Signature

It’s our deep future—New Year’s morning of the year 1347, to be precise. Psychoanalyst Israel Weaver (“= Izzy”), mediator Abel Joshua Lee, and astrono= mer Titus Mack (three old friends self-tagged “the Group”) are in Mack’s observatory with his grudging holiday gue= st, historical professor Moses Amantu. Mack has assembled the= se distinguished gentlemen to witness his mind-boggling discovery firsthand: an atmospheric field of captured <= /span>“waveprints,” the electromagnetic residue of our planet’s past physical activity. The observatory’s sympathetic program Solomon is able to sample and digitize waveprint clusters, transpose them as values, and replay them as projections on the inner wall = (or “skin”), and as internal holographic imagery, turning the place into a living theater.

   =        There’s enormous news to be had: acce= pted history is actually a lie, a governmental rewrite designed by a logic progr= am to cover up the sociopolitical calamity of 2116, some four hundred years pr= ior. That program identified runaway religiosity as the phenomenon responsible f= or the near-collapse of western civilization, and fabricated a secular history freed of superstitious passions, along with a mysterious viral factor to account for the illogical behavior of zealots. Descendants of those original believers live quarantined in the Western Hemisphere= ’s central plague Colony, and after four hundred years of underground adaptati= on fully resemble the raving carriers of urban legends and horror stories. In = these days to come, proselytizers, or “snatchers,” use telepresence to leap city lines. Unusual ideas are suspect, passions frowned upon. Trespass= ing Colonists are shot on sight.

   =        Solomon (activated by the password “Solo”) puts the rewrite = to rest with heart-stopping 3D, revealing everything from the Deluge to Jack t= he Ripper to Ground Zero at Hiros= hima. In the following sample, two chapter breaks have been removed for the sake = of continuity. The story is picked up in chapter five, as the men witness America= ’s great church-versus-state disaster in the second decade of the twenty-second century. Titus Mack is speaking:

&= nbsp;         “Solo. Samuel Obadiah Butcher. The Republican Convention of 2116. Still Motion.= 221;

&= nbsp;         The skin immediately reconfigured as four right-angled apparent walls ninety fe= et apart, converting the roomy observatory into a packed auditorium. There must have been six hundred black-robed, black-brimmed statues crammed inside this huge teak-and-mahogany image of a room, each one mesmerized by a gaunt, fie= rce-eyed elderly man behind a cruciform podium on a backlit stage.=

      =     “= Sam Butcher,” Mack said evenly. “The Republican Party’s man of the hour. Raised in a famous evangelical family, ‘The Barnstorming Butchers,’ as I recall. Born entertainer, stand-up orator, and multimillionaire at forty. As patriarch of a bay-to-cape web of Faith Famil= ies, he attacked the Amer= icas’ moral decay with venom and resolve.”

&= nbsp;         “Ven-ge . . .” Izzy sputtered. “I . . . what? Clarify, man! Even-who-ical?”

&= nbsp;         “Evangel= ical. ‘Evangelists’ were the forerunners of our modern snatchers. But this was way before telepresence. The evangelism of Butcher’s day was= a perfectly legal system promoting the tenets of a globally-accepted supreme being’s teaching, complete with aggressive campaigning and ritualistic behavior.”

&= nbsp;         Abel slapped his knees. “Oh, please.”

&= nbsp;         “Now wait a minute, AJ. These people were sincere. What’s more, they were desperate. There’d been a deep schism in the machinery of democracy f= or forty years, with liberals and conservatives leaning ever farther from the middle; the left wing becoming the Hard Left and the right wing the Hard Ri= ght, the former growing deliberately dirtier= in retaliation to the vaunted spotlessness of the latter. Our political system= was in civil war. And with the election nearing, fully half the population were ready to fight to the death for Mister Butcher here, while the other half w= ere rowdily impassioned over their candidate. Solo. Harry Riser. Two hours late= r. Still Motion.”

