Chapter Text

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Delmutt The Woodcutter, Present Day

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Miss Delmutt had never subscribed to the old religions of Shoton, the town of her conception. They were dogmatic and inflexible, full of rules about what kind of vessels were ‘Pure,’ how to live, and what kind of information could be eaten. She understood it, on some level- when the old ways were thought up, certain practices had to be imposed to ensure herd integrity for vessels, or so that certain concepts weren’t lost entirely. How awful it would have been if everyone in a society of a few tens of thousands had accidentally eaten their understanding of mathematics simultaneously!

But, she had often thought in her youth, those days were long gone. The population was vast now- millions across the world, easily- and there were whole universities dedicated purely to holding onto and expanding civilization’s core understandings! It just wasn’t necessary to abide by such oppressive rules, let alone dress them up in trappings of unearned authority! So what if she preferred vessels of one gender over the other? There were always going to be enough to breed, it was fine! Better to let communities experiment and find the ways of living that suited them best. And so many of the rules didn’t seem to make any sense.

That was why she’d moved way out west,to civilization’s edge, and become a woodcutter. She’d had three vessels, all dedicated to the task, and she’d been good at it. Knew the forest like the back of her favorite vessel, all the best groves and easiest routes. She’d pulled in three times the weight in lumber of anyone else! Sure, she had to bring in other vessels to stud, but it wasn’t that inconvenient and her girls seemed to work much better together, like they had some ancient social instinct that made them more at ease around each other.

But that was then. Now, though, this great Swap had happened, and suddenly vessels were scarce. People were dying, true death, left and right for lack of bodies. Was this truly the end time that the old religion had foretold? The realm of punishment for sinners and the unrepentant? It didn’t seem to fit. The squishy pink flesh bodied people weren’t demons, they didn’t match the descriptions. They thought having one gender was normal! She’d been quite delighted when she figured that out. Such validation! They’d done it for the whole of their culture’s span, and it hadn’t ruined their society!

When she’d first gotten here, the scaley one had helped her quite a bit. She’d followed her instructions and made a hard trek to his great colosseum, and there were other humans here, equally helpful. They’d given her the most amazing meal she’d had in years- enough data to feed on for weeks, something that the human helping her had called ‘Wiki-pedia’ in their language, though really she didn’t understand what feet had to do with it. And the people here, the other infomorphs in their vessels- many of them were religious and quite pious! Already there were little nest-side shrines all over the field- crude graven images of Ulagi, set over those who seek refuge, and Sisdall, of the dark and unknown. She’d even seen a few, half-hidden carvings of that scaled lady. That seemed a bit of a stretch, to her- only a person, no guardian angel she, even if she did have a spectacular vessel.

So she remained atheist, but she kept a careful eye out. There was magic here, and mystery- their transport to this realm was certainly beyond any achievement of morphkind she’d ever heard of, and she’d lived in a big city, with indoor plumbing! Just because one religion wasn’t true didn’t discount all of them.

Lumber wasn’t needed here, and besides the cities here were so big, so full of hard stone buildings and black tarry roads, that she’d hardly seen any decent groves- if you could even call the things here trees- on her long hike down the roads to this place. So she busied herself with the others, in the great grass field in the center of the colosseum. In just a day a cottage industry had started up, among those who’d managed to get fed. They were tearing up the many strangely-shaped seats of this arena and using the cloth to make crude but effective clothing and the padding to make sleeping nests. Others had set up a breeding pen in the areas called ‘Dugouts.’ Her vessel didn’t have eggs to lay at the moment, but as soon as it did she would contribute. Getting more vessels was going to be critical unless they wanted to die of old age, how absurd!

Still others had daisy-chained their vessels together and were having an impromptu town-hall in the shared space created by so many linked substrates, while sharing the Sheriff’s language center copies among themselves. These she had joined, eventually, and found them to be great company. Such an amazing variety of society here! There was a cobbler, and a banker, and a great ocean-faring merchant still shaking the sea salt from his joints, and a soldier from a land so distant she’d never even heard of it! The variety of thoughts and perspectives simply overwhelmed her, it was the cacophony of the city all over again. They were trying to decide what to do next while they practiced their new language.

