VZ by Joseph Haryana Alexander Chapters 1 - 8

VZ


by JosephHAlexander


Cicadas buzzed to fill the air left empty - a spell had been broken. Busy minds trying to catalogue things that were still true. Spontaneous feet carrying them out onto the streets to search and tell others. Sounds of celebration. A lenient sun. Cacophonous booming of rival bass lines from people's windows. Occasional whoops of distant crowds. And there, cutting through them like an oil tanker, filled with black, viscous goo, was he.
    +
                    The world is dead. The struggle is over. None of it is worth saving.
    +
                                He looked at the city over the river in the distance. Concrete, glass, steel, brick - earth dug up from the depths and piled high in disgusting, constructed order, like a hornet's nest or a throat ulcer, a thing of malevolent chitinous creatures that festers and grows in damp and stagnant places, places you forget or don't want to look in, full of slimy, pulsating little pods where creepy bacteria lived and ate and excreted until their slimy little pods were full and they'd build new ones and the ulcer would push out further. He wondered if the planet felt pain.
    +
                                There was no point to any of it now. Might as well go.
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                                Maybe there was never a fight. If there was, it's now lost. There is nothing to do anymore.
    +
                                Suicide. The word circulated in his head, the sounds separated from their meaning. Suicide. Suicide. Suicide. Suiii-cide. In a way he'd been preparing for it for a long time, decades. But not like this. He wondered if this is how people felt when they killed themselves. Probably not, right? Most people are losers, they don't realise there isn't a point to any of this, they off themselves because they think they'll get something. I bet they regret it just when they realise it's working. That's why most of them botch it.
    +
                    He thumbed the little indented VZ on the pill in his pocket. Impossible to botch it with this.
    +
                                Should he do it? Should he just go? There was no point in staying. No need for a replacement. It was over.
    +
                                But he was afraid. What if it hurts? What happens when it ends? Does anything happen? Will he just not exist? Probably. Right? Probably. There is nothing afterwards. What would it be like to not have a consciousness? That didn't really matter then, as he won't have a consciousness – it wouldn't be like anything. Just empty, not even some dark poetic absence but literally nothing. Absolute nothingness. No dreams, no thoughts, no one-ness with all beings, not even space to have a void in or time for the void to last. It scared him. There would be no him after that. No him, and no loss of him as he would no longer be there to feel any loss. Nothing.
    +
                    Should he do something first? One last smoke before the firing squad. Like order champagne or something. Eat. Get drunk. Feel some physical sensation that would tie him back to this world for one last second, let the world come in to his head. Should he fuck? Why not call a prostitute. Like a really high class one, he had all the worthless money he'd ever need for it, and he wasn't exactly saving up for a house was he. Like a French one who would blow him until his eyes popped from his head, and then he could bite the pill.
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                                But what would be the point? So he would get some sensory stimulus in him for a few minutes, see some juggling round shapes that tickled some nerve somewhere and pumped out a hormone somewhere else. Everyone can fuck. And they do. That's the whole idea. That was his whole work.
    +
                                And in between all the fucking they run after each other to snatch a designer shirt or jewel or painting or sneaker from all the other zombies with outstretched arms and drooling mouths, ready to be fed whatever we could think to feed them, or chasing after imaginary money so that they could use it to buy unnecessary shit like sports cars or just hold it in a bank to feel superior. He'd never understood what the hell the point of a sports car was. You'd be stuck in the same traffic jam no matter how powerful your car. Except yeah, the thing is powerful. So other men use men's desire to feel powerful to screw them for shit-tons of money in exchange for a car that, really, would never go very fast but potentially could, if nobody else existed, the roads were perfect and generally traffic flow wasn't such a complex system. Maybe they didn't even have the engines. Maybe they just had something that shook and made a big noise.
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        Why let his last act on this earth be devoted to the irrational animal? Why not just jump out gracefully; this is my stop, it's been a shitty ride, fuck you all.
    +
There were people everywhere, beautiful, elated people. Most of them were pretty young. He walked along Brattle Street towards Harvard Yard. The back of his shirt inside his suit jacket was damp and stale. George Washington's HQ. People were celebrating on the grass, on the streets. People were waving American flags. There is a war going on and they don't even know it. Or maybe there isn't. He didn't give a fuck anymore. My stop.
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A young mother was carrying a baby whose jump suit was all stars and stripes. NASCAR baby. Where did people even get this shit from in Boston? Flags, of course. Can't get anywhere without flags in this place. But all this other stars and stripes shit, jumpsuits for babies whose main purpose is to consume and shit themselves and grow larger, and then grow old and die. If they love their flag so much, why do they let their jumpsuit-shitters shit in it?
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A young woman was jumping up and down and screaming in joy, wearing stars and stripes bikini. He could see her abs contracting when she screamed. He looked at the tits, yes – might as well, she's clearly here to be seen, not by him specifically but by some abstract idea of a viewer, though she might never have the level of awareness to be conscious of it. He felt his dick move gently but then settle down. He found it sort of morosely funny, all things considered.
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Why did they get their tits out to celebrate? Celebratory tits? That didn't make any sense. Is that what people do, showcase their reproductive prowess when they perceive things going well? Would a guy get his dick out if he won the lottery?
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Shit, maybe he would. All those dick pics from politicians and bankers and other high-status males, it must be that they showcase good vascular health and reproductive capacity when they win something that bumps them up to a higher social status class and means they might get a shot at a higher status female to reproduce with. Maybe he could have used this in his work, somehow? For every dick that is sent to a woman, a banker gets his bonus.
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Didn't make a difference now.
    +
He was still looking at bikini girl when the woman with the baby spoke to him.
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"Isn't it wonderful?" she said. He turned his head to face her and realised she was now only a foot away. Maybe she was drunk. She put her hand on his chest while the other held the baby.
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"In a way," he said. "But probably not in the way that you think."
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"Oh don't be a party pooper," she said and curled her lower lip like a child. She had clearly been a beautiful girl, maybe prom queen, and got used to playing men. Must have been quite the nasty climbdown when she hadn't manage to hijack someone else's life before she got too old for a buyout. "It's wonderful!" she said, in a giggling girlish voice that was odd coming from a grown woman.
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"What is?"
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"This whole thing! Look at everybody. Look at everyone smiling and dancing and laughing. It's great isn't it!"
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"I have my doubts."
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"It's wonderful," she insisted. "It's finished, it's finally over!"
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"Well you've got that right," he said and smiled with the warmth of a horror movie poster. The woman was taken aback for half a second, and then continued:
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"There you go! So what do you do? You're someone important, I can tell."
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"Not much really. And not really."
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"My boy is going to go to college and everything now. I know it. His dad-dy will-be-back-soon," she said, punctuating the last sentence's each syllable with little slaps of her hand on his chest, followed by a flick of her hair from one side to another and a giggle.
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Got to hand it to her, she knows which strings to pull. Take the wife of a returning grunt before he's back, it's your last chance mister. Plunder the exposed riches, be the man. I wonder how many times she's done this.
    +
The baby is a bit much.
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"You took your baby out on a day like this."
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"I had to! I want to tell him when he grows up that he was there when it happened. Came straight to Washington's house."
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"Right, yes. Big day."
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"It's so wonderful. We'll be free. We'll all be free. Have you heard of the two guys who made it all stop-"
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"I've heard," he interrupted. "Yes. I've heard plenty."
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"Isn't it amazing?"
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"In the original sense of the word."
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"Do you think they'll be here soon? I heard they're on their way to DC and then New York. I heard that everywhere they go the whole city comes out to meet them. Millions of people. Can you imagine that in Boston?"
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The girl in the bikini had gravitated towards him and her tits were now jumping up and down about six inches from his face.
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"WOO!" she shouted, over and over. The arrhythmic and vivacious bobbing made it all look like some kind of primal mating dance. He wondered if it was, deep down, or whether it was just his male mind distorting the evidence.
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Didn't matter.
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He thumbed the pill in his pocket.
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"So, college then?"
    +
"Huh?"
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"For your son."
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"Oh yes. He's going far."
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"I have no doubt. Here," he said and took out his business card. It was metal and looked more like the key card to some exclusive sex club only former presidents were allowed in. "Take this and show it at the admissions office at Harvard."
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"Oh really? See, I knew you were someone important."
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"I suppose. Keep it until he's old enough and try, you never know."
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"OK mister, I will. Can I call you for advice? Like, later maybe?"
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He sighed. You brought the fucking baby, Jesus.
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"I doubt that would be useful. Take care now."
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"You too sir."
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"I will," he said with his back already to the young-ish mother, carrying on his walk. He crossed the road and a car almost ran him over. He nodded at the driver and smiled, took the next one right and walked along the river all the way to the bridge that went across to the business school. There he stood, turned back the direction he had come, looking towards the boathouses and away from Boston. There were boats on the Charles, crews waving their arms about and crowds chanting USA-USA-USA, as though the it had been America that had somehow solved the whole world by finally getting its shit together. There is a war going on and nobody can even see it. The world just ended.
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He wondered if the water supply would somehow get messed up if he bit the pill and jumped in. Boston didn't get its water from the Charles, did it? it seemed like the sort of thing he ought to have known.
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Fuck it, he thought.
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Let the planet have a breather.
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He reached into his pocket and then to his mouth, stepped on the concrete block, stared down for a second, and stepped out to vanish below its edge.
    +


