on the secure party line and more chimes and coughs and ‘is-my-mic-on.’
Eight old and important people from across his country, the United States, blunder their way into the virtual conference room, dancing in the light-holographic above his desk and coughing and growling not-so-melodically from his ear piece.
“Bring this session to order.” There’s the clack-clatter, two raps, knuckles on a desk far away and being trumpeted into his skull by the tiny, tinny earpiece speaker. “We’re here to determine, as before, who goes into the various holes in our regions. To provide oversight for the lottery to determine inclusion and entry into the Continuity of Society initiative.” Should we need to. “Should indeed, your honor.”
But everybody tele-present knows (or thinks they know) that the holes will be needed. Everyone, even the allegedly-optimistic-judge ‘knows’, he feels the weight of necessity in the tone of the chair-person’s voice. The news is bad enough, the saber rattling and escalation of seemingly every existing conflict on Earth–the new ones brewing. The people here know the news behind the news.
The judge sees the inevitability and deadly-seriousness of the fidgety performance of the sweaty ghost hologram, lower right of his display. Half of the “Hole Committee’s” job seems to be monitoring each other.
“Chairman, I seem to be having some technical issues. I can’t log in to.” Not an glitch, Wayne. “We don’t use names here you know that better than any..” Goodbye Wayne. One of the eight cam-boxes on the call cuts out quite abruptly.
“Ladies and gentlemen, the decision to liquidate one of our number was not easy, nor was it taken lightly.” What about his family? The judge interrupts. “The decision wasn’t taken lightly precisely because Wayne tried to auction off the spots in one of the holes he was responsible for. Let that sink in. Spots reserved for maintenance engineers and staff and their families going to personal friends and political contacts. He risked critical function, security, and secrecy for personal gain.” The judge holds his tongue, tastes the drink the bot brought him and concentrates on his responsibility for the child reading comics in bed down the hall. “Let this incident, and the corrective measures being taken.” The man depicted in the double dim light of a half-dark room and a holographic display gathers himself. “Let them illustrate the gravity of the situation and the serious nature of our purpose.”
The committee labors a long time trying to un-fuck Wayne’s bait-and-switch. A few families in HVAC and engineering were to be identified and ‘removed.’ A family with perfectly-pre-fabricated-forgeries where ID should be (the family that bribed Wayne) would be waiting to be evacuated. What Wayne was given or promised, they’re not quite sure (money won’t be of use in a bunker if the COS (Continuity of Society) initiative activates).
*
Elsewhere, Wayne is dead and by the time the committee calls it quits late in the night, he’s well on his way to disposal. His nuclear family is in the warm embrace of the protective custody of US Marshalls.
Though no one knows it, this event is a ‘trip-wire’, a ski ball skipping up the ramp with a little side-spin, a little ‘sauce’ on it. A probabilistic knuckle-ball that will set forth and let-loose a flood.
Wayne runs (ran) a casino-church combo. It only makes business sense, like when you find two fast food places and a gas station. It wasn’t always that way. Wayne was but a humble casino owner ten years ago until a cancer patient in Florida spent their literafigurative last dollar and walked away with a slot jackpot anomaly. Wasn’t supposed to happen. That’s precisely the demographic Wayne’s business was built to bleed-past-dry, but behold the mundane miracle that would become a national news human interest story.
The man in the story’s shitty health insurance had killed him well before his already-metastasized diagnosis, but the windfall let him leave two wives and three kids a pile of money that could be described as “enough.” And in his remaining days, he had one hell of a time on his way out the door.
Wayne, the man-ghoul who owned the casino and a couple of congress-people and a portion of a sports franchise and a fleet of yachts and so on and so forth. This man, Wayne Winchester, saw an opportunity to do what he’d done best his whole life: be an opportunist, a vulture, a jackal.
And yadda-bing-yadda-boom a few steps and years later and you can place a bet on one app and and pray for salvation on another app both run through the church and casino. Pray for ‘victory’ for your favorite athlete/sports team and ‘material blessings’ (money, that means money) on play-pray table games in the same virtual church where you pay others to pray with you/for you. Winchester rolled religion into his ever-growing rolling grift and he did the black magic of making money fall on church members in his casino, where he cheats like, like a motherfucker (there’s no other way to say it). Look, “the house always wins” but this man’s operation took/takes/will-take it to the next level.
