The Rapture: Australia Undone

  Appear far when you are near, appear near when you are far. There wasn't any doubt now that they were in a war zone. And the Art of War was as helpful a guide as any written in human history. There was the clash of swords, the arguments behind the scenes, the desperate attempt to cover their tracks, the groaning bureaucracies, all based on deceits, the lazy, defeated, purposeless population, and idiot wars far off. Once again all the old truths came true: you can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all the people all the time. The Other Side Goes Belly Up. The extreme, indeed one could say extraordinary, manipulation of the public narrative by the government and its many agencies, most of them either incompetent or totalitarian in nature, distrustful of the general population and desperate to hide their own lies. For no one likes to be caught in a lie.  All the old truths came back. The ground was well prepared. What could be seen and not seen. What ...

  After a brief few days of summer warmth, the cold gripped them again. They were surrounded by fraud. A disillusioned population was limping past the goal post, although there was no goal post. There was nothing but those abandoned buildings on the outskirts of the village, a miasma of indulgence and despair. The authorities had pepper sprayed the population with meth amphetamines, sourced from the Chinese. The betrayal was so absolute future historians would struggle to make sense of it, in those days before cybernetic and genetic enhancement became the norm.  They were fascinated, just as humans of the 20th and 21st Centuries had been fascinated by their predecessors, before the wide adoption of electricity changed everything.  As if they had discovered a sole surviving tribe of Neanderthals deep within the highest, most remote valleys of some future kingdom. The white cranes rose from an ancient swamp, the predecessors to birds flew high over the rich planes, and thes...

  That strange coven. I hate to tell you but you've been compromised. He had fled so often into the undergrowth, into the leaf litter, that it had become a way of life. But you didn't know, and he didn't know, the time of choosing. And so it was that they rose up in a single unified moment which defied all of previous history. For no one knows the time and the place.  He was insulated and could hear all too many things. My team, my team, I need to justify this to my team, and my bosses, the bureaucrats and parasites and transcendental wonders who had settled, or were settling, on this place. It was all very strange; yet he knew.  The symbols, or the symbology, had become very confused. The population was dying, poisoned by air, by sea, by water, in their food and in their soil, eradicated, mercifully, some would say, eradicated for good. Those futures that played god, those entities which wished to know the secrets to allmighty power, they were not to be trusted under any...

  With great power comes great responsibility, they repeated over and over again. He was clear now, the deal. He wanted none of them, their treachery, their outright deceit, their blatant lies, their manipulations, their craven attempts to please their idiot bosses. None of it. Why would anyone surrender to their web? Why would anyone surrender their own humanity, if that was what it was called. He had rarely been human, but at least he did not lie. This litter on the forest floor. These debased excuses for sentience. These craven, ape-like forms.  Descended from monkeys, he heard them say; as the giant passage, the swirl of millions of entities, the city that moved across time and space, the geospatial, other-worldly phenomen. On the outskirts of the village the gallows were being hung. He knew, exactly, what had happened to them all, those who betrayed him, those who kissed the garment's trim and then turned and betrayed him to their own masters. He knew how shallow, how dec...

  Throughout history various sages and prophets had predicted this as the so-called End of Days. It was certainly the end of something and the beginning of something entirely different. It was entirely unclear, inside a human, with their limited capacity for reason and their limited intellects, to tell exactly what that was; gripped as we all were by strange forces.  Saints and sages babbled across the globe; while wars and the rumours of wars were the daily fodder of the headlines, and an escalating fear that human civilisation itself now faced an existential threat, that they would survive, as he believed, only in remote valleys in the Himalayas, far from the daily threats of civilisation. Here in Australia, the utter and complete betrayal of the population by its leaders was now clearly understood by a significant section of the population. Parasites they were, our so-called leaders, leaching money off the struggling muddling middle classes, hoovering every spare dollar the...

  What makes this era feel especially mad is the mismatch. The weapons are industrial and precise; the politics are still honour, fear, and faction. People far from the front can watch it in high definition and still have almost no say. That gap—between how cheap it is to see the wreckage and how hard it is to stop the machine—is a lot of the nausea. I don’t have a tidy moral formula that dissolves all three at once. The least dishonest stance is to treat each as a specific failure of off-ramps, not as a single morality play, and to notice how often “we had no choice” is the story told after the choice was already made. Adapted from a conversation with Grok. The parasites fled into the rotting buildings at the outskirts of the abandoned village. We were here and you are where you are. There was nowhere for them to hide. The internet, those ancient eyes, had recorded everything.  They were so naive, so impoverished, and so spectacularly unintelligent, these humans they had been...

Those whom the Gods destroy they first drive crazy, as the old saying goes. Or, defy the Gods and we will see what happens. The West, their role model, the United States; mad Trump, a tireless Iran War, a weary population, here in the Great Southern Land, where the usual suspects declared the winter just gone as the hottest on record, yeah, right, as if anyone believed the climate hysterics anymore.  "We're between two ice ages," he would shrug. "It's all going to look bloody silly under 60 feet of ice." Survival. It came down to survival. The ancients stirred and had seen so many things. We come. We stay for a while. We move on. The emissaries of the Time Lords continued to prepare the ground.  Everywhere he went, the local cafes, a government funded restaurant employing the disabled, at vast expense and with a welter of paperwork, the same words, or similar, came out: "The country's fucked." It was true. The traditional cheerful optimism of A...

  The ever shrinking Albo had become the subject of ridicule across Australia. The left was in disarray, their big fat white hero spurting lies about mass immigration, climate change and gender politics, having failed to find a public following. Instead, they could smell the grubby accretions between his rolls of fat, his alcohol besieged liver, his dank breath, his disgusting personality. They could smell it all. They could spot a phony a mile off; that was ingrained in the Australian psyche. Step one in any new encounter: prove you're not a wanker. Faced with plumetting standards of living, the population had turned en masse. And those who dared to point out the bleeding obvious, their treachery, their dishonesty, their blatant lies and their idiot scripts, they were targeted. If you had an old male friend who you knew had had struggles with the meth pipe a decade before, ending up in a foreign hospital, if you knew your 74-year-old friend had been struggling with high blood pres...

  They were utterly corrupt. They were liars, first and foremost, caught in a trap of their own making, their web of lies.  And so he backed away, and let the ancient spirits take care of the mess. The perimeters of the encampment were being established. And anyone who crossed those barriers would pay dearly for their naievty, their foolishness, their brash belief in their own power. Ask others who had gone before. Had anything in their lives ever gone right again. Of course not. The babbling brook of millions of entities settling in these hills and valleys; the Time Lords still far off, but approaching, and he simply went about his work. In the Beginning was the Word and the Word was God. Australia, well the old Australia, was under direct seige. The economic collapse, engineered by the vicious fools who ruled them, the obsequious, talentless, overweight products of their own low moral standards, their diminished brain power, their foolishness in having believed their own nar...