FATHER NEPTUNE
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EOT / ARCHIVES / RECRUITMENT RECORD: A(0x7C0)
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“Of course I wanna know a secret. They are delicious.” The ghost who was a man and will be the Herald slumps to his knees, but his eyes rise to the Accountabilibuddy: the woman in a hoody and pajama pants hovering cross legged before him, the one sipping coffee.
Wind whisper-whistling nowhere-to-nowhere, and its quiet enough to hear the plip of each drip–blood on packed ash plain. He looks to the woman sipping coffee from a cup in her right hand. The left, she holds (not high, but firm) in the posture of a teacher in an old tapestry: palm forward presenting like a lectern, thumb and first finger up and speaking, second finger half bowed before expertise and the third and forth curled low over their notes. Behind her, the glow-growing firmament. The light of all the luminous matter and the sacred black that buttresses everything that ever was or will be, bends gravity-lense around the archivist.
There’s pity in the eyes when she assigns the recruit his first task: “There are no secrets, not for an Archivist. You first record is your last. Tell me, for posterity, how and why you died, A(0x7C0).“
“I died in a car on fire on a road in the snow because a vain little klutz tripped over my feet and decided to murder me, to go all Operation Condor over it.”
“Accurate but insufficient. Start again. Expand and expound, my man.”
“I died for no fucking reason.” Says the exasperated ghost. “I died for no fucking reason, and I am clearly in hell.”
“Wrong!” She spills coffee. Collects herself and wipes the beverage on her robes. “Wrong and offensive. First effort was better. Try again, Archivist. We don’t make meaning. Rather, we let it emerge from events.” When the man doesn’t respond. “Tell me again, Archivist. How and why did you die?”
*
EARTH(0xBED42820A) 3030
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More montage, more of the Idaho Jones to satisfy that addiction itch for narrative haste and the nightmare train’s need to stretch its legs. The Unlawful Assembly dips from -midst the revolutionary ecstasy, the impromptu feast. The nightmare train, longer-much-longer now and dangling metastasized mouths and eyes and brood tumors with spare Heralds, rumbles through the fresh forest of fruiting bodies that replaced the arcologies of idle rich the Mighty One ate. The freshly freed people Poly-Cotton blend plant green things in fresh soil. The flock tangled in itself on the locomotives backs begins this leg of the journey exalting. Joyful. Singing (and not just to expectorate plastic snot).
The faithful don’t understand why the herald cries: “good Earth, dude. That’s coffee dirt. Gift from god” and they point to the Mighty One’s nearest eye. The flock heeds their terrifying new god’s instructions, and mock the “little bitch Herald, look at him peeping for a tree to cry on” (the insult idiom loses everything in translation, trust me Reader, it is devastating).
There would be a test or shibboleth for the Unlawful Assembly and their fresh faith and awe for a terrifying minor god of decomposition, but it would come East and far out over the acidified-half-dead Old Atlantic–where the cross-hatched fabric of plasticrete bore the marks of war. Big bits of hashtag gone, great bites taken out of the endless cement waffle.
Scorched Earth was Unanimity’s answer to the infection revolution wrought by the Mighty One’s mycorrhizal moves, it’s rapid growth and incredible new aptitude and appetite for consuming concrete. There’s shock, the songs halt momentarily, when the flock watches a span of plasticrete, a full reform-kilometer span of track parallel to they, groan and sag-sigh-dive to the sea below with a plop and fizz.
There is horrified awe on the faces of the flock at the source of the pall crawling across the sky: Unanimity’s violence. Through the smoke that burns and chokes and falls like snow rise the dead arcologies, destroyed not by the Mighty One but Unanimity’s own guns.
From the last arcology came every kind of weapon. The three-pronged dick tower, tallest of them all, rapidly manufactured-at-scale, all the toys and cunning killing machines. Drones and self-piloting missiles with names ranging from cutsie (Soldier’s Helper or BugBot) to butch-alpha-cringe (ADJUDICATOR or LASER-RAZER).