Saul


by JosephHAlexander


By all appearances it was a normal party, with the slight exception that everyone was sitting on the floor. There were no actual seats anywhere. The flat was draped in weird silks with all kinds of symbols, some Hindi, some Japanese or Chinese, some middle-eastern. One had the Star of David, but on a green circle itself on a purple background, with Russian orthodox onion domes all around the circle, the colour combination being somewhere just south of nauseating.
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                    Saul wasn't sure how he'd got to Jennifer & Atticus's apartment, an amazing, small place in the Back Bay area, not far from Boston Common, near the statue of Buddy the Dog Who Saved Boston. People just gravitated there, facilitated by Jennifer & Atticus's 'inclusivity' and 'openness' and motivated by the free food and central location, plus, let's not kid ourselves, the pot, and often other substances. People frequently stayed the night, though nobody ever admitted that this had been their plan all along and sort of pretended all night that they were just about to leave and go home and attend to something urgent that they didn't much want to attend to and would much rather stay, but needs must, oh but alright, they could stay maybe just a few more minutes.
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                    Most guests came with detail-heavy explanations of how they couldn't deal with their moms or dads or whatever just at this moment, despite living in a completely different city, most of them, and how they just needed a short recharge and a break from it all, and could they possibly be so much trouble as to come over, just to hang out, just for a bit, all explained when they were already inside the apartment. By the end of the impromptu parties you were lucky to leave the flat with less than four life stories, all sort of harrowing and incomplete.
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                    Atticus's dad has bought the place and let it to them for peppercorn rent, that Jennifer & Atticus still complained about because it hindered their organic food truck business's expansion, a business that nobody needed to look at the books of to conclude it could well afford a few reasonable expenses given the pretty much ideal location near Boston University with thousands of hungry, mostly upper middle class students who couldn't wait to unload some Coastal Union Adjusted Dollars at anything that called itself 'organic' or 'authentic'. The food they cooked was pretty phenomenal, it must be said. The post-post-millenial upper middle class white kids could be almost paradoxically discerning about their free food, and Jennifer & Atticus's flat always had guests in a sign of prandial confidence so total that it might as well be used as a whole ad campaign. The food - again, phenomenal - fell broadly under the umbrella of 'Asian fusion' (no surprises there), which umbrella could, in white upper middle class Back Bay, pretty much be stretched to include anything with steamed rice. Atticus had grown up, he said, in Seoul, where his dad had been (and this he didn't say) an ambassador of the then-newly-split-and-reunited-and-reformed (and doubly tautologous) Union of States of the Coastal Union and Central States sometime after the Great Blunder, though his account of his discovery of ancient culinary wisdom always neglected to mention that the Seoul district they had lived in was Gangnam, an almost post-apocalyptic-overlord wealthy and artificial light-filled quarter that was like an overblown parody of Western culture, and also that he had been max maybe five or seven years old when they moved out and he went into a fancy boarding school in Devonshire, England.
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                                Had he come here for the food? He genuinely didn't know. It was like he had just walked over the bridge from Harvard, in what must have been absolutely skin-melting afternoon heat, in search of what, food? Is that why he didn't seem to have any recollection of the trip – simple dehydration? Is this how everyone felt at one of Jennifer & Atticus's parties, like they just suddenly appeared here with no backstory but just decided to stay because there would be nourishment?
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                                It was an obviously welcome change from the usual Value peanut butter and Value jelly sandwiches that he subsisted on, both peanut butter and jelly carefully chosen from the floor level cheap shelves that made poor people bend down constantly at his local Star Market and which bending carried a precisely calculated - by the supermarket PR folks - amount of social stigma that acted as a disincentive. By now his mother suffered from a pretty searing back pain that supposedly made her essentially unable to work but still allowed her to reach any shelf anywhere in the house as long as there was a vodka bottle on it – it's amazing what a strong enough will could accomplish. His mother had once been a great beauty, well, at least locally, and had possibly married or at least had a child with a marine, though it may have been around the time when everyone who couldn't buy their way out of it was conscripted and was therefore a 'marine', and then he, the marine, had gone missing in action either just before or during the Great Blunder. He wasn't sure what the Great Blunder actually was, though he pretended to know if someone mentioned it and could even offer a pretty convincing explanation, all things considered. The jelly was in a large plastic jar and was made of 1% raspberries and 98% food coloured high fructose corn starch and maintained the shape of the plastic jar for weeks if you took out the whole chunk. Maybe forever. Saul had given up after two weeks, and the thing had still been perfectly edible, untouched by bacteria or even flies. Unchanged, in fact. It was the cheapest way to stay alive, following the price/calorie ratio the supermarket displays by Massachusetts law that the last labour unions had pushed in their death rattles as a kind of ironic nod to corporate-feudal serfdom, passed in the most brutal response to any irony – by taking it seriously, though rumour has it that when the governor signed the bill into law, the 8-bit Nintendo tune of a jump-in-the-air-and-dying Super Mario was played.
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                    "John, welcome!" Atticus said and hugged John for a moment that was just maybe a second longer than would have been socially comfortable. "Have you met the birthday boy?"
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            Oh, it's a birthday, Saul thought.
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            "Oh it's a birthday?" Saul said. "Whose?"
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            "Yours."
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            "Really?"
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He thought about it.
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            "Goddamn it, you're right!" he said. "Hello John, it's my birthday." John hugged him without warning.
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            Saul wondered why he was so forgetful all of a sudden. The older you get, the more of each day starts to be automated. You go to work, you work, you come home, pick up something on the way, stand in the cashier line, go home, read a bit, maybe, and then sleep, and you don't remember any part of it. Sometimes you, apparently, wander off to your friends' house for a party, and sometimes that party is for you.
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One great downside of parties at Jennifer & Atticus was a kind of spectator sport Saul had quietly dubbed the Empathy Contest. Jennifer & Atticus had the most carefully tuned empathy circuits Saul had ever seen, and were therefore basically unable to have a normal couple's fight. They literally couldn't say anything damaging to one another, or even suggest that there was anything damaging to say, or even that they would ever think to look for anything damaging to say, or that either would even consider looking, and so on. All this would imply dominance or the will to dominate, and they both knew that the knowledge of living with a partner that you loved but who was basically looking out for chinks in your armour so that they could gain some kind of pointless upper hand was knowledge too painful to live with.
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But they still had disagreements, obviously, and fought for dominance like almost any couple, only they did so in really bizarre ways. This was the Empathy Contest. The unwritten rules were (approximately) that 1. you couldn't openly or even implicitly contradict anything the other had said, 2. you couldn't make it explicit that there was a disagreement and 3. you couldn't assert authority in any way. Whoever could therefore be more exhaustingly accommodating to the other's position to the point that the other finally exerts authority would win, through a psychological reverse double tap of forcing the loser to both realise that they would now have to feel guilt about having exerted authority and wanted to feel superior, and realising also that the winner would feel steamrolled or dominated or not listened to. What exactly was gained by winning was unclear to all but Jennifer & Atticus themselves. An approximate, randomly chosen example:
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J: Should we go to the shop?
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A: I don't know. Do you want to?
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J: Not necessarily, I was just thinking, since we might need something for the food.
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A: I didn't really have any specific plans for what food we were going to cook.
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J: Yeah no I didn't mean that we have to cook anything specific, but just that we might need some, like, generic foodstuffs for cooking.
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A: Yeah, maybe, are you hungry?
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J: Well, not really, not hungry as such, but like eventually we'd maybe eat something. Are you?
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A: Maybe. I'm not sure. Maybe not yet. But I might be later.
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J: Yeah, I didn't mean that we'd have to go to the shop right now, I mean we can go later. If you want.
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A: Well, we'd have to first think whether we even need anything.
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(A masterly save, spectators agreed, completely untying the game-theoretical bag Atticus had almost found himself in.)
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        J: Yeah, I mean obviously we wouldn't need to go if we don't need to go, you're right.
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(An excellent comeback, almost screaming for some kind of committal.)
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A: Well I don't mean that we can't go. We can go if you want. Do you have any specific dish in mind that we can cook?
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J: No no, I don't want to make choices for you darling, we can cook whatever you like.
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A: Well, should we decide what we want to cook first, and then see if there's anything we need?
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(The crowd starts to fill with excitement.)
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J: Maybe we should first see what we have and then decide what to cook? I really don't mind.
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A: Can do, if you want.
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J: Or we can do it your way, we can decide what we want to cook and then take inventory.
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A: Well I didn't mean it to be like 'my way' in any way, it was just a suggestion. We can do whatever you want.
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J: Or whether to cook.
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(Crowd oohs in dramatic buildup.)
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A: Yeah, do you want to cook something later?
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J: ...
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A: Sorry, I mean do you want us to cook something later?
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J: Oh okay, well, I think people might get hungry at some point...
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And so on, ad nauseam.
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The game would often go on for hours, and really put a downer on all but the most hardened Empathy Contest watchers, particularly if they were hungry and waiting for decisions. The indecision was worse and almost painful to watch if you were high. A common theory was that they did it on purpose, so as to whittle down the number of unannounced guests to an absolute minimum, all the while maintaining an inclusive and universe-loving atmosphere in the flat. Nobody was unwelcome here, and decisions were made together, collaboratively, in cooperation and common understanding.
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Saul's theory was kinder. His version, backed up by lots of unintended and subliminally subtle interpretations he'd received in response to hurried text messages he'd sent to either Atticus or Jennifer over the years, was that they both had immensely well-developed right-side supramarginal gyri, or the part of the cerebral cortex that dealt with empathy, understanding, and compassion. They were so attuned to changes in each other's voices and to the subtlest verbal cues that their conversation was simply on another, almost superhuman level, inaccessible to anyone else. They talked in empathy waves, and the words themselves that others could hear were almost irrelevant. Where the rest of us heard going round and round in circles, they identified issues of contention, not about the matter being discussed but about their relationship and intrapersonal power dynamic, and gently teased out various strands of it, dissected and analysed issues and their sore points, and gently massaged them to arrive at a perfectly negotiated settlements that were intricately balanced, didn't hurt anyone's feelings and left nobody thinking they had been bulldozed.
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It was kind of heart-warming. They could hear and speak love.
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The theory that they were whittling down guests because they didn't want to feed and provide pot to everyone all the time revealed more about the people who believed in the theory than about Jennifer & Atticus. An unmentionable fact that everyone was nonetheless aware of was that some guests were really selfish and kind of bad at disguising it in a way that embarrassed the people who saw through it, and had probably exaggerated or flat-out made up whatever conflict had brought them there that day. Saul's term for light chitchat at one of Jennifer & Atticus's parties was 'Touring the Abyss'. There were dear childhood pets that had died just when mothers had contracted cancer, who had then died, and passed on the cancer to the speaker in some vague magical holistic spiritual way of the universe (like, psychologically, maybe? Metaphorically?), and surgeries coming up (so, not just psychologically or metaphorically but really, like factual cancer?), and depression that was just about to flare up again, they could feel it, and descriptions of past 'shock', or electroconvulsive therapy rounds, and how 'shock' might be the only thing that helps this time, and descriptions of maxing out on Zoloft and Prozac, and visits to the elite McLean Psychiatric Hospital in Belmont, not far from where he lived actually, and bipolar disorders, and panic disorders, and dead brothers and sisters and abusive dads, sexually abusive dads, though never actually full-on penile-penetration-incestuous dads but more like touchy-feely, psycho-sexually abusive (whatever that meant) or otherwise creepy dads, sometimes uncles (never named) that they just couldn't face going to the police about, and secret adoptions that the speaker has never revealed to anyone or has just learned him- or herself. Sometimes they were frank admissions that the speaker 'just couldn't take being alone right now', usually after some alleged small familial disagreement over the phone, of which further details were not forthcoming and inquiries were interpreted as unempathetic, the answer to which inquiries was always vague and unsatisfying and really not worth the effort or social cost of seeming unempathetic, answers that more or less amounted to no reason in particular (do NOT point out this latter fact, Saul had learned early).
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        It turns out that John is a spirit healer and only drinks bottled water for reasons unclear and not followed-up on, though the 'mind-controlling effects' of chlorine were alluded to. Saul hadn't quite got to the butt end of this former fact (or, you know, description) yet, meaning the spirit healing bit, but he would as the evening's Empathy Contest wore on to its nth round. John also had elaborate calendars and numeric representations for the planets' movements, heavy-looking leather-bound suckers that he apparently either carried with him at all times or at the very least brought to strangers' birthday parties, because 'you can't do astrology if it's not scientific'.
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Jennifer & Atticus's parties were always sort of tense and hectic and wild but in a completely unconventional way. Everyone sat on the floor nicely, and ate nice food (eventually), and talked softly in a low voice. Nothing much actually happened. There was no loud shouting, no blasting music, no breaking of furniture. The discussion burbled on, and if you didn't actually listen to it or just waited for your turn to jab in a good amusing anecdote or other conventional party-stuff, you could leave the party not realising that you just went to the craziest party you've ever been to. The wildness of the party was intellectually abstract, and a lot of people couldn't adequately perceive abstraction.
    +
Someone picked at a guitar in a corner, having first tuned it for about an hour, and kept stopping to say 'it's still not right' before tuning it some more. Two or three people talked about literature while the other simultaneous conversations ranged from George Soros and spirit healing to native American treaties and, broadly, sort of, religion or maybe spirituality. It was difficult to tell one conversation from another, and the characters became so colourfully muddled that it was hard to keep track of anything. They may all have been the same conversation. It was really, really intense if you really listened to it.
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"Like, a lot of people don't know how formulaic the stories they follow are."
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"We're hardwired to follow narratives."
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"That's what Marx said!"
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"Yeah, like, everything has a spirit. The ancient Japanese religion already knew that before Christians came and took over. Finnish people too, they think everything has a spirit. It's even in their language."
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"I'd just want to read a story where the protagonist isn't a writer or something to do with writing, like a book seller or something."
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 "There is a lot of symbolism in the 'is equal to' symbol, if you think about it. Like two lines that are equal but don't cross? Did you know that's how native Americans did their treaty with the colonial government?"
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"Finland isn't real. Honestly. It's not a real place. It's made up by the Soviet Union and Japan. Haven't you ever wondered why there are so many weird cultural similarities between the Finnish and the Japanese?"
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"Yeah, the narratives we follow though are really strange. Like, whose actual life has a beginning, a middle and an end, and you go on an epic journey and meet people whose backstories are slowly revealed to you just before they die so that you'll care about their dying and are thereby manipulated to feel a strong emotion whose only purpose seems to be that you're sickly entertained, in the sense of stirred from your regular numb slumber, by that feeling?"
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"Did Marx say that?"
    +
"Are there?"
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"Like when Dumbledore died?"
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"If you repeat certain words enough, you find out all kinds of things. Words without meaning, like Om."
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"Even actions can have a spirit. And they can come to life. Like if you make an image of yourself, you'll be captured by the image and you have to become it yourself. The image is an onryo, a vengeful ghost."
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        "Like, read a random short story, and odds are 3-1 that someone in the story is a writer, or an MFA student, or an editor, or some other book business person before the first page is over."
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"Yeah, it's pretty stupid."
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"If it makes people happy, does it matter that it's machine-made and formulaic? Like, aren't stories just entertainment in a way. And the characters have to be characters that readers can identify with, it's nobody's fault that only writers read nowadays."
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"They wove it into fabric with some beads. It's called a Wampum belt, it has two equidistant lines that don't cross, symbolising the peaceful coexistence of the two Americas. A treaty doesn't need a single word. Words are imperialistic. We must reject the analytical tradition."
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"We don't have meaningless words in the west do we? Maybe that's why we're not enlightened."
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"Are people stupid, or are they just being convinced they are stupid?"
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 "I mean, how come people don't see that if you just change the name of the characters and their surroundings, the story still stays the same?"
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"Like Jesus and Luke Skywalker."
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"The message is in the casting."
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"Yeah exactly!"
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"We have loads of meaningless words. Like, 'like', and 'so', and 'anyway'. They just signal that the the speaker is moving on to the next thing."
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"I'm wearing one right now."
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"Marx is irrelevant. Marx is just vocabulary. Who is Marx?"
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"Guys, I think I want to make a speech."
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"Symbols are important. They hold a lot of information. Even real people can be symbols. Want to see a symbolic joke?"
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"Anyway, it's the context that counts. You have to read between the lines."
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"What if the formula gets kind of twisted? Like what if you mess with it? Does the narrative get messed up too?"
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"Jesus is an interesting one."
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"So, almost like Marx!"
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"Like Yurei. They can also be vengeful."
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"See a joke? Go on."
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"I don't think it's meant to be worn?"
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"Guys, guys, guys! I want to make a speech!"
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"A lot of ghosts just kind of are, they don't really do anything apart from just exist. They're not always malevolent."
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"Knock knock."
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"Who's there?"
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*holds up a card with this sign: ??*
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"The most difficult thing to handle, I think, is the thought that you are not the hero. You don't have a journey. You don't get an amulet that's going to help you later. You just are, and fart around, and some of what you do is funny or sad, and then you die."
    +
"Yeah, I mean I'm not sure who's behind it, but I'm pretty sure George Soros was part of it."
    +
"He's just a construct! He doesn't mean anything. Like Adam Smith. Adam Smith never said 'invisible hand'."
    +
"Aw geez. He's piece of work."
    +
"I'm telling you, someone is behind this. Someone is directing everyone. Even us."
    +
"I don't get it."
    +
"But is the story the same? Like if he context changes."
    +
"Didn't he? I think he said it. It's invisible, that's the thing."
    +
        "He's basically sun worship if you think about it. Son of god? Sun-God. Rises on the third day? Dots, connect, anyone?"
    +
"Okay he said it, but not the way that people mean it. Not like 'ooh, here's an all-powerful and infallible market that's going to correct everything', wrong! It was more like that British industry titans had such a strong nationalist streak that they won't let all the jobs go to India, as though by invisible hand. Free markets and nationalism are like yin and yang."
    +
"Like Isis and Horus."
    +
"What if there is no invisible hand at all? Isn't that even more terrible? Like, it's all just random flailing about. Nothing means anything, everything is random, any pattern we might detect is just the Ramsay theory."
    +
"I don't think that's right. I mean it's the structure of the story that counts, not the context. The structure is where the point of a story is."
    +
"Yeah, I see. So Jesus is like a metaphor? Like Marx?"
    +
"Why does it need a point? Can't it just be fun?"
    +
"I don't think that's what Adam Smith said. Isn't that just a globalist misreading of Adam Smith? That's the edition Soros edited himself."
    +
"The message is in the casting."
    +
"Allegedly."
    +
"What's the point of a pointless story?"
    +
"Is Marx a sun god? Is Adam Smith a sun god?"
    +
"Aren't you just being paranoid because it gives you a sense of agency or at least like you're on the inside of some great and ancient secret, that if other people were just intelligent enough to understand, like you are, then the world would be a better place? Isn't that just like imperialism with just one step removed? If everyone could be as wise and enlightened as you are and know what you know then everything would be better? All that's missing is you going out and forcing people to believe what you believe. Isn't that what paranoia is? Just you salvaging a bit of dignity or status for yourself when you realise the world is full of crooks feeding off each other, and you, and that your life has no meaning and you have no control over it and that eventually you will die and it won't mean a goddamn thing, so you retreat into your own head where you are still reigning supreme and cook up this fantasy that has you on the inside of intrigue and secrets so you don't have to face the fact that nothing matters."
    +
"What if it's just that the story, or the plot I mean, is just a conduit, like a way to get the story out, and the story is all in the context. Like the causality of one thing leading to another and it all coming to some kind of head in a way that is engaging and pulls you along, what if all of that is just to get you to read the real story behind the plot?"
    +
"No. I'm just being rational. I think we're being watched and influenced for nefarious and selfish ends because we are."
    +
            "I'M WARNING YOU!" an angry upstairs neighbour shouted from behind the front door. Someone opened it.
    +
 "Listen to me you hippie shits, I KNOW THERE WILL BE ALL KINDS OF SHENANIGANS AND I'M WARNING YOU!" he gargled while pointing a rhythmic finger at the young woman who had opened the door, who was neither Jennifer nor Atticus and whom Saul had never met before but who, based on this evening's story, was having trouble with her mother and who had made several quite obvious passes at Saul, the young woman that is, when he'd volunteered out of social embarrassment at the smoking area outside that he worked at Harvard. Jennifer hurried to the door, and another guest with hair that would make Prodigy's Keith attend boarding school swiftly directed the young woman, whose name later turned out to be Hannah or something, away as she clung to his shoulder and cried that the man at the door was just like her mother.
    +
        Saul was pretty sure there was objectively no reason why the neighbour would have been annoyed or disturbed. There was a party, but nobody spoke in anything louder than normal speaking voice. The only music was the perfectionist guitar tuning guy. Saul thought maybe the neighbour had somehow sensed from upstairs that the content of the discussion, if not the volume, was somehow disturbingly jumpy and ontologically unnerving.
    +
            "Why do you want to warn us?" Jennifer asked gently.
    +
            The neighbour had clearly run out of steam and couldn't think of what else to say – he was only there to say the one thing and then leave, having in his fantasies solved what needed to be solved, because these people needed to be told. But now he was trapped. He had come in with a strong opening and couldn't let it be when it didn't have the desired effect immediately.
    +
            "Uh... BECAUSE I'M ON TO YOU THAT'S WHY!"
    +
            "Well, you're welcome to join us if you like. We're just talking. I'm sorry if we were disturbing you."
    +
            The neighbour was really having to squint out any further lines in his head. He hadn't banked on the engagement becoming entrenched like this.
    +
            "Disturbing! Hah! I wouldn't give you the satisfaction."
    +
            "Well, I hope you feel better. Would you like to come inside?"
    +
            "INSIDE?!"
    +
            "Yes. We'll be cooking something later and you're welcome to stay."
    +
            "That's right!" Atticus shouted from the depths of the apartment. "We're cooking a raw food pad thai with cucumber noodles!"
    +
            "We're cooking a raw food pad thai with cucumber noodles. It's very nice."
    +
            "Or, I guess, making. You know, since it's raw food?" a voice offered tentatively.
    +
            "Don't be such an imperialist!" another hit back.
    +
"Ask him if he'd like some kombucha!" Atticus sounded from the depths.
    +
            "Guys! Come here for John's speech!"
    +
            "Would you like some kombucha? Its effects are really reconstructing."
    +
Saul was pretty sure someone had farted, but nobody seemed to acknowledge it.
    +
            The neighbour was so confused at the lack of pushback he actually joined the party for half an hour, had half a glass of kombucha and agreed it was quite nice until he was shown the mushroom culture in the jar from which the drink came, which got him to make his excuses and leave in a state of complex humiliation that was so total he couldn't even understand how it had happened. Something about sitting on the floor, and being made to drink the weird mouldy liquid must have been intentionally aimed at embarrassing him, were it not for the fact that everyone else was also doing these things. Also, he'd done it all voluntarily, and what he chose to do was always rational if you asked him, unless it was all some kind of psychological trick. He thought he had been prepared. He was visibly still angry the whole time, looking for someone to explode at, but nobody gave him anything except gentle and nurturing encouragement. John came to hug him as he left. The half-drunk glass of kombucha remained untouched on the floor for the duration of the party, like a ghost of the angry upstairs neighbour's presence.
    +
            Everyone had gathered around John, but were still burbling little conversations that were hard to tell apart. Then, without any coordination, they all quieted. John started his speech.
    +
