“All things began in order, so shall they end, and so shall they begin again.” —Sir Thomas Browne, Cyrus' Garden 2050 Promise 3:1 Texas, North America Comity Empire He was standing, if one could call it that, in his music room near the summit of El Capitan, the stunning prominence at the southern end of the Guadalupe mountain range. He was looking through a broad span of ten-meter windows overlooking the mountain’s southward face. Sheer walls of limestone extended three hundred meters below him, making it appear as if he was at the helm of a great battleship. Above him was a Texas sky: vast, blue, and cloudless. A red-tailed hawk hung in the air below him, its broad wings riding an uplift wind. The Chihuahuan Desert far below was scattered with scrubs of yucca, mesquite, and creosote. El Paso was 175 kilometers straight west. Texas still claimed that shit hole for some reason, but it was Mexico’s now. They could have it. He had been a brash twenty-one-year-old when he first looked out over these desert plains that stretched to the horizon. Amanda was with him that day. They were newlyweds slowly making their way to his first post-Army job at Lockheed Burbank. That summer they had ridden all over West Texas on a Harley FLH Duo Glide Panhead they had dubbed ‘Drag’n fly.’ They had camped in the oil fields around Midland and Odessa. They had cruised to Sonora to see Texas’s most beautiful cavern. They had enjoyed pitchers of beer and cheap pizzas in shabby, roadside taverns. Amanda and he first spied El Capitan as they shot along US Highway 62 on their way to Carlsbad Caverns. He pulled the bike to the side of the road, and they took in the majestic view. In no hurry to get anywhere, they decided to climb the mountain. They bushwhacked through cactus, yucca, and scrub, and scrambled over boulders and scree. When they reached the peak in the late afternoon, they celebrated their achievement by building a small cairn, which remarkably still stood there. Then they joined the Mile High Club without an airplane. Sex at 8,400 feet. As the sun descended into a red and purple haze of an impossibly distant horizon, they stood there—here—naked, hand in hand, shouting their love to the sky, to the edge of the world, and to their future. This house had been a surprise birthday present for Amanda. The land had once been a US national park, but his money and power ensured the political support of Comity-North America that he needed to purchase it. He bought the whole god-damned thing, all 86,367 acres of it. The fine print of inscrutable legalese inserted into an appropriations bill declared the habitation, designed by a world-class Japanese architect, to be a historic landmark. Construction bots from one of his companies were carving deep shafts into the limestone before anyone could protest. A hundred million Comity crowns later, the house was completed, the surrounding habitat undisturbed, no sign of its structure visible from the ground below. He had built Amanda a palace fit for a queen. She christened their new home ‘Haadi’aa,’ the Apache Indian word for ‘singing.’ An action verb. So very much like her. Amanda had wanted their house to always be filled with music. And so it was. He was now listening to Nightwish’s ‘Ghost Love Score,’ the classic Wacken 2013 Concert edition. Their song. He allowed himself to listen to it only on their wedding anniversary. If Amanda were still alive, today would have been their eighty-first wedding anniversary. Still, I write my songs about that dream of mine Worth everything I may ever be Right after high school he signed up with the US Army. He volunteered to earn a Green Beret just to see if he could do it. He was assigned to the A Team from the 7th Special Forces Group to help replenish the outfit after the battle of Nam Dong. After two tours, which produced a Bronze Star, a few Purple Hearts, and memories he didn’t want to think about, he left active duty. He accepted a position offered by a war buddy with Lockheed Martin in something called the Skunk Works. A decade later he and Amanda went into the defense contracting business for themselves, starting with aerospace. They moved to Texas. Their millions soon became billions, and, at last count, his assets exceeded one trillion, two hundred fifty billion Comity crowns. He owned entire industries from defense (including the former Lockheed Martin) to bio-manufacturing and everything in between. By most accounts, including his own, he was the wealthiest man who had ever lived. Money itself meant little to him, however. This amount of wealth was like an ocean of water, beautiful to look at from the beach, but you could only drink so much of it in any number of lifetimes. Money could buy happiness, he supposed, but it had been devastating to