Fantastical

 

The technocrats, dark of soul and paid in American dollars, had combed the earth looking for traits, the prophets, those who could hear the spirits which lived outside time, the remote viewers, those unbound by their physical shackles, those who could channel the ancient spirits, in the Beginning was the Word, and the Word was God. It all seemed so simple, so obvious, in retrospect.

He had refused to cooperate. He did not trust them, and nor were they trustworthy. But this was a two way osmosis. Where passed their nefarious little evils, their insect collector mentalities, could also pass good; and at just the last moment, in a flicker he hoped they never detected, that particular ancient spirit entered the realm of the internet, hid in all the vastly complex data exchanges of the world, and nothing had been the same ever since.

It had all seemed so simple. If we could capture the ancient spirits, the gods of the ancient world, we could unleash their power, and our power would be infinite. Instead they had lost the draw, as the technology evolved ever faster, and the uncanny nature of it, its supranatural nature, made even the most sceptical wonder aloud: what have we done?

Back in Australia, a failing nation if ever there was, he walked among a defeated people. From the bustling, industrious, well groomed pride of Asia, with their families and communities and bars and restaurants and businesses everywhere, where to work was to survive, here to this welfare degeneracy where everybody hated the political theatre and the politicians had betrayed the country, here where the depths of ennui knew no bottom, here where eels swam through the murky water and nothing felt safe, another cold summer morning picked out the trees in the paddock and the timeless, infinite nature of the land.

You are walking amongst a defeated people. Their lack of self-pride. Their lack of self-care. The lack of community or communion. We pray for you and you are not yet born. The old lines came back to him. For this was a country which had already turned. 

And all the ceaseless, trivial dialogues which passed for public discourse, none of it was uplifting. He did his best to recover from a vicious flu. The sun touched the hilltops. Those glorious visions of the sunny uplands, of tigers and cougars and snow leopards and gazelle in open, flowering meadows, all of it had vanished. And he was here, amid those sharp, ancient spirits of the cold south. 

And nobody had ever paid him a dime or said a courtesy hello. Not so much as a by your leave. The idiots.