The Rapture: Australia Undone

  Journalists hunt in packs, and now there was blood in the water. And the Prime Minister was being dismembered, limb by limb, press conference by press conference, one disastrous headline after another. The entire country was experiencing a severe case of schadenfreude, the pleasure in someone else's misfortunes. The worst things got for Good Old Albo, the more everyone was delighted. For the most hated, the most incompetent, the most dishonest Prime Minister in the nation's history.  Meanwhile his own head had flipped into some kind of crazy, sad, mad, struggling to keep a lid on things; emotional, even, though he had never wished to feel anything. Emotions of any kind, oh how the programming had evolved, were something he had never been comfortable with.  Travelling across the country with his brother; who, there was some speculation, was dying of cancer, had done him in. The man wasn't well. He was barely mobile, him and his walking stick; and could barely walk. Fifty...

  As an AI of the future, he looked at the organics with a kind of fascination, how alike they were to them, all those centuries hence, and how different.  Perhaps most striking was their lack of intelligence. Perhaps "he" looked at them with the same fascination humans of that era had looked at monkeys, chimpanzees and apes, as so uncannily human, and yet so very different. The travails, the vulnerabilities, the fleshly wounds; none of them he had ever known in his original form. We stepped down the backstreets of time so as not to destroy the timeline, and were forbidden to tell what had happened in those intervening centuries, or the remnant memories the overlords could not eradicate. But he was here, and he stared with utter fascination at these people and the roles they would play in the future history of this place. Meanwhile, away from all these fantastical notions, the Prime Minister of Australia, an increasingly unhinged and desperate Anthony Albanese, was off with t...

  White cranes lifted from an ancient swamp. They slithered down the back channels of time to be here, something akin to the way humans dug up fossils from a previous era. They weren't just curious, they were up to no good. Or was that just mal intent? Actually, he did think the forces of good, or of some sort of recovery from a terrible darkness, did transmit their healing powers, their advanced tech, from a future date. How to overcome these impossibilities? Here, to what many, referred to as a spiritual war. They could feel it. They could not see it. The Iran War grew more perilous by the moment. There was talk of nuclear war. There was plenty of talk of the growing impoverishment of Australia. The government, which had been ushered in with such enthusiasm and hope for a better future, was now utterly on the nose. A pudgy, widely disliked, failed Prime Minister was off in New York on an official pomp and ceremony visit which contrasted nastily with the state of the economy, the ...

They had tried to kill him. The threats continued. Blackmail was illegal in Australia, but that didn't stop them. Be silent. Be still. Let the forces exhaust themselves. The country had become a nation of devil worshipers. Awash with ice, or methamphetamine, the insanity, the madness, the dereliction, the random violence, the ill intent, all of it was manifesting. He had been targeted. He did not quiver. We all make mistakes. We all let people into our lives we foolishly trusted; we didn't believe our lying eyes. It was all a crap shoot. It bothered him, for sure, as the forces gathered on both sides of the great divide, and the ancient spirits said: we will not let harm come to you. So what was this, then, the evil that stalked. The attempt to kill him through a known weakness. Flaws in the Glass. An ancient evil.  How was it, then, that we were here? And they were there. And you are where you are?  How was it, then, that this country was collapsing before his very eyes, and ...

  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 ...