&= nbsp;         The black-garbed statues dissolved like men of foam. In their place arose an eq= ual number of men and women, all outrageously coiffed and costumed. Many were nearly naked, wearing only scraps of flesh-tone underwear strung with bizarrely-dyed feathers and lewdly-shaped baubles. By their posture it was evident they’d been captured in a highly suggestive dance. Up onstage= , a chubby beaming man posed like a gaudy gift to humanity.
&= nbsp;         “Harry Riser was a gadabout, a publicity hound and, well, quite frankly, a flaming homosexual. He represented a popular interpretation of the constitution that equates liberty with license—= as though the meaning of a free society is getting away with all you can. There’s no doubt that under any other circumstances he and his hedonistic circus would have b= een laughed into obscurity, but the Hard Right represented something that, to freemen everywhere, was even more unpalatable: the utter annihilation of t= hat hard-won liberty. A week before the election the consensus was plain: the Left was going to win in a landslide. Sam Butcher was shouted down and threatened, his speeches parodi= ed and his platform ridiculed. At the close of the campaign he was all but impotent.”

&= nbsp;         Izzy considered the crowd through his glass, his head rocking left and right. “But . . . Gad, man! Was no—middle ground?”

&= nbsp;         “None. The pendulum had swung too far. Now skip a beat. Mysterious rumors surface alleging improprieties between Riser and a retarded boy; a boy whose mother boasted a red-letter reputation with congressmen and various welfare person= nel. Although this woman is reported receiving a million dollars from unnamed sources before evaporating from public view, it’s already too late for Riser. A kind of tribal rage against child molestation takes the mind of man and media. Rider is hounded, assaulted, placed under full Secret Service protection. The Butcher camp leap on the moment like piranha. Sam’s eleventh-hour slogan trembles on every lip: ‘Cop or con, man or child; no one likes a pedophile!’= Riser is consigned to the bowels of history. Solo. Harry Riser. Two days Forward. Real Time.”

&= nbsp;         An instant later the men were outdoors. All those dancing statues had been replaced by a wildly screaming mob of frenetic projections, blowing in and = out of focus as they ran. Fists passed through Abel’s and Amantu’s gaping faces while Izzy scrambled under nonexistent feet. The din-and-flurry was so realistic it all but obscured a phalanx of riot police fighting to escort a haunted-looking Riser to safety.

&= nbsp;         “Solo. Break.” Mack clasped his hands behind his back and absently watched h= is guests recover. “Now, Butcher did win the presidency, but less by electoral college than by acclamation. As things turned out, we’d all have been a lot better off if they’d just stuck with Riser.

“= Sam was a born showman with a tremendous ego. His speeches became sermons, his = Oval Office objections outright chastisements. He turned the highest office on t= he planet into his personal pulpit. This was too much for the Senate and House= .

&= nbsp;         “Butcher was impeached, found mad, and removed unto the wailing bereavement of over a billion ‘Little Butchers.’ His Vice bailed out right behind him. The interim rule of the House Speaker was so deliberately neutral the man w= as nicknamed the ‘Plain Vanilla President.’

&= nbsp;         “Butcher began wandering across the country, preaching from the stage of a motorized sound system. Solo. The ‘Soul Tsunami.’ Overhead Zoom. Real Time.”

&= nbsp;         The skin’s phantom horizon gave way to hills crawling with people. The Gr= oup again received the distinct impression of observing from on high, though th= eir feet remained in direct contact with Mack’s floor. The big difference between this scene and Solomon’s Black Death rendition was the level = of activity—the mob ‘below’ was beyond belief; blue hills bl= ack with millions of followers, all crammed about the tiny creeping dot that was the rolling stage bearing Samuel Obadiah Butcher. The Group could hear him hollering over a powerful public address system; of repentance and remittance, of demons slain in virtuous battle.

&= nbsp; “Sam knew how to hold a crowd; he used repetition to keep them in a trancelike s= tate. This was one of the oldest tricks in the evangelical book. Listen to how he uses a simple singsong phrase, ‘Oh Soul,’ to control pheromonal output and blood pressure. Solo. Loc= ate a Tsunami Chant. Enhance the Butcher audio file.”