                    "Dear fellow... Humans," John closed his eyes in a tight squeeze that frowned his eyebrows. "No." He bowed his head and brought his hand onto the base of his nose, like he suddenly had a migraine attack. He winced violently for about three seconds. Then he breathed in, lowered the hand to his chest with open palm and fingers pointing straight up  in a Bruce Lee-esque motion of concentrated centering and silently lipped the words heart chakra.  And then he started what was (apparently) singing, his eyes still closed, though now less tightly.
    +
            His voice was weak and Saul wasn't sure whether he just couldn't keep a tune, or whether this was the tune. The overly preachy lyrics, concerning mother earth's 'ascendence' (sic), are totally irreproducible in sensible print. It was clear the song had serious tautological and syntactic problems, and the message didn't really seem very coherent or well-established, and the whole thing was very difficult to follow because of the uneven but also oddly bland and unaccented tune that was somehow both cacophonic and monotonous.
    +
            When the song finished, the guy with hair that was like if Andy Warhol had taken Keith's place in the Prodigy, a guy who had literally not said a word all evening and had just sat there and let his hairstyle, like, sink in and dominate the room in its artistic presence, couldn't hold it in anymore and burst out into beeps and boops that eventually organised themselves into the original John Williams tune played in the Han Solo introduction bar scene in the first ever Star Wars.
    +
            Nobody mentioned either the speech or the act that followed it.
    +
            At that moment, someone jumped out of Jennifer & Atticus's bedroom and yelled 'SURPRISE!', turned his bare ass toward the room and slapped it twice before raising his pants.
    +
            "Jesus! How long have you been there?" Jennifer said, and briefly mentally enumerated all the things they had done with Atticus in the room in the last 24 hours.
    +
            "I snuck in through the window."
    +
            "And you've just been hiding there? Why?"
    +
The woman whose reason for coming had been unspecified maternal oppression turned to Saul.
    +
            "So, what do you do?" she asked.
    +
            "I work at the Strategic Surgical Derivatives Division of the University Wealth Fund."
    +
            "Oh interesting! What's that?"
    +
            "It's a long story."
    +
            "I have time! I just don't want to think about my mother right now, you know?"
    +
            Shit, Saul thought. The horrific downside of all this patent kindness and empathy and inclusivity that Saul was well aware he was feeding off, a downside with a vengeance like if Shakespeare was made into a Japanese horror movie, was that you couldn't get rid of people that you wanted to get rid of if they refused to take hints or had a different code of verbal subtleties. This is why, a couple of hours later, Saul would end up being 'spiritually healed' by John, the singing speech giver, who made short work of Saul's unwillingness to give flat out denials when offered a 'healing' and who had somehow worked out that Saul was 'tense'.
    +
            Saul was unsure how to explain what he did. The web of complex causes and effects that had led to it even being a job was kind of difficult to get a handle on.
    +
"Uh. Okay. Well, here's a little understood fact; it was the machine gun after all, the original WMD, that ended war. It just took a little over a hundred years."
    +
Saul stared into the middle distance, resigned to the fact that he might even have to sleep with this woman later if he wasn't real careful, and kept talking.
    +
        "The machine gun fully appeared in its current form on the battlefield in WWI. The point of it was to stop war, the paradoxical idea being that you wouldn't need a ton of soldiers on a battlefield firing single-shot rifles when a single multi-shot machine gun could do the same job. Of course, it didn't work out that way. Good idea in a way, but the consequential complexities hadn't been accounted for, basically because the person who invented it imagined that nothing else would change about warfare or society as a result of his invention, and that the enemy was incapable of innovating. Instead what happened was that the war became so nasty and so bogged down that it was literally intolerable. Lots of people wouldn't fight. Lots of people were dragged in front of firing squads. But lots of people also realised it wouldn't be like the last war, it wouldn't be over in 9 months tops, and there was no real objective with which to measure whether the war was any closer to finishing. For all they knew, it might last forever. So they wouldn't attack, and no amount of dragging privates in front of firing squads could make them do it."
    +
"Weren't we supposed to go buy some food?" Jennifer said.
    +
"Hang on, he might talk about the financial system," Atticus said.
    +
"Meanwhile the mass assaults and cavalry charges of the previous war, the running towards cannons that were now suddenly miles away but fired frighteningly accurately, the fucking hours spent training how to fix bayonets for close combat – all useless bullshit before the mighty Maxim. Going on the offensive was made absolutely intolerable. Mouths of barrels turned back towards their owners."
    +
"I don't see how this has anything to do with the financial system."
    +
"Just wait."
    +
"So you're a historian?" the woman who was Hannah or whatever asked.
    +
 "No, hang on. I told you it was a long story. So anyway, the engineers went to work putting some distance between the attackers and the machine guns. They built tanks. Biplanes. Long-range field artillery. Troop carriers. Battle tanks. Bombers. Fighters. Close Air Support. Anti-tank guns. AA-guns. Missiles. Nuclear missiles. Long-range nuclear missiles. Intercontinental nuclear missiles. Hydrogen bombs. Remote-controlled drones. Laser-guided precision bombs, fired out of 'Flying Fortress' B52s miles above the target. Satellite position tracking. All so you wouldn't have to get caught out before a machine gun with nothing more than a thick felt trench coat and some air between you and it. And when the H-Bomb and intercontinental missiles were found out for having, for the first time, real world-destroying capacities with obvious species-survival consequences, then came economic sanctions, economic restructurings, mass destruction derivatives and later strategic surgical derivatives. Use of actual force became more and more rare, and more and more privatised as the government had more effective and less costly tools at its disposal – though private investment could still stir up some major trouble in some third world country somewhere if there was a bubble in non-directed fire requisitioning speculation."
    +
"Wow, you were right. I think he got to the financial system."
    +
"So I work for the government-subsidised research programme for strategic surgical derivatives at Harvard University. We identify a threatening individual or community that is economically dependent on a given product or service subsector, swing the market against the sector in the area with heavy investment in wealth-reversing derivatives which we design to fit the needs of the economic area and their market niche, if the savages have one, to minimise the affected area as closely as possible to resemble the area in which the troublesome individual or community physically lives, and when it is sufficiently weakened we buy the whole area out, disperse the community by monopolising some essential service like housing, food or water, and watch as the will to rebel slowly dies down in favour of finding somewhere habitable to live or some water to wash the fly-infested eyes of your newborn. It's really quite a peaceful way to resolve major conflicts if you think about it. It's like there's a war, but nobody knows about it, not even the people fighting it. It can also turn quite a profit sometimes for the university wealth fund. I mostly get paid in intellectual capital, plus a scholarship."
    +
        "We should probably go to the shops now," Atticus said to everyone's enormous surprise and delight.
    +
***
    +
Saul woke up in his room. He was not too sweaty. The AC hadn't been on all night, but the window had been open. It was still dark.
    +
He got up and turned the lights on to find the glass water bottle. It was empty, he had drunk it all last night. When had he got back? It was like there had just been a crossfade and suddenly he was in his room in Belmont. He opened the door. The room spilled into the corridor and on to the blueish darkness, and radiated yellow into the little-used dining hall. He snuck out in his pyjamas and cold, sweat-dampened t-shirt towards the tap in the kitchen, trying to remember where the creaky bit in the dining room floor was. It creaked under his foot just then. He lived in the same flat as his landlady, but she never was almost comically hard of hearing.
    +
He listened in the dark as the tone of escaping air ascended up the bottle, and closed the tap when he thought it wouldn't go any higher without spilling over.
    +
The coffee maker in his room hissed, bubbled and steamed pleasantly, the door to the corridor now closed and all the light contained. There was a faintly mouldy smell in the air, but a dry, dead mould. It could be the lead paint. He wondered if the constant heat made it powder and flake into the air where it would all end up in his lungs and circulation. Maybe that's why he couldn't think to just fall the fuck in line and get a real job like everyone else, selling third world bombing derivatives. Maybe he was poisoned in some way.
    +
It would soon get warm, it was time to get going. It would take him 45 minutes to walk to Cambridge with his heavy briefcase, and if the heat would come down before he had a chance to sit down in the café with AC he'd be all clammy and sticky all day.
    +
He had a shower, packed his bag, and was on the way on the concrete.
    +
He trudged along the narrow footpath by Mt Auburn, past the lushly grassy cemetery where the sprinklers were already rising to the challenge, the cars starting to pack along it towards Boston. Sleek, black cars, sports cars, shitty old Priuses. Here he always saw the Belmont Oracle, a guy who looked like a 1980s Super Mario, carrying a different huge placard every day with a predictably crazy text, walking towards where the cars were coming from. He always ended up at Harvard Square as well, so he must walk all the way out of Boston every morning and then take a bus to Harvard Square where he tried to challenge passing students. This morning was no disappointment – the card read: ARE YOU READY FOR POISON SNOW? THE GOVERNMENT IS HAPPY TO OBLIGE! The bus he could have taken was slowly racing him towards Harvard Square, him catching up to it and overtaking until there was another ebb in traffic.
    +
When he took the turn to Brattle St he could hear the electrified demon locust sound of the cicadas. The noise went up and became overbearing, like standing next to an enormous transformer pumping juice to the financial district, and then it died and closed with an unnatural buzz like a primitively mechanised automatic door from a hundred years ago. He walked past the hospital, past the playing field and the non-drawn fire requisitioning booths where lines had already started to form. A heavily armed security guard or private policeman walked past in all black, with reflective and insectoid shades on, with a little wireless transmitter stick growing from his ear like a little plastic tree. Some serious firepower was starting to flow out and gather from the Trekky gliding doors of the hospital – it was probably cooler there. Jesus, what a job, he thought. He rather hoped there was a water fountain nearby or these guys might go into dehydration shock, go mad and start spraying into the queue with their large automatic weapons that had clearly been designed for maximum visual meanness.
    +
A lot of private equity would gather in the queue in the next hour, an easy hit for the types at Commonwealth Avenue where the fire requisitioning booths had been previously, but by the time they footed their way through the concrete desert and across the river they'd be docile and exhausted by the heat. The guns probably didn't even have much ammo, or it was too expensive to waste on the Comm Ave crazies.
    +
        He wondered if the people who were so eager to drop their cash off at the bombing market even knew or cared whether or where the bombs would eventually drop. Maybe they were as terrified as the rest that they would start dropping in their neighbourhood, but thought it an inevitable development so might as well make some money riding the market wave upward and taking their investments out at the right time. The horror stories of burst fire requisitioning bubbles that left millions dead from his childhood hung in the air but without sufficient detail to be dignifiedly called 'memory'. The BBs were starting to show with their eponymous blue blazers, each slightly off-fitting on the wearer but always in some bizarrely individualistic way, like they were off-the-rack blazers but each off a different hand-crafted rack.
    +
He'd resisted the slap-in-the-face-obvious incentives for joining the BBs after he finished his undergrad. He had always been uncomfortable in any space where everyone is wearing the same piece of distinctive clothing. The ones coming to man the booths were young, early twenties, probably just out of undergrad, probably just like he would have been. He wondered how much money they made on commission, or if they had the same sort of deal he had with the University Wealth Fund.
    +
He carried on walking. The markets would open soon and he didn't want to be here to see it. The first BBs were already filling in the first few note slips for the first few private investors they would grace with a sale once the bell rang. Behind them were a couple of trainees with serving trolleys that moved awkwardly on what had once been grass, the trolleys full of pre-filled forms. Their job was periodically to gather the sale forms from the traders, put the sale contract onto actual paper, call in the sales to the head office, check for any irregularities in them and send them off to the counter-signatories. There were horror stories of trainees forgetting to check the collateral (usually the 'client's' house), and having to bear the loss themselves when the deal turned sour. As it is this collateral that keeps the whole deal out of the courts (and thereby, the legal systems) of any country, this could have gone really terribly wrong for everyone.
    +
Washington's HQ. Cicadas, impossible to ignore now, screaming their horrifying Tesla-coil dive bomb sound. Sweat was starting to funnel down between his shoulder blades, dampening the back of his shirt. His forearm under his jacket was clammy and hot. He switched the jacket over to the other arm. He wondered if the Blue Blazers had it any better. They certainly seemed to be covered in fiery poon by the looks of their Instagram accounts.
    +
"Hey, hey!" one of the BBs shouted. "Saul!"
    +
He turned.
    +
"Yes?" he said, looking around for the source of the voice. The BBs all approximated the same outfit so well that it was difficult to tell them apart, somehow more difficult than if they had all been literally identical. He had been to a few of their parties and still knew people from his undergraduate days who were working for them now, and even when they took the blazers off they all had the same clothes underneath – white or light blue shirt, blond chinos, brown deck shoes. When a critical mass of them was reached the image went from funny to creepy. How did they know to dress this way? Nobody told them to. It was like coming across a battalion of soldiers in full dress uniform, but discovering that they had simply decided, on their own and without coordinating with each other, to dress like this for no real reason except that they genuinely thought it looked good on them.
    +
"Over here!" a BB had his hand up.
    +
"Yeah?"
    +
"It's me! Wyatt!"
    +
Saul recognised him now. He was much more polished than he had been in college.
    +
"Oh, hi Wyatt," he said and after a brief internal battle with no  victory possible walked over to him.
    +
        There was a woman hovering about on her phone, waiting for the trading to start.
    +
"How do you like this, man!" Wyatt said. Saul looked around but didn't see anything of note.
    +
"...I'm glad you're up, or at least awake. I left a bit earlier. Are you feeling better today?" the woman said to whoever was on the other end.
    +
"Like what?"
    +
"The radio. Look!" Wyatt held up the radio phone. "This is my trade floor now!"
    +
"I'm sure you'll feel better soon. Don't worry about anything, just concentrate on getting better," the woman said. She was in her early thirties, and had a thin, sad voice that didn't carry well.
    +
Saul looked Wyatt over again. There was a pin on the lapel of his blue blazer that had the letters VIP on it.
    +
"Wow Wyatt, that's great."
    +
"Yeah, that's after I said we should change the location of the booths from Commonwealth Avenue to here. Historical significance, see? Great PR. Real reason is it's much safer because all the rich people can drive but the hoodlums are going to have to walk over the bridge in this heat, but we obviously can't just say that."
    +
"Yeah I know honey. It's hard, but we're all here for you."
    +
"Clever."
    +
"Yeah man. Like, let mother nature take care of it. So they gave me the floor."
    +
"And a radio," Saul said.
    +
"Listen, I talked to this guy who said he can get our deposit back... Yeah. It's all going to be alright, I promise.'
    +
"Yeah it's pretty cool. So I'm now VIP level Blue Blazer. Loving it. Drowning in pussy from the first year JailBates."
    +
"Charming."
    +
"Don't worry... No he's very nice. He said he'd help us. He's been really helpful."
    +
"I know. It's great," Wyatt said. In college he had been the Central States conman type, he came in all selling vitamins and essential oils with some bullshit story of how it had cured his irritable bowel syndrome or some mild case of the nerves or some shit, that supposedly doctors had told him only left him with two years of unencumbered life left but here he was, running his own business, a God's honest miracle! Saul had never seen him sell a single vile of essential oils to anyone, and rather suspected the real end purchaser of all the essential oils et al had been Wyatt himself and the real business owner was the guy who had sold them to him. He had clearly decided not to go back to the USCS and stay in Coastal Union for bigger cons. "What are you up to now, Saul? Haven't seen you in years."
    +
"Don't worry about anything. It's all going to be alright. We can get our deposit back. I mean we obviously have to pay him for all the stuff he's done, like I don't know, two hundred? But don't worry, I'll take care of it I promise. It's all going to be alright." The woman's slight voice trembled a bit.
    +
"Oh not much. Still at Harvard. I work for their endowment fund now."
    +
"Oh wow, that's a pretty big job. You're one of the investment interns now then?"
    +
"Yeah," he said. He knew they both knew the position was unpaid.
    +
"Amazing intellectual capital gains," Wyatt said. Saul wondered if the concept really was all as sound as it had seemed to him when he signed on, now that Wyatt seemed to have a working grasp of it.
    +
"I best be going now, before it gets too hot," Saul said.
    +
"Yeah, at least you get to work indoors with AC!"
    +
"See you around, let's grab a coffee sometime," Saul said, which he thought they both knew was code for never wanting to see each other again.
    +
"Sure!"
    +
So it was here that Wyatt had ended up – on the second lowest rung of a very large pyramid. He wondered if people like Wyatt knew about the Blue Blazers any more than he did. Maybe it would have been worth it to join? Couldn't do it now, he'd end up working for Wyatt and having to admit his bet to pursue the wealth fund internship, a choice with a years' long opportunity cost, had not been the right one. He could maybe do it if Wyatt wasn't there, but he fucking was, so that was that. Saul walked the rest of the way to Harvard Yard just as the heat had started to really press down. The cicadas screamed their electrified firesound like a malfunctioning electric chair, but as horrific and unnatural as it sounded, somehow, nothing in their scream suggested they were about to die.
    +
The noise of the cicadas died down around the Harvard Square T station. The front of his shirt was starting to show little droplets of sweat, that would soon merge and make his shirt transparent if he didn't get inside quickly. A fat woman with bad teeth sat on the pavement outside the broken escalators leading to the red-tiled T station, with a big cardboard sign that explained in elaborately uneven lettering that she and her girlfriend had been KICKED OUT by her landlord because of LGBT DISCRIMINATION!! Please HELP!, with an old patriots XLIX superbowl cap on the ground with a few dollars in it. She was haggard and possibly disabled in some way. She held her eyes closed and sang challenging showtunes in a tone of someone who had heard of singing but didn't know its point was to vary the tone. It was sad in the way that would make you do anything to get away from, just so you don't have to think about the respective narrative arcs that had led both her and Saul onto the same square from such different vantage points. As Saul passed her, she was being interrupted by an African preacher who also frequented the spot for donations or ecumenical mission or whatever it is that African preachers might want from passing Harvard students. The preacher had read the sign, and was telling the fat woman in a thick east African accent that lesbianity was a sin, and that God was punishing her.
    +
"You can't talk to me like that," the woman said in a cautious tone. She must clearly have been unaccustomed to even verbal conflict before moving to the Harvard Square T Station with her girlfriend, where life was a nightly hustle and sometimes physical combat for food, water and warmth.
    +
"You are a sinner!" the preacher said relentlessly. He was much louder than she was.
    +
"This is America!" she said, as the final sad appeal of a person without means to defend herself. Saul hurried away, through Harvard yard and onto Law School turf, and into his shared office the Law School had rented to the University Wealth Fund, where none of his fellow interns ever talked to him or to each other.
    +
He opened his computer. There was a message there for him that would very soon get him into serious trouble.
    +
"I know who you are, though you might not. I have a dangerous trip for you. I am not sure you should undertake it, but I know I should inform you that it's there. It could very well kill you, or it could be the answer to all your prayers."
    +
                            The Nuthouse Interviews
                                by JosephHAlexander
                            They walked along the corridor, incredulous of their luck in that they had even been allowed in, not to mention that you apparently could just go and talk to one of the residents, just like that, with no ID, on the flimsiest cover story, like, only one or two steps above 'we're doing a school project on crazy people'.
    +
                    They'd walked in through an unlocked door, found nobody at reception, walked around the desk and used the phone to make sure this was actually the right place. When they picked up the receiver, the call went to some kind of operator, whom they gave the - apparently - way too well-thought out cover story and who redirected them towards the Assistant Warden.
    +
                                They walked past offices in the well-lit and airy sanatorium. Windows were all large and showed calming views of trees. The sanatorium business, down on its luck for so long that many of the original buildings had been converted into flats, had seen a recent boom when the prescription mood-management business house of cards had come tumbling down, crashing bricks first on the very patients who had taken the mood managers and who then had to be sectioned – the problem being that the managed mood business had obvious incentives to medicate away even slight discomforts as rose-garden-rainish as teenage heartbreak or gentle unease at the thought of an approaching visit from one's extremist 'fiscally conservative' in-laws, which discomforts consumers had been all too happy to be rid of without any concern for the medications' side effects, and the effects had necessitated further prescriptions of mental sharpeners to manage, and those prescriptions' had in turn meant that sleeping pills were needed, and those then led to morning uppers and so on in a chain of further and further prescriptions with a devilish Red Queen effect that, once the pill dispensers had got so byzantine that members of the public needed degree-level knowledge of pharmacology to manage their drum-tight medication schedules amidst the chaotic unpredictability of every-day life and started missing pills with obvious knock on effects, led to the so-called patients' internal neuro-chemical makeups falling apart into states that were intense and fearful and extremely difficult to make heads or tails of given the limited knowledge of the brain's structure that doctors continue to have. So, suddenly, because of the upper-echelon clientele of the mood management business that now formed the clientele of the sanatorium business, the bad ring that the word 'sanatorium' had had since the 1960s started to sound sort of glamorous (this was not the case though with the word 'asylum'), and many were re-re-purposed, expensively refitted and boldly redecorated for the most tasteful and discerning mental patients.
    +
                    A door to one of the offices was open, and inside a man was turning a few screws on a contraption that looked like a modified xylophone where instead of blocks of different lengths, there were little boxes with holes in them, taken from an old Whack-A-Mole game. Some of the holes had cats peeking out. The man hummed to himself, and occasionally pressed a key, a cat meowed to the man's displeasure, and he kept working.
    +
                                "What is that?"
    +
                                "Oh, hello there! Do you work here?"
    +
                    "What? No."
    +
                    "Visitors!"
    +
                                "Yes, what is it that you're doing?"
    +
                                "Oh, it's just a project I'm working on. A cat piano."
    +
                                They looked at each other, and back at the man.
    +
                                "You see, cats have their own frequencies, and if you arrange them in order and get them to meow on command, you can play songs. I've trained them to meow when they are hit, or touched, really, with a small cloth hammer inside the boxes that moves when I press these keys. Like so:"
    +
                                A different cat meowed.
    +
                                "No no no. Egbert. Innsbruck. Mao. You're all wrong," the man said to his cats. "Would you like to stay and hear me play happy birthday?"
    +
                    "Uh, no thanks. Are you sure it doesn't hurt the cats?"
    +
            "Oh positive. They're piano hammers. Nothing dangerous about those. Very light touch."
    +
            The man took an egg from his pocket.
    +
            "Would you like a boiled egg? I took it for lunch but I don't think I'm hungry."
    +
            "No thanks. Could you direct us to the deputy warden?"
    +
            "Assistant warden," the man said. "He's down the hall to your right. There's a sign on his door."
    +
            "Thank you. And who are you?"
    +
            "I am the assistant warden's assistant."
    +
            They found the assistant warden who greeted them like a long-lost relative.
    +
            "And are you long-lost relatives?"
    +
            "Uh... No. We're here to... do a story on one of your residents."
    +
            "Oh very good. We like stories. We do an excellent job here you know. No torture or anything, hehe! No mad scientist experiments on the crazies! Hehehee!"
    +
            "That's good."
    +
            "Yes! We run a clean operation here, through and through. No selling of crazy plasma, no feeling up the crazies, all very above board. We're very proud of our record."
    +
            "Oh, yes, uh, that's why we're here to do the story."
    +
            "Can I see your patient request form?"
    +
            "Here you go."
    +
            They handed him the forged form, hoping that they didn't do security stuff like change the colours each day or something, and that the old real form they had managed to get a hold of would not turn out to be out of use.
    +
"Oh this guy is bat-ty. Like absolutely bedshittingly mad. Totally bonkingly cray cray. He's quite entertaining though, the staff around here think quite highly of him. One of those crazies that kinda makes sense, you know? Of course, terrible what they did to him, no doubt about that. No sir-ree."
    +
"Isn't that a little offensive?"
    +
"What?"
    +
"Calling your residents crazy and so on?"
    +
"Oh no. Not at all. They know it themselves. The warden calls them that all the time, I mean I'm assistant warden, and I call them that, so it's fine. Let's call an orderly to take us to the guy. We can talk on the way. Man is he bats!"
    +
The corridor was a light green, the colour of spring if that spring was also puke. They came to a door, and the medical orderly directed them in. They muttered under their breaths:
    +
"Are you sure this is the guy?"
    +
"Pretty sure. We'll have to see."
    +
"What if we just spend our precious time talking to some loonie? I mean we did a bunch of shit to get the Order pissed off. If they're following us, we don't have time to waste."
    +
"That's a risk we'll have to take."
    +
"What!" the orderly said. "I can't hear you if you mutter like that!"
    +
"Oh, nothing, just, uh, nice to meet you."
    +
"Oh! We can give him some serum if you'd like?!" the orderly suggested at a volume that was completely out of place in the otherwise quiet sanatorium. "Though he's not exactly tongue-tied at the best of times, this one!"
    +
        "Not necessary."
    +
"I'll say!" said the assistant warden. "Now, don't be taken in by all what he says. He talks like an encyclopedia. Nobody knows how he does it. I mean it's all totally off-the-wall mad of course, but he's quite fun to listen to." The assistant warden lowered his head and looked at them from under his brow as if about to say something that was secret. They both lowered theirs.
    +
"Sometimes," he continued, "Sometimes, when you're a bit bored at the end of the day, we use him sort of like a juke box. You just tell him a topic and he starts blabbering away. It really speeds up the hours I'll tell you."
    +
"What?!" The orderly said loudly.
    +
"So what's wrong with him, exactly?"
    +
"Well, we're not quite sure. Like psychology-wise. I mean we know that he was tortured, and that it was, like, a lot, a lot of torture, you'll probably see the scars. Probably also some kind of attempted lobotomy, maybe. Hard to say. For one thing, he seems to have had some kind of extremely traumatic event, like, way before any of that happened, something he saw or did or something."
    +
"How do you know that?"
    +
"What?"
    +
"How do you know he had a traumatic event before the torture? You said you don't really know anything about his past, except that he was tortured at some point before coming here."
    +
"Oh! That's pretty easy. So, there's pretty solid neuro-psychological research that links the area of the brain that deals with your sense of direction and time to how well or easily you recover from trauma. Like, psychological trauma. You know the phrase, leaving something behind? As in if you, for example, are abused by someone when you are young, and you are powerless to stop it and you realise you are powerless, it leaves a psychological trauma of powerlessness that one is often encouraged to quote, leave behind? So, it turns out that the phrase is probably not an accident, in that people who are quote well-adjusted despite having had traumatic events in their life also have a highly-developed sense of direction, so they know which way they came and which way they are going to, and they can sort of conceptualise their life's dramatic arc in the same way, that some stuff happened in Act 1 but now we are in Act 3 and the stuff in Act 1 is, quote unquote, behind them. See? Do you know the phrase? I've heard it many times myself, in this business. Loved ones and such. So anyway, some further research into the field has shown that there are such highly traumatic events that they completely fry the circuit board, so to speak, where this quote unquote leaving something behind you happens in your brain. So you, as in the patient, don't know what is where, you don't know what is in the past and what is in the present and your life doesn't feel like a one-directional vector anymore, so it's not an arc but a spiral, or something. You get confused. Things aren't linear for you anymore. Even your sense of time becomes all muddled. The world doesn't so much seem like a straight plot that moves forward as one thing causes another, but fragmented and full of characters that you can't easily see the relations of and lots and lots of detail and background, that last part is because when you don't perceive a life's arc, you also don't know which bits of your everyday experience are worth noting, part of the plot as it were, so you try to note everything, or your brain does, rather. So anyway, we actually know the part of the brain that this is, the entorhinal cortex, and we can see if it is damaged, and whether it was damaged because of something external or whether it fried itself in an effort to save your consciousness from having to comprehend and deal with something so traumatic that it either kills you or scrambles your sense of time and direction forever. And this guy has an entorhinal cortex that could be served as part of an English breakfast, and it appears to have happened years ago, way before he was tortured. Though obviously it may have contributed to his current problem, in that when he was being tortured he may not have had the entorhinal juice left to realise that the torture would ever end, or that he ever had any life other than the torture. We're not sure how bad the torture was or whether it had any quote unquote point to it, but we can tell by the scarring that it must have been pretty bad."