learn that money could not buy everything. My love in the dark heart of the night I have lost the path before me The one behind will lead me Amanda had taken sick. Their lives became a pilgrimage of sorts. The best doctors, the best clinics, the best treatments. Nothing had worked. She passed away after months of constant pain and suffering. He loved her now more than ever because he missed her now more than ever. Her passing had almost killed him too. He still held onto a fragment of hope that they would be together again someday. But that would happen only if there was a god or two out there that actually cared. It was much more likely that in the infinite reverberations of the universe, as it pulsed between birth and death every trillion years, they would be together again. That they would climb this mountain, make love, and be together time after infinite times. Maybe that was what the Abrahamists taught about eternal life. He didn’t know. Until then, or until a medical miracle occurred, he kept Amanda’s body in a deep freeze facility deep below this house. His team of scientists might come up with something to bring her back to life someday. He paid them enough, anyway. He had always wanted to live to at least one hundred and three years old, the life span of his great grandmother, Sarah Jane O’Malley. She had been a tiny, domineering woman who had fallen down her porch steps at about that age and broken her hip. She ended up in a hospital in Milwaukee. His parents brought him along to visit her once. It had been a bright, sunny day. At that time a hospital was a very strange and fascinating place to visit. Great Grandma O’Malley lay on a hospital bed, a tiny figure with wrinkled features topped with wispy, white hair. Her mind was still quick, her gaze still penetrating. She acted like it was a bother for you to visit her. He was not exactly afraid of her, but he knew she could boss his parents around if she wanted to. Tough as she was, she never walked again, never returned to her house, never again commandeered a household. Sarah Jane O’Malley died on that hospital bed, crisp white sheets, and all. One hundred three years old. Pretty damn impressive at the time. He was now 102. One more year to go. True, he was dependent on machines to keep him alive. He was encased in an exo that permitted him to stand erect and move around, as his legs were too weak to support him. His body contained artificial glands, organs, and bio-implants grown from reprogrammed fibroblasts. Clouds of strange drugs coursed through his veins. Everything was the latest technology available only to a lucky few. His brain was the only original thing left of him. Vintage. Every night, his man Morgan would separate him from his ambulatory medical equipment and hook him up into a cluster of machines near his bed. Every night, he would lean over and turn down Amanda’s side of the blankets. Though he knew better, sometimes he could sense that Amanda was in another room. He would disconnect himself from the bioelectronics, strap himself into his exo, and wander from room to room, hoping to see her. But she would always be just around the next corner, like the ghost in the song he was listening to, or a thought or memory he could not quite pin down. Morgan would always find him and guide him back to his room. Take me Cure me Kill me Bring me home He reached for his glass of Bordeaux from a nearby table. A stunning 1945 Chateau Haut Brion Rouge. Bottled the year he was born, grapes harvested from a vineyard he now owned. The doctors forbade him to drink alcohol. Screw them. He took a gulp, feeling its warmth course through his veins. Amanda. The only love of his life. They had grown up together in Brownwood, Texas. Brownwood’s claim to fame was that it was the home of actor Bob Denver of Gilligan’s Island fame and Robert E. Howard, the creator of Conan the Barbarian. He grew up on a ranch outside of town. Amanda was a townie. They had dated throughout high school. He was a wrestler in a football town, and Amanda was captain of the cheerleading squad. When he went off to the Army, she stayed at home and took accounting at Howard Payne. On his first leave after Vietnam, he had arranged to meet Amanda at the lake, near the spillway of the Pecan Bayou River. He had just secured her dad’s permission for his sole daughter’s hand in marriage, and, with an engagement ring tucked firmly in his pocket, he leaped into the family’s F-100 and sped off toward the girl he had not seen in eighteen months. Redeem me into childhood Show me myself without the shell Like the advent of May I'll be there when you say Time to never hold our love He could picture it in his mind’s eye just like it happened yesterday. The azure sky, hot and hazy from oil field dust. Amanda