&= nbsp; The scene shifted to late afternoon. Now Butcher’s voice came through with exceptional clarity, while the mass responses of the crowd sounded as thoug= h on a separate track.

&= nbsp; “Oh Soul of the burning night!̶= 1;

&= nbsp; “= Oh Soul!”

&= nbsp; “Oh Soul of the deepest sea!”=

&= nbsp; “= Oh Soul!”

&= nbsp; “Oh Soul, do we, cry un-to thee!”

&= nbsp; “= Oh Soul! Oh Soul! Oh Soul!&#= 8221;

&= nbsp; Mack was noting his friends’ puzzled<= /span> expres= sions while the chant progressed. “Solo. Stop.” The mob froze, though= its rhythm and passion still filled the room. “A ‘soul’,̶= 1; Mack explained, “was a supposed entity, non-corporeal, that departed a cadaver to join the divinity in its otherworldly domain. It was essentially one’s consciousness, freed from the unclean body for purification in = an ‘afterlife.’ A neat trick if you can pull it off: mental immortality. As expressed in Tsunami philosophy, ‘soul of&= #8217; meant the deity itself; kind of a universal entelechy.”

&= nbsp; Abel laughed appropriately, but Amantu mused, “Rather like a signature, al= beit one infused with self-will.”

&= nbsp; Mack kneaded his chin. “Y’know, Hammer, you’re a funny guy. A dynamic signature!” He winked at Abel. “Anyway, to stir up this kind of feeling was to waken a potentially wild animal, one that could go into stampede-mode at the = drop of a hat. So from their earliest barnstorming days the Butchers had kept an ensemble of bodyguards; as much family as employees. By the time of the Tsunami, Sam was abundantly aware of his own mortality. Solo. Zoom in on Security. Real Time.” Solomon instantly magnified a bare ring surroun= ding the slowly proceeding stage. Within this ring were hundreds of burly men, stepping back and forth, turning on their toes while staring into the crowd with looks of exaggerated menace. Security wore black shovel hats, very dark sunglasses, plush sable-lined parkas, black paratrooper pants, black combat boots. Each sloping hat bore a slender white cross emblazoned on its crown. Continuing this theme were bolo ties designed to resemble long white dangli= ng crucifixes over black rayon dress shirts. Whenever these men turned, and th= ey turned often, similar bone-white crosses could be seen running down the bac= ks of their parkas; vertical beams corresponding to spines, horizontals to outstretched arms. “Mark well those men. They, and their descendants, play a pivotal role in the fun to come.

&= nbsp; “Everywh= ere Butcher paused, this astounding entourage halted with him. Whole cities eru= pted on these sites, bearing strange names like Davidtown, Miracle House, Jericho Junction. Some still exist. That entourage included media of every level and caliber, National Guardsmen and special agents, sympathizers and camp followers, the dysfunctional and the dispossessed. And, thanks to those media, the details of his movements spre= ad like wildfire. Finally Butcher, claiming to be directed by a voice on high, staked his claim in an area known as Kentucky, now the Colony’s dead-center. He named this area New Nazareth, and it became a magnet for millions upon millions of citizens from every coast. Th= ere was no way on earth to take care of sanitation in such a situation. A hardy breed of field rat came out of the hills and ran rampant in the garbage and half-buried fecal matter. Sexually-transmitted diseases went unchecked. The place began to look more like a battlefield than a mass celebration, and so= on death walked boldly among the faithful. The Guard and Crosses worked heroically, the rats were fought with cleavers and gate wire, but in the en= d it was Butcher’s charisma that held everybody together. The worse it got, the more they saw Sam as their savior. These were some odd times. In all ma= jor cities, his supporters erected supply lines, darkened the windows of their houses, and walked around dressed entirely in black, making no secret of th= eir allegiance. At the same time, perfectly stable citizens were quitting their jobs and selling their homes, packing up their families and joyously crossi= ng the country to support the Tsunami. Solo. Break.” The lights came up.