    +
        "Could we talk to him?"
    +
"Sure! We do all the time," he said and turned to the orderly. "Don't we!?"
    +
"What?! I can't hear you!"
    +
"Oh never mind."
    +
"WHAT?!"
    +
"I SAID... NICE WEATHER TODAY!"
    +
"YES!"
    +
"Is it okay if we record what he says?" they asked the assistant warden.
    +
"WERE YOU GUYS TALKING ABOUT ME?!"
    +
"Sure!" the man said. "But it won't make any sense, no sir-ree!"
    +
    +
***
    +
Couple of controls first.
    +
Do you know how you got here?
    +
            No. Well, I think I do.
    +
How?
    +
            I was brought. I don't remember from where.
    +
Do you know why you were brought here?
    +
            You guys think I'm crazy. I don't remember why, specifically, you think that. Or whoever brought me here thought that.
    +
Are you?
    +
I don't think so.
    +
See, this is where we get stuck. If you'd only realise that you're bats, we could maybe move on, therapy-wise, but with you it's just one crazy conspiracy after another. Anyway, he's all yours. Ask him about anything. Like, ask him about the Blue Blazer Organisation. There's a laugh.
    +
Yeah, go on. It'll be a good test. Like if this guy really is the guy.
    +
Do you mind if we play Sudoku while you talk with him? We've heard this one.
    +
Ok, could you tell us about the Blue Blazers? Like, where do they come from, who are they, and so on? Yeah so, that's my question, go.
    +
Sure. The Blue Blazers are a new, street-visible sign of a ground-breaking economic theory, Blue Blazer Economics. The idea had initially been developed in the United Kingdom in the immediate aftermath of the Great Blunder when everything was really very chaotic there and adopted when the next suitable disaster came that called for bold societal changes. It was basically a method of ensuring the right people are in charge, which necessitated a lot of national mood control after the Great Blunder when traditional methods had run out of steam.
    +
So, in the United Kingdom they had had a lot of practice in national mood control, all the way from the seminal foundation of the Department of Information in 1917 following the immensely successful propaganda effort that got young people, the same young people who had voted with their feet even at the Oxford Union to never go to war only a few years earlier, to go to war for no apparent reason. So the Brits had got very good at it and it's no accident the Order started there. Blue Blazer Economics is obviously a lot more recent. Its roots go all the way to a time before the invention of quantum computers, when the political climate in the now-former-former world super power was extremely hostile to any kind of firesale of the nation's assets. The problem was, the prevailing political theory at the time damn near demanded that exactly such a firesale be effected and effected quickly, for rapid GDP growth and just smack-out-the-cricket-field-and-throw-the-bat-after political gains. So this gave rise to a tricky public relations conundrum: how to get the nation to back proposals they did not want to back and that were sometimes harmful to them? It eventually turned out that all you needed to do was to do your utmost to get people to wear a certain piece of distinctive clothing with certain political connotations, and their sunk cost fallacy/cognitive dissonance/psychological commitment circuits would do the rest.
    +
        But let's backtrack. Initially the problem was so Gordian in all its messy complexity that entire professions were devoted to solving it, resulting in a whole new social class referred to in in common usage British English, as 'middle class', which denotation was itself a sort of PR triumph given that these people are not in the middle of any distribution and comprise a relatively small fraction of the population – it should really be called something more like 'the people earning the arithmetic mean or above', which was three to five times the number for median earnings. Like, we're talking the wealthiest 25 percent of the population at most. They were affectionately referred to as 'the Beef', as in 'bring home the Beef', by the leaders of the parent movement under which the Blue Blazers operated, on which more later. This group, and their innate dress sense, would form the aspirational backbone for the whole blue blazer movement, and so in an ironic twist actually provided the solution, as a social science phenomenon if not on an individual level, to the problem.
    +
Anyway, so there was a need to control the public discussion in ways that weren't obvious, and, in a fit of genius, one of the solutions of swaying public opinion on putting vital national functions like infrastructure, justice system and prisons in private hands had been to shift and limit the public discussion to certain parts of the national heritage and haul ass to work on the rest while everyone was busy debating. The most effective of these was the discussion shift to the British health care system, then known as the National Health Service. The genius of this was that discussion of 'protecting the NHS' versus 'privatising the NHS' was completely irrelevant, as the NHS already operated as a series of semi-independent trust structures, much in the way of English education establishments from the famous six so-called 'public schools' (all private) all the way up to the famous colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, technically organised as Charitable Trusts. What this meant was that although the medical service was 'free' to the consumer (i.e., entirely paid for by the general body of taxpayers), it was nonetheless essentially run by wealthy individuals using the trust money (which the government paid them) to pay themselves salaries so there wasn't much to privatise anyway, and when the newly-formed consultant caste was parachuted in to siphon off significant parts of an individual trust's budget into private hands, and on their recommendations private management companies with private shareholders were founded to actually run the trusts, not a lot of money ended up funding the care and most of the money rain ended up pooling in stockholder hands. All the while the public perception was firmly that the NHS was not private, and should not be private, and lots of public debate was had about this while the political class went about privatising other stuff.
    +
So wealth began to flow away from what would anywhere else be called the working and middle classes and accumulate on the wealthiest 25 percent with an exponential curve towards the top end, which was later during the introduction of the 'aspirational caste system' dubbed 'the director caste'. But the solution didn't last forever. Eventually the profit-making opportunities inherent in national assets started to dry out, which meant that more drastic measures needed to be taken to cook the national growth numbers – and since the internal economic activity started to grind to a halt, more money had to flow into the economy from outside sources. To attract 'investment', the governments of the day had firmly committed to the policy now known as 'Singaporefication', that is, to make London a kind of private equity paradise under its own management and have the rest of England provide it with a cheap labour force who didn't have a say in how London managed its affairs. This was mostly done through redrawing voting boundaries, making London politically autonomous and effecting policies that led to rising house prices within London, which meant that the labour force couldn't afford to live (and vote) in the area where they worked and thereby had an interest in policy outcomes (and, as a bonus, also meant the house price growth could be marked as additional value in the economy which then showed up as GDP growth). But the battle was very much an uphill one, and this policy even sparked the brief but, to some of the upper echelons, psychologically taxing Great Unruly Riot in which several of the highest ranking financial institutions lost their CEOs as they were making their way home to their Chelsea, Holland Park and Mayfair houses and apartments. This, unlike the 2011 riot, could not be contained in the poorer regions of East and South London but actually made its way to the City and the West, a development which finally and conclusively convinced the education minister at the time that the lower classes simply could not be educated out of their ignorance of central principles of capitalist freedom, but would in fact use their new-found confidence to engage in a more effective class guerrilla warfare and therefore could not be trusted with what became to be thought of as the Sacred Teachings of Freedom Man, lest they be misunderstood and mangled to suggest there was anything wrong with said teachings. Incidentally, some years after the Great Blunder, seeing opportunity in the crisis that followed, a new clergy was instituted to safeguard and engage in theological study of the Freedom Man's Teachings that obviously could not be trusted to the general public's unwashed hands, a clergy known as the Sacred and Holy Association for Freedom, Trade and Enterprise and Precise Use of Grammar, or SHAFTEPUG, the mother organisation of the Blue Blazer movement (frequently referred to as the more dignified 'Holy Order').
    +
        So, we had a situation where 25 percent of the population was siphoning off the assets of the other 75 percent, doing inconsequential jobs like 'consulting' or 'managing' entities where public money had accumulated. The actual work that was done in these jobs was mostly of no interest to anyone, and the positions only existed so that the kids from rich families who filled them could be hired to make £100,000-a-pop-posters to their local hospital. Some of these jobs, more directly related to PR, did useful work in that their output pulled the wool over the 75 percent's eyes by creating misconceived public debates like 'public vs private funding of the NHS'.
    +
It turned out, after extensive social science research, that the population had developed very complicated and sort of paradoxical attitudes to money and class as a side effect of these fairly innocuous wealth transfer and GDP growth policies. These attitudes later led to the aspirational caste system's adoption, which system's main innovation was that people would be born into one cast and likely remain there, but always, as a sort of guilty dark fantasy, aspired to be in another. The 75 percent, while professing a deep-seated loathing for the people that had enriched themselves with their tax money and through the credit they had leveraged, actually looked up to the 25 percent and wanted to belong to that class and often voted for policies that benefited not them but the Beef. At the same time, it also turned out that you didn't actually have to be among the wealthiest quarter of the population to think that you were – all you needed was a symbol that clothed you in the image of that quarter. As the final revelation, it also turned out that as long as you were, or thought you were, in the top 25 percent, it didn't matter how poor or rich you were objectively – all that mattered was relative wealth, which in turn meant that with the right symbolism you could carve out an exponentially wealthier subset of the 25 percent and leave the accrued gains in GDP growth and political control intact. The quest to find the right symbol began, and all that was needed for implementation was some kind of shock that would allow for sweeping changes to be made.
    +
The disaster itself that sparked the foundation of Blue Blazer economics and which gave rise to the fundamental shift in the British social order, or at least its real causes, have still not been satisfactorily explained and access to some of the primary source materials is limited by the SHAFTEPUG. It is unlikely, however, that they know much beyond what is explained here, apart from a few obscure references to mystical 'Freedom Particles', probably modelled on the Midichlorians of the Star Wars franchise, which for a brief moment began to be thought of as real things due to the immense commercial success of the Star Wars movies – in accordance with SHAFTEPUG's economic-Darwinist theory of validity that anything that is commercially successful must reflect a deep feeling that the collective consciousness has, not just as stories and allegory but in actual metaphorical truth content. In simpler terms, if enough people like it enough to spend money on it, it must be true. If it was demonstrably not factually true, then the definition of truth would have to shift to a higher plane, sometimes called 'profoundly true', 'true in a higher sense' or 'metaphorically true'.
    +
The disaster, which became known as the Leftward Electron Shift, LES for short soundbitish reference, really started all the way back in the early 1980s when commercial personal computers started to gain public interest. With the rapid shift of consumer dollars to personal computers, private companies started channelling immense wealth to research and development of computer technology, resulting in faster and faster processors in smaller and smaller spaces, starting from the humble transistor and moving into semiconductor circuits in smaller and smaller sizes, providing more and more computing power per square inch and faster and faster computers for consumer use. The rate at which computing power grew, approximately doubling every two years, was called Moore's Law, though it was really more like an empirical prediction made in 1965 by one G E Moore. But the name stuck, and had its effects.
    +
                    The process was led by mostly computer illiterate company directors who had heard the term 'Moore's Law', and who kept the money taps pouring into the R&D departments of their respective companies and pushed the engineers harder and harder until the circuits were tickling the elusive 5 nanometre limit in the early 21stcentury, only marginally smaller in size than the 7nm node but a giant leap in terms of our understanding of the physical fabric of our existence. Transistors smaller than 7nm are so small that they start to be affected by quantum mechanics rather than your conventional every day Newtonian stuff where one ball hits another and momentum is conserved and stuff only ever exists in one place at any given time. By contrast, in quantum mechanics an electron can be in two places at one time (this is because an electron is a particle small enough that its second, non-particle wave form is detectable and interference patterns on a wave can be detected in two places), until its position is checked by an observer (which checking basically introduced interference with the existing electron wave and made it materialise in certain locations and dematerialise in others), when it effectively retrospectively erases all its traces of existence from the other place where it really, really was also. In other words, the observer appears to change the position of the electron simply by checking where it is, and so to be on the safe side you couldn't in fact check where an electron was for fear of changing its position in the process. Basically, modern physics just hadn't developed far enough to be able to deal with what happened in the quantum level, especially in a way that could be used in computer technology, and verifiable experimental evidence was extremely difficult to obtain without looking. Some 'alternative physicists' tried to develop divination techniques which did not involve any actual data transfer from the quantum set, but still managed to convey the relevant information of how the electrons were behaving within the transistor. The experimental funding was not renewed after it was found that a group of physicists were using chicken entrails and movements of the stars as their data sets, and were less than 50% correct on yes/no formulations (though they argued that this was because someone had checked the actual state of affairs, which of course would affect the reality of said state). A certain section of the scientific community, that would later become the first anointed clergy of the Sacred and Holy Association for Freedom, Trade and Enterprise and Precise Use of Grammar, even stopped looking at the number sheets after they had written their work on them blindfolded for fear that the numbers might change if they are seen, but of course verification of this was difficult to obtain as to compare the numbers to the actual positions of the quantum particles was to look, check and plot on number sheets, thus starting the whole process of not looking all over again. In the SHAFTEPUG archives there is a whole year's worth of paper from those early zealot days, that has never been checked. It has become something of a holy book of the order, but of course the verisimilitude of what the Holy Order says is in those books cannot really be assessed without seeing what is in it, and nobody is allowed to look.
    +
Anyway, when the post-5nm node was finally produced, it was humorously named the 'Little Black Box' or LBB, as nobody actually knew what would happen inside the circuit and there was no way to check without changing what happened. In computational mathematics, this would be called a 'Lambda function', or a function that does stuff to an input to create an output, but there is no internal state to look into, just an input and an output and an anonymous function. Now, normally it would be pretty easy to work out what the internal state would be in a black box, just by comparing the input and output, so say into the black box goes x, out of the black box comes x+1, the Lambda function (written down formally as [lambda]x.x+1) pretty clearly just adds an integer to the input. But with the LBB nodes, the stuff that came out was such Heisenbergian wave-particle mindfuckery that if you tried to reduce it to ones and zeros it seemed to be logically inconsistent, say out comes both x and x+1 at the same time, and the internal workings of the Lambda function could neither be deduced from the output, nor actually checked because the checking messed up the data or reduced a wave-particle either to an artificial location with extremely uncertain velocity or an artificial wave with an extremely uncertain location. This created certain problems, as there was no sure way to tell what was going to happen to an input signal once it was run through an LBB node. This became humorously known as the Ultimate Lambda, or sometimes the Ultimate Abstract or the Ultimate Anonymous, all packed into the symbol [LAMBDA]. There are certain sects of fanatical mathematicians and formal logicians out there to this day that are devoted to finding the mythical [LAMBDA], which sects believe that finding it is the key to human existence itself. It may be of relevance here that the man who invented Lambda Calculus, Alonso Church, who is held by the Ultimate [LAMBDA] sect to be sort of a heroic-messianic character or at least a very serious prophet, was the PhD supervisor of Alan Turing, who of course made the famous Turing machine and was the father of theoretical computing science and artificial intelligence, until he was medicated to suicide.
    +
        Anyway, computer engineers struggled with LBB nodes and used up more than twice their normal amount of tobacco and coffee, until finally, and oddly, one of them decided to go out to a dinner party, where he met a weather man and a structured finance banker.
    +
The encounter led to the adoption in computer hardware technology of the so-called Monte Carlo method, named after the famous casino and used in both weather prediction and economic growth projection (and many tools of corporate finance and economics). The Monte Carlo method is a mathematical tool with which random chance can be studied and its effects predicted without having to know its cause, and thus it was the perfect analytical tool to be adopted in the consumer adaptation of Little Black Box computer technology.
    +
"Basically," the weather man had said, "because the global climate is such a complex nonlinear system that you can never really be sure of all the causative elements in it, a butterfly flapping its wings causing hurricanes and whathaveyou, we had to start using some model to simplify the problem. So what we do now is take the current situation on any given day, pick ten or so random outcomes of the current situation and see what consequences follow from each. So let's say that in six of those situations it rains in Yorkshire, in three it doesn't and in one there is a hurricane. In the weather forecast we then say that it rains in Yorkshire. There might be a hurricane, but it's only 1 out of 10 cases."
    +
"Yeah," the banker had said, "we do the same thing only with the economy. That's why in the growth projections you don't see one line but one line of best fit and a range of other lines. And those lines are only 90% of the cases, not the outlier really weird things like the systemic crash in 2008. That's the hurricane that sometimes happens, but we wouldn't really want to spend our time worrying about it when there's all this money to be made."
    +
"But don't you study the data at all?" asked the scientist. "How do you know it's remotely accurate?"
    +
"Look," said both, in for a Bach-esque counterpoint of explanation that just so happened to plot perfectly, if one were inclined to plot it, as sine/cosine curves on a [Who's Talking] vs [Time] grid, "clue yourself in plz. To study - or even find! - all the complicated, real causative big connections and really figure out what is going to happen, nine out of ten cases the thing would happen before we finish studying. That's how complex it is. We have to simplify. So we built a computer that plots random possibilities and calculates outcomes and we just act on the most likely ones."
    +
And so the Monte Carlo method came to be applied in the new quantum computers, and the engineers saw that it was good. Incidentally, that same banker was unceremoniously pianoed to death by hoodlums associated with the Great Unruly Riot on his way home from that very dinner party. Ironically, had the hoodlums succeeded in their bloody task only a few hours earlier, when the banker was on his way to the dinner party, they might well have managed to stop the bizarre crash that later became known as the Leftward Electron Shift, which was precisely the sort of thing they were killing all those bankers to stop, had they known it was going to happen.
    +
Anyway, lo and behold, the quantum computers worked, even if nobody knew how and modern physics hadn't really got that far. In fact, once the new generation of computer-illiterate company directors realised that there was no need to throw perfectly good money at theoretical physics, the last few remaining serious theoretical physicists still working on quantum physics became to be seen (and were so represented in the papers if at all) as social pariahs and daydreamers who spent their days in ivory towers spending taxpayer funds on vanity projects that can never be proved and will never be of any use to anyone. Their society continued to issue warnings about the unpredictable outcomes of mass consumer technology of whose basic operation we have about the same understanding as gorillas have of Mozart. It is easy, in hindsight, to say very simply that these warnings were considered unremarkable and spoiling the party, and the Royal Society of Physicists was thought to be a bunch of white-coated killjoys who were bitter that their lives' work had become about as useful to rest of society as archery or curling. Most remaining physicists joined the now extremely profitable SHAFTEPUG, or corporate finance, or offered cheap weather predictions to passers-by on the streets of London, or some combination of the above.
    +
        YOU HAVE TO ADD A ZERO TO THE FIRST FIVE.
    +
What? You can't add a zero. What good does that do? Zero is nothing. Zero isn't even part of sudoku.
    +
DON'T BE SO PYTHAGOREAN.
    +
Ahem. The calculating power of the new quantum computers was immense, and fed the consumers' hunger for storing immense amounts of data of themselves for public viewing, editing, analysing and dissecting. For a time Moore's Law was actually modified to its original form, that the calculating power of computers will double every year. The computer-illiterate company directors came to be seen (and, again, were so represented in the various consumer media) as visionaries, movers and shakers of their industry, shapers of the entire human endeavour. Their relentless and untiring insistence of walking into engineers' workspaces and fearlessly effecting the paradigm shift of telling them to stuff twice as much data in half as much space, the sheer innovation that is required of someone to see the future that twice as much data can fit in half as much space, and the masterly repetition of this insistence every so often without regard for the engineers' unjustifiable whining of 'any ideas of how do you expect us to do that' and 'oh yeah, that's genius, I never thought of just making it smaller' and 'modern physics can't do that' – for there really is no can't, it is all in the mind – this became the stuff of legends. Books were written and subsequent movies were made of these fearless CEOs' successes and their tireless defence of freedom, individualism and enterprise that lifted the entire human spirit. The Holy Order is in the process of declaring these fearless innovators saints, even (or especially) now, after the disaster. Movies are now being made of the fearless movie directors who made the movies of these inspiring heroes in spite of it all.
    +
Right, about the blue blazers. As noted, nobody really knows what happened, because literally nobody can know. But one day, as had happened in 2008, it just so happened that the Monte Carlo rounding error had masked a risk that was real, insofar as anything in quantum mechanics is verifiably real, but totally hidden from anyone who put their trust on the Quantum Revolution. It had just so happened that the United Kingdom had been something of a testing ground for quantum computers, with everything from TV cameras to toasters to cars to automatic contract drafters had been computerised, essentially meaning the whole economy depended on the validity of the Monte Carlo model. And one day the hurricane happened, and there was nothing about it in the weather forecast.
    +
Subsequently the Holy Order released a statement, once they had figured out how to release a statement without using any of the then-known methods for releasing statements and having finally found a regular pen and some paper somewhere, that every electron in all quantum nodes in the country had simultaneously jumped left for some bizarre theological reason – hence the name Leftward Electron Shift. By that time nobody really took any note enough to argue otherwise, as the country was in chaos with every computer having shut down, the economy in a spiralling nosedive, all the money in the electronic banking system gone, the Bank of England overrun, stores amid an epic looting wave, ministerial heads on spikes on Westminster Bridge and so on and so forth. It was, it is perhaps needless to say, thoroughly nasty business. Some people really got what was coming to them, but most didn't, and either way at this stage it didn't really matter much and not many people found out about it.
    +
Oh, all this was after the Great Blunder.
    +
But the Holy Order did not stand idle. Over the years they had slowly seeped through the economics departments in many leading universities in the English-Speaking world. Given that many of the Order's top brass had originally been newspaper columnists, then briefly politicians, then academics writing about economics, they sought to change the discourse from a topic they found uncomfortable to one they were at ease with. Thus was born the most comprehensive interdisciplinary comparative social science revolution that the economics departments of Oxbridge and Ivy League had ever dared to dream of, producing a seemingly unending stream of work for the fellows of those departments. The Holy Order's academic members started to look at economic theory in a brave new way, and the well-known Politics, Philosophy and Economics degree at Oxford was changed to Politics, Public Relations and Economics with a strong de-emphasis of computation and critical analysis of basic concepts (which were thought to be heretical).
    +
This new subject field envisaged economics as really a species of politics, which itself was mostly about what the public perception of governing policy was at any given time. Economic policy was no longer to be determined in terms of wealth distribution, or even wealth creation, but rather how people felt about their prospects and who got to be in charge. The main economic initiative was therefore to spread wealth to the bottom 99 percent only so far as to give enough of them enough money to buy a blue blazer, a symbol of wealth, of economically conservative wisdom, of striving towards freedom of man, of ambition to transcend one's meagre origins. Give them welfare, but only enough to make them aspirational.
    +
It worked like a fucking charm. In public polling, people who owned and regularly wore a blue blazer actually thought things were 48 percent better (on a SHAFTEPUG-developed How Great Are Things Really –index), and that they themselves were 25 percent higher up in the national wealth distribution than was actually the case.
    +
As the blue blazers abounded, votes concentrated into the hands of the Order. It was commonly agreed among this new class of academics that only the Holy Order could be trusted to be in charge of the country's main policy initiatives, as only they had access to the Freedom Man's Great Teachings and the Holy Book Which Shall Not Be Looked At. Median earnings plummeted (average earnings stayed mostly level) and economic policy was shrouded in mystical catch phrases, but the votes kept coming in from all doors and windows and blue blazers started to be a common sight on the streets of London. In an act of political brilliance the Countryside Shooting Jacket was introduced, and soon the country was in essence a one-party state, with two different factions of imperceptibly differing policy objectives but visibly different jackets and periodic elections to give the illusion of popular empowerment (essential for SHAFTEPUG's doctrines).
    +
It was not long until the now-divided post-war, post-blunder US, with its two-state solution of independent Central States and Coastal Union all tied together under a unified central banking system, took note of this radically effective economic direction that seemed to be tailor-fitted to the needs of a divided country. The Neo-Feudal Government started to invest heavily in Disney, which had, as the owner of the Star Wars franchise, reached a settlement with SHAFTEPUG as to the incorporation of Midichlorians into Holy Order ideology and was then made to disseminate SHAFTEPUG ideology in entertainments of all forms. Writers went to work on crafting whole series' of movies with heroic blue blazered main characters who took matters into their own hands and carved civilisation from barbaric muck. Blue blazers suddenly started to appear on the streets of New York, Boston, Washington DC, Chicago, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Austin, Richmond, Des Moines and so on. The shooting jacket was also gaining popularity, especially among the economically ambitious young in USCS.
    +
But the US youth were more industrious than just voting once every five years as their counterparts did in the Former-former-UK, now known as the United Conglomerate. They started a pyramid hierarchy system where young initiates would join at the end of their university studies, and move through the trading floor ranks towards greater and greater things and more and more 'leverage' - meaning more people working below them, part of whose earnings went up to management. And this is the Blue Blazer Organisation as we know it today. Combined with its sister organisation, the Countryside Shooting Jacket Org, it is the largest employer of graduates in the Union of States of Coastal Union and Central States.
    +
DID I TELL YOU ABOUT THE TIME I GOT LOST IN CAMEROON?
    +
Shh!
    +


