Transparency: My Interpretation of a Selection of Billy Idol's Music
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Here I stand, atop the crest of what once was a thriving city, brown skin darkened and sunburnt, blue eyes scanning walking paths and roadways for signs of life no longer existent. The future imploded into the present, sixteen months ago, as the crow flies. Sixteen months, to the day.
Nearly five hundred days ago, the First Edict came down. None but those who agreed to implantation would be allowed to walk freely. Women, men, and children - natal and reborn - mowed down. To the left and right, forward, to the side, and kicked backward, carcasses of the dying and the dead littered the barren landscape. Handfuls escaped - mere handfuls out of billions - and of them, thousands were unable to overcome the combinations of noxious, black billows of strychnine and burning rubber, seeping through blood-bathed doorways and pucture-resistant window sealings that offered no barrier against the diamond-sharpened steel projectiles piercing through the moonlight. Preppers were caught unprepared. The unprepared died almost instantly. Lucky bastards.
I escaped through the underground tunnels buried deep below what used to be the primary seat of the Most Favored Nation. A diplomatic missionary, working in futility to avoid the inevitable chemical-laced cyber assaults. Tomorrow, they said. We'll work on that. Tomorrow. And tomorrow, they came.
Once the Nanos entered your cyberspace, that was it. Despite the safeguards, no living being was safe, no water or food unsealed fit for consumption, no air - even filtered - fit to breathe. All that was left were the military rations and freeze-dried victuals meant for astronauts and aquaformers, deep below oceans and disintegrating coral reefs.
Disinformation had convinced the populace the tunnels were fictional. Even at the highest levels of government, officials and ministers scoffed at the thought that such could exist. They died with laughter in their throats, unable to utter, "God," in the midst of their wretched gurgling and paralyzing gasps. Lucky bastards.
I had not agreed to be implanted. A line in a long-ago movie had said that death was more desirable than slavery. By blood and by choice, I became a member of that thriving culture, whose members could now be called a race - since most other ethnicities had perished, as the Nanos continued to spread their poison.
Religion had been abandoned and banned, just before the Nanostorm. That had been the first to go. Except among the fearless and dying, there was to be no religion at all. I had long thought that the root of all evil was religion, not money or the worship of it or other idols. The worship of religion had been the cause of every evil wrought by every descendant of Protogene and Mitochondria. Humankind had turned religion into an idol unto its own.
Blue eyes crying in the rain, how long had it been? Losing love and hope, and heaven, too. This vast dustbowl of sniper wind and rattling stones, water unseen in reefs and riverbeds for four hundred ninety three days. Remembering when the moon danced its final bow, just before the birth of the day exploded in my eyes. Once a ripening force for hues and blues, the explosion threatened to tear the very corneas away from my irises. I can still see, though. There is still some life within the science and technology that replaced my dilated and blackened eyes. At least I kept the blue. At least, they left me the blue.
Confession is good for the soul. I stole my lover's heart. I ripped it out with such force that the very vessels that kept it beating wilted in my dusty grasp. I could see the shape of things to come. I stopped my love's heart before my lover's eyes could see it, too. Am I making up a lie, you ask. Why would I? Would lie not, eventually, become truth - tearing apart the world it knew? No. I would not. No more murder, not of things past, nor of things to come. But I cannot stop the eclipse of emotion that turns light to night, faster than it ever did before.
When I came to this place, I knew the evil that lurked within. As if evil were a shadow, tangible only to the naked soul. But in order to believe in evil, in order to wage war against evil, one must break the Second Edict. And one mustn't do that.
The Second Edict, No Religion, was - not unexpectedly - not well-received, for all temples, churches, mosques, icons, stars, signs, statues - all of them, gone. It came, in fact, before the First. Like words on pages of ancient texts, reordered, so as to appear in false ascendancy. It is not the order of things.
Destroyed by fire, acid, demolition, implosion - certainly, explosion - gone. All outside structures and relics used in corporate religious ceremony and service, gone. Homes, raided. Books, burned. All gone. Like the Templar Knights, anyone found with any item related to organized religious expression were given two options: die with it or die without it. Where any two were gathered, they died crying out to their god or goddess or whatever-gender deity. No animal sacred. No ritual, left unbroken. Natural beauty had been destroyed, as had sacred stone structures and intentionally-carved mazes. Religion, as it was known before the Second Edict - which had come before the First - is dead. Does it matter, now which came first? Six hundred and fifty eight days without faith may as well be five hundred days with dead water. It is still gone. No evil, no good. No religion. Shangri-la is dead.