The race goes not to the swift or the slow, not to a fixed wing straight shot or a quad-copter loiter-bot, no not one drone found ‘home’–hit target. Flock sang off key, halted, that forced hopeful held hostage by circumstance. The Nightmare Train shits chaff, chuffs great clouds of spore. Something psychoactive in the camoflauge cloud takes the edge off the terror for the Flock. Something else in the spore drinks radio waves–grabs messages and drowns them in prismatic static. The drones sent by the idle rich in the last arcology death dive into the ocean. All the ballistic missiles, mighty and baroque as the hypersonic uniforms on the warpigs that flung them found nothing but ocean or decoy trains with nothing on their backs but fungus. The PeeVees the first person piloted drones flown from far away got a special treat, a bad trip, a heavy dose of something psychadelic and electromagnetic. Every armchair ace flying a first person death machine found madness, swift and permanent, in his little headset.
Nightmare Train arrives in scorched Earth country. Missile-cut cliff looking at-ofF melted plasticrete identical to every other cut cliff where the last arcology stood cut off and alone and defiant of the Mighty One and the infection revolution. With all their killing toys befuddled, the ones in the Baroque-Absurd-Rococo turn to the “final option”–the nukes they kept in a ‘peaceful’ world (hoping for an excuse to use them).
At and above the Azores, a great many missiles, codpieces nuclear tipped, lean at launch angles out the side of the tower built of hubris and shaped like Poseidon’s three pronged dick. The brutalist prick bristles with missiles like venereal disease. The Herald appraises the missiles through a pair of them rich folks opera glass optics: “Well. Shit.”
“Do you still wish to reason with them, Herald?” The Mighty One taunts while the Unlawful Assembly sings lamentations, great expectorating heaps of lamenations.
The holy man folds his scrap plastic robes the way Lem’s Ratboys taught him. The Herald girds his loins. “Yes. Give me the Zeus juice, even just a little bit, and let me talk to them.”
*
UNANIMITY 8.5 / 9 / EPILOGUE
CONSENSUS AND CONSENT
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It is good, in practical and pragmatic terms, that the Mighty One print re-printed so many spare Herald’s ahead of time. The scorched Earth gap in the road and track, like a moat round a castle of old, is a whole half of a metric-mile. First Herald thrown hits the water to drown tangled in the plastic tarp he wore as clothes. Wrapped like a sacrificial snack for Poseidon.
Second Herald got shot out of the nightmare train’s cloaca like a cannon, shot straight into the opposing plasticrete cliff where the road is cut.
It’s not the Herald’s pleas for power, his beggar’s poetry, that moves the Mighty One to grant his wish. No, it is embarrassment. Hot shame at being a god, a chain breaker who befuddles armies, who (in front of the eyes of its own flock) cannot properly aim: “Herald. I accept your earlier offer. Take my power and teach the gilded turds in the last tower to fear us. Or else”
No time to answer before the Herald is lobbed. Spit-shit out a cloaca at artillery speed, powered by god-hubris and the power-real-power of that hungry thing beneath the Earth. Herald lands precise, tuck-and-roll barrels through the Machinenmensch standing sentry far side.
*
The heads of Union’s wealthiest families lounge on divans where applicable. When their Baroque-absurd-Rococo costumes custom made for the occasion do not allow the wearer to sit, they lean on clever little platforms built-in. These most-idle who “do no work” do in fact work. Oh, it’s lazy work, to be sure, but please understand that the work of signification is work. Let me show you, Reader.
Fly with my cinematic eye. Watch as we fly in murmuration-formation with one of the thousand personal security drones that document the permanently bored rich of Union. These most gilded glide on down from on high to watch the showdown on hover yachts. The heads of family-firms, born managers all, are adorned as exalted-exaggerated forms of what they already are: Pharoes, Czars, Oligarchs, and Olympians blasphemously reborn. There, on one particularly large and be-dazzled float-yacht–the one with all the fake mahogany (ain’t been a mahogany tree in three-and-third centuries).
