HEX BORE: (0X7C0); LOCATION: EARTH/EOT; TF: EARLY-MID-21ST CENTURY
TEXT: FOUNDRY(CH:9 V:9)
ARCHIVES: WE CAN TELL YOU WHAT OR WE CAN TELL YOU WHEN. THANK YOU FOR SEARCH INQUIRY AND INQUISITIVE NATURE. BE WELL AND NOT AFFRAID.
God walks the path ineffable, divine, and other exalted adjectives. To behold the divine presence, I’m told, is a hell of an incitement to poetry in languages both living and dead. They, god, are the sublime. The sublimely ineffable and inscrutable one.
This is the point in the story when, un-when, god wonders if all the ineff-and-inscrutability–the holy fucking mystery–is part of the problem with all this, the multiverse they authored. Here god gestures, with an arm that’s 60-different arms in the second it takes to sweep and point to the cosmos. Then, in a voice that is the same sacred-sixty-different and them some says: “leave me be.”
Verily, I do leave them be, having seen what a smiting can do. And god continues on toward the heart of it, not the heart of the multiverse. No. God, author of all that is, walks on across the packed ash flat-plain to the basement beneath reality’s sub-basement–toward the broken machine they left to do the work in their absence. God’s got half a mind to fix the thing (whatever that means).
*
I don’t ‘work’ any more. I mean, I have a job because cats-to-feed and bills-to-pay. But when I lay down at night, I stay laid up until morning. I can’t fall through. That is, I can’t fall through to anywhere at the End of Time but archives. Even then, I’m stuck in the lobby–a pocket dimension media center. But it smells right, all flinty and book-dusty. It looks like someone tried to make a cozy-comfy study room in a missile silo. The little light being fae-things staff the place but an ancient-beyond-ancient research terminal runs things. The Stewards know me, and a few of them do not loathe me. One is a friend.
They tender access in exchange for my rendering aid, we blow gage in the pocket dimension and discuss the good bad-old-days and other times and ages. The Steward picks the music, and has impeccable taste (they all do, honestly). Every time we hang out, we have a good time, it’s nice and we’re doing a long-goodbye thing. That’s inevitably when they hammer me with the “help-me-out-with-this” huge ass side project and I can’t say no to that lil’ buddy. Yes, I know the language of the Stewards. It’s actually a mish-mash of a lot of languages (all of them dead), but the heart of it is god’s language from ‘before.’ They speak what’s left of god’s mother tongue–the one they abandoned when they came here to make “here.”
When my Steward friend, whose name I still don’t know, asked me to do the proper after-action–to write the Parson’s epitaph–they knew I’d do it. Preacher is a friend. Her end involved me–in that it had nothing to do with me,(but I’m nosy when it comes to anyone wearing my nose). This doesn’t matter if the nose is attached to my face or another iteration of me out in the multitudes. It doesn’t matter if the nose is rotted away. I care what they get up to and feel responsible for them. Stupidly responsible.
My friend finishes the ritual of acting like they’re asking me a favor (instead of doing me one), and I have offered to help them (accepted their help), I do approach the reference computer. The sage-somber thing. I asked it in English-or-something-like-it for “all materials related to” whatever the Parson got into and receive the holo-projection of her little research nook. I sit (friend fae-floats) and read and snack as we follow the same shit-chute story that confuse-infuriate-incited the Parson to action.
Because I could not follow her, I began her search anew in the oldest tongue I (kinda) knew. It’s not magic, the Stewards’ speech, but it feels like magic when a mortal made out of mud like myself speaks it. You don’t really speak it. You do it. I know that doesn’t make sense.
When I woke up here on Earth(REDACTED) I tried. I really did my best to truly represent the language here for you. But nothing is less real than realism, and I almost brain hemorrhaged. I concentrated really hard on a few basic words and concepts. Got a hell of a nose bleed, but I continued to the translate-and-type phase of the trial. A basic “greetings-and-salutations” message. The first keystroke called the crack of thunder to a calm summer sky outside. No lie. By the end of the first syllable, the characters burned through the screen on that old laptop. I was flash-blind and bleeding from the ears when I lost consciousness. We don’t use those words on Earth. Only ever elsewhere.