Hugo


by JosephHAlexander


"Turn to the person next to you, give 'em a high-five and say YOU are the centre of your WOORLD!" the impressive PA system boomed the words of the man on stage, a millisecond later than his mouth had lipped them.
    +
                    "You are the centre of the world!" a thousand voices screamed in total ensuing chaos of ecstatic high-fives while the man on stage drank water and watched.
    +
                    Hugo was becoming a veteran of these things, and the pudgy, curly-haired female staff in these mass events had started to recognise him from previous events. He had first gone to Unlock Your Emotions – Three Days to Emotional Strength, then Inner Power Plus Weekend, The Perfect Diet Powertools Retreat, The Zen Warrior Camp Intensive and now the Subjective Reality Bombshell– the Secrets to Health, Wealth and Happiness. He did everything he was told by the man on stage just as he was told, but somehow couldn't believe everybody else did and with such intensity. The high-fives usually signalled a coffee or lunch break, but now, after the thousand-strong empowering sing-along in the arm-linked energy-integration circle formed around the large events room, he knew that it would signal the end and a small-scale dystopian rush of people pushing off each other's eyeballs towards the toilets and then exits. He, being an experienced seminar-goer, always managed to get to the urinals without having to queue. This time was no exception.
    +
                    Yellow. Mild to moderate dehydration.
    +
                    By now he had become pretty good at picking out the Suckers in the crowds. At various points during the 'educational' material, just after the post-lunch follow-the-leader-dance-off they would be subjected to some exceptionally intensive selling. Selling by way of guilt-tripping ('if you want your family to survive, join us in our five-day event...'), selling by way of peer pressure and identity mind games ('the best of you have already gone to the back and are lining up for tickets now, those are the people who are committed to doing whatever it takes. The rest of you, flick back in your notebooks to the declarations you signed and think if you are acting consistently...'), selling by way of enrolling ('who here wants more wealth and happiness in their life? If you raised your hand, this event is for you...'), selling by way of artificial scarcity ('we can only take 20 more people from this seminar. I would love to take all of you, but we have four more cities to visit in our tour and...'). The Suckers were usually the enthusiastic dancers, the smugly smiling foreigners who had come from all over the world to hear this, the teary-eyed women in their mid-thirties realising thiswas what they had been missing all their lives. It seemed incredible to him that they somehow found and actually coughed up the £7,995 plus VAT to register for the Complete Warrior Package, entitling the bearer to nothing more concrete than a rubber wristband that says 'I AM A WARRIOR' and four weekend seminars, or the 12,995 plus VAT to register for the Inner Mastery Package, giving the Sucker a card to wear around his neck, identifying him as a Class A Sucker, and a stage-commanded round of validating applause, some of which he was sure must have been ironic.
    +
                    The first time he had bought a General Admissions ticket with a humiliating red wristband, as opposed to the double-the-price VIP ticket with a much nicer blue wristband, as opposed to the quadruple-the-price Gold Access ticket with a lovely yellow wristband, as opposed to the octuple-the-price Phoenix Resurrection Partnership ticket which came with Diamond Lounge Privileges plus signed copy of the presenter's book, The Secrets to Unlocking Your Emotions, the holders of which they presumably recognised by face or by them waving the book at security.
    +
                    But Hugo wasn't a sucker, no. He knew about consumer surplus. He genuinely got more from it than he paid, because he put this shit into use. He was more in touch with his own emotions and the needs of his subconscious. He had even changed his diet, and now monitored his hydration levels every time he urinated. He planned his days on paper like they had taught in The Camp, repeated the conditioning mantras that he had learned in Inner Power Plus, and this one, this one was great.
    +
                    The seminar he was in, the Subjective Reality Bombshell, was really something. The speaker had come on stage in the morning, looked at them all, and just blurted it out – what if your whole life is a simulation? What if none of this is real? Nobody you've ever known exists. Nothing you do matters.
    +
                    Imagine the freedom.
    +
                    When your whole life is a simulation, you can do anything. You can't offend anyone, because if you do, you've just caused a computer programme to act in a way so as to simulate offence. The computer programme has no interests, or opinions, wants, desires, needs, preferences. Worrying about insulting it, or acting in a way that might cause it harm, is about as sensible as worrying about causing harm to plants or stones. They don't feel anything. Just like a stone in your way or a weed in your garden, they're just there to stop you from doing what you want to do, from getting the life that you deserve. They are nothing.
    +
                    Here, in this seminar, in one-friggin'-day, you're going to learn how to see the world differently. You're going to see the evidence. You're going to hear from people who have made up their minds, and said that's it, I'm not having any more of this shit, it's time to take charge. We are going to show you that it is all an illusion, and that when you realise that, you have the power. You can do anything.
    +
                    Now remember though, the simulation is powerful. It has you. You can't escape. If you do something that you would expect will end up in prison, the simulation will put you there, and you might be there for the rest of your life. I don't know, I haven't tried! Hahaa! And you shouldn't either. But as long as you do something that isso-cietally accep-ted, that won't lead to prison, you can do anything. That is the only rule.
    +
                    But George, that means I can't do anything! I know what you're thinking. Let me tell you. You can commit fraud. You can steal. You can bump into old ladies. You can touch up that hot co-worker, grab her tits, or grab his dick or whatever it is you ladies do, you can steal steal steal, and when you're caught you'll be given more money! It's called Wall Street! Hahaa! See! You have so much freedom, you just have to know how to play the simulation. You can't do exactly everything, because every simulation has what is known as parameters, but you can do almost anything you want! Who's in! Who wants to take control of their life! Who here knows, for a fact, that you are the centre of your world? I bet you've felt it! I bet you've thought, hang on, this is actually true. This works. I am the centre of this. You know it, in your heart of hearts, I'm just here to show it to you and help you discover what's there.
    +
                    And man, you're going to make so much money, and have so much success, it's going to make you puke! Hahaa! Yes! I said puke! It's funny! You'll get everything you want, as long as you want it enough! All you need to understand is that – wait for it, listen up, come closer – reality is subjective. That's all! This is your reality! Make it yours!
    +
                    (The music had faded in and was by this time reaching a brassy and oomphy bit.)
    +
                    Now turn to the person next to you, give them a high five, and shout at. The. Top. Of. Your. Lungs: YOU are the centre of your WOOORLD!
    +
                    Hugo did, and he was blown away. He couldn't believe it. Everything he'd ever felt about life somehow made sense. And next to him was a guy, Hal, who was just as sure as Hugo was that this was absolutely real. They had exchanged numbers, hugged many times, and Hugo had shown him how to rush to the front of the loo queue before anyone else tried it. Hal had told him he worked in a private security company, was an actual patrolling warrior, and Hugo knew that this was a friend to keep.
    +


The Nuthouse Interviews


by JosephHAlexander


In the early stages of the Sacred and Holy Association of Freedom, Trade and Enterprise, and Precise Use of Grammar, the prevailing theory was that there was actually no escape from the teachings of Freedom Man, no way to opt out. Human beings just sort of naturally followed them, whether they knew it or not. If His teachings were in some way 'mistaken', this would invariably be proved to be intentional, a sort of clue to higher discovery if you like, and, upon close analysis would lead to a deeper understanding of individual freedom and Hayekian spontaneous order. Often the mistakes were explained as 'invisible' forms of precisely used grammar that the reader/doubter was, frankly, unequipped to deal with due to his/her low-level status and insufficient intelligence, and which grammar would only reveal itself when important ontological matters were discussed. The mission, so went the Holy Order's own internal corporate training memos at the time from levels 5 upwards, was only to make sure that nobody artificially hamper the fulfilment of Freedom Man's predictions, which was perceived as having been the whole problem with the Great Blunder and events leading up to it – more on that later. Whatever a large group of people got up to (so long as the group was large enough to be statistically significant and not stunted by undue regulation, the obvious caveats went) was right, and legislation, executive decision making, and all other aspects of society-building were supposed to go along with it. This theory was thought to be essentially bulletproof. Often some initial wavering would occur when a group of individuals engaged in some activity which was frankly not economically productive, but after careful multivariate analysis of the whole set of facts the thesis was always confirmed, and always came out stronger. As counterfactual thought experiments on Freedom Man's teaching's were theologically prohibited, it would then be suggested that whoever found the supposed mistake in the first place see a prescription automat to readjust his brain chemistry, lest he succumb to what is clearly budding schizophrenia, which became highlighted as a sort of a favourite diagnostic buzzword to throw around for people who didn't follow His Teachings.
    +
                                As an illustrative example, the seemingly curious practice of Pianoing was initially thought to be deplorable, counter-productive and against the Freedom Man's teachings. It was this practice that ultimately sank the theory of 'Freedom Particles', the pure and all-pervasive sparks of human freedom (and source of the human need of throwing off of regulatory shackles) as it became obvious that not all human beings had them. This also made theological sense. Hierarchy was obviously axiomatic to Freedom Man's doctrines. If everyone wereto have 'freedom particles', the Rabble and Beef (general names for various castes in the lower three and upper quartiles of the population) could and should be allowed to influence policymaking, which more or less meant that the Order should not exist. So, though it was decided that Freedom Particle theory be abandoned as a result of pianoing, the overall doctrinal coherency of SHAFTEPUG remained intact.
    +
                                Pianoing, at its heyday, was a form of activism, or 'resistance' to the Holy Order. It involved carefully placing a prominent member of the Order, such as an economist, a financial services provider, an investment banker, an accountant or derivatives trader on top of an X or some other blatantly obvious marker, only to kill him or her off by dropping a piano on them like in old Looney Tunes. The activists would compete in how obvious the marker was, and how innocuously they could get the target on top of it, and film the whole thing to put it on YouTube and Reddit and other internet forums to encourage others to do the same. The practice was both entertaining and very, very deadly.
    +
                                The main message of the resistance, so far as there was one, was that there was more to life than financial economics, and that the teachings of Freedom Man should be questioned (Freedom Man Forbid), and that running a society on the idea of competitive individualism was simply wrong and somehow inefficient. As though by way of proof, the resistance members would often catch the target in a hug, tying them up and preventing their escape but also causing the activists' own cartoonish and terrifying deaths by the crushing weight of a hefty musical instrument, particularly practiced where the target was both high-ranking and had caught on to the pianoing before the instrument could make contact. This, so the implicit argument ran, was an expression of the selfless motivations of the activist involved, who was willing to 'die by the piano' in order to spare the world of another disaster caused by 'Men in Suits with Graphs' (or 'MSG', as they called the Order and its predecessors).
    +
                                For a while this shook the Order. Those in lower ranks, ones not yet initiated to the higher learning of Freedom Man and therefore still reliant on their intuitive understanding of His Teachings, were starting to waver. If competitive individualism were really the best way to build a society, why was it that these seemingly normal people objected to it so much that they were willing to throw away the future opportunity to cash in all the game theoretical advantages built up in their lifetime (which is what death represented, in Holy Order teachings) to oppose it?
    +
                                The Clergy level struggled to articulate a theoretically coherent reason for pianoing in response to the rank and file's confusions. It seemed obvious that the whole thing was in some way compliant with Freedom Man's teachings, but the way in which it could specifically be justified did not lend itself to an easy answer. One suggested solution was the uptick in piano sales, which was said to be good for a controlled rise in manufacturing base and economic growth, but still marginal enough to ensure it only led to an increased sale of Blue Blazers and not substantive mixing of social classes as was required by central SHAFTEPUG doctrine. But if this were the reason, the Order should come out stronger as a result and the rather heavy losses suffered in the worst pianoing waves seemed to suggest otherwise. It was known that this must have followed Freedom Man's teachings, but it was still more of a paradigmatic assumption, waiting for solid proof.
    +
                                The whole matter wasn't spoken of much, until someone pointed out that the filming and posting online was not simply recruitment and assurance of other 'resistance' members, as the activists were fond of claiming. Instead, it was an expression of the economic will of the body of consumers. This approach demanded that pianoing be looked at again, not as resistance but as rationally selfish economic activity.
    +
                    A theory emerged. The consumer did not watch these films because they were encouraged to act in the same way, or because they doubted the Teachings, no. They watched them because they were entertaining, equating fantastically to commercialised human emotion coefficients which in turn meant harnessing of individual decision making for economic self-interest. In other words, the consumer liked it, and clicked on it, and whoever posted the video made money. In fact, it was soon realised that this was the way people from the Rabble rose to the ranks of the Order. These so-called members of the Resistance were scaring and entertaining people to get more views and clicks, to 'sell their product', and to gain economic and monetary advantage from their activities. This meant that they could rise from the Rabble and join the Beef, and perhaps eventually even the Order. The 'resistance' was really just another small private limited corporation whose entrepreneurial CEO had found a way to competitive individual success, by pretending to 'resist' what they in fact sought to join.
    +
                    This seemed spot on – the videos were both funny and horrific, providing two clear ticks in the list of variables of the Newsworthiness Equation that Holy Order Freedom Researchers at the newly established PPrE department at Oxford and Cambridge had developed. It was this that explained the whole thing, and once the Order had understood the clues, its upper echelons demanded that the Order use their higher understanding.
    +
                    The Order swiftly regained the upper hand. The 'resistance' were selling a media product, and needed content that stirred up clicks. They therefore needed conflict, because as everyone knows, any conflict sells - even the most childishly highschool-ish popstar spats made their, the conflict-participant popstars', records make swift and uninterrupted beelines out the shelves as people who otherwise couldn't have given a smaller speck of excrement suddenly had to pick a side. The Order was perceived as a humorous and engaging target of the conflict, due its growing authority in academic and governmental sectors, and the pianoing was therefore all the more comically effective in gathering viewers due to the perceived cartoonish slap in the face to authority. The 'resistance' was not fighting to rid itself of Freedom Man – they were in fact providing conflict publicity to SHAFTEPUG, and the controversy made people pay attention and make a choice – the Order, or Chaos. It was recommended that the Order not hamper the pianoing itself, but simply emphasise the choice. And given a binary choice, most people will assume the two sides are of equal size, like yin and yang or day and night, and hurry to thrown their lots in with the one that scares them less – the Order.
    +


