THE DISTANCE
EARTH 3030
*
Come sit in orbit with me and look down on Earth from on high. Come and see that sickly shade of orange sherbert. If you’ve ever seen an industrialized Earth, you’ll recognize the anemic orange symphony of mercury-vapor lamps amassed where the people live. The pattern of dash-dotted lines that tie arcology super-city to brutalist mass-mega-manor might be new to you, but the song is the same.
Here, night side of a sick-sad Earth, there’s a competing glow from a fresh-grown forest (of a sort), orange dimmed then eaten by the Mighty One’s fruiting body azure. From above, higher than the birds or satellites fly. Bioluminescent blue and brilliant, strobing between the black velvet firmament and the shadowed firm dirt. It’s beautiful, bittersweet- beautiful, every bit of blue signifies a tomb–an arcology consumed (and the Attendees and Ferals thereabout free from toil or threat). The blue rash like strobing ringworm follows the nightmare train. It crawls every direction from Cleveland along the plasticrete thoroughfares wove threadbare and thrown over one-third the Earth.
Bless the Herald, his scrawny ass and naivete. For the little fool, limbs and dick flapping in the free-fall wind above Pittsburgh as I etch these words on silver plates eternal, that idiot thinks he can find the right words to sway a minor god of decomposition—to teach it things like leadership and mercy mild (not mercy killing). Bless his stupid little heart, he that would plead for the lives of those in Arcologies. Out in the acidified and almost dead ocean once called Atlantic, the greatest and most brutal-brutalist block of all spears the ocean floor where the Azores used to be, and its tip-top is tall enough to toss satellites into orbit by hand. There, in the tower that looks like a phallic rendering of Poseidon’s trident, the most idle of the rich ready themselves for war–rapid-prototyping Baroque-absurd-Roccoco killing machines designed to counter the Mighty one (or so they hope). He’s a fool, the Herald, and I find his fool’s hope invigorating.
HVAC gets ‘battle buddies.’ We don’t do that shit in Archives. It’s more like an accountabilibuddy. Verily, that’s me the narrator and I assure you Dear Reader, that I will retrieve the Herald from the mushroom’s asshole (when-only-when the time is right). He’s a big boy (figuratively) and already dead. He’ll be fine.
The task, the job from Archives, is for he and me and we to fetchquest the rotting Machinenmensch–the one from the clearing so the thing itself and its story can be preserved for posterity, and as long as that loot finds its way to a library borehole, they’ll be happy.
For now, let’s let the Herald stew. The Mighty One? Let her cook. She’s a fungus and thus got no gender or perhaps all of them. She is vast and contains multitudes. You ought to already know she’s standing in for nature (kinda) in this report-as-parable no one asked for and no one who is not a machine is ever likely to read. The fungus, she is rightfully angry at those that hurt her home in a way that will be satisfied (but not by reason).
*
Lem, the big Feral priestess, fishes the half-drowned Herald out of the Ohio river. Later-long-later in the psychedelic gospels penned by people Poly-Cotton blended by the mingling of the Attendees and Ferals, the words and the holos will exaggerate her magic. Stories (writ in paper or light) will have Lem fly into the sky to catch the naked guy. She’ll be rendered superhuman by proximity to events and people holy. We know better. The Herald is a man, a mediocre one with the non-zero luck to become a ghost (good or bad depends on perspective).
The priestess sees the holy man through the still-growing thicket of religious awe that distorts and mushroom drugs whose shine accentuates all things. Lem tries to busy herself organizing the gaggle, the flock, the Unlawful Assembly of Ferals (and a few adventurous Attendees). But the rat boys have a new favorite word: “nourishment” and they chant it passing liberated provisions to the stoned congregation arguing, singing, writing, writhing atop the nightmare train.
It’s funny-not-actually-funny how humans hang dead people’s clothes on the living. Every person is their singular self and each an archetype (or set) the same, and if we live long enough we’ll see people again and again again. It’s not said to diminish any one drop but to explain currents in the sea and what is happening inside Lem when she stands bold and strides up to the machines with the fungal infection standing like an honor guard around the Herald that argues with the air.
Lem sits beside the Herald who is pleading like a fool for the lives of those in the Arcologies to the minor god’s avatar–a hard-hearted (re)possessed robot. As the train speeds to DeeCee Arcology, Lem waits and the shrooms in her system do what they do—a sacred vision, recollection if we’re honest, ensues.
