The Rapture: Australia Undone

  He had begun to swarm, a condition he had avoided for much of his life for the simple fact that it was so frightening.  But here it was. And here we were. ' "We've always been so lucky," he thought, and shortly afterwards won $133 at the local club where they had stopped for lunch, Renmark in South Australia, if he had got that right. The exact same number as a house where he had grown up on the then remote northern beaches, surrounded by towering gums and swooping kookaburras and koalas hanging undisturbed in the giant trees.  They tried four different EV chargers before finally finding one that worked.  The people so busily destroying the country were in hiding, or retreat. Everything they had said to get into power had proved to be a lie. At the cost of billions, they were creating an energy crisis which would propel the country to that edge between civilisation and chaos. Just turn off the lights and see what happens. Three days to riots and pillaging.  Th...

  Ciu bono? Who benefits? The game was rigged, and not for our benefit.  They leapt off cliffs; they soared in the fetid air. Everything was overheating. They lived in tremulous, tumultuous times. Humans were a flick in the history of the world.  Everyone knew. No one explained to the herd what was happening to them. We lived, well, they lived, in a kind of peaceful, guttered, narrow range of options, and had no idea of the world that swirled around them; pinned to a time and place as if it mattered.  No one informed them of the truth. This realm, this not very tidy realm, was in an upheaval unlike any in its long history; and the humans of that era, some knew of the cataclysm about to overtake them, but many did not.  We lived tiny lives. We paid onerous taxes. We struggled even to maintain a lower working class style of living; for everything now cost a fortune, and those who had engineered this recession moving rapidly into another Great Depression, those ign...

  Negotiating that period of turbulence had been beyond difficult for the time lords; and the streams of turbulence that swarmed past the house and around the world, that, too, in this difficult epoch was something hard to fathom. That we were here, these biological weapons brought to life, but how it could be, that something they did now would alter the future, but that future hadn't yet happened, so how could we be here. All those old time paradoxes. Not that it mattered much, in the comparatively brief history of this species. The cities rained fire down upon the last remaining humans, in those villages which had been protected, at that point, in their environmental domes, for generations, indeed for centuries. It was a classic time skip, this time across two sections of two centuries each, to a point 400 years in the future when a distressed priest in a temple next to the last preserved stand of ancient forest anywhere on this section of the coast, where the ancients could stil...

  Indeed, there was turbulence. And Australians, typically resilient and typically cheerful, had turned on a dime. The Prime Minister Anthony Albanese had become the most hated Prime Minister in Australian history. And at one gathering after another, they were all voting for Pauline. The Outsider. The renegade. The one who had never changed her stance. Remarkably, Pauline Hanson was now the most popular politician in the country. All the old shibboleths, all the old ways of thinking, had turned on a dime. The ceaseless multi-billion dollar pro-multicultural propaganda which had rained down on the population for decades was now seen as nothing but traitorous. And now the greatest traitor of them all, Albanese himself, was pilloried and despised from one end of the country to the other. By one of those coincidences of fate and history, Old Alex knew his speech writer, or at least one of them, and wondered, sometimes, how he was going.  All that posturing, all that fleeing to the...

  Cheers and jeers. One crowded hour. The mood of the country had shifted downhill at remarkable pace. On the way back from putting his car in the garage he stopped at the coffee van. With is head swirling, Old Alex needed to sit down for a moment. He ordered a mixed juice, lichee and orange, some modern concoction, and complained about the price of absolutely everything when the bill was more than $8 for something that would have been circa $4 or $5 only a short couple of years ago. "I never understood why everybody hated politicians so much until I had my own business," the young woman behind the counter said, while making what had become the a typical sarcastic, dismissive comment about Albo, the Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, being in all their pockets.  "He's got his fingers in everything," Old Alex responded. "I hated Scott Morrison and Malcolm Turnbull, but Albo takes the cake. Everybody hates his guts. Nobody can get ahead." Or words to that ...

  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...