At the prow, safely shielded behind industrial-diamond imbued armor-glass and a field of strange-force that alters the angles of projectiles passing through it, behind all that protection stands a man who signifies ultimate destruction: ‘the bomb.’ His face is just a face, this rich man, with words paint-written in brutalist font, nary a serif: “war is beautiful.” Around the fascist’s face LED’s pay pale homage to a bomb flash brighter than the sun. His head dress is a cloud of smoke, the bottom of his robes the skeleton of building. His torso is a sky on fire, or so the scene dancing in the holo-fiber fabric would suggest.
All about the man dressed as death are his servants, his family and their attendants. The servants, each decked in their own shade of azure and their bodies smeared in Prussian blue dance havoc and snort the drugs of war. The whole scene that signifies Union’s resolve to defend Unanimity with the fire that ends everything is quite clearly written on that yacht, on every laden boat that circles above the Herald like marine predators used to in the half-dead ocean below. The Herald waits a long time for their speaker to arrive.
The Supreme Speaker takes long dive down from tip-top of the tower where air is rare riding the Mechanical Bull of Heaven. Down on the track where the Herald’s at, out come the hostages: attendees manacled and Machinenmensch armed behind.
“YOU WISH TO PARLE WITH HUMBABA, HIGHEST OF ALL SPEAKERS AND KEEPER OF UNION’S FIRE?” Accompanied by some instrumental shriek, pyrotechnics, and a dazzling drone dance and laser display that writes missiles and fires in the sky. From forty paces away and astride the Mechanical Bull of a Heaven, gold bull bot hovering and breathing flame, Humbaba taunts, and the towers sound-system amplifies: “Prove yourself worthy of speaking in our presence, Rogue. Prove yourself literate by reading our tableau, Villain.” The speaker casts his arm high, gestures wild-wide at the whole spectacle of hostages and hover yachts.
“I’ll play ball.” says the man made mushroom-holy. Herald strokes his beard and holds his chin like he’s in an art museum. The man reprinted cocks his head like a dog, like he’s listening for the crack of a bat or a beat to drop or the first lilting notes of something sweet. Every dissembling step the Herald takes, his filthy feet and god-borrowed power deposit fungal spore that is microscopic and macro-hungry on the no-longer quarantined plasticrete beneath his feet. From the Herald’s feet to to the street to the grid of plastic highways running nervous-system through the plasticrete. Beneath the spectacle, the Mighty One (with practiced speed and stealth) does discretely eat it’s way toward and into the great, brittle dick-tower bristling with missiles nuclear-tipped (to disarm the missiles or bring the tower down like Babel on the gilded turds, whichever is needed).
The Herald speaks in a voice amplified (quite well) by his ego by the Mushroom god’s good drugs: “You clothe yourselves, blasphemously I might add, like the god’s of old. Olympians, but you’re all Ozymandias. We all are. Every human. And I am here to carry the words of the new god, the god of death and decomposition that you and yours called forth: woe to thee. Abandon your gilded towers and your guns and choose to live in peace with the people Poly-Cotton blended. Surrender to…”
“WE WILL NEVER SURRENDER” Humbaba’s words blur the Herald’s vision. Some seconds later (many reform-kilometers away) the flock on the locomotive’s back feels the words in their bones. It is an absolute certainty that Union will launch their missiles, will burn all other life on earth and call the cold. The Oligarch’s will burn everything in the fool’s faith their bunker tower can protect them from nuclear fimble-winter (just as soon as they can find the launch keys to the centuries old weapons).
Humbaba dismounts his mechanical bull and the beast follows the great speaker while he and the Herald circle one another. Each man postures, plays for time, Humbaba to end the world and the Herald to save it.
The Great speaker removes rank epaulets riddled with diamonds and platinum and all the precious only to cast them into his bull’s mouth. Shocked gasps from the audience. The Great Speaker of Union drops cape and breeches, complex expensive-exotic pieces of the excessive uniform while the audience weeps and curses the waste of such exquisite waste. And while the wealthy on hover yachts swear violence, Humbaba speaks: “Words will not settle this, ‘Herald.’“
“I don’t want to fight you, Humie.” Sharp clap of a laugh track.
