LERISTORY -- Episode 15
"pro-apoc"
Darren BaulerNobody knows this but the involved party and his dentist (who was sworn to secrecy by fear of humiliation, shame, public agony, credit nullification, cosmetic disfigurement, sterility, male pattern baldness and eventual, prolonged death), but General Moore has a quotation tatooed across the inside of his upper lip, which reads
"Do not expect too much from the end of the world."Details like this become amusing in a universe post-mortem.
Purposes take on interesting hues. Humanity: failed prototypes, recording angels, sexual organs for a machine phylum, bad joke? Aleph: universal mind lattice, grand universal theory, the final assimilation, bad joke? If there was no end of the world, as the ancient joke goes, we would have to make one up.
If we were really bored, we might even go through with it.
There was always a time better than this time. At some point in the past, you were happy, and now you're not, and you're never going to be that happy again. Unless. Unless you come crawling, unless you beg for it, and then I can givce you the past again, and again, and again until you're so utterly fucking fried you don't have the brains I gave a rock. This is the call of The Recording Angel.
There was always a time better than this time. At some point in the past, you were happy, and now you're not, and you're never going to be that happy again. So let's just call the whole thing off. This is the call of The Annihilating Angel.
The Manifestation of The Aleph throughout the other vats was quick and, in a way, quite beautiful. Here on earth7623476357, however, The Aleph calls to us, and it says You Have Taken Too Much Time, Too Much Space, Too Much Reality.
And now, you fucking pigs, you will Give It All Back.
- General Moore begins to notice a tic in his right eye about the time Lieutenant Juxlus comes in.
"Ring-Tailed-Jesus-Fucking-Christ[tm], what the -" Moore sputters.
"Let me stop you right there. First, pull that trademark off. We've had to abandon any attempt to enforce copyright now that the Home Office has been destoryed."
"Destoryed? WHAT?"
"Sorry, sir. I mean destroyed."
"Destroyed? What? Fuckers! I'll see every last one of these nematodes hang from The Gallows-"
"Gone. As of 23:47:19. That's what I'm here to tell you -- while you were playing The Fuck You Game with your friend Veronica Jones, our instillations across the galaxy were blinking out like christmas lights. We've put the remaining ones on Full Alert; hopefully we can get some insight as to what's going on."
"Run me the simulation where this happens! There have to be strategies to put into effect!"
"...And that's the other thing, General. The tapes are decaying. We're losing past simulations at an exponential rate. Right now, unless something changes, our entire catalog of TapeL00ps will be gone within thirteen minutes."
General Moore began to feel The Fear soming on.
There is a Yndr'thian myth which says, roughly, that God is a weapon, and it is up to the Yndr'thian people to disarm it before they run out of time. As a collective, this myth has been lost -- they're all too junked out on TapeL00ps to bother with such things.
There is a Inter.Loper myth which says, roughly, that something exists only as long as it is remembered, that "heaven" is a place called The Land of the Remembered, and once a person is lost to history, they are thrown from this "heaven" into nothingness. Thus, the more legendary a person's life is, the more time they spend in "heaven". As a collective, this myth has been lost -- they're all too busy thinking about The Movement to remember old stories.
They're all dead now, so I guess heaven is empty. Aleph has seen to that.
"THE OVERSEERS! GET ME THE OVERSEERS!!!" General Moore screams between sobs.
"Don't bother. They've gone quite mad, with whatever happened down at the vats and all. They've probably killed each other. There seems to be a lot of that going around."
"RELEASE THE NANOVIRUS!!!"
"But sir, we did that already -"
"DO IT AGAIN!" Genreal Moore spits from between clenched teeth as the lights on his Great Big Strategic Map continue to go out.
"This is Fortress #947, Sir. Right now, everything's fine; there's been some squabbling out by the lines but --" (static)
"Lights, sir, lights in the sky, are there supposed to be ships coming in? I don't remember --" (static)
"This is The TapeL00p vats, General. I've killed the others. They wouldn't let you see what was happening. They were hoarding realities. But not me! I'm true blue, all the way behind --" (static)
There was only one light left on the map.
There's a human myth that used to be quite the big deal called the christian god. What this god did was conquer. it would not rest until everything in its wake was beneath its power. Serving as a kind of plague, it infected the people of earth for nearly two thousand years, mutating to adapt itself to the times and sensibility of its hosts. humans wanted to be like their god, and thus conquered. We, in imitation of our god, wanted to turn the rest of the universe into us. We gave it a good try. But in the end, as in all endings, we had to Give It All Back.
Nothing is alien in heaven.
The Aleph watched the last light go out, and smiled.
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