“We should settle. Dig in. Find space, build industry. These people are hospitable, but we cannot live on their handouts. They’ll want this stadium back soon.” This from the soldier, his mind all crystalline hard edges and quick decisive action.

“We can’t just go running off!” The merchant, haughty and grand, his mind a swirl of arabesques and beautiful calligraphy. “What if we get swapped back? I don’t want to end up plonked in the ocean 3,000 miles off shore!”

“Gods’ll provide, if we do our part.” The cobbler, a simple mind, not quite threadbare but worn and comfortable to look on. “I’d like to run off, find my mates, but we need to attend to immediate needs.”

“Needs? Needs? I spent my life building a fortune and now I’m a pauper! I’ll not spend years doing it again! Someone brought us here, and we need to find out who. “ The banker, a mind of fat and gilt, fraying in parts as everything he’d trained for became useless. That one needed to be careful or he’d suffer mind-death, go feral.

Others ran on and on. There were as many opinions as there were minds, and Delmutt thought it was wonderful. What an equalizer all of this had been! It was day one of a new world. They could build a new society, learn from these aliens, seemingly so much more advanced than they. A vast future of new possibilities stretched out before her. Her own mind, presenting as a simple woodland realm with hidden depths, spoke out. “I like it here. I think we should work alongside them. Find the ways we work together. Not stand apart, not chase the past. There’s so much we could do, could be together! Have you read any of this food? They know how to fly! I want to see the clouds from the other side.”

The merchant scoffed. “Fah, if they’ll have us. I don’t think they’re any happier about the end of their world than we are about ours. When I got here, the one I was standing in front of tried to kill me! Would have done it too, if this old boy wasn’t so hard.” He patted his vessel’s image with affection. “No, young Delmutt, I’ve seen a few cases like this. Find some uncontacted tribe, it all goes well at first- or maybe not so well- but it stabilizes and you see great opportunities! Fortunes to be made! The very next time the currents bring you around, maybe not even ten season cycles hence, they’ll be gone entirely. Disease and change and war will wipe them out, sure as the tide. What’s left will just be you, again, in a different set of skins.”

“But it does beg the question,” said the soldier. “Are we natives in your scenario, or the contacting civilization? Who is wiped out, and who is left?”

“I think that,” said the cobbler, “will be up to our Gods. And theirs.”

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Sean And Haley, 6 Years Ago

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I was chuckling gleefully when the door slammed open.

“Fucking mower! ” This, from Haley. We’d moved to this tiny little shack of a place shortly before we were married. It was the sort of house you got because you were young, and in a hurry to start a job in a new town, and it was the only one available to rent on two weeks notice. It wasn’t the sort you wanted to stay in longer than you absolutely had to, but we’d signed a contract. Now one year in, the wheels were coming off. Just a bit. “The wheels keep coming off!” Okay, maybe a lot. “What are you even laughing at over there?”

“Oh I’m reading a review of the Left Behind series. It’s excruciating, I love it.”

She huffed, angrily. “Alright, if I’m going to be mad I might as well be mad at terrible literature. Tell me about it.”

“So it’s kind of based on this Biblical interpretation called dispensationalism, which I absolutely love. It basically assumes that God is the worst kind of Calvinball-playing middle manager, and his style is to periodically change all the rules about who goes to heaven and hell, ‘Reveal’ these in a series of obscure pronouncements and visions, and then get pissed at Humanity when they completely fail to figure out what the fuck he’s talking about.”

She nodded, moving into the kitchen. “I’ve had Deans like that. I’ve had marriages like that.”