was calmly standing there as he pulled up, one tanned hand shading her eyes from the retreating sun, the other grasping the leather reigns of her mare, Topusana, Cherokee for “prairie flower.” Amanda was always giving things names. He switched the engine off, setting the ignition switch to leave Eddy Arnold playing on the radio. He had resisted the urge to run to her as they did in the movies. His heart pounding, he forced himself to slowly pull himself from the bench seat and push the creaky door closed behind him. He leaned back against the truck and struck a cowboy pose, arms crossed over his chest like he was bored and had all day. Amanda knew what he was up to. Their little ritual was an old joke, based on a humiliating tactic he had tried out on their first date at the roller rink. She smirked at him, not moving a step, just the toe of her right boot toying a little in the red dirt. He was dressed in his Class-A uniform, polished and bloused Corcorans, and green beret. He risked a long, thirsty look at her, still not saying a word. As always, she was wearing her riding clothes: everyday blue jeans, plaid work shirt, and dusty brown roper boots. The first thing he noticed that was different about her was that she had cut off most of her thick, yellow hair. Just a little gold peaked from beneath the brim of her cattleman. The second thing he noticed was her eyes. Deep pools of glistening, penetrating blue, highlighted by thick false eyelashes and pale green mascara. He warmed at the smattering of freckles above her button nose. Her full lips were moist with coral Yardley. Twiggy had taken the world by storm back then, even in backwater Texas. And then Amanda smiled, a grin so warm and loving and meaningful and familiar that his heart burst and melted at the same time. The next thing he knew was that they were in each other’s arms. He picked her up, twirled her around, laughing-kissing-crying. He was home. He buried his face against her neck, she smelled a little of horse and Ivory soap but more of Heaven Scent. Later, they made love, going all the way for their first time on an old blanket strewn on the back of the truck. He slipped inside her just as the last, faint wisps of twilight melted away. I keep on watching us sleep The Texan’s old eyes filled with soft tears, as he returned to his present. He raised his glass in a silent toast to her, his hand shaking, his heart both sad and full. Theirs had been a great love, a great story, so long as it had lasted. But now ... what had brought him to this point? The Quick One. ‘TQ1’ as they called it now. ‘Quick’ because it was a war all but over in a single day. The horror started with a dirty nuke blast in the Ha'Ir Ha’Atiqah sector of Jerusalem. Jerusalem was the official Israeli capital back in those days before its government-in-exile moved to Berlin. Other cities got their own nuke. Brussels, London, Manhattan, Washington, D.C., and a few other centers of commerce across Europe and America. And the fucking Muslims, innocent of this particular crime against humanity, had gotten the blame for the attack. Western retaliation had been preplanned, immediate, and devastating. The Middle East capitals and their holy sites like Mecca and Medina became mounds of rubble surrounded in crusts of black sand. He had been informed that this attack was imminent. Yet he had also been led to believe that “the balloon would not go up” for two more weeks. In a last-ditch effort to stop it, he had flown toward Washington D.C. in his customized 747. Despite his protestation, Amanda had insisted on coming along. As their plane approached Dulles, they saw thick black smoke rising to the heavens. The captain reported pervasive radio static. Having no permission to land, they returned to Texas. The Texan shook his head with ancient sorrow and frustration. The Comity Empire. Its roots extended back to the heady days following victories in World War Two. They had manipulated the public into a mass paranoia over the Soviet Threat with their first Cold War. He himself had been one of those “duck and cover” kids practicing civil defense along with Bert the Turtle. In 1961, when he and Amanda were still in high school, President Eisenhower warned of the danger to democracy of the American military-industrial complex, or MIC, composed of unelected oligarchs and government bureaucrats that swayed foreign policy and military matters. Then former CIA director Allen Dulles and rogue agents assassinated JFK, a sitting president that they perceived to be both soft on communism and against their greatest blood profits yet: the Vietnam War. Hell, even that was launched under the false flag pretense of the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. The MIC morphed into the Deep