Back at the library of babel’s lobby: “Help me understand the knot the Parson got caught in?” This is the best I can do to translate what I said. It’s supposed to be a teacher-type question that’s not accusing or demanding. It invites explanation (at length). It’s open-ended, and though such questions tend to infuriate the stern-somber and so-very-logical research portal–that language opens doors. To this old computer that language was as authoritative as it was kind and the machine did do a different dance with me–not linear-rational but rhizomatic-associative. We wove a web of texts that would take me a weeks worth of dreaming to read (even with time dilation)–for I can only visit the library when I sleep. We read and questioned the circle liturgical, the Steward and the research terminal and I.
This is what we found at the center of that web:
*
ANN ARBOR, MI. EARTH(HEX:NULL)
*
Jonah(CAT) starts himself awake still wailing “No!” into the dark of some great cavernous room–before him an enormous beast of a cat. The great beast wears a mighty and massive collar with a large metal weight seemingly the size of a man’s head. There is a name carved on the enormous heart-shaped charm: “Molly.” The beast pounces and trounces.
Oh shit, I blew it again. He’s a cat. Jonah-the-holy-man is now a cat. He missed his mark. More accurately, the Parson made him miss his interdimensional mark–botched his landing. We were going to have such a journey of hilarious self discovery for several pages as he figured this out. My bad.
Why is Jonah a cat? I don’t know. Ask god. Best guess: to re-enter a physical plane as energy-with-intention (here a murdery one) is to demand corporeal form. Molly’s hatred of Jonah and similar mission/vector/trajectory (her murdery intentions) might have drawn him like a little fuzzy hate magnet.
There she is: Molly beating his ass in the lonely-dark living room. At least listen while your eyes adjust to the dark. She’s just speed-bagging little fella’s face with her front paws. Get those arms up, protect your mug little guy. Ope! Jonah-cat has made a break for it, nope. No. Molly is quicker.
When the commotion, the yowling of feline violence calls Jonah out of the late-evening conference call (it is fundraising season in a ‘crucial’ election year). When the home-office light pours from the second floor, Molly snatches the other cat by the scruff in her mouth. She drags hostage-cat under the sofa, a paw over his mouth. Molly hisses in his ear: “Shut it, you shut your stupid mouth and you don’t open it” and the paw moves to his neck–claws out and flexing against Jonah(CAT)’s throat.
“What is going on down there you little shit? You better not have killed something in the house” and the man trips into the wall, the landing half-way down the slippery stairs. Jonah(MAN) Finds the light-switch past the window a foot from where he remembered. “You better not have killed something in the house.” The man begins to half-heartedly search for Molly. “Again.”
When feet fall close to the couch. Jonah(CAT) sly-stretches. He’s reaching from under the couch toward the light. One more wriggle-reach. He feels that he might escape, might catch the man’s shoelace and attention (and mercy). His little paw pokes out into the light, and an attentive man might’ve seen it.
The clawed-paw at his throat wrenches Cat-Jonah back, and he feels a second paw on his tummy–the two mitts moving rhythmically, claws pressed painfully deep into flesh. Molly’s whisper-hiss, almost silent: “Feel me making biscuits? Don’t speak, nod.” Cat-Jonah shakes his head. “Molly’s making murder biscuits. Do you want to taste these biscuits?” in his ear as she draws a drop of blood, cuts him under his chin. Cat-Jonah shakes his fuzzy little head “no” and promptly faints.
As below, so above. Jonah(MAN) staggers, woozy. He has to steady himself a while. It’s only when he tries to reach his office, crawls to the landing half-way up the stairs–farther from that other iteration of himself–that the man regains his bearing and balance and something-like proper cognition.
Self-association is a hell of a thing. Face-to-face with yourself, another iteration, can kill you. As you can see, proximity to yourself transfigured-to-cat is enough to fuck you up (but good). Another being noticed what self-association did, how the man and her hostage perked up again with some distance between them: Molly.
“Excellent.” She hissed to no one at all, and when Jonah(MAN) had retreated to his lair upstairs. She interrogated his cat counterpart: “Name?”
“Jonah.”
Molly’s eyes narrow: “Why are you here” She spits the name “Jonah“?
“To kill him, me, other me. I’m him..” He’s rambling away and about to yowl-mow so loud the neighbors will hear.
Molly slaps him. “Be quiet or be silent.” She leans and looms over the cat-man “You have a new name and a new purpose: weapon.” Weapon? “Shut up.”
Molly crawls out and (when she sees its safe) leaps easily to the arm of the sofa (where she was once not allowed to be). When the coward cat joins her she gestures in the night to the door with the light leaking from its base. “Tonight we strike. When the stupid man takes his prostate piss in the wee hours, when he’s already weak and tired and extra stupid. You will be waiting outside the door–that door.”