“Savage! Philistine! We shall not fight with fists like feral abominations or robots, but rather as men fight. We dance.” The great speaker, stripped down to a leotard and simple meta-silk robe stretches then twirls. As the man whirls, the robe grows and unfolds while complex algorithms written in the fabric about his body transliterate speed-angle-momentum and motion-whole into song, fresh symphony replete with beats derived from the dancer’s style. “We dance, Herald…” Last word stretched long nasal, snide, disrespectful.”
“First, Herald is a job title I didn’t ask for so mock it all you like.”
“I will mock you, Villain.” The speaker spins melodically every other step. His garments sing. The tall towers sound system amplify-accompanies.
Herald continues to circle, trying to bop (almost rhythmically) like somebody’s middle aged dad who found hip hop from his decade on the car radio between the classic rock and country pop. “Ok well, I still can’t dance, so…”
“Then those you claim to care for die. First these hostages” music lilt’s as the Speaker angles body toward the manacled Attendees. “Then the attendants to this tower” The mechanical bull bows low and guitars shred and strings scream as the speaker rolls on his back over the bull, kicking high to pose dramatically to the North, toward all the Attendant skyscrapers on islands nearby (and all the Ferals doubtless huddled below).
At that the great hand of the Mighty one does shove itself up the Herald’s ass and the voice of the god of decomposition does pour down his mushroom chapeaux: “Dance, Herald.” At a distance and on the wind, the Herald hears the song of the Unlawful Assembly, an odd mix of beat boxing and lamentations. Mushroom magic tells him to visualize, in great detail, every music video he saw in his miserable and boring mortal life. Verily, the herald does visualize, and the Mighty One translates imagination to body moves that the Herald in turn busts.
“Dance in me, Muse.” And the Herald does this little goofy-ass-shimmy like he’s shaking down a glass of Scotch, and it shouldn’t look cool (but it does). The holy man keeps walking. In time. With style and grace.
“What vulgar gyrations are these, Herald of Abomination?” Says the Speaker mid-pirouette, the Mechanical Bull of Heaven prancing ’bout him and spouting gouts of flame in time to the competing songs coming from the tower and nightmare train.
“I’m poppin’ locks, motherfucker.” Verily, the Herald does. “Work it. Uh. Said, get it.” And the holy man’s ass pops beneath plastic robes “Get low.” And the Herald puts his ass to the floor, Reader.
Humbaba and the Herald dance about each other in terpsichorean battle a long while, serving and one upping one another. When the Great Speaker calls in drone swarms and laser show accompaniment, the Herald calls wind to stir waves and brings down lightning that startles the rich like horses.
Finally, the Herald does The Worm with such force, determination, and vigor as to break the very street beneath their feet, exposing the fungal tendrils already eating into the last arcology’s nerves and veins and plasticrete meat.
“DECEPTION!” Humbaba roars and points in horror at writhing fungus. “DECEPTION AND INFECTION! LAUNCH ALL MISSILES IMMEDIATELY!”
“Wait! You can still evacuate! It doesn’t have to be …” but the Mechanical Bull of Heaven breathes upon the Herald and stomps the ash. On the side of the tower made of plasticrete and hubris, the half the whole arsenal that Unanimity can launch (the half they found the codes for) begins to rumble and roar to life.
“No.” The Herald, so freshly rendered a ghost (yet again) doesn’t shout (for he doesn’t have a mouth). “No.” The ghost doesn’t think it for he’s not yet awakened in a fresh body. “No.” The Herald wills the word, and through the power gifted him by the Mighty One, the man-made-holy does awaken every copy of himself in the belly of the Nightmare Train at once. Herald then grips the trains bowels, the Mighty One’s bowels, in a great metaphysical hand he just discovered. He grips and squeezes that bowel with more force than any mere mortal man can.
“I know what I am. I know why I am.” says every copy of the Herald as it flies, fist out superhero pose to intercept every. last. missile.