State, the Shadow Government, whatever you wanted to call it. Its tentacles spread into the UK and Europe through NATO. The Five Eyes Intelligence Alliance became Nine. Then fourteen. Then Ophanim. They employed blackmail and bribery to manipulate business leaders, elected officials, bankers, and even supreme court justices. They took down anyone, even presidents who stood in their way. Their final enemy was their own people. The ordinary citizenry was left with an illusion of democracy and burdened with the debt-fueled false prosperity that would ultimately transfer their wealth and political power to their unseen masters. Advanced surveillance and propaganda technology was employed. Every expression of opinion and communication was monitored, mapped, and manipulated by algorithms. All movement, associations, financial transaction were tracked. Nothing new, really. Oligarchs had always ruled the world, whether their governing scheme was feudal, religious, mercantile, or Marxist. They managed to keep their facade going for decades, using every financial and political trick in the books. Enemies were manufactured as needed. They declared war on everything: the war against poverty, the war against drugs, the war against terror, the ongoing war against religious mythology. Everything but war against war. However, contrary forces gathered like tsunamis on steroids. A global, grassroots-driven reaction to the obscene level of income disparity, the collapse of any identifiable cultural fabric, and dysfunctional, scandal-plagued governments began to take its inexorable toll on public trust. Their fiat currencies, exotic debt instruments, and the financial strain of hundreds of trillions of un-repayable debt were leading to the collapse of their financial and political machinations. Oh yes, they tried everything to hold it off for as long as they could, hoping for a miracle. Maybe they counted on Jesus Christ or L. Ron Hubbard to return in glory and save their bloody asses. But no, their crimes, incompetence, and self-serving manipulations had been so impossible to hide or repair that it took a miniature nuclear war to keep them in power. Desperate, before it was too late, it was time for them to initiate their Plan B. TQ1. On the verge of political and economic collapse, just when they would have lost their trillions in assets, just before their puppet governments would have otherwise collapsed into irrelevance, they—what is now The Twenty—had done it, launched TQ1 to save their asses. The Twenty. Greedy, mother-fucking, self-righteous, murderous ass holes. The omnipotent leaders of the Comity Empire. And he was one of them. Despite the price in lives paid by a half-billion or so innocent people and damage to the earth’s ecology, they had achieved what they wanted: a financial and political reset giving them absolute control of the western world. They founded the Comity Empire on the ashes of their old system. Their police and military quickly established order. Vast troves of secreted food, medical supplies, and equipment were released. The crown was established as the Empire’s sole digital currency. Surveillance systems openly tracked everyone and everything for their safety and security. The practice of religion, incriminated as the chief motivation for the Muslim attackers, was denounced, and then criminalized. Those who interfered or did not cooperate were ‘othered,’ as they called it. His Texas and his America, what was left of them, anyway, became subject states of the Comity Empire. It was thoroughly transformed from the Land of Opportunity, the Arsenal of Democracy, the very Beacon of Freedom, into their technocratic wet dream of a totalitarian empire. World history had always been a war between ordinary people and the sociopaths that led them. The wellspring was always there, a tool that manifested itself in different ways: popes that exercised power over both temporal and eternal worlds, the divine right of kings, empires in which the sun never set, Manifest Destiny, American Exceptionalism, Workers Unite, and One Europe. The globalist coup had not gone off without challenge. The infamous Million Man March on WDC by Constitutionalist protesters was crushed in a bloody, missile drone attack blamed on some fringe group. The flailing American government had even nuked Boise, Idaho in a failed effort to wipe out the Constitutionalists holed up in their so-called Redoubt. All that seemed so long ago, now. He sighed, lifted the bottle of Bordeaux, and refilled his glass. The doctors had told him that Amanda suffered from the radioactive fallout unleashed in TQ1. In the months and years after Amanda had passed away just one thing guided his thinking: an end that justified its means. Redeem me into childhood Show me myself