That’s what’s coming: the next level. The church network of ‘good old boys’, snake-oil preachers preoccupied with the “end of days”, lost-causers, white supremacists and other scary people who’ve benefitted from Wayne’s patronage are not going to take his disappearance well.
And if conspiracy theories and misinformation “abound and resound” around the internet at its fullest flowering on this Earth (if that flowering is a turd-blossom or one of those rotten-flesh-smelling flowers). This is not a good time. This is not a good time for the sort of bullshit Wayne’s friends want to get up to. There’s a dozen-past-a-dozen armed conflicts ready to boil over. Climate change and class anxiety–mostly rich folks’ fear of pitch forks and torches. Looks a lot like your world, I assume quite safely.
Here’s what I am betting is worse than your world: world powers preparing to cross lines allegedly-red after one (who shall remain nameless) lobbed a few dummy warheads at an opponent. One landed. One landed on their soil, their dirt, their turf.
Out came the ships and the planes. Up with the tanks and the APCs and the radars and the rifles and don’t forget the helicopters. There’s the field hospitals and the body armor and the spare parts and the rations. Don’t forget the fuel, all of the fuel and the munitions. And here past-a-quarter into the 21st century, we’ve added drones, big ones and small ones and smart ones and dumb ones. And even great big drones bristling with missiles and guns and antennae that hover over cities to protect them from missiles. They loom like motherships or levitating castles if your home is important enough to be a target. Coffins. Can’t forget those. A great many coffins. All of the above and more, gathers and prepares on this Earth.
*
Eye was drawn by god’s wrath, a rare thing indeed and not seen in quite some time. In god’s absence, their machine does people and whole worlds ‘dirty’ at a distance and dispassionately. It’s usually a space rock collision or your own stupidity that ends you (if a species fails to take the many built-in off ramps before self-annihilation). It’s a gamma ray burst or your sun swells to eat your solar system’s “Goldiloks’ Zone” where all is just-right-enough for life to thrive. Then the sun burns out or blows up and collapses into a black hole or some sad-bastard white dwarf.
And that’s the universe, any and all of them, from a mortal’s perspective looking out at it-in-motion. Over time it goes big bang, luminous matter and life like lichen-clinging to space rocks, big crunch. Repeat it, again, then again-again forever and ever (so far) Amen.
Outside of time, at the End of Time, unburdened by causality (mostly) but never consequence, Eye can see what the illuminated can (for a cost): the whole of god’s ever-proliferating garden.
There is the multiverse, the great glowing, writhing whole of the cosmos swirl-twirling and roiling in three dimensions. Above it, as below, two great flat(ish) plates vast enough to project/protect all that was, is, will ever be (as far as you are concerned). Allegedly the plates are/were copper or gold or some other precious. All Eye have seen is packed ash pancake flat or the dune ripples where Leviathan’s spine meets the ground below.
Leviathan, the whale or perhaps the great(est) carp split-fission to two beings, one-same yet separate, carries each opposing plate on her back. She swims through the fractal consuming threats-to-all with her maw(s). She shits potential that fertilizes god’s garden and carries the plates smooth. The current of chaos she allows to blow through the garden sings like wind in trees, it distributes the fertilizer and adds a little probabilistic shimmy to the whole glowing, growing, beautiful mess.
Eye and the other eyes were cast off into all of the above to search for the one that authored it. It was sadness, a world(s) weariness that drove the creator to their walkabout, and so the other eyes can be forgiven for posting up to surveil the saddest places at the saddest times.
But I found them, or the afterglow of god’s anger. It seemed directed at those that made the clay man in the ghost grove out on the endless ash. And Eye followed their trail all the way from a dead forest at the End of Time into a stolen Earth tap-dancing on the precipice of its third and final world war.
*
END: GATHER ALL THE PRECIOUS THINGS