*
MANY YEARS LATER, AZORES
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Nana Lem, the old priestess of a church as laid back and rational as it is psychedelic does tell re-tell the age-appropriate version of the tale she saw at distance and through opera glasses. Every kid in this well fed congregation has a name. Nobody younger than she even remembers Rat Fever, and everykid has a name, and every parent present in the congregation Poly-Cotton Blended.
And when the young ones, “And then? and then?” ask after the Herald at the stories end. Lem tries to offer them narrative consolation. “Well, the idle rich surrendered and ran from the tower before it fell on their heads.”
But the Herald?
“He put the Mighty One to sleep, and gave us the idea of climbing into mushroom guts to manipulate machines merged with fungus, to manage fusion plants and air-filtration machinery and so much more.”
But where did he go?
“Honey, the Herald is gone and all around us.”
*
MICHIGAN, DEAD CLEARING, 3030
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Never leave your accountabilibuddy behind. That’s not an actual rule, creed, policy or what have you. But it ought to be our rule. It’s my rule, certainly.
When we arrived, myself and two friends from HVAC, the fungus had him tied to a rock. Herald is held to a dolomite slab like a sacrifice on an altar (and smiling “yes lord!” about it) High as hell and bout to be dragged into a subterranean midwestern hell for practically-eternal digestion-damnation.
Reader, I beat that mushroom that called itself a god to sleep, I’m not proud to say. We beat all that accidental sentience out of every mushroom tumor. We went full equal-opposite one Thaddeus MacGuffin and thumped the light divine out the fungus (and grabbed the sacred-or-whatever artifact to boot). Big feels, I sense you seething. I was with the Mighty One when it did what the meek couldn’t: protect their inheritance. Fungus from nature, of it, not the whole show. And claiming godhead in this multiverse gets one got, if not by the Author, then by the logic with which they wove reality (and its opposite).
The Mighty One had to go to sleep lest it eat the meek and their inheritance. The Herald’s last thoughts that were his own, that were not infected by the power the fungus gave him? They dealt with the writing on the wall that was for once mercifully clear on this iteration of Earth: “you are what you eat.” That shroom would’ve turned heel and eaten the ones it wanted worship from. The meek on that Earth will make good on their inheritance, just you watch.
Let me and the boys finish wrestling the Herald into the trunk of the Forge and let us get these restraints on him. Look, no. It’s for his own good, he’s high on a lot of chemicals and a taste of godhead (the real and for true shit even) and he’s not himself. I will apologize for the extra trauma-sauce of tossing him in the trunk with the Machienmensch corpse when we deposit him at the Church Ethereal for detox (and retox).
But let’s detour a thousand years into the future of one Earth(0xBED42820A). Peer with me from interstitial space, not out the windshield where the wiper blades drag streaks of liquid light that drip or deluge off the intoxicating irrational geometry. Nope. Look in the rearview or side mirror carefully and you’ll see.
In 4040 the seas on Earth are green and alive, whole-and-healed tapestry from plankton to great whales (and Leviathan about its business in the depths). The crosshatched concrete that scarred 1 full 3rd the Earth is gone and so much of the Alkali plasticrete dissolved for the ocean to eat (like a supplement for Poseidon) did right it’s chemistry. Forests and trees and all the simple and complex creatures grow again.
The people, they humble themselves as the Herald did, and crawl into mushroom pods to pilot great ships and operate machinery that controls fusion plants and writes gene-code. The people Poly-Cotton blended from Ferals and Attendees and the rich that surrendered pilot the sleeping mushroom’s might to make what they need and craft what they want.
They follow a faith psychadelic and rational, the people Poly-Cotton blended. They are intellectual and superstitious. Some centuries later, when refugees from a neighboring world arrived by sleeper ship, the people of Earth welcome the strangers to their planet (and soon into the Poly-Cotton blend). After thousand years of work to heal the thousand years of damage done by rich unanimous-in-brutality, the citizens of Earth (all of it and every kind of person) do set out to explore the stars in ships whose hulls were printed by mushrooms.