“If you got stilts, come join the parade. If you on two-feet? Get the fuck off the street!” The lyrics to the marching cadence are simple and direct, amplified by cupped hands and bullhorns and accompanied by brass, wind, and percussion. Indeed, people in the capitol respond by heeding the call and staying the fuck inside.
Maybe you did “duck and cover” beneath a desk or a tornado drill or prepped for a quake in school or at work? Well, Ignatians in the capitol drill twice yearly (once per mating season). Every office and shop, the HR guy or the Mom or maybe even the Pop comes down with the red and black Bird Binder. Everybody practices noise discipline and somebody’s got a stop watch while a “safety officer” gets people upstairs or hunkered down in a one story.
May 1, 2020 is the second time the drill has been used, and the first time in Ignatian history it’s ever been effective in preserving human life.
*
NORTH NULL SITE
*
Todd’s a bit of a chunk head in the day-to-day or a conversational environment. The man knows it, but he reads. He thinks. Aims for warrior poet and lands at Secret Agent Soccer Dad who is trying. But in the bunkers, at the choke points and dead-corners and crossroads with opportunity for enfilade, the man shows his brilliance. Any place the the men in tight pants wait last stand style to get the drop on them, Todd transforms to Ajax or Achilles while You-You directs the birds to rage and devour.
The heroes sought to return two bombs and found an arsenal cobbled a nuke at a time from every iteration of Earth the Consortium had slithered over / under / into–a great arsenal of city busters and world enders under lock and key under an already-ruined Earth.
Todd returns with only the rad-shielded hearts of two American weapons lost since 1966, great hefty things on a bubble wheeled cart that will test the big fella’s endurance in the woods ahead. Ulysses relays what fungus says is to come and how it must be and what cannot be. “I don’t see the need for some heroic self sacrifice. You might have years, decades before this kills you. Look at you. You’re magnificent, and your momma wants you alive.” One naked blue man to another.
And I’d like to continue living long enough to figure out how, but I’ve got to excise a tumor and exorcise a demon. “Shroom?” Shroom.
“We got a good a thing. I’m breach. You and the birds are clear. I’m Salsa, you’re Money. It’s buddy cop action flick chemistry.” What are you trying to communicate?
“Let me help you slay the dragon so we both go home alive.” Todd pops his pecks excessively, still flying high on You-You’s drugged-sweat paint-resin. “Put me in, Coach.”
Ulysses transfigured glows brighter and flexes his muscles back. No. Go home to your family. And he bows as is if to pray at the vault door and the birds gathered there bow alike, shiver, and sway in communion. A song, chant, poem in a dead language Ulysses learned in that instant pours from his lips first a plea. The man’s voice climbs to a wail, then call, ended command sang again and again again as the birds wailed along. Todd “caught the spirit” and danced about the man chanting the prayer the same until light poured a jellied fluid from Ullysses flesh to wash his whole flock until the screeching things glow the same hue of blue.
There the birds, every Ignatian Puffin in proximity to Ulysses-transfigured tasted the holy light. Oh the the wretched auks assembled still carry hate in their hearts, and mushroom rot where the brain should be, but somewhere in each Puffin there is a bit of Ulysses.
You-You lifts a man-portable nuclear mortar scavenged from some hell Earth in the multiverse off a shelf, hefts the thing. Go, quick as you can. My babies will help you find the way back through-and-to-surface. Tell my mom, I didn’t leave her again, and I’ll never leave Ignatius again. Not ever.
Todd, full in the grip of the drug and the moment, kisses Ulysses on the mouth.
*
CAPITOL
*
The revolution? What’s to tell. It was velvet. Nobody died. Not one person. Not an amped up mercenary in the penthouse. Not even Consortium Man Supreme. And let me tell you buddy, everybody who had a somebody who got disappeared or had to go live with the Bird Folk just to avoid disappear-as-verb wasn’t happy with that, but the guy ends up rotting in the prison he used to let people rot in.
The success of the Ignatian Velvet Revolution is primarily attributed to a safety regulation: In the capitol city there shall be, on every city block, not fewer than one building not taller than five meters. And each five meter tall building shall have unobstructed sight lines and no more than a quarter mile walk to the next five meter tall building. Furthermore, the state shall contribute resources for the hardening of these buildings for the purpose of shelter and search-and-rescue in Avian event. Five meter tall buildings shall maintain ready barricades and supply caches (to be detailed below).
Like all regulations pertaining to the public’s safety and health (which public? Any public). That regulation is written in blood–its the result of the last three times Puffins came calling. Twice they picked the place clean. Third time, half the town lived because of the five meter shelters.
The fourth time the birds came, not one person lost their life. I won’t bore you with the rest of that regulatory language, but that’s what won the day: rest. The marching band beat out a tune to keep the birds from killing everyone. The musicians and marchers, from the percussion to the wind instruments and the chorus of Ignatians on roof-tops and balconies singing long lullabies in the night, worked in shifts.