I tactfully ignored this last pronouncement, choosing instead to focus on my tale. “So what I love about it is how batshit the rules are. God basically decides it’s time for a change-up so he raptures all the Protestants, Catholics need not apply. All the other religions get merged into ‘Enigma Babylon One World Faith,’ which has a super-pope, and then a dude called Nicolae Carpathia somehow becomes leader of the United Nations -”

“What, like the guy from Ghostbusters 2?”

“No that was Vigo the Carpathian but yeah that is probably exactly where they got the character, anyway, he’s the Antichrist because of course he is, why wouldn’t the Antichrist take over the most toothless body on the planet. And of course only a bunch of bumblefuck Americans realize this shocking truth, which means they ‘Win’ and can now become good christian citizens by resisting the terrible world order of the United Nations, according to God’s new rule book, and assuming they can endure several years of tedious Tom Clancy potboiler fic.”

“So what’s not to like? Sounds like standard contemporary fantasy, honestly. Come do dishes.”

“I think the thing about it that fascinates and repels me is that the authors clearly believe what they’re fantasizing about. You’re always going to get some aspect of the author in your fiction, but this is written for a bunch of people fantasizing about the apocalypse because the apocalypse would mean they were right in what they actually believe. They literally believe that God and the Devil are physical, incarnate, and having a war for souls using criteria that, to anybody else, would look like the shifting self-justifications of white people having an identity crisis, but in this story nope they’re actually the rules and whoops everyone who loved God in slightly the wrong way or whatever is going to hell. It’s not a fantasy, it’s a wish, an active prayer to some higher power for the extreme suffering of the vast majority of the population of earth. That’s pretty sick.”

She popped her head back out of the kitchen. “What’s sick is sitting on the couch while your wife cleans the house!”

I bristled. She wasn’t wrong, it was just- I- I didn’t really have a good justification. “You’re the rationalist. Explain to me how I can want to do a thing, and know I should be doing a thing, and still not get up and do it. Without being sick.”

She paused, and I saw her eyes go unfocused. She was considering. I justified to myself. It wasn’t manipulation, not really- she would pretty much always step back and think if an appeal was made to rationality, it was one of those traits I loved about her. But after 2 years of dating, and 1 year of marriage, it was also the kind of thing I had gotten in a bad habit of using when I felt caught out. Finally, she snapped back to reality. “Stubborn.”

That wasn’t quite what I expected. “Sorry?”

“You’re stubborn. Not quite lazy. Some part of you is angry, and wants something to push against, any kind of boundary. I don’t think it matters what. You hate being told you’re wrong. Your automatic response to the guilt you feel when you suspect it might be true is to dig in your heels. You know that sitting on your ass while I run around cleaning is a shit thing to do, but some part of you resents being dictated to, and you give that resistance more weight than the guilt. Maybe you are angling for the fight afterwards as another thing to resist.”

Well that rocked me back. “I-. Huh. I guess my first instinct is to say you’re wrong, but then it would be, wouldn’t it.” She nodded. “So, uh. What would you do, in that situation? How do you set a boundary for someone who will test them automatically?”

She came over and sat on the couch with me. “First of all, it’s not my job to fix you. But to speculate- I can’t ignore the issue now that I’ve brought it up, because we’re both smart enough to know that me walking around doing housework and explicitly not saying anything after this conversation would be a guilt trip.”

“And I would resist that without fail, unconsciously.”

She put her feet on my lap. “Correct. And I can’t provide you with the fight, can’t escalate. I could win in the short term,” this said with absolute certainty, we both knew it was true, “but there’s obviously a limit to the energy I can put in just to get you to do your part, and a stress limit to our relationship if that became our dynamic, so that’s a non starter.”

Well if I wasn’t feeling guilty before I sure as shit was now , and it wasn’t the resentful kind of guilt either. It was hard to imagine someone seeing you this clearly, laid out before them like an anatomical model, all your flaws and ugliness, and still wanting to be around you. “I suppose there’s always that ultimate boundary, that I wouldn’t want to test.”