Patrick Romain Green


by JosephHAlexander

Old, slippered footsteps pattered about the old house and down the creaky stairs. The vertical slit of a window in the landing had a curled corner through which the cold eked in, down the side of the wall and onto Patrick's feet. He grunted out a long and dissatisfied noise. He tried to close the unclosable once or twice, and decided to leave it to whosever fault it was in the first place.
    +
                    He went downstairs and put the kettle on. In the morning he liked to have two fingers of a venomously stiff instant coffee, with his sugared corn flakes that he drowned in milk. These, and a couple of teas later in the afternoon, were the only liquids he consumed in a day. He had pretty severe urinary problems he had ignored for years. His daughter kept telling him to drink more water, but he didn't like it. He'd made it this far.
    +
                    His back didn't bend properly. He had trouble breathing, and sounded like Darth Vader. His right knee went stiff every so often. His skin had slowly been melting off him and hung loose off his face. It had also got papery and thin. His hair had lost its colour and then, eventually, fallen off. He run as fast as he could and willed himself to go on, raged vivacious, reaching on for what would save him, before his skin would harden and crack and his body would petrify from under him and he was finally caught, but now he had the aches and ailments that slowly lull you to accept your own end. It was coming. He never talked about it.
    +
                    Today, he decided, he would get the Financial Times. He'd read it thoroughly over the next hour or two, and groan at the various financial products that had been developed using his techniques but that went way above his head and couldn't possibly work for reasons he could not quite find. Superficially the structures seemed exactly as he had once structured his own financial products, but something was off and he knew it. They would be trouble for the whole industry. He retired 20 years ago today.
    +
                    Houtu would sleep until about noon again. He used to be bothered enough to try and get her to have breakfast with him. Why do I have to get up, she would say. You're just going to get the paper anyway. Jesus, what a fine thing it was that the daughter hadn't taken after the mother. She'd turned out to be a fine, fine young woman. Heavenly woman. A muse of the stars.
    +
                    Is it wrong to be more attracted to your own daughter than your wife? It's just a fact. Dagny, she's a world-class beauty. Real piece of work I tell you. Hou was a beauty but she's really let herself down. What a failure she was. Doesn't matter what tits I get her, she's still going to be old and lazy and stupid.
    +
                    He would normally have the morning all to himself. Sometimes he catalogued his old achievements, the USCUCS Medal of Freedom, the Knighthood of the Holy Order (or association of whatever), the Uraeus headdress with the sacred serpent and gold and jade accents, hieroglyphs he couldn't make heads or tails of, all on blue to signify the ancient Egyptian battle crown, that was the highest honour that the Holy Order could bestow. But that was all a long time ago. Normally he didn't get up before eight.
    +
                    Patrick Green liked it when Dagny called him 'daddy'. He hoped Dagny would call today, but he understood she was busy. She was everything you would want in a daughter. She was successful, famous, beautiful. In all likelihood he would just read his papers again and groan at the state of the count- Conglomerate, and the miserable whingers it supported. The scrounger press was like porn to him.
    +
                    All this moaning about house prices. He had bought his first flat at 23, after he had finished university and gone to work like a normal person. Young people these days, they work but still they don't buy a place of their own. Good deal for them, they're saving all that money for their fancy coffees and health foods while they feed off the previous generation, the one that actually got out of bed and did something. What a scam.
    +
                    If you can't afford a place when both of you are working, there is something wrong with you. He'd bought his at 23. His other daughter, Patricia, from his previous marriage, was nearly 60, had a house and husband – the husband was a bit of a Del Boy but definitely moneyed – and children and grandchildren.
    +
        These goddamn fire derivatives. They may be on the up now but they'll come down. Mark my words.
    +
But nobody was interested. Thank you for your accomplishments, they would say. You're THAT Patrick Green? Patrick Romain Green? The Green Formula guy? Wow, that's amazing. That's all they'd say, they wouldn't listen if he said anything back. 'Yeah, that's interesting. Have you met...?" they'd reply and push him off to some other clueless arsehole with a tight part who'd say the exact same thing.
    +
What he had realised was really very simple. If you make a raincoat that costs you £5 to make, and sell it for £50, you would have produced £45 of economic growth just by owning the thing and selling it to the right person. If someone resells that raincoat for £500, the same applies - £450 of growth, boom. An asset that was worth 5, is now worth 500. Except that a normal consumer isn't going to be able to afford a £500 raincoat, so they have to leverage credit. So someone lends the consumer the money, say £450, for the portion he can't afford, in exchange for repayment of capital plus interest over time. The lender gets, say, £500 back on his £450, representing a further £50 of economic growth. The beauty of it is that the money didn't even exist until the lender gave it to the borrower who wants to buy the raincoat – it's all promises. A well-regarded credit provider whose client wants to buy a raincoat rings up and promises the raincoat seller's bank that they now owe £450 plus interest to the bank, and the bank promises its customer, the raincoat seller, that they now owe £450 plus interest more than they used to owe to the raincoat seller, and the raincoat buyer promises the credit provider that he now owes £450 plus interest to the credit provider. No paper money is printed, but the economy is worth £450 (plus three times interest) more because it includes a raincoat that is worth as much, and some tit didn't have the money to buy it outright.
    +
The buyer then resells his £500 raincoat to someone else for £5000 – another £4500 of growth, another credit facility provided, more money created. This much had pretty much been known already.
    +
What Patrick Romain Green came up with is a formula to predict when you should resell the asset, say the raincoat, and for what price. See, the problem with this really quite conventional economic growth and expanding money supply is that it's all just promises until you cash out. When you hold a raincoat that you bought for £500, of which £450 was on credit, all your credit facility has is a promise that you'll work harder than you apparently hitherto had the capacity to work, to earn back the £450 plus interest, and all the bank has is a promise from the credit provider that you'll work harder than you used to so they can get their money off you and they'll pay the bank £450 plus interest, and all the seller has is a promise from their bank that they'll get the money off your credit provider who has promised that you'll work harder than you used to in order to pay them the £450 plus interest that they'll then pay to the bank and the bank will pay the seller – and so the merry-go-round goes. The only way this imaginary money becomes real is if you sell the asset you have for more than you bought it and buy a debt-free real-world asset with it. Say, you sell the jacket on to someone else for £5000, pay off your credit card for £450, pocket the difference and buy something real with it, like a house or a piece of land or something. As to the asset itself and its imaginary credit-fed value, that is someone else's problem now.
    +
So it's risky business. If you're too early in the chain, you definitely make your imaginary money real but don't make much of it. Plus, if you just hold on to it, and it's not very much, then it'll just disappear when all the other arseholes later down the chain create more money that will make your money's value dissolve. If you're too late in the chain and no one will buy your raincoat for £50,000, or the credit provider goes bust, or the bank does, or for whatever reason you can't get your imaginary £50,000 value realised or £5000 investment back, you're screwed. Your latest promise to work really hard in the future to earn more money in wages than you have currently managed to work now means you actually have to do it, and not only to work extra hard yourself but you've actually cashed out everyone else's promise to work extra hard too, from the guy who first bought the raincoat for £500, £450 of which was just his promise to work harder and earn more money to pay off his debts, to you.
    +
        So there is an optimal time to sell the asset without having to work harder for the rest of your life – when you are the second-last person in the chain. You (literally) make the most (imaginary) money, and convert it to a real asset before the shitcurtain descends.
    +
So the Green Formula was used to predict when the music would stop, and when the second-last link in the chain would be. It was all very profitable, and investment strategy based on the Green Formula could withstand extremely volatile conditions like the Great Blunder – it was fantastic at entrenching the clients' positions, so that they wouldn't go broke when the whole imaginary money scheme would be discovered and everyone suddenly realised the raincoat was only ever worth £50 max. And because the fact that people used his equations led to more people credit-betting at the last minute, the equation had to be continually improved to include new variables – whoever had the latest edition made the biggest profits, and he was basically well-remunerated for the rest of his life for what was really quite a simple research job.
    +
The day he decided to quit and live off his pension was the day that he realised more, and more complex, variables had to be introduced. He had never really been that clever, if he really thought about it, he had just realised a pretty common sense thing that could be put into mathematical language. But eventually he realised the reason why some of the predictions he had made in certain sectors did not work out or his exit was premature, namely that the government was adding links to certain chains because the chain represented steady, if imaginary, economic growth, and governments had an interest in making it appear as though there was plenty of it to go around.
    +
Take the London housing market. The music should have stopped ages ago, as normal people just couldn't afford to buy houses and couldn't afford to take bigger mortgages. Someone in the government must have realised this, possibly even using his formula, because just before the crash was meant to happen and all the imaginary money about to go where imaginary money goes, the government announced a new incentive scheme designed to encourage people to split their houses into smaller and smaller flats that people could afford again. Once the splitting was coming to an end and the flats a normal person with normal wages could afford was really just a room with a shared kitchen, toilet, shower and hallway door, the government announced new incentive schemes – buying only a share of a larger flat and paying rent on the rest (creatively branded as 'shared ownership'), putting lending caps on local authorities so they would eventually have to sell land and public housing to developers to make ends meet (essentially removing cheap housing from the market and replacing it with 'developed' expensive housing), equity loans, government bonus schemes, tax relief, and so on. All this was specifically designed, so it seemed, to postpone the moment when the imaginary money evaporates. He realised that he was playing chess against someone in the government. Someone was behind it, controlling him like a puppet. He didn't know what to do. How do you predict what the government is going to come up with? They can always just make a law that changes the rules of the game. He felt like a fraud, and was worried that everyone would be looking to him to give some kind of answer. He decided to quit and convert his imaginary assets into real wealth, before they build the financial equivalent of a Uranium bomb using his method and he'll get blamed for it when it blows up.
    +
His feet had stepped out of the slippers, his hands pulled up proper trousers, his chest now jumper-clad and bejacketed, his feet in encased in shoes, and he had closed the door behind him. Hou had still not got up. You get to a certain age and you don't even notice most of what you do. You walk to the corner shop to get a paper, pay for the paper, walk back, make your venomously bitter two fingers of coffee and start reading before you realise the paper is in front of you.
    +
It had been glorious. Like the empire. He had travelled the world, he had been a celebrity, he had left his previous wife and found a new one, Houtu, a Chinese beauty queen. He had been the king of the world. Now he was trapped having to house everyone, clean the house, do the washing, pick up the paper, make the coffee. What had happened? How had this woman managed to wear him down until he was nothing but a cleaner, hotelier, credit facility?
    +
He patted along on the high street towards the newsagent. Raj knew him by name. Now that was a man who knew how to take care of his own. Never took a holiday, never worked less than 12 hours a day. Why can't these young people nowadays do the same?
    +
He got out the door of the newsagent with his Times and Telegraph. Might as well read both – hear what the lefties had been up to and how they were wrong and the FT would just get him angry.
    +
He had never found out who it was, in the government, who had been his opponent. Some abstract, anonymous someone. But these things now; they just can't work anymore. They're nothing more than well-branded pyramid scams. They call them Green Derivatives. Jesus.
    +
Or maybe they already had literally build single-stage uranium bomb derivatives? A uranium fission bomb would probably count as a tactical weapon nowadays, no? The thermonuclear stuff is still off limits, but you can speculate on the uranium fission bomb market, right? Or definitely the uranium commodity market.
    +
'Hello?' someone asked. 'Hello?'
    +
'Yes?' Patrick said.
    +
'I'm frightfully sorry to say, but your shoes are untied I'm afraid,' the young man said in a upper class accent that was almost comical.
    +
'Pardon me?'
    +
'Your shoes.'
    +
Patrick looked down.
    +
'No they're not,' he said and looked up. 'What are you talking about?'
    +
The young man was running off.
    +
'Uh?' Patrick had time to say. He looked down again, and noticed he was standing on top of a large painted X.
    +
'Look up!' someone shouted.
    +
Most of the pianoing nowadays did not actually involve a piano, but often a box or suitcase filled with rocks, sometimes an anvil (though anvils were hard to come by, and every time one was used it was taken away as evidence and chopped up and sold off to scrap by whichever private security firm happened to be first on the scene and supposedly investigating the event). The actual pianos were difficult to procure, to winch up without anyone noticing and generally involved a lot of unnecessary effort, planning and risks of getting caught. Consequently, the actual comic book references such as anvils and pianos were saved for the truly important hits.
    +
There was a horrid wet crack as the 500lb big upright came down right on the man's forehead, falling down through the air, standing up as though someone was still playing it. In the consequent slow-motion video online it looked as though the piano was the way it was supposed to be, and the landscape was reeled up fast like a webpage. When the piano hit the man it didn't show any sign of slowing, and the man seemed to cower and disappear underneath it. His knees didn't give way, so on the film you can just make out his tibia popping out through his knees and tearing through his trousers, his back break down the middle and nudge to the left, his torso double back on itself and the horrified and bewildered look on his face as the head is tilted back until the neck snapped and there was only chin to see. His hands flailed up in a pitiful reaction as though to stop or deflect the 500lb piano with serious downward momentum. The living space for his body got more and more restricted between the bottom of the piano and the top of the pavement, and the piano came closer and closer to the pavement in merciless slow motion, not caring about any distress or pain, obeying only the physical laws it had been made to be subject to. As it touched down, the first crack grew up from the ground in the middle of the piano where the man's body was disappearing, the sides hit the pavement and seemed to dig into it until the wood splinters started to fly out in all directions from the contact points, making it clear that the piano was not travelling through it. The noise was horrific. A sock-and-knicker-twisting long yelp issued from the man that sounded like a long eeeEEEEAAA but not like any sound that any human could make, until it was suddenly gone in a viscous throttling sound and replaced by the sound of impact.
    +
It was like a giant toddler had smashed all the keys of a giant piano all at the same time, but with no resonance or liveliness and with hints of flying springs and dull clunk of heavy metal car parts. It did not sound so much like a musical instrument as multi-frequency thunder hitting the earth, with some poor frail man stuck underneath. The ten-year-old child standing 20 yards away from the whole thing in later life also recalled to her life coach a horrendous crackle of bones popping in half and in half again and a splat of blood on the hot pavement, but that may all just be a false memory mixed with too much vintage Tom & Jerry.
    +
And this, the brutal and comical murder of who was now just another insignificant old man, would set off all kinds of event and cause untold running around and flailing about. And the video didn't even get many hits.
    +


