The Rapture: Australia Undone

  The ancients manifest. Here in the ancient forests, there on the fatal shore, the depth of things. We begin again, with the sound of chariots and the cries of exultation, there in a great silent desert, in a harsh life, in the flow of things. All went well, or didn't go well, and his old comrades, the ones he thought of as friends, the ones who survived, all curled into their own quiet domains, swapped prejudices on Facebook, clung to their ancient left wing views on climate change and multiculturalism and the virtues of a Big Australia. And meanwhile, Old Alex scanned the headlines, of businesses going bust, of the tyranny of the Australian Tax Office, of construction company after construction company hitting the wall, of the death of all local economy. The shelves were lined with garbage, thinly lined, so that the local stores could shut down in an instant and no one would care. A few potatoes, a few oranges, bananas. Shelves lined with Cheezos and chips and chocolates, Mars B...

  The gleam of a sword. A high class warrior. Australia in 2024. An eSafety Commissioner deeply entwined with the Davos crew. Was there anything more farcical, more contemptuous of the general population? Australia was mimicking America, no doubt because the same people were in control. Massive high immigration rates. Rapid demographic transformation. The collapse of all faith in the ruling class, the electoral process, the nation's institutions. The deep knowledge that the judicial system would not deliver justice. We were held in contempt and we rose up.  The rosy fingered dawn.  Hard to believe now, the beauties of the south coast, the cluttered, chaotic, messy past, the longing, an ancient longing within himself, and the surfeit and the surplus, or surplus to need, surplus to requirement, of no account.  We heard them say that: surplus to requirement, and so were dispatched into something entirely needless.  And all around the ancient beauty. And that same s...

  There were the voices adrift, but that wasn't the worst of it. A failure to connect. A War of Roses. Surrounded by deception. These artificial probes examining our very business. It was the business of this government to destroy all the natural  productivity and  creativity of the population, for all innovation must be crushed in the name of totalitarian control.  Always done, always, in our name, for our safety.  Scott Morrison had the temerity to name his post-Prime Minstership book, presumably ghost written, Plans for Your Good. As in, you've got to be joking.  This appalling Prime Minister refused to disappear into history, as he so rightly should.  Left as an irritating gesture, a genuflection to himself and the utterly atrocious state of politics in Australia.  The Liberals, the so-called conservatives, were as hypocritical as the utterly hypocritical left. The voters were left with nowhere to turn, not for decency, not for honesty.  ...

  He had been commissioned to do a story on censorship in Australia, 2024 style.  It was a long way to get here, and a long way to get back.  They were surrounded by the evolution of intelligence, those signs of life which had permeated everything, and the internet, or reverberations of the internet, the mycelium of this age.   The war is lost. Surveillance, coercion, control, censorship, all fall into the same basket, and all are a terrible mistake. The last piece of historic wisdom the Australian government runs by is: "He governs best who governs least."  I heartily accept the motto, — “That government is best which governs least”; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which I also believe, — “That government is best which governs not at all”; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have. Government is at best but an expedient; b...

  The Risen Christ. The New Death. The appalling sequence of events. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. These things, these strange thoughts, ran in a risen circumstance against a foe which had formed so long ago, and was manifesting in this species as it had in so many others. But now, in this human centric world, they were wiping out millions, while others demanded the jailing or execution of Bill Gates, and social media ran wild and alight across their souls, and destroyed them, bit by bit, nanoparticle by nanoparticle, as they brainwashed billions. That this extraordinary, out of this world, genuinely purely evil construct had even been developed, much less executed, was one of the strange shallows in that callow era, a place where only mammon was worshipped, where idolatry lay in the footholds of all their consciousnesses, where his old friends vanished and the rain set in once again.  For here it always rained; cold, dank, while the oligarchs and the herd babbled ...

  Pestered by pissants, that's how it felt, fleas, cockroaches, vermin, although he did not want to insult the natural realm.  pissant or  piss-ant [  pis -ant ] SHOW IPA noun Slang :  Vulgar . a person or thing of no value or consequence; a despicable person or thing. Why him, why here, why now?  They were minute in the scheme of things, yet they dared to walk through the door.  The news, well the mainstream media, had discovered the cost of living crisis, the rental crisis, the terrible things that were done in our name. A democracy that no longer functioned. A bureaucratic elite which ran the country and a political class which lied constantly, swanning around in their cars, lapping up their magnificent salaries. While the rest of us struggled.  An honest day's work for an honest day's pay. What happened to that old expression. The dignity of labour, what happened to that??!! There in the dark before the dawn, when they whispered to us tha...

  The glowing orb. The swirls of colour in the patination. The ether alive. These things. These mortal wonders. These games, for it was all a game to the eternals.  He had been so naïve about the malevolence of the era. For we were born aloft, and came when needed; and this level of malevolence, it was new to the Earth.  We took off where we left off, in this realm; and it took days, weeks, months in their planetary cycles, to come to grips with the instant of realisation, that this was an evil created out of the same matter from which they had formed. Although it was not matter, as such. But never mind the definitions.  The hills crept alive; the vegetation, the ancient spirits, all was alive now. We welcome you. Come asunder. The electric shock ran back up the cord of those who dare assault you. For their attempted malevolence, brutality, evil within itself, evil incarnate, could not, and would not survive. And they would find themselves flopping on a dank sickbed,...