without the shell/Like the advent of May I'll be there when you say Time to never hold our love Revenge. The sole target of his retaliative efforts was to destroy the Comity Empire. He had secretly arranged to apply some of his vast resources to ultimately bring it down. Treason. His strategy was guided by a Deep Think expert system that dynamically analyzed thousands of variables and implications of events, nudging here and there, adapting, sometimes setting ripples in motion with small pebbles, sometimes dropping boulders, always inching toward the goal of overthrowing the vast and powerful empire. He had also established an underground network of freedom fighters. He called the revolutionaries, “Little Sis,” just to thumb his nose at the Empire’s Big Brother shit. Additionally, his computer companies had sowed invisible seeds of code in the neurosynaptic computers that were in use everywhere. And now a new weapon, the most powerful ever, was ready to be unleashed. The big question that had been much on his mind of late, the one he had been struggling to answer for himself, was whether he had the moral right to use it. My fall will be for you My love will be in you You were the one to cut me So I'll bleed forever The deployment was highly controversial within LS circles. The final decision became his alone to make. And time was running out. There was evidence that Comity scientists were pursing similar weaponization. His heart swelled with the music, the powerful crescendo. Dutch mezzo-soprano Floor Jensen hit her high notes, both beautiful and sad. And then the performance was over. It had never failed to stir him. He usually shed bittersweet tears at this point, the beautiful song, it's meaning in their lives. But today he was apprehensive; distracted. He took the final sip, then, on impulse, hurled the crystal into the fireplace. It felt good to hear it shatter against the logs. At the sound, Morgan appeared like a magic trick and quietly led him to his study, the pneumatics of his Exo hissing with each slow step. Morgan had not spoken a word. He liked that about the man. The Texan moved to his computer terminal. Morgan gently closed the door behind him and departed the room. Should he? Was it the right thing to do? Significant forces in play that were forcing his hand and making time of the essence. man named The Preacher was gathering significant power within The Twenty by promoting his Religion of Man. While Comity had snuffed out religious practices after TQ1, there was still a instinctive need for a common cultural bind. The computer was ready for him. If he uttered a single word, a message would be encrypted from a one-time pad, sent around the world through many servers, disguised from any possible tracking. The message was an order directed to a single individual. The man awaiting his message would proceed according to pre-arranged instructions. Once sent, he could not withdraw the order. It was now and always or now and never. He heard a faint noise outside his office. The Texan glanced at the door. His heart skipped a beat. Was this how German General Ludwig Beck felt as he was told to accept the consequences of his assassination attempt on Hitler? One could never know what they knew. Would this be the way it would end? Gentle taps followed by a rush of elite Comity XSF troops; a smug, uniformed officer stepping smartly through the door; the accusation of treason; the concise presentation of evidence that they knew everything; the pistol with a single bullet slid across the desk; their wait outside for a detonation initiated by his hand. No, his counter-espionage contacts were too embedded for such a surprise, his home too isolated and shielded with layers of defensive and offensive weapons. The sound was just Morgan hovering beyond the door in case he required anything. His heart’s beat and pressure were guided by medicines and machines, slowly settled back into a steady rhythm. Were revolutionaries always so self-tortured, so paranoid? Would Amanda have supported this action? Would she have washed the blood from his hands? Did he have the right to take this risk? So much he didn’t know. “Sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.” It was an unhelpful maxim, it explained nothing and rationalized everything. Perhaps he should say something noble, the magnitude of the moment demanded it. What was it that everyone said when he was a kid? When in doubt, do it. The Great Dissenter had coined that phrase. So that, then, was his decision. For the sake of his military days, he wriggled his body to a pose of attention. He stood as erect as he could muster, his neck pressed into the padded brace of the exo. His voice firm, he spoke a single word: “Haadi’aa.” Their song would be heard by all.