The Two Prophets


by JosephHAlexander


The celebrations in Cambridge and in Boston ended abruptly, and were replaced by a fear that the end of the world had actually come and that the war ending was just one apocalyptic horseman's wrestlemania-type tap switch with another. That evening, many of the celebrations all over town had ended up in the Charles river for alcoholic skinny-dips and beach parties and the like, particularly in the park near Harvard stadium and in Riverbend Park on the other side, and pretty soon the people there, overwhelmingly young and beautiful Harvard and BU students, had started to hallucinate in the water.
    +
                    "Hey, did you hear the Two Prophets are on their way to Boston! I heard it from a classmate. Nobody knows how they do it, but they basically just dismantle capitalism wherever they go," one student said to another.
    +
                    "What, here? How do they singlehandedly (sic) dismantle capitalism? Do we even want that?" the other said back.
    +
                    "I dunno, could be fun? Better than this shit!"
    +
                    It was fun at first, and sort of enlightening. Something in the river seemed to spark really great conversation. The water seemed blessed, and interfaced with the human nervous system in just the right way to produce a sweet spot, a feeling of mild and approaching realisation or epiphany. 'Everybody, get in the water!' the shouts went, and as the sense of widespread spiritual and psychic discovery grew, some enterprising Harvard student even decided to take the crew team up and down the river and shout from the cox's megaphone to everyone on the banks to take a swim. The mood in the whole city was extremely celebratory, and the physical movements of celebration – jumping up and down rhythmically, screaming, hoisting girlfriends up on shoulders, throwing one's hands up, chanting the country's initials and so on – had caused a sort of mass hypnosis whereupon it only took the barest of suggestion or expression of will for everyone else blindly to do whatever the benevolent command indicated, like the most epic game of Simon Says ever. Lots of people got in the water without so much as turning the ignition key on their brains' analytical centers. And they loved it.
    +
                    The sense one got, from whatever it was in the river, was a warm tingling going up one's legs and soon inhabiting the entire body, like the way a tree sucks water from the ground. The skin seemed, for the first time ever, to be an enormous sense organ and not just something to be washed and covered in lotions or clothes, to really take the world in and interact with it. The mind was entirely present in the body. Every splash of water seemed somehow astrally significant, like a touch of a sentient and benevolent universe. The cold of the water didn't feel cold anymore, not exactly – or it felt cold but not unpleasant or something to be avoided. It felt not like the cold was somehow penetrating your body, but like your body's warmth was oozing out into the water, in all directions like you were a paintbrush loaded with watercolour dipped into a clean rinsing glass. It wasn't the unpleasant world coming in, it was you coming out, and it felt like you had never really come out before. Soon it started to feel like the water connected everyone splashing in it somehow, like they had all just been wired parallel with each other and could feel each other's circuits. It felt like you could move the hand of another person, and they could move yours, and your wills somehow gripped both of you at the same time but were still independent. This feeling was unverifiable – the minute you tried to lift someone else's hand, you realised that you may have just been watching someone else lift their hand and feel like it was you who did it, and if they raised their eyes to meet yours, they felt like it was you too. Everyone evidently felt the same.
    +
                    Seeing young, beautiful people love whatever it is that they were experiencing was elating and alarming in equal measure, and beckoned everyone else to join in. What could be so great about swimming? What if they got to experience something that I didn't? By the looks of it, it must have been some fantastic, super experience, once in a life time stuff, and nobody wanted to miss it. People jumping into the river started to look like the banks falling in as the lone rowboat with its 8-crew and cox went past.
    +
        The sense of jubilation turned into wonder. Many were staring at their hands. Some tried kissing but it was like they had forgotten how to do it, instead just rubbing their open mouths together and getting a lot of less-than-perfectly-sanitary water in their systems. People splashed, and laughed, and tired themselves out.
    +
"I think I need to get out now," one young woman said.
    +
"Yeah I know right!" someone from around her said.
    +
"Seriously. I just need to get out of the water," she said
    +
"Why? This is so great," a male acquaintance she had just met said. "Can I get your number? I think I'm in love with you."
    +
"Can you help me? I need to get on the ground. I don't feel great."
    +
"Ok, ok, sure. Here, let me help you."
    +
The pair struggled up from the water and onto the grass, singed brittle by the summer.
    +
"I'm just going to lie here for a bit," she said.
    +
"Yeah," he said. "Me too. I feel kinda funny."
    +
"Could you hold my hand?" she said.
    +
They lay down next to each other, turned to their sides and curled up together. Their eyes rolled back in reality's abandonment, looking deep inside, like trying to see the self behind the pupils. They fell deeper and deeper, all at once without even realising, and lost all sense of the outside world, all sense that there even was an outside and an inside. It was both soothing and terrifying. Somewhere, deep inside them, a faint and simple will remained and wished for it to stop, panicking at the powerlessness, the hurricane of energy and the world that the bare and naked consciousness stood in the middle of, its only plan to just hold on and stay still, until it gave in and disappeared forever. They would be found two days later, a faint and dried driblet of vomit running from her mouth to the ground from when her body had tried its last vain attempt to hold onto itself and not melt into the burst and blizzard of particles, now just particles with no clear shape or form, that had carried them away. She had just come back from a year out in Bavaria and re-registered at BU, the whole trip's point being to show (expressly to her parents but secretly also to herself) that the world wasn't going to end and that it was still safe to do normal young-person stuff, despite the chaotic war - she hadn't even been back to see her parents and brother yet.
    +
The mass neural overload caused by the diluted VZ in the water would never be satisfactorily explained, mostly because nobody had an interest in any thorough investigation of who had dumped what into the Charles river water. It had been assumed that, since the Boston estuary water flows into the Atlantic very soon after Riverbend Park, whatever you dumped in the river would basically dilute into safe concentrations almost immediately as the Charles River opened up, and then just flow into the sea where it would be someone else's problem. The City Councils of the various regions had all issued dumping licences to local businesses in exchange for cash without really keeping a very good track of who else had issued such licences, everyone apparently assuming that only they could have been so brazen as to patch up the public finances in this way. When the mass insanity of the riverside broke out and the number of fatalities rose, both from direct (later filed under 'exposure to foreign substance' and 'drowning' or both) and indirect (trampling, biting, violence, mass panic, suicide) causes, investigatory bodies, working under the auspices of the same state actors who had issued the dumping licences in the first place, were subjected to unprecedentedly sustained and carefully micro-targeted campaigns of suggestion and false information, things like hijacking their phones, TV, car radio and social media, and filling all these with subtle cues to suggest the option of 'dance mania' or 'dance plague', curable by prayers to St Paul and a good old ravishing Catholic exorcism, which option the investigators all seemingly independently accepted with detailed and unlikely accounts of how they came to discover and prove that this had indeed been an instance of it. The historical precedent was from Aachen in July 1374 where thousands danced seemingly involuntarily for days until they collapsed in exhaustion by the Rhine river, and in Strasbourg in 1518 where a woman started dancing in the streets, eventually drawing out thousands to the streets like the Pied Piper to boogie on down to their deaths. Various theories of the cause of this most recent instance of the mania were presented, most to do with some supernatural being. These beliefs were strengthened by various, probably unconnected events, of which further below.
    +
        Anyway, but the point is that within an evening Boston went from peaceful celebration to a complete hailing shitstorm. The students one by one became psychotic, stopped staring at their hands and each other and climbed out of the water with intent to do grievous physical harm and property damage. Some stayed in the river, fell down into it like an elegant lady faints or the World Trade Center fell into the smoke, and drowned. Some pulled others with them. The crew team was seen scratching and biting each other's eyes out on the gracefully-gliding boat, oars released and flapping tst-tst-tst against the moving river surface. The students that climbed out of the water soon started throwing people in and then running in towards the city like a crazed zombie mob. They trickled down towards Comm Ave through Allston, breaking into the wooden triple decker houses and torching them as they went. The group at Magazine Beach Park crossed the bridge and hurried down the decrepit little steps on its side, the green paint flaking off the metal frame as they thundered past, to Boston University where another mob had just gathered and was currently trashing the law school. They then spilled over to Commonwealth Avenue, smashing in windows, running into their BU dorms and throwing their desks, TVs and anything that came loose out onto the streets. One driver at the Boston University Bridge intersection, seeing incredulous people who had always sort of quietly assumed that being in a car meant safety being violently dragged out of their vehicles in ways that would have spelled rolling heads at Boston's Finest if a news helicopter had been present, panicked and drove ahead hitting one or two of the students before being sideswiped by truck coming from the right. Commonwealth Avenue was quickly blocked by cars, which is when the police, in full riot gear, finally showed up.
    +
The students had not, obviously, been armed in any way when they went to celebrate the mutual capitulation and the end of global hostilities that the Two Prophets had caused. It would have been an utter misreading of the cultural moment to bring anything resembling a weapon to a spontaneous celebration of mysteriously broken-out peace. But by this time the students had been back to their dorms, and had always been equipped with big bottles of alcohol, cigarette lighters and excellent designer t-shirts that could be torn into first class rags, and when the riot-geared Boston's Finest showed up looking insectoidally terrifying, it was more or less interpreted like the arrival of a mass of giant soldier ants, which – in the imagination of a large set of already crazed nervous systems that contained previously compartmentalised imagery like jackbooted, black-overalled fanatics or heavily armoured chitinous alien death squads – really looked like they had come here to kill and enslave, and the sight of the approaching black mass of a police phalanx made legs of broken chairs thrown out dorm windows turn into clubs, vodka and tequila bottles combine with rags and turn into Molotov cocktails and pieces of smashed glass turn into knives. One or two people had handguns, gifts from parents who, though overjoyed that the kid had got into college in America's birthplace, thought it best to equip the beloved with a bit of counter-oomph should the university lefties stage a coup.
    +
The students meant business, and were mysteriously joined by other locals in the mayhem either because the madness was somehow airborne and spread, or because a lot of Boston residents, pissed-off and riotous about the Patriots' recent Super Bowl loss, wanted to take it out on the Boston's Finest. These people were not used to organising other than for sports matches involving a local team, but were very much used to fending for themselves and fighting their corner. They, meaning the Bostonites who had not been affected by the VZ water, became the sort of berserker squads of the rapidly forming student brigade, meaning troops whose purpose was to break the ranks of approaching BF and allow for the (strangely) way, way more organised, VZ-crazed students to punch through in coordinated spearhead formations. Molotov cocktails also flew into the police formations and forced them to disperse, which quickly made the whole BU Commonwealth Avenue area a total chaotic triple Mongolian clusterfuck, where nobody knew who was on what side, tear gas and burning liquid containers were hurled on anyone and everyone and there were no fronts, police or otherwise.
    +
        As it turned out, and this definitely counts in the column of stuff that made people think this whole thing was somehow religious or supernatural, the horrific sheisseparade came to a rolling stop, west to east, along the very same Commonwealth Avenue, by what was described later as a ghost, or wraith, or banshee, an angel of death or, somewhat oddly, Holy Mary. This..., this... woman, who walked calmly in the middle of Commonwealth Avenue, right where the trams would normally go, without looking left or right like she had blinders on, all the way to where Boston Common began.
    +
Nobody saw where she came from. She materialised somewhere around Saint Paul Street station. It was hard to say whether this was actually true, as it either lent credence to, or was the possible cause of, the rumour that she was 'born of the Son of the Cross', a euphemism that people eventually started using out of fear of offending St. Paul, or the Pope. She wore, or more like was clad, in some ethereally torn white gown-and-sheet-ensemble that waved in the wind and was in such tiny shreds that it seemed to blend into the air, or she seemed to somehow gather and take form from the atmosphere, and looked like long hair waving freely under water. Shots rang and people wrestled each other around her, but when she had passed they all fell silent and just stared at the ghost.
    +
There she was, in the streets. Everyone could see her. The sight of her produced abject terror. Grown men and women cowered and fell to their knees. Some begged for her forgiveness as she slowly passed, without seeming so much to walk but more like glide. A strange, high whistling sound emitted from her, like an antique kettle or a group of tribal warriors screaming in the distance that turned everyone's heads and made everyone's tickers jump right up to their throats. They could not see her face, and the whiteness of her figure somehow made people think of or utter the word death, and somehow feel it, fear it, feel their own insignificance at the face of it, and either fall on the ground and look down or to run away. Later, the onlookers more susceptible to external suggestion circulated a rumour that the ground froze beneath her and flames quenched themselves, though this was probably not the case seeing how much work the Boston Fire Department had to do to put down the burning shops. To everyone's increasing horror, she seemed to be carrying something in her arms, something that looked like – oh Jesus – a baby, swaddled and motionless. Nobody needed to confirm this, but just one glance at her made everyone know, know, deep in their bones that the baby just had to be, had to be, dead, and terrifying to look at. Some claimed they had seen it, and that it was bald and blue and withered and just the conceptual opposite of any redemptively good-looking and laughing and cute human newborn. It was like the figure of all your horror movie piss-yourself nightmares had come to life and stepped right out through the screen into real life. The crowds dispersed, people took shelter behind counters and upturned tables of looted shops, and some even jumped into burning buildings and the last that could be seen of their tragic, fiery forms was a posture like a weeping child, kneeling down with face buried in hands.
    +
Nobody followed her to see where she was going, and she disappeared somewhere before Boston Common. She may have walked into the lake with the swan boats, nobody was sure. Rumours abounded.
    +
The sight of the ghost/angel was enough to give everyone (law enforcement and madmen included) an absolute therapy-grade shock that jolted everyone's rugs straight upstairs. There was something about the sound she emitted as well that made it all the more effective. Some people ran away and went home (most of the true crazies), but some people faced up to the daunting process of rehabilitation from the intoxicating and inhibition-varpourising mass hysteria by starting all the way down at level 1 of basic human decency, which in this case meant not just running off but facing up to the collective responsibility and dragging bodies off the streets. The next day everyone was at it: cleaning up, painting store fronts, scrubbing off blood and picking up empty cartridges and so on. Many of the neurally affected students were caught, or just found hunched under showers, and quietly sectioned until someone could work out what had just happened. Incidentally, the investigation of the actual cause of this supposed 'dance mania' never got further than, according to newspaper headlines, 'attempted socialist revolution following international news' and the slightly closer-to-the-mark 'Was it something in the water', the author of the latter headline quickly being moved to the metro section on certain high-ranking state house recommendations.
    +
        But as the night fell, and Commonwealth Avenue's street lights turned on, they could hear the sound again, only clearer and shreakier. A terrifying and off-note howl, like an infinitely elongated hyena laugh, sinusoidally getting stronger and then gradually weaker in a slow cycle. It put everyone on guard.
    +
And there she was, the white figure that was very clearly human-shaped and that very clearly walked (or glided, it was conceded), with what was very clearly a tightly swaddled and terrifying baby in her arms, going west to east in the middle of Commonwealth Avenue. Trams stopped and their drivers ducked under their consoles when they saw her, baby and all. People hurried inside to university buildings, cafes, shops. Cars screeched to a halt upon sight of her, ending up diagonally in the middle of the street, their drivers shooting out and ducking through doors. Some people wet themselves at just the sound. The bravest peeked up to see her, but could only see the hypnotic white ethereal form, looking the way sandy columns that winds sometimes make up seemingly out of nothing sandy anywhere within miles looked. The sight scared the living shisticks out of anyone who looked, and one's eyes' hypnotic and involuntary fixing on the wavy figure gave everyone who had looked the neural heebie jeebies for days to come. In the medium term, some became alcoholics, others swore off booze and started taking long and contemplative walks.
    +
Then she disappeared again, at some point just before Boston Common. Nobody knew where she came from, and nobody knew where she went. People were beginning to fear that she was going to visit them every night, which of course was just what she proceeded to do, without fail, the eerie howl accompanying her approach every sundown, and the people who had expressed such fears aloud went to confessionals, called their parents after long silences, swore to lose weight and started jogging or taking up something they called 'practicing yoga'. Large crowds of people from the greater Boston area started assembling on Commonwealth Avenue just before dark, in the hopes of seeing her and begging for her forgiveness, but the crowds always dispersed in abject terror when she actually came.
    +
Someone set up a gofundme page to make an icon of Holy Mary, who was gaining popular traction as a theory of the white lady's identity (what with the baby and everything), the proposed icon smelted out of the empty cartridges of bullets fired in the riot as a form of symbolic apology. The page quickly made enormous sums of money, and the person who had set it up (who described himself as something called a 'start-up entrepreneur') first paid himself a salary, then paid people rewards on any found cartridges in the Commonwealth Avenue area, then paid a local artist to make the icon, and when after a couple more days of the lady's terrifying visits the gofundme page went absolutely apeshit, he then flew in a team of Russian monks to remake the whole thing, and after all that the rest was dissipated in some unknown expenditures and the start-up entrepreneur unceremoniously wrapped up the whole page having realised in terror that what she, the wraith, was reminding or even punishing Boston's citizenry of/for, might be behaviour precisely like his own. After the icon had been smelted and delivered to where Commonwealth Avenue ended and the Boston Public Garden began, and after the Lady in White had continued to make her nightly visits that by now were really beginning to make everyone in the greater Boston area shit their collective beds and clean up their acts, the young entrepreneur was found having shot himself in one of the swan boats. He was rumoured to have attempted to confront the White Wraith with Terrifying Death Baby and ask her a number of tough questions and to have brought the ordinance for self-defence in case she turned out to be some kind of demon, but once he had actually come face-to-face with her he had, by always second or third hand eyewitness accounts, been either possessed by a malevolent spirit or had some kind of fundamental psychological breakdown so that he suddenly ran over to his swan boat, his eyes totally walled up, his head tilted down into his hands and he just paddled off semi-autonomously, in his slowly sloshing avian paddler, skating on the bottomlessly dark water and him and his bird-shaped vessel fading to black until a brief flash lit up his face and his head fell down unnaturally between his knees. The phone camera footage from the scene, filmed and posted online by hundreds of Bostonites who had braved to witness the encounter and had the wherewithal to turn on their phone cameras when the entrepreneur had got on his swan boat and paddled off, invariably got all shaky at this point as the people filming turned on their heels and ran in total, helpless panic. The following day whole food sales spiked, everyone's aunt finally tried avocado, local salad bars ran out of things to sell and for the first time ever, even the last lone chard in the stalls of East Boston Farmers' Market was sold.
    +
        One witness dropped his phone, whose camera was left just eerily looking up into the darkness for a dramatically exact 10 seconds, until a white, and glowy-eyed, demonic lady appeared to look down on it holding some kind of eyeless swaddled terror worm whose dripping maw was not open side-to-side but top-to-bottom, and who had many rows of nasty teeth like the mouth of a shark, the lady just staring into the camera for a second before the feed cuts off. This made a lot of Boston's Finest simply just pack it in, call in sick or just drop off their gun and badge at the precinct and leave a note saying that as per requirements of Boston cops they were pretty resilient, all things considered, but that they had just about motherfucking had it at demonic worm babies swaddled by undead death angel devil ladies switching iPhones off with nothing but a stern look. Mind you, this was all the same, as Boston's Finest had in fact basically been without a job ever since the Bashee-Wraith-Succubus with horrifying tooth-maw-soul-devourer-infant appeared. When the riot abruptly ended, pretty much all crime had ceased, starting with violent street crime and moving all the way up to white-collar fraud and even tax evasion, and even the most hardened advantage-takers of the chaotic post-mutual-abdication-and-subsequent-crazy-riot Greater Boston started to see the White Lady in their dreams by day three of her appearances. Nobody did anything. Not a child pinched candy, not an unlocked bike was stirred. Medical practices were overrun by marijuana users asking for prescriptions to make it all above board, despite the fact that recreational use had been formally decriminalised for a long while. Even the crazies, some of whom had not been sectioned with the others and were presumably still crazy and definitely still on the loose, stayed deeply incognito. Some voluntarily reported at police stations, and as their last coherent act of a self-conscious human asked to be sent off to an institution before their maddening urge to kill, maim and pillage overcame the last ounce of constraining will they had left in them.
    +
This phenomenon of everyone suddenly behaving as a society of angels and spontaneously coordinating without any state coercion or threat of the same was fortified by the way in which the video – showing the demon lady and her similarly demonic baby – turned out to be a hoax. Nobody had really thought to check this, but one night the person who had edited it – who really had been there to see the young entrepreneur's untimely demise but who had then thought to make himself famous by editing a slenderman-ish pseudo-reality horror show out of the footage he found on his phone when he located it the following morning, having comprehensively lost his shit and legged it when the shot rang on the swan boat – one night that guy also showed up to meet the lady, after days of being so debilitatingly guilt-ridden about his doctoring the video that he had not even had a normal bowel movement since he posted it. He knelt down in the strip of statues where Commonwealth Avenue meets the park's edge. It was impossible to divine any kind of sensible motive behind this, which of course is how people realised the video must have been fake.
    +
The white lady approached him, gliding softly in the middle of Commonwealth Avenue where the statues are, with the strange accompanying wail coming and going like a distant and heavily edited police siren. Little gusts of wind blew her sheet/gown shreds to her sides and then back, making her look much larger than she was, billowing and contracting like a medusa's swim. She was above-and-sidelit by street lights on her way, making her hooded face appear like a black abyss as she walked past the lamp, before her entire figure went dark again. The young man wet himself without realising. She was coming straight towards him.
    +
"I'm sorry!" he started yelling when she was about 20 yards away. "I'm so sorry! Leave me alone please!"
    +
A bystander allowed the obvious thought to glide into his head like the shadow of cloud passing overhead, that if the guy was so intent on being left alone by the wraith, why was he there, right on its nightly glide-path, before banishing the thought for fear that he might be next. But the wraith kept coming, straight towards the man, like he hadn't said a word.
    +
        "Please!"
    +
The man didn't know what to do. He just knelt there and looked without looking, the way you both look and don't look at people's genitals in the gym showers. Lots of people had gathered at the windows of the buildings lining the avenue, but many couldn't see very well because of the trees on the green.
    +
"Please! For God's sake!"
    +
It was uniformly felt that this angered the wraith, and possibly her deep-sea-monster-horror-deathbaby, though nobody could dissect any visually detectable change in her behaviour. Some reported that the air got colder, and everyone felt like something changed, like there was a charge in the atmosphere.
    +
The wraith walked straight toward the young man who was still yelling various apologies, and passed him slowly and sort of rhythmically like a bridal procession without so much as looking at him. Some later said she passed through him, and the internet communities agreed that that definitely constitutes a touch in so far as ghosts and demons are concerned, and many felt that the touch of a ghost, angel of death or a demon of some kind with a real flesh-and-blood –type human entity has all kinds of mythical effects. This went some way towards explaining what happened next, namely that the guy's face, like the previous guy's face come to think of it, totally walled up like a carnivorous plant trying to eat itself, tears fell out of his eyes, fell out, whenever he opened them like he had been pepper sprayed, he curled up on his side on the ground and just wailed and wailed and wailed. Debates were had in overlooking windowed flats about whether the guy had looked up right at her before breaking down. When someone had finally had the guts to look up from having ducked down at the mass-stasis-crushing climax of the guy falling down in tears, the white lady was nowhere to be seen and the guy was clawing his way towards the statue of Alexander Hamilton and, presumably, beyond it to the pond. Some police officers did the first job-relevant thing they had done in a week and rushed over to drag the guy into custody, for his own sake. The following day was the slowest in Boston bakeries' history, as people shunned anything containing gluten or refined sugars.
    +
A lot of the proprietors of the surrounding flats started selling tickets on Airbnb to each night's horror show, treating their flats' windows like boxes at an opera house. Within a day some investment firm had gone around everyone's flat and offered huge and immediate cash sums in exchange for all future ticket earnings, which offers had been accepted by a lot of homeowners, even ones who had not previously thought of selling tickets. Within eyesight of a literal briefcase full of cash that was yours just by uttering a three-letter word, it was hard to read the small print in the contract that put the flat up as collateral. A lot of money changed hands, though most payments were made through crude attempts to hide the payments' origin or ultimate destination out of fear that they would be next in line, on their knees on the terrifying and unchangeable cruise path of the wraith.
    +
The theory most in vogue at this time was that maybe the wraith was not Holy Mary after all, but that she was death incarnate. She didn't seem to care about you at all, no matter how much you feared her or begged her or tried to stop her. She just kept coming, and no amount of pleading had any effect. She also seemed to possess, for some reason, the people who committed greedy and vaguely wrongful acts, showcasing a sort of classical catholic and sort of naive wages-of-sin-are-death-type belief, which realisation upon becoming prevalent two days after the first ticket sales started brought the very lucrative Comm Ave spectator market hurtling down to the metaphorical rocks, and with it down came the ingenious secondary market for future ticket sale income. This was a real head-scratcher for investors who had put a lot of their liquid assets into these, admittedly speculative, investment products and were now expecting to get paid at least something. As these products crashed, the collateral came to be enforced and a lot of quite expensive flats were put on the market simultaneously, which of course crashed their value in turn and started to affect the whole market in Boston. Someone at the very end of the chain was even kicked out of their house, until, it seemed, the wraith had a dream-invading word with the landlord/bank about it the following night and he was quickly let back in.
    +
        As far as market shifts go, this was extremely quick. The whole thing- the enormous upswing when ticket sales were commoditised into an investment product, the gold rush when those investment products were sold to investors who took them on the way fluffy pancakes take syrup, and the dizzyingly spiralling plummet of a downturn when ticket sales dried up, whole upscale Commonwealth Avenue buildings went on the market, house prices crashed – all this happened within a matter of days, which sent shockwaves all around the country. Within three days of plummeting S&P500, it was the investment salesmen on the first day, and then their bosses on the second, and then the actual institutional investors on the third and eventually the CEOs of some S&P500 companies that were all on their knees lining the wraith's path on Commonwealth. They begged and pleaded for her to go away, and to just take whatever infant harbinger of death and doom she carried with her, and to please just leave Boston alone. She was merciless in her ignorance of their pleading, and only kept wailing her eerie and terrifying slow hyena-laugh wail, and always disappeared in some moment when everyone had simultaneously looked down out of terror, or in search of forgiveness, or out of respect. One investment banker in her late thirties, who thought that she had been touched by one of the shreds of the Wraith's clothing, quit her job the next day and went back to her native China to apologise to her mother for never having studied enough in school or for always having seen the violin as a sort of enemy to be conquered rather than a friend to be loved, and generally for having been such a bad daughter to her, and would spend the next three years on various yoga and silent retreats spending the rather immense amounts of cash she had earned as an investment banker, and would finally have a vision that she was to have a baby (which, after a lot of IVF and in utero genetic testing, she would eventually manage to have), which baby – a daughter – she would promptly sign up for Spanish classes and ballet and violin lessons two days after she was born.
    +
The wraith's visits had been going for about two weeks at this point, and the crowd of investment salesmen, bankers and investors was big enough and held such socio-economic sway as to cause more and more people to join them. It wasn't long until one day, most of the adult population of greater Boston would line Commonwealth Avenue, the green between the streets, the two streets of the avenue and even buildings. The bankers were now shuffled into the crowd, the great leveller, and there was no way to pay your way into the front. All of Comm Ave became a traffic-free zone. It didn't matter how expensive your car was or how much money you had. Nothing could move up or down as people stood there in waiting for the White Lady each day. The spectators also crowded the park at the Boston end of Comm Ave and even spilled on to Boston Common. Nobody, not anyone, so much as put a toe on the path going in the middle of Commonwealth avenue, or in any way obstructed the wraith's procession.
    +
She appeared again at Saint Paul, and suddenly was just gliding along her crowd-lined path, accompanied by her ghostly screech. A million pairs of eyes followed her, but dared not look at her directly. Some had phone cameras out, live streaming the event for people at the back who couldn't see otherwise. Nobody said a word. The masses of crowd on her either side had formed a sort of wind tunnel, which made her shredded white form billow and wave even more than usual.
    +
Only the first row or two on either side could kneel, but kneel they did. Others bowed their heads as she passed, and eventually looked up after her. They had almost completely forgotten how this all started. The war was over, unexpectedly and painlessly, and it seemed like there could never be war again. Nobody's son or daughter would be sent off to the meat grinder after this. Nobody would have to go, because nobody would go after what had happened, after what the Two Prophets had done. They, meaning the people of Boston, had forgotten the celebrations that broke out throughout the country, that in Boston ended in terror, violence and fear. Nobody had found out why Boston had to suffer, first the partial loss of its student population and then the terrible fear under this wraith. Nobody remembered it was the wraith who had stopped it all, put a hold on Boston's breakdown until the Two Prophets could make it there, if they ever made it, on their rumoured tour of great American cities. Nobody knew how long this would go on for, but everyone hoped it would be over soon but that it wouldn't end in their deaths.
    +
        Bostonians had their cerebral hands too full with their local, potentially real end of the world to have any more room in their noodlers to noodle about the probably fundamental and coming change of the world as they knew it. It is hard to feel cheery and upbeat about how they weren't all going to die in a fireball of globally escalating use of force when an actual and audiovisually verifiable angel of death was walking, and wailing, among them every night giving everyone the spine-shitting heebiecreeps. One million pairs of eyes followed her, in dead quiet, and two young men pushed their way through Boston Public Garden, onto the clearing on Arlington street and in through the gate to the walkway on Commonwealth Avenue, straight onto her path.
    +
A few thousand people all breathed in at the same time causing a sound like wind through a leafy forest, and then made a little pleased burble at the sound they had all formed together. There was an audible "whoat tha fack" from the crowd, followed by hushes. Who were these idiots? More phones suddenly came out and started filming the whole thing, and tweeting, and live streaming. Everyone was terrified. Were these morons going to fight her? Were they, like, trying to tell her to leave the city alone? Were they some kind of superheroes maybe? What was their deal? Everyone in the crowds behind the first couple of lines got their phones out and found the closest live streaming video footage of what was happening. Everyone was watching, either live with their own eyes or live through a phone screen, everyone in greater Boston, what was about to happen.
    +
Que the high-pitched whistle-whine that, come to think of it, even sounded a bit like the word 'eerie', said slowly at a high pitch – EEEEEE-RIEEEEE – over and over. The watchers didn't know what to do. What if she, like, explodes or something, and there's nowhere to run because the streets are backed up by a million people? Obviously, it would just be those two guys that, like, died or went crazy like the last two times, right? This was it. The dramatic confrontation. The woman, and her swaddled baby in her arms, approached the two men, and the men approached her. The scene vaguely resembled the Nuremberg rallies if everyone at the rally were terrified and not a Nazi. The crowd packed closer and closer, and the people who couldn't see otherwise were glued to their screens. The men stopped just in front of Alexander Hamilton's statue, where the white lady met them and stopped. People around braced themselves for some kind of impact.
    +
"Oh it's you," she said as a sharp sliver of a scream was released from the crowd and then muffled, eyes protruded from heads and jaws took up positions on the ground. "I'm so glad you're here." Her voice was gentle but sad, like a mourning grandmother's.
    +
            The two men looked at each other, and then at her. Her face was tanned, dirty and pockmarked and it had deep lines all across like thin wires had been cutting into her. She was missing teeth.
    +
            "Thank you for bringing all these people here," one of the men said and gently touched his hands to her wrists. The crowd ghasped again. "And for keeping the peace until we got here."
    +
            "I don't know what they want," she said. "I don't know why they come."
    +
            "They come for you," he said. "Why do you come?"
    +
            The other man looked at the swaddled baby in her arms, and looked up at the first man with a slight, concerned frown. The first man gently nodded at him without breaking the friendly arc of his mouth or taking his eyes off the lady.
    +
            "Can I see?" he asked the lady. She opened up the swaddle a little, at which point some people in the audience swore of caffeine and refined oils for good, and a few of the people who felt they spent too much time on Netflix micro-fainted, held up by the crowd's density for a split second, and then recovered. There, in her arms, swaddled in her finest white table cloth, was what was very clearly a shrivelled and dried body of a dog, its eyes closed into lines and mouth frozen in a gentle smile.
    +
            "Buddy," she said slowly, like she had never meant a word more. Tears started to form in her eyes and for a second, the wail reappeared. The dog's paws were pushed to its sides like bird wings, bent at the wrists.
    +
            The first man put an arm on her shoulder.
    +
            "There. I think it's time to let Buddy rest. You've both done well. Buddy has done really well."
    +
            The lady reswaddled the dog, and laid it on the ground by Alexander Hamilton's feet.
    +
            "He came up with all this," she said. "He ought to know."
    +
            "He sure did," the second man said. "And we're here to take it down."
    +
            She looked at him, and nodded.
    +
            "I came here every night to pray to him."
    +
            "You're over two hundred years late."
    +
            "I guess so. I just thought, he must be some kind of god."
    +
            "You'd think that."
    +
            "Yeah. I guess it's time."
    +
            "Where are you staying?" The first man asked her.
    +
            "Nowhere in particular. I sleep at the T in Saint Paul. I try to keep Buddy warm and safe the way he used to keep me, before everyone went crazy."
    +
            The two looked at each other, and millions looked at them. The live streams had, by now, been joined by millions of people throughout the world.
    +
            "We'll find you somewhere to stay. Leave Buddy with us."
    +
            "Okay. I will. I just miss him so much."
    +
            "Buddy needs to rest now. He's been a good boy. He saved the whole city. The best dog in Boston."
    +
            The two men turned, each to face their side of the crowd. One of them spoke:
    +
            "First, who will look after this woman for us? She needs food, and warmth, and a good long bath and probably a doctor."
    +
            A doctor three rows back in the relieved, still crowd put up his hand. A wave of sadness swept them. "I will. I live just over there. I'll look after her for as long as it takes," he said.
    +
            "Good," the first man replied. "Thank you." He turned to the lady, removed her hood to show her graying and frazzled hair. "Okay, this guy is going to look after you for now. Don't steal anything from him and run off, okay? You don't need to. He's there to help. He's not going to hurt you or screw you over. Honestly."
    +
            "Okay, I won't."
    +
The lady walked over to the man, the crowd slowly opened a little corridor and they together walked through it. The two men waited, and the first one started out:
    +
"You might know us as the two prophets. Sorry it took us so long."
    +