&= nbsp; “Gentlem= en, this was no fad or public caprice. So far as the government was concerned, = the Soul Tsunami’s mass migration was tantamount to anarchy.” Mack stabbed a forefinger in the air to make his points. “Minimally, its effects were a staggered economy, a break= down of law and order, and a dramatic increase in civil polarization.=

&= nbsp; “The Hard Left’s abiding resentment over Riser’s foiling, and their burning hatred of the Little Butchers’ haughty divinity-worship, grew into a cult, the cult into a movement, and the movement into a crusade. The= re were some despicable beatings of those black-draped followers, right in pub= lic. Their children were ostracized, their wives ridiculed and sexually assaulte= d. Then in 2118, on a special divinity-holiday known as ‘Christmas,̵= 7; a coast-to-coast coalition of university students, goaded by rage, pharmaceuticals, and peer pressure, introduced a digital virus into every municipal mainframe. This virus, the so-called ‘Messiah Bug,’ instantly deleted every reference to religion. The divinity-worshippersR= 17; overpowering word of history and law, a two thousand year-old tome known as ‘Bible,’ was wiped from the annals of history in a heartbeat.

&= nbsp; “My friends, it’s impossible to overstate the effect this single act had = upon millions and millions of human beings. Beyond outrage, beyond violation, be= yond imagination—the record of all= they believed and prized . . . gone! After an interim of shock the faithful went berserk, attacking anyone in uniform. They felt that the system, and that technology itself, were somehow to blame&#= 8212;that the government, having transferred all hard copy into a digital format, was directly responsible for the complete loss of their profound teaching. All = over the continent, appliances in general, and digital devices in particular, we= re attacked with great vengeance. Fueled by religious sermons on every street corner, mobs dressed entirely in black stormed archives and governmental offices, smashing to pieces all equipment responsible for data storage and manipulation . . . for filtration, for power, for sewage. Officials—even minor bureaucrats—were = torn limb from limb, buildings were burned to the ground. In their frenzy the faithful destroyed the foundation of their very survival.=

&= nbsp; “When word of the tome’s deletion reached New Nazareth, the Little Butchers= went through various stages of denial and hysteria before breaking down complete= ly. Butcher himself collapsed as though struck by lightning. Once recovered, he claimed to have undergone some kind of subliminal interview with the divini= ty, who told him that prayer must not be a meek mumbling but a ‘begging outcry.’ And ‘prayer,’ in this context, means a vocal att= empt to attract a busy divinity’s attention. So the heart of New Nazareth bleated out its plaint, and the fringes joined in. The urgency went out in = waves, until it seemed that every North American voice was involved. Throats were screamed bloody raw, women swooned, elderly men died in their passion.=

&= nbsp; “One night not long after, a divine vision appeared in New Nazareth for a period= of just over eleven seconds before vanishing altogether. But it was enough to convince the Little Butchers that Sam was their ‘New Messiah,’ which meant he was, practically speaking, an heir in the divine line, essentially a second son of the divinity itself. Butcher thereupon wandered= off in a trance, his path cleared by hundreds of thousands of scrabbling men and women. With millions more hard on his heels, he staggered up to Crystal Cave, the mouth of a vast undergro= und caverns-system known, pre-Colony, as Mammoth. Standing in a sea of jabbering humanity, Sam informed a breathless world by video that his deity had order= ed him to produce a new divine literature in their beloved old, centuries-test= ed hard copy, complete with an updated set of laws and admonitions. This work-= of-works was to be known as the New Faith, and its word was to be absolute, with Butcher’s interpretation final. Additionally he, Samuel Obadiah Butch= er, had been divinely-directed to select a body of assistants. Solo. Crystal Cave. Zoom out. Still Motion.̶= 1;

&= nbsp; From an apparent rise some two hundred yards off the Mammoth entrance, the Group watched Butcher standing in a pose of beatific submission, his arms thrown high. So sensitive to human viewpoint was Solomon that the contemporary observers were aligned in perfect juxtaposition with the proximate projecti= ons, as opposed to those seemingly-smaller figures in the “distance.”= ; At this magnification there were already thousands upon thousands of men and w= omen squeezed about the Group, their eyes and hands raised passionately.

