The Rapture: Australia Undone

  Everywhere but this quiet place was in chaos, it sometimes felt. With the constant news of thousands, or tens of thousands, killed in Iran. Of the violent clashes on the streets of Sydney with pro-Palestinian marches and footage of police punching and abusing protestors.  In those heightened scenes, familiar to anti-vaxxers and anti-lockdown protestors but essentially unfamiliar to the left, whose protests, on climate change or racism, normally jelled perfectly with government agendas and provided a  cause célèbre   to push their laws through parliament. Even then. Even now. The wind whipping up a disturbance. The police repeatedly bashing prone protestors, pepper spraying people straight in the face, doing the bidding of a government doing the bidding of a Jewish lobby, and the government generated notion of social cohesion smashed into the concrete.  Social cohesion: Nothing could be further from the truth. Riven from one end to the other with mass migration...

  All sides talked of God, but they couldn't all be right, could they? There were demonic signs everywhere, and signs of institutional and societal collapse.  We, that is the country, the dispirited, unhealthy, defeated population filling the malls with their pointless purchases and inane conversations. He just stared, a lot, at the size of them, the degree of obvious ill health. The charlatans in government chanted "Keeping Australians safe"; but they weren't doing anything of the kind. The ancient wars of the Middle East were spread all over the news. And people who couldn't care less whether their neighbours lived or died chanted passionately, from the river to the sea, although many could not name either the river or the sea.  Caught up in the visible horrors of Gaza, unforgiveable as Tucker put it, the government's blatant disregard for truth, or their own part in it, supplying high tech weaponry components to kill people, Palestinians on behalf of Israel...

  They had already fled, their dreams to nought, their schemes unfulfilled. Having been treated as just another resource, the DNA and its secrets harvested for their own use, they fled clutching their prizes and mumbling their discontents, at his concealment, their own crumbling edifices, and the world moved on. Day by terrible day, those days, when everything was on a pivot and the elites were upgrading themselves and Designer DNA became a real thing for the super rich. The rest? There was a reason they were happy to slaughter the herd. What happened here? What happened to these people? He watched obscenely overweight women walk on their stumps of fat. He watched men, almost all of them overweight. While he felt the weight of history; and of a lonely soul working through the night in a giant, empty warehouse, the only one there, the only one awake on the entire block, in that cluttered warehouse in the centre of Darlinghurst, now a block of apartments, then a golden opportunity. S...