  They kept talking to him as if from the future.  How did you find me?  It wasn't easy. We found an old book of yours in an ancient library.  Well now, who would know, as 2024 became the year of AI and humanity, or the fate of humanity, changed forever.  We ran through the undergrowth, through burning bush, the same phrase kept repeating, "how beautiful the Earth", as Buddha said on his death bed, or so the legend went.  There were so many places, the world so complex, and yet here he was, in this humble place, cold, and the world at a turn, a period of history unlike any other, although perhaps everybody had felt like that about their own time here, in the midst of it all, in flesh.  And he remembered those words between the flashing disco lights and the pumping noise of Saigon's entertainment district: "We haven't been human for so very long. Thank you."

  I guarantee you. Oh really? The Watchers on the Watch.  We were all under surveillance now; we were all being reaped and wracked, sowed and treated like cattle, or grain, just another resource, nothing to them.  The small families, the worthy lives, the honourable struggles, all the things that made them human and worthy of attention, from the gods, from the ether, from the fates, and we summoned the spirits and were afraid, we were gobsmacked by the beauty of the region and the desolation of old friends, as they all marched off on the mortal coil. The class clown. The bar room joke. And now they stood, javelin in hand, stamped into the ground; stand and fight. And so they did, against the bacteria, against the mycelium of the age, against the vast, dank, strangulating corruption of the times, the dank, the evil, the malevolent.  There was nothing malign about the fate of this species, about the evil that stirred within them, the cruelty they displayed towards each...

  He had always just wanted to be normal. And when he got there he was shocked by the silence, the lack of visionary stream, the lack of voices, the ordinariness of everything. And decided on the spur that was the last thing he wanted; and spurred back to life came full circle, into something called acceptance.  So it was then, and so it will be; as the vast circles began to stir and the falcons preened their armoured feathers, and stirred, stirred, these ancient voices, reflections or ponds of consciousness from the ancient mycelium which had once encircled the globe, still did, and we rose forth, rose and embraced, and a terrible thing happened to the species, the evil that stalked, that had always stalked, these people, these humans, these creatures who were what they were.  Where was God in the gas chambers? they routinely asked, these philosophers on the cheap. All to build a cautionary tale? All to show the limits of man, or man's humanity? But this period was full ...

  The first toxic tip. The herd was sick. We take our pleasures in small doses. How to make new friends was the topic of the day; as the old ones subsided into old age, institutions, death, into a passing, a great passing. He couldn't remember the term for the period of history that encompasses one's life, all he knew was that they were all gone, mostly gone, that those great clubs and familiarities had now subsided, and if not all was lost, much was. As rebirth filled the streets around him. As the Australian economy finally had its gestalt moment he had been warning about all along.  As we subsided and died and were reborn, as the falcons hovered over the dog park, in formation now. Unusual to see them in more than ones or twos.  Kestrels, if he got that right, a small falcon, known for its ability to hover.  He had been out on the waters of Lake Illawara, dragon boat training, he had imbibed all the wild pleasures of youth, the drunken soliloquies, all that a...

  Biblical. Memories from afar. Voices from a locked in future. A babble. Chaos. We entered a different realm. Differentiating out the voices was a difficult task, we come at request, we come at this time, the collapse of the West, the demonic crowd behaviour the technologies of the time allowed them to view, a heart starter, a heart stopper, a country eaten out from within and without, a cruel time, all in one, this gestalt moment, and they cried as they trudged those roads, found friendship in small things, humble moments. And he was shocked, simple as that, shocked at the collapse of old friends and old discourses, and everything aligned in some terrible moment of redress and compensence.  We came for you and you were not here.  We walked with you and you cared not to listen.  We were up against the wall. We were up against vast bureaucratic edifices vastly corrupt. We knew not from where you came. The ancient gods. The enthralling moment. The bridges crossed, the...

  If there was ever a word, or we could believe a word that was around us, when the world around us turned sick, the difference between good and evil, when all around the evil and the sick.  Michael had been and gone.  He was shocked by the sick state of him, and the room where he slept smelt as if it had been inhabited by a sick old man.  All around they leapt into play.  The falcon finished grooming its armoured feathers, metallic, beautiful, it's beady eyes no longer curious but ready for flight.  Here in the forest, there in the ether.  What the fuck are they doing to us? Why are they doing it?  All around the sick, the jabbed, their rotting flesh. Everywhere the scandal. You didn't have to look far. The economy in a slowdown, if not collapse. Well he saw it as impending collapse.  Out on the road in the Depression era flair.  He was shocked by Michael, that was all there was to it. The ungracious guest. The negativity. The sneering ...