I have similar talks with Genghis Khan, Billie Jean King, Elvis (usually during his final sitdown), and George Bush Jr. Don’t tell anyone, but I even visit myself, that previous iteration who spent three decades rotting in a deep, dark hole. I sit on the rim of his pit and smoke a fat one and whisper the highlights of The Cask of Amontillado while he screams and laughs. I’ve never actually decided to speak with him. Perhaps someday.
Dystopian days again. That fiasco with the creatures from Dimension X was just the warm- up match. Whilst depopulating Terra, our enemies were busy laying the groundwork for the return to primacy of their dread gods. Less than a millennium passed and the stars changed. The mother continent rose from primordial muck and its rulers and their servitors took over the regions they desired and we humans got the scraps.
It didn’t even amount to a shooting war — occasionally one or another cephalopodan monstrosity lumbered forth from the slimy sea and hoovered up a hundred thousand from the crowded tenements beneath an atmospheric dome or conculcated another half billion of them to jelly. The Old Ones hooted and cavorted, and colors not meant to be seen by human eyes drove whole continental populations to suicide or catatonia. Numerous regions of the planet became even more polluted and inhospitable to carbon-based life. But this behavior signified nothing of malice; it was an afterthought. Notable landmarks survived in defiance of conventional Hollywood Armageddon logic — New York, Paris, Tokyo. What kind of monsters eat Yokohama and leave Tokyo standing? There wasn’t a damned thing mankind could do to affect these shambling beings who exist partially in extra-dimensional vaults of space-time. The Old Ones didn’t give a rat’s ass about our nukes, our neutron bombs, our anthrax, our existence in general.
Eventually, we did what men do best and aimed our fear and rage at one another. The pogroms were a riot, literally. I slept through most of them. My approval rating was in the toilet; a lot of my constituent children plotted to draw and quarter their Dear Leader, their All Father, despite the fact the masses had everything. Everything except what they most desired — the end of the Occupation. I was a god-emperor who didn’t measure up to the real thing lurching along the horizon two hundred stories high.
Still, you’d think superpowers and the quenching of material hunger might suffice. Wrongo. Sure, sure, everybody went bonkers for molecular modifications when the technology arrived on the scene. It was my booboo even to drop a hint regarding that avenue of scientific inquiry — and no, I’m not an egghead. Stick around long enough to watch civilization go through the rinse cycle and you start to look smarter than you really are.
On one of my frequent jaunts to ye olden times I attended a yacht party thrown by Caligula. Cal didn’t make an appearance; he’d gone with a party of visiting senators to have an orgy at the altar of Artemis. I missed the little punk. I was drunk as a lord and chatting up some prime Macedonian honeys, when one of Cal’s pet mathematicians started holding forth primitive astro-physical theories I’d seen debunked in more lifetimes than I care to count. One argument led to another and the next thing I knew, me and Prof Toga are hanging our sandals over the stern and I’m trying to explain, via my own admittedly crude understanding, the basics of molecular biology and how nanobots are the wave of the future.
Ha! We know how that turned out, don’t we? The average schmuck acquired the ability to modify his biological settings with the flip of a mental switch. Everybody fooled around with sprouting extra arms and legs, bat wings and gigantic penises, and in general ran amok. A few even joined forces and blew themselves up large enough to take on our overlords of non-Euclidian properties. Imagine a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day float filled to the stem with blood. Then imagine that float in the grip of a flabby, squamous set of claws or an enveloping tentacle — and a big, convulsive squeeze. Not pretty.
Like fries with a burger, this new craze also conferred a limited form of immortality. I say limited because hacking each other to bits, drinking each other’s blood, or committing thrill kills in a million different ways remained a game ender. The other drawback was that fucking around with one’s DNA also seemed to make Swiss cheese of one’s brain. So, a good percentage of humanity went to work on their brothers and sisters hammer and tong, tooth and claw, in the Mother of All Wars, while an equal number swapped around their primal matter so much they gradually converted themselves to blithering masses of effluvium and drifted away or were rendered unto ooze that returned to the brine.
It was a big old mess, and as I said, arguably my fault. A few of my closest, and only, friends (collaborators with the extra-dimensional monster set) got together and decided to put me out of my misery — for the sake of all concerned, which was everyone in the known universe, except me. The sneaky bastards crept into the past and blasted me while I lay comatose from a semi- lethal cocktail of booze, drugs, and guilt. That’s where you, or me, came in. I mean, no matter who you are, you’re really me, in drag or out.
Afterward, the gang held a private wake that lasted nearly a month. There were lovely eulogies and good booze and a surprising measure of crocodile (better than nothing!) grief. I was impressed and even a little touched.
For a couple thousand years I played dead. And once bored with my private version of Paradise Lost, I reorganized myself into material form and began a come-back that involved a centuries-long campaign of terror through proxy. I had a hell of a time tracking down my erstwhile comrades. Those who’d irritated me most, I kept trapped in perpetual stasis. Mine is the First Power, and to this day I, or one of my ever exponentially replicating selves, revive a traitor on occasions that I’m in a pissy mood and torment him or her in diabolical ways I’ve perfected in past, present, and future.
Now, it amuses me to walk among mortals in disguise of a fellow commoner. I also feel a hell of a lot safer — the Old Ones sometimes rouse from their obliviousness to humanity and send questing tendrils to identify and extract those who excite their obscene, yet unknowable interest.
I’m going to wait them out.
Seven or eight of us still celebrate the Fourth of July despite the fact the United States is of no more modern relevance than cave paintings by hominids. Specialist historians and sentimental fools such as me are the only ones who care.
This year, Pontiff Sacrus, Lord High Necromancer, bought me a hot dog, heavy on the mustard, from an actual human vendor, and we sat on a park bench. Fireworks cracked over the lake. Small red and green paper lanterns bobbed on the water. The lanterns were dogs and cats and Paul Revere and his horse. The city had strung wires along the thoroughfares. American flags chattered in a stiffening breeze. I breathed in the smoke and petted Softy-Cuddles who’d appeared from nowhere to settle in my lap.
The pogroms were finished. Pontiff Sacrus had overseen the Stonehenge Massacre that spring and there weren’t any further executions scheduled. According to my calculations, exactly six hundred and sixty-seven unmodified Homo sapiens remained extant, although none were aware the majority of the billions who populated the planet were replicants, androids, and remote-operated clones. Pontiff Sacrus’s purge squads had eradicated the changelings and shifters and the gene-splicers and any related medical doctors who might conspire to reintroduce that most diabolical technology. He’d reversed the Singularity and lobotomized the once nigh- universal A.I. Super job, pontiff old bean. He purported himself to be the High Priest of the Undying Ones, but they ignored him pretty much the same as every priest of every denomination has ever been ignored by his deity.