She poked me in the stomach with her toe. I took the direct hint and began administering foot rubs. “You could. I could simply set it as the boundary for every action. Do the dishes or I’m leaving you, mow the lawn or I’m leaving you. But people get accustomed to things. If the only outcome is mutually assured relationship destruction, neither of us will pull the trigger, and lines will continue to be crossed.” My foot rubbing was met with some amount of approval, and the strangest feeling of redemption.

“Okay, so you can’t pick a short term fight, can’t passive aggress, and you can’t make apocalyptic threats. You can’t provide any consequence at all, because I’ll resist it.”

She had her eyes closed now. Crisis averted? “Yes and no. You hate boundaries but you like structure, and choice. ”

I was a bit puzzled now. “Okay. I don’t see the difference between those, inherently.”

“One is external, the others are internal. I am now God.” Uh, well, I wasn’t gonna touch that one. “If I tell you, ‘Be an Evangelical Christian or I will put you in hell,’ that is a boundary. If I instead say ‘Please define a set of rules for living a good life as you understand it, here are some suggestions. Follow your own rules. Failure to do so may result in being hell-bound.’ that is still a kind of boundary, but at a higher level. The actual rules that govern your life are self-selected, self-imposed, and for certain personalities,” she indicated me with another poke of the foot, “those are much easier to follow. But you have to own it.”

I thought I got it. “Okay so basically the difference between Baptist Plague-Sending God and Unitarian Buffet-Style God. I’d definitely have an easier time with the second. So what you’re suggesting...”

She opened her eyes. “I am now your wife, again. Please define a set of rules for being a good husband as you understand it. If you’d like suggestions, I will make some. Follow your own rules. If you want to make a schedule for some of them, I’d like that.”

I nodded. “Okay. I’m… sorry. You are the most patient and understanding person I’ve ever met. I love you and I’m… sincerely sorry that I haven’t kept up.”

She sighed, but it sounded more like a release of tension. “Relationships are work. I don’t remember where I learned that, but it’s been a good lesson. Sometimes that means housework, but a lot of times the heavy lifting is actually in diverting the course of whatever emotion is driving us to conflict. I could get angry in the moment, but then I remember that I love you, and you respond better to reason. Making this work is about trust, too. We have to trust in each other’s best intentions. I know you’re not trying to take advantage of me, and if it’s pointed out, you’ll work on it. But you may need this talk, this contract, to help set the standards in your mind.”

I couldn’t resist one last poke at the boundary. “And just to be clear, Unitarian God Wife, what’ll happen if I don’t manage to follow my own rules?”

She looked me dead in the eye. “Oh, you know exactly what will happen. And it won’t be the Unitarian version.”

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Colonel Charles Kaur, Present Day

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“But the hour and the day no man knoweth, neither the angels in heaven, nor shall they know until he comes.”

“... pardon, sir?”

Colonel Charles Kaur looked up from his desk. Deep in officer country at Redman AFB, it was rare to experience interruptions from anyone less senior than a O-4, but officers were in short supply today. Everyone was in short supply today. Half his goddamn country had disappeared, replaced by those demons. He considered the Captain before him. Young man, freshly promoted, looked scared shitless. Smart, then. “Captain Kitchener, if I may ask, what are your religious inclinations?” Usually he wouldn’t have to ask, but everyone immediately under him was missing, or dead.

“Uh. Well, I’m- we go to a first Episcopalian back in Whitebridge, but I haven’t had much time lately. Why, sir? Are you implying all this- “ the Captain, still standing at semi-attention, gestured broadly, indicating the whole clusterfuck of a situation, “might be… a Biblical event?”

The Colonel sat back. “Roy- can I call you Roy? Roy, I don’t know what else it could be. The Doctrine and Covenants say that the righteous on earth will be caught up to meet him, and his coming will be preceded by fires, floods, hurricanes- we’ve certainly seen enough of both of those signs, even if the ‘Righteous’ seem a bit randomly selected. Half the Church, but half of everyone else too. Not my place to question. But the… things left in their place don’t fit in at all. And there’s been no great sign, and no angels announcing Christ’s return, so it’s hard to say that this fits the Mormon interpretation of a Second Coming. Maybe that happens on day three.”