Alex


by JosephHAlexander

Down in a dim, low-ceiling church basement, Pastor Randy Smith put down thick printouts on the foldable picnic tables arranged like an angular U, with a whiteboard at the mouth. The seats were plastic and the back rest leaned back an inch too far sort of uncomfortably, but the chairs stacked and were light to move around. He would stand, like he always did. He was a white man, 45 years old, and had a goatee. The top of his head had a spot the size of a silver dollar that was leathery and bare, and the hairline on his forehead was slowly climbing upwards. He was in decently good shape for his age, but already in the kind of wiry old-guy way that, like, fit and tanned 75-years-olds were at country clubs. He was not tanned. He spent a lot of time in the church. In the corner of the room, half hidden by a curtain, there was a white flag with a blue square in the top left, and a red Christian cross on the blue. Next to it was the old USA flag. He still remembered the pledges of allegiance, and hummed them under his breath:I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all;
    +
                                And;
    +
                                I pledge allegiance to the Christian flag, and to the Saviour for whose Kingdom it stands; one Saviour, crucified, risen, and coming again with life and liberty for all who believe.
    +
                                Or, more colloquially stated among friends;
    +
                                I am a Christian, American and Conservative – in that order. Some just tattooed CAC on their shoulders, and some added an initial at the end signifying 'Klan', an attempted reclaiming of an organisation besmirched beyond any hope of unbesmirching.
    +
                                To be accepted, you had know the two pledges of allegiance by heart, and then recite with a papal hand, "I am a Western chauvinist, I defend Judeo-Christian values against Jesuits, the Papacy, Bankers and Gold Gamblers, Communists, Freemasonry, The Bavarian Illuminati and All that seek to undermine and destroy American Capitalism, and I refuse to apologize, ever, for carving out the modern world from barbarian mud". At level two, you had to ceremonially fight (complete with overtly kung-fu-esque movements and postures) ten of your brethren for five minutes, while reciting backwards the five most valuable brands of America's supposed and temporally flexible heyday: Coca Cola, General Electric, Texaco, AT&T, IBM. At level three, you had to get the tattoo. Pastor Randy was level three.
    +
                                The Christian flag wasn't flown much anymore, though the old American flag was still on people's cars, painted on the hood or unfurled on the inside of the rear wind screen. Some people kept a small diagonal pole on their porch and would fly the flag from there. The pledge of allegiance that was now read in schools, sports events and churches was not to the US of A, but to the Union of States of the Coastal Union and Central States of America, a tautologous and indefinite, sort of federal but really more like commercial and definitely financial union of the two mighty countries that had formerly made up the United States of America, before the Great Blunder had necessitated, somehow, its breakup. Pastor Randy wasn't quite sure about how the whole thing worked. He was a man of God, and to him this whole thing was pretty ephemeral and momentary, and the second coming would pretty much wipe its har-mageddony ass with any man-made political unions anyway to make way for a greater Man's Union of the Heart under God. He instructed his kids to do what they must in school, and to be proud of their own country, the god-ordained USCS that, in Randy's opinion, kept the whole union of the two countries standing, on the backs of people like those that the kids he taught in bible class would become. The wads of paper he had curated, printed out and was now handing to each seat detailed how 'we' must become 'soldiers of God'.
    +
                                The kids came in, and sat on the uncomfortably back-tilted plastic chairs, Alex among the first, her large ocean blue eyes looking around Bambi-like, their ovals tilted downwards at the outer corner to make a sort of permanently mildly sad look, but, like, understandingly sad, like she could see your soul's torment, even, or especially, when she smiled. She was tall and slender. Her neck was the neck of godly swans. Her skin was almost porcelain white, except around her face where she had mild freckles, and smooth and perfect that made the eye just glide over it, up to wherever her it finally tucked under clothes, enough to drive any man with, like, even half-functioning eyeballs batshit cray-cray.
    +
        "Okay everybody, settle down now, settle down. Today is a Thursday class, so as you know it's time for sharing your ideas and experiences about Jesus and God, or you can ask questions. If nobody has anything I've got a normal class sheet that I've put out in front of you, there. So everything you need is right in front of you, unless you want to ask a question."
    +
Some students turned around their sheets, and saw the title of 'God's warriors' displayed there. This made everyone quickly scramble for questions, for conditioned fear of another one of Pastor Randy's sort of militant lectures about 'taking up arms with your soul' and so on. The man did have an encyclopaedic knowledge of Scripture and could conjure up a passage to back up just about any point he was making, so the students never exactly felt like they were being led astray with any of this warrior stuff, but they also didn't really want to think about taking up arms, and what and whom those arms might be aimed at, except of course Reagan who was a bit of a special case and, just like his former marine dad, pretty bananas about the shape, feel, heft and firing rate of all kinds of arms.
    +
"I'm okay with you doing the talking," said Reagan.
    +
"I had a question," volunteered one kid, Lee, much to everyone's relief except Reagan's.
    +
"Fire away" said Pastor Randy with an encouraging sideways head movement that was like the single headshake of a firm 'no' and the down-to-up reverse of a single firm nod of a 'yes' simultaneously, sort of Jim Carreyish and comical, like he was emerging from under a tiny tree branch, a movement that signalled his becoming more relaxed in front of the kids.
    +
"Yeah, so, what it is, I guess, is about... Last week we talked about predestination and I guess I don't really understand it. Like, I have to believe in God, and that, but also everything is part of his plan, so isn't my belief in him also part of his plan? So, like, if I didn't believe in God, isn't that just part of his plan too? Like what he wants me to do at that point, so that he can get some kind of big plan off the ground? So do I really believe in him, or is he just making me believe in him?"
    +
Randy looked down for a split second, no more. "Romans, 8:29 and 30. Let's open our Bibles, who would like to read? Braden? Alex?"
    +
This didn't come off to the kids as playing for time, though internally Pastor Randy was about as confident about being able analytically to break this paradox as he was about Reagan's dad's ability to keep the conversation light and apolitical at the next men's breakfast, a monthly gathering of their church.
    +
Alex took a moment to find the relevant chapter and verse, and read: "For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified."
    +
"Yeah, but what does that mean though?"
    +
"Well it's a doctrine of election," PR said, as his stock response. "you don't have to accept it and you still get to go to heaven."
    +
This gets some of the students to laugh. PR, grateful, continued.
    +
"What it is, is that God, being almighty, has predestined...," he stopped to write 'PREDESTINED' on the whiteboard behind him, "Predestined – see? – that some people get to go to heaven. They will be saved. God chooses who gets to be saved," another pause to draw the two parallel lines of an 'is equal to' symbol, "I mean it can't be any other way, because God is sovereign. God decides everything."
    +
PR wrote 'PREDETERMINED' after the equal sign, and looked at the kids with a pleased look on his face.
    +
The students looked around, inspired by the confidence if not the actual words. But the kid, Lee, much to PR's internal sense of just bursting hot hostility, kept at it like he hadn't said anything.
    +
        "So, I'm saved if God decides I'm saved?" Lee continued.
    +
Pastor Randy was beginning to think he would need more than one key for this.
    +
Before he could think what to say, the question had begat more questions: "But it's belief in God that saves me. And if so, then why do I get to go to heaven and why do some people not get to go to heaven? Like, wouldn't God want to choose that everyone is saved? If I were God, wouldn't I want everyone to believe in me and in Jesus and be saved? Who would go to hell if God decides they go to hell? Like, why would God decide that some people sin?"
    +
This struck a deep chord that made everyone uncomfortable. The unspoken assumption had always been that God is not only omniscient, but that he is looking out for you, and looking out for you, as in the specific you, the you that is a protagonist to whom all the stuff happens but happens for a reason. God is out there helping you get to your goals and if there are harsh lessons you must learn along the way to become the you that you must become, then so be it, God doesn't care about you-the-person, whom He'll happily put through all kinds of shit if lessons need to be given, but does care, deeply, about you-the-protagonist whose plot it is and who'll see the point of the whole thing at the end and realise that what just seemed at the time like pointless problems were, in fact, Trials and Tribulations of the Great You, meaning the stuff you had to get through to really become the superhero Christian you were always meant to become and would not have become without all those trials and tribulations which now in hindsight look like really awesome trials and tribulations, so gee, thanks God, you really were looking out for me and gave me just what I needed to fulfil my dreams even if I didn't always realise it at the time! It was a benevolent schizophrenia. But what Lee had inadvertently laid bare was that there was a scripturally coherent possibility that even though God exists, you aren't the protagonist in His plot. You may be a side character, or a plot device, or a comic relief or something, in someone else's plot, and God might not be secretly helping you get famous for your piety and righteousness and exceptionally great prayers but he might be helping someone else, like Reagan, who sure could stand to learn a few lessons if lessons need be learned, just a suggestion, though if he doesn't then let that be a lesson to the rest of us that we don't get to decide when lessons are in need of learning and that is perhaps the greatest lesson of all, if you think about it.
    +
But anyway, here was Lee, implicitly suggesting that maybe God didn't want some people to have any point in their life or to get to heaven where they'll see what it all was about. The thought was creeping up the collective cerebral ladder in the room, but as the class's participants were between the ages of 13 and 18 it was struggling to find adequate verbal form (or even like grammatical structures or even contentless buzzwords) to express.
    +
"Oh SHUT UP!" a lot of the other kids cried out.
    +
"God doesn't like sin, does he?"
    +
"No, let him speak," PR said with ostentatious grace and a Papal hand motion. "Thursdays are for questions. He has a question. Good. So, Lee, it is because of free will. If everyone went to heaven, it would mean that everyone is good. That means everyone does good deeds all the time, but that would mean nobody has free will because God just commands them to do good deeds all the time. But like I said, it's a doctrine of election. God doesn't require you to adopt the doctrine of predestination. You still get to go to heaven if you don't, it's actually there in the doctrine of predestination itself. Some people get chosen, but others can still go to heaven."
    +
"But, doesn't that mean free will is, like, more important than good deeds, if God would rather want us to have free will than to all go to heaven? And what about the predestined people, do they not have free will?"
    +
        Other kids broke in.
    +
"Because you need free will to be saved. You need to choose Jesus."
    +
"But why though? Can't God just make me choose Jesus? God wants good, and he's all powerful and sovereign, but if I or someone chooses not to let Jesus in then how can God be all-powerful and sovereign? Didn't God want that person? Doesn't God want everyone to be saved? I just don't understand it."
    +
Kids were looking around confusedly. Braden, a boy of maybe 14 and Alex's little brother, piped up.
    +
"I got a story about this," he said. Braden was a good kid, but no Alex, and not the most luminescent gaseous sphere in the group's intellectual galaxy. He had already gone on his first hunt, so he attended Men's Breakfast now, which was apt to start irritating Pastor Randy as soon as he was done with being irritated at Reagan, who had also joined this fall. Some 'men' were never men, and Pastor Randy didn't have high hopes for either.
    +
"Go on Braden," he said, dreading what was coming.
    +
"Well what it is is these three guys in a bar."
    +
Pastor Randy liked the way this started. Three was always a good number for a nice illustrative story of God's grace. And a bar, a little conventional, but maybe a sort of modern take on 'den of sin'. Maybe one of them turns out to be Jesus.
    +
"And one of them sits at the bar, and orders three whiskeys but, like, drinks them by himself and –oh, the bar is in like a skyscraper like in the big cities-"
    +
There was an audible shudder from many of the kids at this detail.
    +
"Typical!" one shouted.
    +
Pastor Randy was starting mentally to add appendices to the phrase 'there are no stupid questions'.
    +
"So anyway, the bar is in a skyscraper, and the first guy drinks the whiskeys and jumps out the window, like, a hundred storeys high and stuff. The two other guys are horrified, and run up to the window and look down, but they can't see him down there. They go over to the bartender and just as they are about to ask him to call the police, the first guy walks in from the door and sits down again."
    +
"What?" one of the other kids asked. "Was that it?"
    +
"No, numbskull. Just wait."
    +
"Braden, we shouldn't call each other names."
    +
"Okay sorry Pastor Randy. Anyway, the guy sits down, drinks three more whiskeys and jumps out, and comes back in and sits down, and does it a few times, and then the two other guys are like 'how do you do that? That is amazing!' and the first guy goes, 'easy, I'm a devout Christian and my faith in God is so great that he saves me every time I jump, and pushes me through an open window a few floors down. The only problem is I need a bit of Dutch courage before I can make the jump."
    +
"That's not how it works," exclaimed another kid. "First, God doesn't save you if you test him, everyone knows that, like, he didn't stop me when I intentionally tilted the chair backwards and then fell, because God doesn't just help you because you test him. And if he had such faith in God how come he needed the whiskey to make the jump?"
    +
"I'd make the jump on my faith alone," one kid said.
    +
Pastor Randy exhaled audibly, and decided to let this run its course on nothing but the kids' own ecclesiastical steam.
    +
"SHUT UP you wiener. Let him tell the story." It was unclear who had said this, so Pastor Randy just turned quickly to glance around the room in what he tried to make a mildly menacing look, like a mobster in a movie, which was tough to make really stinging without the background music.
    +
        "So the other guy went, 'really? God just saves you if you jump out? I'm a devout Christian, I'm going to try it. 'Go ahead!' Said the first guy. So the second guy jumps out, and a few minutes later comes back up to the bar and sits down. 'It worked! God is great, he saved me because I believed!' So the third guy, oh, he's an atheist, says 'I don't think so. I think it's just an air vortex that pushes you back in. It's all science. Here, I'll prove it to you.' The third guy then goes out, jumps out and goes SPLAT on the sidewalk. 'He didn't have the faith,' the first guy says, drinks three whiskeys and jumps out again and comes back up on the elevator and sits down. The second guy, the Christian, says 'I'll help you kick that habit, brother. You don't need alcohol to make the jump, just the faith you have in God almighty is enough. Didn't you see? He saved me and I haven't had a drop.' The first guy goes 'oh yeah? But I'm scared, you see. I have faith in God, I just need a bit to make the jump. When I fall, I pray and then I'm saved.' The second guy goes, 'Look!' and jumps out the window, and goes SPLAT on the sidewalk next to the other guy."
    +
"Oh my goodness!" came the spontaneous exclamation of Cammy, a 13-year-old and precociously artsy photography girl who mostly took black and white pictures of Alex that were rabidly popular even among surprisingly old male parishioners. Pastor Randy was holding his head in his hands. Braden was unfazed, and continued, his voice suddenly wavering with emotion:
    +
 "The bartender looks at the first guy and says-"
    +
Braden choked and gathered himself. The reaction was so sudden and confusing that Pastor Randy had to look up to make sure Braden wasn't literally choking.
    +
"He said, 'God, you're a nasty drunk.'"
    +
The double entendre took a while to land with the other kids. Pastor Randy had almost managed to jump in to stop the whole, obviously, bar room joke before it had got to its punchline, but he had been empathetically one-two-ed into the briefest moment confusion by Braden's clearly sincere emotion and welling up in his telling of a – once again – obvious joke where God was going to be very much at the butt end of the joke, pretty sure constituting taking the Lord's name in vain by the way, while his, the Pastor's, neural circuitry had tried to compute what sincere interpretation the coming punchline had come to have in Braden's hormonally souped-up teenage brain and whether and how it could be used to lead the discussion on into something more meaningful. Here Pastor Randy had decidedly dropped the doctrinal ball and would have to spend bladder-testingly considerable amounts of subtle-nudge-time directing the discussion back to where he'd wanted it to go, the children's future duties as soldiers of God. If only this was like the summer camp where they could just play some music and make the kids dance for a bit to rasa their tabulas whenever the children's 'guided discovery' went seriously off-piste, message-wise, but those techniques didn't work unless the crowd was way bigger. At least the children, still more interested in themselves, hadn't noticed his short hesitation, during which he had lost whatever remaining tip-of-his-fingernails-grip he had still had on the conversational conch.
    +
"Wait, you mean, the first guy was... God?"
    +
"Yeah. He was testing their faith. The first guy was an unbeliever, so he wasn't saved. He believed in natural forces over God, and those natural forces do not come to your aid when you need them. The second guy was a believer, so he was assured by God that he would save him, like that he would get to heaven, and in the end he did."
    +
"I wish I was in heaven," one little girl said. "I'm jealous of my grandma because she gets to be with Jesus."
    +
"You mean envious," a kid that was possibly Lee volunteered.
    +
"But the real lesson is the bartender, he doesn't know or realise that what God has just done is shown grace to the second guy, meaning the second guy was one of the chosen ones. See, the message is in the guy you're not seeing in the story, the fourth guy that's there to see the whole thing from start to finish. Here he is, the bartender, and God – and he knows it's God – has just sent a true believer up to heaven, and all he thinks is it's God being somehow 'nasty' and 'drunk', but he's really just saving one and not saving the other. He gave both of them the same choice, and they both took it, the only difference was that one of them believed and the other one didn't. So that one was chosen to go to heaven. He wasn't mean, God I mean, He didn't owe anything to the atheist guy. The atheist guy made his own choice. You know? It's about choice. The bartender doesn't understand that, so he doesn't understand God."
    +
"I don't think that explained anything," said Lee.
    +
Thank God there was the ceremony this weekend, Pastor Randy thought. He could show Pastor Levi, the big church- no, Central States, superstar. Nobody gave a sermon like Pastor Levi Vaartvader. He could show him Alex. Alex the obedient. Alex the meek. Alex the lovely, angelic, pure. He looked over at Alex, with her swan-like neck bent down with her eyes resting elegantly on her notes, as the theological debate among the kids was starting to catch fire. Thank God for the ceremony.
    +
Alex hadn't moved, and was just looking down at her notes, the whole time.
    +