The Rapture: Australia Undone

  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...

  They came awake all over the world for one reason: the stakes were high enough. The End of the American Empire was creating chaos around the globe. And those old voices, "we come at the end of the Empire", once again appeared. The Time Lords were preparing the ground in front of them. Reaching out, those of like-mind, or those pretending to be of like-mind, hovered at the realms of possibility, there in those dank decaying villages and those destroyed societies. "They did a good job with the vaccines," Michael commented, as the talked about the zombie state of the population; and those stumbling, overweight, poorly dressed individuals who had no idea what was happening to them. Far away, on the other side of the globe, the possibility of a nuclear war, long the stuff of fiction and fantasy, had become a real thing. Were they crazy enough? Were the Americans really that crazy? Were the forces of darkness and the MK Ultra style mind control of their leaders powerful...

  The spirit moved through the sword grass. It was meant to be a surprise party. Instead their battered schemes filtered into the walls and backfired; and the country as a whole, it just teetered on the edge, led by incompetents so grandiose and so sheltered from the consequences of it all they defied imagination. They had no conscience. They had no idea how truly stupid they were. He was gathering strength. There was a window and a consequence; and in that battered, mildewed light the last vestiges of humanity stood firm. We stood tall. We stared them in the face. They were of no consequence. The wheels of history, sweeping, grand, powerful beyond human comprehension, all of them swirled accoss the planet surface, lifting those pooled images of prehistoric eras as dionsaurs grazed on the rich, flood lit plains.  If Albanese was a dart board he would be full of holes, so many people wanted to have a go at him, so many people were infuriated by the collapse of the country, thei...

  They lied, people died. Australia lived in the aftermath of the greatest globalist and corporate disaster in its history, the living wreckage jerking along on the footpaths, the sad wreckage of a once fit and optimistic country now the living dead. All of those horror zombies, once humans, would be gone within a few years.  And our not just compliant but actively complicit politicians in this own version of genocide. Nasty, it was truly nasty. They continued to pretend that nothing had happened. While high above circling black wings glinted in the quasi-light. Be afraid. Be very afraid. We are dangerous now, they said.  While Old Alex watched in awe and wonder at the arrival of the Time Lords, while elsewhere, far across the oceans, other parts of this matrix, for we are the good, had been busy in the greatest combat zone in hstory. War and the rumours of wars; so it had come to pass.  And now, a defeated people, a defeated slow-massacred population, could not find...

  It was a stupid arrangement all along. He had set the trap long ago; and now it had reached full circle, those hungry worms and vicious teeth hanging from the cave ceiling, those tendrils of venom which made it unsafe for anyone to come near him. Fly fishing across the fate lines, the difficult precision required their full concentration, even at their level of cognition.  This country, bound for hell. The old Australia, disintegrating in front of their eyes. The treachery, deceit and dishonesty which lay all about, the reason for their urgency to get back into the house, their embarrassment in front of their bosses, that they had tried to kill him in such a base and lame way. He knew they were after him. No, it wasn't paranoia. They, too, could fly fish the fate lines and see what lay ahead. The City at the End of Time. The Country at the End of Time. The Species at the End of Their Time.  All of it echoed, the chanting, the deceit, the temples in which those withered ...

  We come from the future to tell you: all is not safe. Your country has been betrayed, you have been betrayed. All is not safe.  They tell you you are loved, but it is a miasma of faith and deception.  The leaders of your country are tantamount to evil. Resident Evil. Another movie of the moment.  The mood of the country had fallen off a cliff; for anyone who chose to care, or the few who chose to care. They shuffled through the miasmas of their local malls, washed, stripped, of all colour. Human companionship had been abolished.  A fit, handsome man stood there; they both knew who each other was, although they had never met.  There was a fog in the air. The mists were more veils than condensation. He left a record, but he did not know for what purpose.  They found him here, and they knew what had to be done. Do not approach. Beware. For they will kill any attacker in a flash, and not care. Because caring was not in their nature. Luckily for them, the...