PmWiki | Tripocalypse / TheSameDream

Dark, it was always dark. Not pitch black; more like a featureless grey. Almost every night when night sleep happened, the same dream. Punctually every day upon exhaustion, the same dream. Every dream, God Almighty talked to the Foreman. Every dream, the Lord showed the Foreman why it was useless to fight the end times.

"YOU SHOULD REPENT."

Technically, the Foreman had that option. Having been in charge of deploying the whole mark-of-loyalty RFID chip electronic money system, keeping around a store of beta version units that did not need to be implanted had been both a no-brainer and, given how hard it was getting to manufacture large runs of anything, a necessity. Some had even been traded to the International Commodity Co-op as a peace offering, not that it had helped much later on when it was they who had resources to spare. "I've done much wrong. And much right. I repented by making amends, when I could. But you mean surrender. No."

"I HAVE DARKENED THE SEAS WITH BLOOD."

In the dream, the Foreman was squatting on the waterline at a grey rocky beach, with grey waves, just a hint of blue, lapping the pebbles and stones. Little fishes played around and nibbled on flapping seaweeds. Then, the waters turned a bright red. The Foreman quickly built a dam of stones, and cemented them with what was available, a bit of seaweed, a bit of trash. A few of the little fishes kept twirling about in the impromptu pond. In reality, the filtering and damming effort had required enlisting the cooperation of the Unity Navy to use nuclear submarines as generators and sinking countless passenger ships to form quays. "And You had to do it twice, because the first time, we cleaned it all up." The second time that the Biblical plague struck, there simply weren't enough resources left to repeat the first effort; at least they'd seen it coming. What sea life had not been preserved in hastily converted wet docks, inland fish farms, and even flooded quarries would have to fend for itself; simulation showed that it would take decades to repopulate the oceans, even with no fishing.

"I HAVE DARKENED THE SKIES WITH FLYING DEATH."

The beach gave way to the sort of suburb that the Foreman had half nebulously inhabited in a bygone youth, half absorbed through a cathode ray tube during it. True to form, the sky darkened with pestiferous insects. The Foreman had dreamed of ineffectually shooing them and their sharp claws away, then took fruitless refuge inside the house, then sprayed pesticide and dry heaved on the fumes. Now, after countless iterations, the Foreman would flip a switch and the house's flagpole would reveal itself as a Tesla coil and begin dispensing purple lightning. That wasn't far from how it had gone during the Great Tribulation, although it had taken all those methods and more. Ultrasound around the executive suites, DDT in the fields and damn the long-term consequences, bug zappers the size of a tree in front of the hospitals. But it got done. The remaining demon locusts took their place in whatever the ecosystem was turning into. They got the penultimate laugh by being poisonous to eat; the Global Community got the llast by figuring out how to turn them into fish feed. The grey sky was clear once more.

"THE MORNING STAR, THE ETERNAL ENEMY, WILL FALL."

A bright, stark landscape of a ravaged land from time immemorial, seen from the height of a satellite reign. Everywhere, angels and demons fighting, on the ground and in the air, each red or white dot resolving to a majestic, terrible being if the Foreman cared to focus. Lucifer and his angels, outnumbered two to one, fighting with copious courage and terrible tactics. Then, finally, a hole opening under their leader, not in the earth's surface, but in the concept of surface itself, the violation of space given to the Foreman's experience as a visual glitch. A great fall, seen from above, as if a perspective trick with a camera. Maybe just the Foreman's imagination, maybe a pallid reflection of a great inexorable memory. "What do I care? I'm not with You or with him against You. But You don't want to understand that, do You?"

"YOU ARE NOTHING."

The Foreman just nodded, the only movement in a now featureless expanse. That was true, as much as it had been achievable. No recognizable features, no nationality, no race, no gender, an indeterminate age that could've been a harried thirty or a very healthy fifty. The Foreman. Very forgettable face. Very forgettable shape. Very handy if you are working for a global dictator that has been less and less immune to outbursts of shoot-the-underling melodramatic villainy. "I'm human. More that can be said of You."

"YOUR WORKS ARE AS FILTHY RAGS TO ME."

The scene changed again. A scrapyard. A scrapyard's scrapyard, where the stuff that couldn't possibly be recycled or reused went. Slag, low-grade rust, orphan machines of a better bygone infrastructure. The clothing of the diseased dead. All fit for the fire, but with not enough fuel to burn. "That's right. Just keep the phones running, me. And all that it implies." By necessity and by cleverness, the "beyond utility" pile had been decreasing steadily.

"YOU WILL LOSE."