The cat that would conquer the world, the one that wants her family back didn’t laugh or cackle or mow loudly. She “murder chirped” while the shook-and-wounded Jonah-Cat cowered beside her.
*
EOT
*
Parson walks with Wadsworth–the little fresh-sentient thing in his extended “why?” stage. The two now fast-walk the shortest route across the packed ash to the Church Ethereal. There’s a rock in the Parson’s gut and dread-restrained is written on her face, but that AI thing keeps asking questions and the woman who wears my nose continues to answer, kindly. The Parson A(0x20B) is a “game facer” now and past-forever.
“Why has god abandoned us?” The little bot asks in his machine font.
The Parson halts. “Wow. That’s a little sophisticated. No ‘where do babies come from?'” I know how babies are made. “Poor judgement and limited prime time programming. But really? ‘Mother, is god dead?'”
“You said ‘ask away'” Yeah, but I don’t speak for the divine.. “Ask me anything” I can play it back in your voice, a verbatim recording” No you little Narc. “Why did god abandon us?”
She sits. The Parson plops. Doesn’t float or levitate. The preacher is weary and needs to rest on the long walk to the place that is most-definitely still there.
“I have no idea why god left, but I don’t think they abandoned us.” Then why did they leave us? Alone?
“Hang on.” And the Parson fiddles with a spliff to play for time. Conjures two coffees and offers one to Wadsworth. When the thing politely refuses the offered cup, she claims both for herself. “See all that?” and points to the ‘sky’, the whole glorious firmament–all that is or will ever be looming over the packed ash at the EOT.
“Woooooow.” “I know right?” and both admire the author’s craftsmanship-all the matter luminous and dark. Though their instruments are crude, the echo of a human eye and a cell phone camera, the two do certainly perceive the majesty of creation. Each pin-point of light above, like a star in your sky, is in fact 200 billion trillion suns and a discreet near-immeasurable multitude of worlds and civilizations and languages and families and beings. The whole thing, montage-collage multiverse roils and rages in the firmament (at the speed stained glass drips).
Finally the Parson speaks: “I think they got overwhelmed.” Perhaps accurate but insufficient. “I don’t claim enlightenment, little one. And I can tell you from experience, intervention in ‘up-there’ affairs? It’s all unintended consequences and collateral damage.” Really? “Yes, at a scale that demands scientific notation. Come on, let’s boogie.”
When the AI says his little liquid-light legs are tired, the Parson puts him on her shoulders and walks, and when she’s tired, she levitates with the little guy still perched.
*
Two pillars of salt. The first fell on where the Parson was supposed to be. It melted the packed ash to glass and incinerated many metastasized villains. The weapon did nothing to the portal of light that linked two tangled Earths (duh, it’s a portal of light).
The second projectile to fall from the firmament found a firmer target: the Church Ethereal. When the Parson finds the ghost grove there are no words. And when Wadsworth’s pleading questions can’t penetrate the white noise rage in her ears, the little AI riding on her shoulders. He hugs her. The little cell phone thing hugs the Parson’s head with what little might there is in his little liquid light arms.
I wish I could tell you the hug was enough, that the narrative arc bent toward healing–that they re-built the church over the course of a forever-or-two. But the broken preacher fell to her knees and wept. The molten salt was so friction hot it was still liquid. The scorched trees in the ghost grove burnt again, so hot was the weapon that flooded the grove and the ant-colony church below.
“Fuck you god.” Perhaps you shouldn’t say such things. “Nope. Said what I said, and I’m doubling down: fuck you god.” They are very powerful. “And I am very unimpressed. No gods, no masters.”
That is the precise moment/un-moment two things happen: Anne, the Parson’s wife leads an emergency excavation team on it’s break-through to the surface. From the hastily dug emergency tunnel tied to the church below–most of the congregation emerges unscathed. Most of the congregation.
Second: an angel appears. The little thing, biblically accurate-ish, super-somber and formal and professionally spouting gibberish, has a tinny-mechanical tone to its voice–off and wrong. It’s an agent of the machine that does god’s work in their absence. An off-brand angel, a lazy ersatz copy doing-the-work. The bargain-bin Metatron pops into being like that animated paper-clip or stapler or whatever-the-fuck-it-was in old Earth word-processing software.
The angel-thing speaks in that tin-nasal voice again, legibly: “It seems you’ve declared war on the almighty author of all that is.” I did no such thing. “Pretty sure you did.”
*
END EPITAPH 6