*
Feral brats young-too-young to have a name but old enough to know “git!” and to run when someone says “lethal force authorized.” You’ve got to live long enough to catch rat fever and live (a few times) to get a name. That’s how it was then and there, and there’s a man.
They’re ground level at the hole in the wall of an Attendant building where the trash falls out. The tribe that is really a pack. And there is a man, skinny-scrawny with a beard about the color of the Herald’s. There’s a man standing in a spotlight like a trash run is a prison break. The man stands, not boldly, one leg shakes quite severely, but he speaks. The man pleads in broken bot-talk for his life and begs for the bounty of trash he and his drag out of a rat-chewed fissure in the basement of a recycling center. The man without a name is on his knees, Machinenmensch on either side, rifles high.
The other person, the one the Feral child thought an angry god, was just a bureaucrat from the arcology above– breathing apparatus unadorned, authority minimal, uniform barely baroque. But even the blandest public servant then and there had mandate to “preserve the property and peace” of the ones up top and the authority to kill “mutant fauna.” The bots shot the man that tried to reason with them and sealed the rat hole with plasticrete. Even the rats went hungry that winter.
*
“Lethal force is authorized. Always authorized.” Lem catches her hand on the Herald’s shoulder, snatches it back. “The costume men talk, but they don’t speak. Never. Lethal. Always lethal.”
When the avatar speaks, the Mighty One’s tones come out tin-mangled and tiny, but Lem still hides her eyes from the terrible thing piloted by the terrible thing: “This adapted human sees as we do. Why the Herald cannot is not our concern. The gilded ones die, go. They clear the way for better, less resource intensive, life.…”
“Or….Keep hearing me out, oh Lord…” The Herald, cross legged, rocking urgently “You break them and let them live.”
“Human bodies are fragile, and how will the rich best serve us if they are maimed?”
“No, don’t physically break them, break their will to resist you, ‘oh lord.'” And the cross-legged Harold here bends low at the waist, “I beseech thee...” and the flattery that always works on minor deities does it’s magic. “God of decomposition, greatest of gods, give me your power for a while. Give me control of whatever magic shoots lightning out of this ass and the voice that jams drones, Oh Lord. Give me that power that I might make the rich bow to you, and you can have me. Willing and forever.
“I have you now.” The Mighty One ain’t wrong.
“On loan. Stolen from power higher, inscrutable, and beyond time. Be a just god and a good god, and I’ll let you digest me before Archives or HVAC or Heaven’s Feds could ever fetch me. You’ll have me as your Herald for all time, and the knowledge metaphysical you can touch but not digest–that from elsewhere you sense written in me but not of my flesh. You’ll have that, to know and possess”
There’s fire beneath the Herald’s feet, hot-anger-held that wants to run through the hotwired nervous system the Mighty One printed for him. Lust to know, that itch to grow, that’s what holds the minor god’s hand. The Mighty One speaks in violence barely restrained: “you, who is made from shit, would judge our justice?”
The mechanical avatar riddled with fungus claps, and another bot in the honor guard pivots to project-holo lights dancing with acid-trip oil sheen and out of focus. There in the air, the shimmering image of a tomb arcology and another and another. “Each tomb exhales air. Actual air clean of all microplastic fibers and particles.” Next slide shows Ferals and Attendees wheelbarrowing some substance fallen from a cloaca dangling from a high Cleveland balcony. “Topsoil. Fecund, fertile earth with every nutrient and germ needed, sans PFAS.”
“Topsoil made of other people. And next time you need some?
“Herald, no…” Lem huddles, tries to make herself small.
First time these people, your people, piss you off, what then? Oh lord most fucking high.”
Fire flies down the head antennae, the fruiting body wired into the Herald’s head carries great gouts of pain.
“Fuck. You.” Choked out. When the Herald won’t repent relent a shaking Machinenmensch, one of his honor guard turns to kick him a while then point a rifle at his head.
“We will print and re-print Heralds until we find one pliable and compliant.” The rusted machine cocks its rifle, presses it to the Herald’s head.
“Lethal force. Lethal force is authorized. Lethal force.” Lem plead repeats, and it’s her words that halt the horrible things.
The fungus that named itself Mighty looks through bot eyes back at the train, sees the fear, not awe but fear.
“Yeah these people are so precious to you. You are what you eat, asshole. Oh lord of assholes.” The Herald finds his feet to walk Lem back to the flock, reaching up to put an arm around her shoulder, muttering angry all the way:
*
END UNANIMITY 7