Custodial Arrangement of Telecommunication Systems. One of the lower-rung Global Community agencies, tasked with, well, keeping the phones - and data lines - running. To the Foreman, that meant quite a wide portfolio. Electricity to power them. Satellites and subsea trunklines to join them together, and ships to repair those. People to use them. A planet for all of this to exist on. The Foreman briefly took cotrol of the mind's eye, to see all these things, emanating from a military style black rotary phone, putting the pieces back in place in the mosaic as they tried to crumble away under the entropy of apocalypse. If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, first you have to invent the universe...

"YOU MUST LOSE."

As if staring at a giant screen, bright enough to make the Foreman's inner eye drop color, all the failures of the past eighty months. The dead; the lost; the forests burned; the seas laid to waste; the times when the Foreman's workers had done too little, too late. The plague of darkness, beaten by ingenuity and ultrasound, only to cause scorching deaths when darkness turned to impossible luminosity, just a little earlier than predicted. All the Foreman's personal failures highlighted with blotches of color. All the tears had been shed; the Foreman looked on, as if in a debriefing, trying to see what could be improved. "All I have to do is break your script. You are the One who has no choice. You made it two thousand years ago."

"YOU CANNOT WIN."

All the moments of empty pomp and grandiloquence, seen through the Foreman's memory - of his boss the Antichrist, of the two false prophets demanding gold and lights and diverting the bandwidth of a continent to show high-def video when medical and relief data was stuck in the cable queue. All the abuses of the Global Community, to which the Foreman heartily belonged, covered in the public eyes by the Antichrist's charisma but all too apparent to even a low ranking cabinet member such as the Foreman. All the private moment in which the Antichrist had spilled over into melodramatic villainy, laughing over the body of a bearer of bad news; some had been the Foreman's responsibility. Like every war, a great game for the generals, with everyone else paying in blood - only, this time, the pain would last forever. The Foreman feebly countered with statistics of lives saved, but the scene refused to change. "You're playing to win. I'm not playing. Big difference."

"YOU CANNOT TIE."

The Angel was upon the Foreman with splendent wings and an iron grip, and they wrestled. This time, the Foreman was barely able to summon up the armor. Tiny chainlink, handcrafted in alloys not found in nature, each in its place. The Angel touches the Foreman's hips, an ethereal finger going right through the armor, and the Foreman's lower body goes limp. Like statuary, the Angel strikes a solemn figure on top of the collapsed heap. "Hah. That's now how it went, and You know it." In reality, the Mark IV Jacobite armor - combined with Hasina's martial arts skill - had performed to specifications: capturing and subsequently interrogating and dissecting the Angel, Anis, had been one of the first real victories of CATS against the encroaching doomsday. Slowly, the pain all too real, the Foreman raised a middle finger to the Angel as it floated vertiginously upwards with the rest of the scene.

"YOU CANNOT QUIT."

Oppressive heat, red-out in the thick fog, smell of sulfur through burnt-out nostrils. The oppressive feeling that nothing else would be there. Normally, the Foreman would make for the shore of the lake of fire, and start digging. Should Hell be humanity's final fate, it would only mean a change of battleground. This dream, however, the Foreman remembered something from the waking world, and for the first time, answered that with a laugh. "You're right."

This time, the Foreman sprang back wide awake; usually, when having that dream, a trusted member of the bridge crew would have to awaken the boss before the sight of the Foreman whimpering like a kitten scared the less trusted CATS employees.

"Boss?"

"Yeah?"

"You passed out for a moment there. Sonic Screwdriver One is a success. We've tested it on our latest capture - no trumpet blast, no soporific benison. Completely muted out. We've just wrapped up the recording."

The control board signaled no red emergencies. The yellows could wait for five minutes.

"Main screen turn on. I want everyone to watch this."

The shipping company office that was affectionately referred to as "the bridge" came to attention, and watched the array of plasma speakers silence a messenger of the Lord through atmospheric heterodyning. The Angel stared blankly in confusion. "About face!" At the crew boss' order, deliberately, everyone present at the test turned away from the Angel, who promptly disappeared as soon as nobody alive was looking. The cameras kept recording.

The cheers were loud but brief - the big timer on the wall had less than a month left, and there was still the problem of scaling the technology up. "Why let it go, Boss?"

"Imagine a scene we've all seen a dozen times. Imagine a poor hapless underling going to cruel, adored master, reporting a failure, dreading punishment. Our dear leader has done this more and more often lately, to some of ours, too. And now, just now, imagine that happening -- to the other guys!"

The cheer this time was longer. The Foreman allowed a parody of an evil grin cross slightly chapped lips. "Proceed with the Plan."