The Rapture: Australia Undone

A naval officer stood on a storm tossed deck, struggling to keep his balance. We were drowning in intelligence, different types of intelligence. We came here and we welcomed you. Outside, the difference. Nobody could keep up, no mere mortal.  The economy sucked. Australia was in an election year. The populace was fed up, but silent. Ah, the blessings of youth. The giants walked in a slow cohesion, a churning walk. On the precipice of what. We were all being crushed by something far larger than ourselves. As for the daily grind, or hope, or optimism, or strange ways of seeing things, of fear, of dread, of hope, yes, hope, and we cast off the shackles and were free. And that storm tossed ship? The waves washing over it, the frightening power of the sea? Of that storm which had possessed them for so many days, which threatened their lives? And so it was. And so it will be. And the storms, too, will wash through these silent suburbs, and the clubs spilling out into the streets and the ...

  We're firebombing the area with a powerful hallucinogen, one of the operatives said. There isn't any doubt anymore. Some will wake up and some will not. A young soldier obsessed over chicken parmigiana, seemed to think about it almost daily, sometimes for hours on end. Nice to be young and hungry, Old Alex thought, there in that place where the ancients came and went, swirls of consciousness while attention was elsewhere, the Trump ascendancy, the remaking of the world, a kind of radical democratisation, the ill fitting thoughts and beliefs of the populace over riding the technocracy and fashionable left shibboleths of the elites. Some true evil had stalked the Earth. He had been in hiding. They had been invisible, or even less visible than usual, while every now and then a great swirl, almost of sadness, overwhelmed him. Come and gone. In abeyance. While the religious prayed fervently, or was it desperately. Release me from these spiritual bonds, these fleshly bonds. While h...