Roy swallowed nervously. Charles understood. Until he’d climbed up a bit on the totem pole he’d had a hard time seeing the forest for the trees. These had always been the end times, that much was obvious to him, but when you were down in the day-to-day of logistics and personnel you could lose track. The unrest in the middle east, the collapse of national sentiment for God, the war on Christmas- it all pointed one way, and now, here was the end of that road. The Captain stammered out “I- I don’t know, sir, I’ve never thought about it that way. I’m just here to give you the briefing we’ve put together?” He raised his clipboard hopefully.

Oh alright, let him off the hook. “Go on then. What’s going on in the world? Have you heard a single damn thing from anyone above us?”

“Nobody at the Federal level. Washington has been completely silent, as of the time of the Incident yesterday. Can’t even get satellite imagery, it looks like a storm but the infrared’s all wrong…” the Captain trailed off. Now come on, son, how many signs do you need? But Charles held his peace and eventually the nervous man resumed. “State level, the Guard has been contacted by the Lieutenant Governor’s office and ordered to secure the population centers and assist with crisis management. Given that they’re at half strength and dealing with the same chaos as the rest of us, that’s taking some time.” They’ll be assembling at the Armory, not too far from here.

The Captain continued. “We’ve received no orders from either level, but we’re in touch with our intelligence apparatus, what’s left of it. There’s a lot of paralysis, sir. This doesn’t feel like enemy action, but…” he trailed off. Charles knew what he meant. But how can you lose half your population overnight, to an accident? Someone’s behind this, somewhere. Gesturing with one hand he bade the captain continue. “Intel is spotty all over. Some pop centers are entirely dark, same as Washington. Overseas, we’ve lost the entirety of Great Britain somehow- there was a brief radio transmission, a warning not to look at a ‘blue-white symbol,’ but the transmitter was overrun. Recon photos show mobs running in the streets, we don’t know why they aren’t speaking. Israel is embattled on at least two fronts, and may be losing ground to an Iranian/Egyptian coalition. There appears to have been a limited nuclear exchange on the Pakistan/India border, and North Korea seems to have launched an all-out assault on Seoul, and possibly initiated an exchange with Japan. They’re calling for our long-range capabilities, but we can’t get authorization.”

Charles nodded. “And nobody’s launched on us? In the blackouts, no detonations detected?”

The Captain shook his head. “No sir. Not that we know of. Some of the blackouts might just be all these… bug aliens, but they’ve been pretty non-aggressive so far. Mostly they just run. They seem intelligent but we haven’t bridged the language barrier yet. We did hear about an autopsy on one that died in an, uh, ‘accident’ but the team doing the dissection couldn’t make heads or tails of what they were seeing.” He paused, finally done. “It’s chaos, sir. The world’s falling apart and nobody knows what to do about it. We need orders.”

We won’t get them. Charles stood up from his desk. “Here are your orders, Roy. We’re not going to initiate a nuclear war when nobody’s fired on the US. Whatever’s happening with the Norks, the South and Japan are going to have deal with it. We, meaning the people on this airbase and every remaining military unit that you can get in touch with, are now the effective government of this country. Our first priority is to assist with securing the population centers from this invasion. Get recon over Midland City and St. Renauld as soon as possible. I want to know what the demons are up to. They may not be hostile individually, but we’re losing cities. We’ll sweep them out, then attempt to link up with other elements.”

The Captain, seemingly relieved just to have a direction to march in, nodded smartly. “Rules of engagement, sir? For the bugs?”

The Colonel smiled- genuinely. It was the look of a man who knew, really knew, for the first time in his life, that he was going to fight for a good cause. “Holy War, Captain. You round up every last one of those fuckers. If they run, if they protest, if they show the slightest sign of resistance... shoot them. God will know his own.”