Golgotha Run
Dave Stone
My fellow Americans,
I am speaking to you today from the Oval Office, to bring you hope and cheer in these troubling times. The succession of catastrophes that have assailed our once-great nation continue to threaten us, but we are resolute.
The negative fertility zone that is the desolation of the mid-west divides east from west, but life is returning. The plucky pioneers of the new Church of Joseph are reclaiming Salt Lake City from the poisonous deserts just as their forefathers once did, and our prayers are with them. And New Orleans may be under eight feet of water, but they don't call it New Venice for nothing.
Here at the heart of government, we continue to work closely with the MegaCorps who made this country the economic miracle it is today, to bring prosperity and opportunity to all who will join us. All those unfortunate or unwilling citizens who exercise their democratic right to live how they will, no matter how far away from the comfort and security of the corporate cities, may once more rest easy in their shacks knowing that the new swathes of Sanctioned Operatives work tirelessly to protect them from the biker gangs and NoGo hoodlums.
The succession of apparently inexplicable or occult manifestations and events we have recently witnessed have unnerved many of us, it is true. Even our own Government scientists are unable to account for much of what is happening. Our church leaders tell us they are holding at bay the unknown entities which have infested the datanets in the guise of viruses.
A concerned citizen asked me the other day whether I thought we were entering the Last Times, when Our Lord God will return to us and visit His Rapture upon us, or whether we were just being tested as He once tested his own son. My friends, I cannot answer that. But I am resolute that with God's help, we shall work, as ever, to create a glorious future in this most beautiful land.
Thank you, and God Bless America.
President Estevez
Brought to you in conjunction with the GenTech Corporation.
Serving America right.
[Script for proposed Presidential address, July 3rd 2021. Never transmitted.]
Who is the Real Benedicta?
A Benedicta I knew, who filled the very world with the Ideal, whose eyes burned with the desire for majesty, beauty, glory and all that has us believe in the immortal.
But this miracle of a girl was just too beautiful to live; she died, therefore, but a few days after I met her-and it was I alone who buried her, on a day when Spring swung her censer even in the cemeteries themselves. It was I alone who buried her, potted in a coffin of a wood fragrant and imperishable as any chest of India.
And as my eyes were glued to the graveyard of my treasure, I saw quite suddenly a diminutive individual bearing a quite singular resemblance to the deceased, who, stamping on the fresh-dug ground with hysterical and somewhat bizarre violence, cried: “I’m the Benedicta! The real deal! And to punish you for your blindness, and your self-delusion, you shall love me as I am!”
“No!” I cried in fury. “No! No! No!” And in the rage of my refusal, I stamped upon the earth so violently that my leg sank to the knee into the fresh-dug grave. And like a wolf caught in a trap, there I remain-attached, perhaps for all time, to the grave in which my Ideal still rots.
All the same, though; I suppose a quick one wouldn’t be entirely out of the question.
– with profound apologies to Charles Baudelaire
To the Public
Before going down among you to pull out your decaying teeth, your running ears, your tongues full of sores,
Before breaking your putrid bones,
Before opening your cholera-infested belly and taking out as use for fertiliser your too-fatted liver, your ignoble spleen and your diabetic kidneys,
Before tearing out your ugly sexual organ, incontinent and slimy,
Before extinguishing your appetite for beauty, ecstasy, sugar, philosophy, mathematical and poetic metaphysical pepper and cucumbers,
Before disinfecting you with vitriol, cleansing you and shellacking you with passion,
Before all that,
We shall take a big antiseptic bath,
And we warn you,
We are murderers.
Manifesto signed by Ribemont-Dessiagnes and read by seven people at the Grand Palais des Champs Elysees, Paris, 5th February 1920
Preliminary Information: Deathless in Des Moines
Artie Newbegin was looking in the bathroom mirror, watching (at last count, the last time he had counted) four thousand, two hundred and thirty-nine fragments of face looking back at him.
Of course, that figure had long lost any kind of meaning by now; he had smacked a fist into the mirror any number of times since then (breaking three fingers the last time, which had actually been quite painful for a few seconds).
The mildew was out of control between the cracks again, Artie noted, congealing over any number of the smaller shards. The overall effect was a little like looking at the surface of a jewel-strewn swamp.
There was no real point in looking in the mirror in any case, nothing to do or worth doing with anything he might find in there, should the shattered visage ever suddenly cohere into something whole and complete.
That face, reassembled, would be a perfect thirty (the mature prime, the optimal point before the human metabolic flipover into catabolism) with no trace of toxin-contamination even to the point of a mild hangover.
The teeth pristine and cavity- and tartar-free, courtesy of the Bug, which knew the function of ostensibly inorganic compounds in the body, and knew, by and large, the differences between benign and malign bacteria. The beard would be a fixed, grown-out and somewhat straggly length, the Bug never having quite gotten its nonexistent head around the entirely human-level concept of shaving.
The hair on the head, interestingly enough, would be thick and lustrous and supremely manageable. Everyone had fantastic hair these days, which might or might not say something about whoever it was who had designed the Bug in the first place, before it had escaped. Almost certainly it had been a he, with a bad case of male-pattern baldness, for starters.
The bathroom was in an apartment, and the apartment was in a block, in what had once been downtown Des Moines, through which the wind whistled. Nothing much had changed, really, despite the pressure of the years inside Containment. Run-down, certainly, but still ticking over. Cars in the streets and the buses ran their routes a time out of three and most of them packed with those who still worked at some daily occupation or other.
The postures of normalcy must be maintained, Artie thought-rather in the same way that he himself would go to bed at night, when the Dome overhead polarised to black, and lie there sleepless.
And then, in the morning, going into the bathroom, even though there was nothing to do there, and going through the motions, before going out to make a killing.
The Welcome Wagon was sleek and black and looked like death on wheels. In the Last Days, in the days before the Rapture Bug, a vehicle of this nature-used for the same general purpose, for example, by some governmental agency-would have been covert rather than overt, customised to look like a battered old baker’s van or something to blend into the scenery. Now, the sight of these utterly distinctive black trucks shuttling merrily through the Des Moines streets warmed the immortal hearts of people in their thousands. It was a bit like catching sight of a fire appliance would have been, in the days before the Bug hit. The Welcome Wagons were a constant reminder that someone, somewhere, cared.
The process-and-containment facilities took up most of the space in the back and the cab was somewhat cramped for three; proximity converting those colleagues one might quite like ordinarily, or at least find tolerable at a distance, into your worst nightmare.