The Consortium men and Oligarch-lackies huddled and counted bullets and gold trinkets they might barter for life and limb with, and Consortium man Supreme threatened any who would suggest surrender with a fancy French word for getting throwed the fuck out a window a full one hundred and fifty stories high. “We will wait these peasants out.”
But I mean, it was time off work for the whole capitol. There was plenty of mystery whiskey and good Ignatian weed and what not and a lot of stashed supplies. And even if one didn’t necessarily want to topple the Consortium, the need to lull the birds that held all present hostage called every person to a figurative barricade.
For a full two days and half a third, the people danced and sang and demanded the resignation of the incompetent shitheels top of the gaudy glass architectural atrocity. From the tippy-top of the needle-dick Tower of Babel speakers amplified threats.
Bullhorns below hollered back: “Hurt us and we’ll herd the birds into your tower to do what they do. And that will be the end of you.” Singing as much as shouting it. Somehow, some tech or magic conveyed communication between parties. And when the Consortium Macbeth threatened death again, the greyest and most stone faced military man called the penthouse just to say, “Hi. Harm the Ignatian people and I’ll throw everything at that ugly building, everything I’ve got, all kinds of booms comin’ your way.”
It was then, the people dancing and Consortium Macbeth brooding. The Army men singing along and refereeing, then that every eye that could see looked to the northeastern sky.
*
NORTH NULL SITE
*
Ulysses wrenches the hatch to the Vessel’s office. At his entrance something calls up the lights to compete with the bioluminescent Blue. The Vessel, the closest thing to an actual Consortium Man Supreme, the shambling semi-sentient thing in a fine suit raises its arm and howls like a ghoul. From vast dark behind the bare desk a tendril ending sucker and spike, like a squid’s grappler made of mushroom lunges toward the former-man’s head to imbed, imbue, and speak-through. The vile rot-body behind the desk hisses “mother” and shudders and still more lights flick-to-life to light the great fungal body dangling from the walls of a rough carved cavern hiding behind the austere office entrance.
The whole great body from the man-puppet to Shroom-itself then speaks: “You will be the next…”
Ulysses interrupts: “I’m going to stop you right there” You-You launches what he’s got, the tiny hell-weapon (the only in the history of the things used to do something decent, for it was detonated in the belly of an already-dead Earth). For a fraction of a portion of a second a second sun erupts and sets to incinerating every wicked thing in the Megalomaniac hole, especially the portion of the Consortium’s cobbled nuclear arsenal most vulnerable to accidental detonation.
Some kind of hellfire crawled through lead-encased concrete and rebar tunnels that straight-line-curled under Ignatius irrational geometry to every world the Consortium conquered, killed, of lodged itself deep within. There and elsewhere across a plane only the fungally profaned among humans can perceive–there is being of beings. Each one looking quite like Shroom but most lacking its malevolence–for none of them brain humped a fascist and found intellectual affinity with the meal. Ulysses fire burnt that diseased node out of the creature-of-creature–the web of fungal fruits and semi-sentient things.
Every bunker on every Ignatius, each hole full of killers in tight pants got burned past ash. Shroom the diseased fascist entity dead, and every metastasized Consortium bunker excised. The tombs are left not clean, but silent and empty–permanent monument to what not to do.
*
Every eye in the capitol looked to the sky, drawn to heaven and the signal flare that hollered Ulysses’ end. On his world, like every other, a flash and a roar and some smoke to the North. No doomsday cloud. Barest wind, barely enough to make a tree shimmy in terms of a shockwave. No end of days scene. The beginning of a life free of a particularly pernicious type of fascist in tight pants.
High above the rest, in the penthouse, Consortium Man Supreme had the best view in town of the smoke that signaled the end of his kayfabe reign. He surrendered to the rebels at sundown on the third day of the Velvet Revolution.
*
EPILOGUE
*
Reader, I wish I could tell you the twelve year reign of Boss Rosa was a golden age, but it weren’t. That was everybody’s hope. The impossible had happened, islanders had wrought and watched it happen when they Toppled Macbeth. The blue birds that guided Todd home and killed exactly no one, certainly this had to be a harbinger of something.
In the bad old days, much of the Consortium’s legitimate illegitimate business, the stuff that funded their megalomania: holding your stash for you. No drug sales (unless they really liked you). That’s a crowded market. No weapons either. All they did is hide your precious for you, in a vault no one without a teleporter could reach. And any time you wanted some nose candy or that human you purchased, just tap the Consortium-FOB and out of the wall steps a man in tight pants with your property in his custody. So far, no entity on Earth(REDACTED) has filled the void left in the market by the Consortium.
At the dawn of the new regime, it was drug tourism because we need the money. Bad. Take the processed fungus that (almost) never gives you a wicked case of ergotism. There might be a second Cold War brewing, but we Ignatians aren’t invited to this one. No blessings or treats from the big economies this time, and the promenades all got dry rot, and we can’t log the forest. It’s oldest on Earth feels wrong, and the birds are still mean. Real mean, wouldn’t let us walk the forest floor if we tried. Maybe they got Ulysses in them, the blue ones, but he must be sleeping. They aren’t “Alphas” or pack leaders or smarter than the average Puffin or anything like that. They’re ravenous and horny and murdery as they ever were, bless their hearts. But it’s beautiful to see the bioluminescent beacons bob-skittering through the woods at night.
People from the big rich fancy places closest to wherever the island decided to be in a given season, the kind who pay to hallucinate came and came and came all over the island. So many tourists came, they tried to expand the international airport. That’s when she’d had enough, Ignatius Child of Leviathan.
She’d healed enough from surgery, she shook from tail to tip and back, as if she’d slapped the ocean with her vast tail, as if she were about to dive. That’s the only signal before your brain tells you you are upside down and inside out something more than an instant and less than a “Wait, what was I saying?”
By the time you remember what you were saying, Ignatius is a few miles outside Tokyo Harbor startling shipping, or hanging out with Haiti. She swam, free. Shifted positions many times per season and whenever she felt like it, Ignatius did. Like a cat that sat down by a human expecting a pre-determined quantity of affection (that it shared with no one), she’d roam from offshore of Oakland to Madagascar to the most isolated patch of the south Pacific almost no-one has ever seen. The Ignatian Leviathan would sit there a week or two, and dash off to somewhere else.
A full of year of running and no stable location to trade for what you need, and nothing but a pretty dangerous drug to trade for it. It was a bad year. A hungry year. Three bird breeding seasons even, and all the woe that comes with.
The omens the masses had misread told the Bird Folk it was time to go back to human sacrifice or something like it. And so they ate of the thing itself, the fungal root, and merged with it like the oracles before, and as many as were illuminated up-and-died or went instantly and indecipherably mad as were able to glean any portents or a glimpse of a freckle on the future’s ass.
What they did: encouraging people to risk death and madness pissed off the gov-ment that was trying for a “we all get to thrive” vibe–though they lacked the resources. And whatever the bird folk saw made them ever more hostile to outsiders and called them deeper ever deeper into the hills on Leviathan’s spine–to-and-through out into the multiverse.
The Bird Folk guarded the caves and their secrets jealously. And while they tried to sweet-talk research access, the jealous and nosy Ignatian government guarded the shores of the island from outside snoops. For every intelligence agency ghoul that read anything interesting and unredacted on the Consortium wanted a selfie with the boogie man’s corpse and to rifle through his figurative pockets. The “how” the Consortium tech and toys. Everyone wanted them. Badly.
The bad year, whatever world power found Ignatius near her shores tossed a few spies onto her back to search for Consortium tech. But three contractors, a family business grown expert in the art of counterintelligence guards the island like Cerberus.
Things weren’t all bad, the only people disappeared by the new regime were the spies come to steal the toys of evil men. The government didn’t persecute the Bird Folk, for Rosa was once one of them–though she would never be welcome among them again after their isolationist turn. Boss lady tried to reason with them, politely asked them not to die by ergot-madness, but Prospero gonna Prospero.
When the island settled, when we stopped trying to lay more concrete and she calmed, she gave us three whole years of summertime. The island jump roped over the equator to follow the the summer-sun and give us great harvests and full bellies and food stashes Leviathan lay well off shore and crept-cautious toward ports, and stayed as long as the humans on her back kept tourist swarms to a minimum.
What came next, the Puff breakthrough, wasn’t a golden age, but biggest win against cancer since Dick Nixon declared war on it long ago. Started with wild claims of “I cured my cancer” with vague woo-woo and unnamed ‘nutritional supplements.’ Of course it didn’t take long to notice such stories came from places and times when Ignatius was lounging offshore and hallucinogen commerce was going down. If that’s your way godspeed, but a little research and biomed know-how and yadda-bing-yadda-boom the fungal toxin that gives you ergot-rot is one hell of a focused and targeted cancer treatment. Who knew?
I told you, Boss Rosa didn’t bring a golden age, but she had her moment(s). My favorite: some pharma suit in a board room wanted to make a lot of money off the marginal-miracle drug derived from puffin shit. Rosa’s government made contact with the research team that did the work and helped ensure that the island was capable of producing the drug (quite a simple process really) at volume to sell at-or-below cost to whomever needed, wherever Ignatius was in a given season.
No gold, no golden age. That’s later, long-later on Earth(REDACTED). It’s a world that could either way perdition or the bland banal opposite we ought to hope for. Ignatius didn’t cure cancer, they just discovered a hell of a drug wrapped inside that other drug that comes from bird shit and shared the good and sacred secret that kills tumors. They set a hell of an example for others elsewhere on that blue world that orbits Sol, one that would alter that whole world’s arc for the better.
So when the Boss Lady retired, she went to her old village, not with a retinue of guards, for she didn’t need them. She had one guard that was more eye candy and elder-helper than armed goon. She was beloved. Years later when she passed, Boss Rosa lay in state in the capitol.
Boss Rosa’s funeral procession found itself halted on the road out of the capitol to the national cemetery north of town on that big bald hill they call a mountain. What couldn’t be was: there, butt-ass-naked, blue and strobe-glowing is the man himself Ulysses, reborn and back from the underworld just in time to see his mother off.
*
END IGNATIUS