&= nbsp; “Zoom Out times ten.” The breadth of vantage increased tenfold, showing countless ever-tinier people cascading to the cave’s mouth, now a bla= ck pinprick in the hills.

&= nbsp; “Times one hundred.” At this point the Group were staring from high upon a r= elief map, yet still swallowed up by raving humanity. Butcher and his new inner circle were but mist. “You see what I mean? <= /span>This is= the effect religion had on people. Solo. Zoom in. Slow Clock at Mark.”

&= nbsp; The perspective rocketed back to Mark, whereupon the imagery moved along at a retarded rate. Butcher was turning in slow motion, a thousand men and women= in his wake. The women were all very comely, the men strapping and intimidatin= g. The mouth of Crystal Cave, essentially an antechamber to the staggering Mammoth Caverns system, was blockaded by Butcher’s security. Their uniform had evolved to meet the leader’s heady status. The men now wo= re hooded black leather trench coats with elongated white crosses on the arms, fronts, and backs. Black leather gloves, heavily studded black belts, black steel-toed boots. The same huge shades covered their eyes, and the same whi= te crosses showed on the fronts of their hoods, but now white paint representi= ng vertical cross-beams ran down the faces, foreheads-to-throats, and across t= he mouths to the ears, representing horizontal cross-beams.<= /p>

= “= Solo. Break. These people accompanying Butcher were to be his personal attendants while he undertook the awesome task of dictating the divinity’s mighty word. He led them into a dark and dangerous world, courageously calling out platitudes to an unseen deity, his arms burdened by a pair of blank flat stones. The rats followed them down.

&= nbsp; “Conditi= ons were deplorable. Unfettered by the regulations of civilization, the baser aspects of human nature quickly took hold. The caverns became savage cloist= ered arenas, and Sam little more than a cartoonish father figure. Torches contributed a fearsome ambience, injuries went untreated, sickness and claustrophobia brought many to the brink of insanity. At the entrance, Secu= rity assured the anxious multitude that everything downstairs was just dandy, and stomped the daylights out of anybody who got too curious. Food came down in= a fairly steady stream, but the scraps were thrown into miscellaneous passage= s to rot, and any old hole served for a toilet. As the diseases of antiquity reemerged, the dying were left screaming in the dark. The rats grew bolder.= In time a cult of the rat grew, blending almost seamlessly with the ancient religious tenets Butcher had been trying so hard to preserve. Even though he was grandstanding bravely, everybody knew he was scared out of his wits. He realized he’d have to resurface eventually, and knew, too, that when = he did he’d better have something pretty damned impressive to show the impatient millions. What he didn’t know is that blind fate will always trump blind faith.

= “= By now Sam was well into his eighties. His joints were wracked, his bowels shot, h= is mind going. But he was, after all, a man. The women he brought down with him were selected for their sexual attractiveness, as well as for their pliabil= ity. And he was a very, very scared little man. The males he’d picked were= the biggest and dumbest he could find. Sam was counting on their loyalty, but in due course progressive senility made him clinically paranoid; afraid of his circle, afraid of the dark, afraid of his own security men. And, more than anything, deathly afraid of the next showing of his deity. Solo. The Honeyc= omb Heart. Still Motion.”

&= nbsp; The observatory’s interior became a deep stone vault lit by standing torc= hes, their eerie peaked flames frozen in space and time. On a rock stage stacked with rat skulls sat a decrepit, weary Sam Butcher, the picture of profound depression, surrounded by black-robed men holding black-leaved manuscripts = with black-dyed covers made of human parchment. Behind these men, soot-painted n= ude women could be seen in apparent pantomime, their arms thrown out and their heads tossed back. The scene in front of that stage was a paused full-blown orgy; naked men and women flung on the dirt floor, their glistening flesh smeared with fresh soot. Others were chained to the walls or heaped semiconscious on the stage. Caught in the act of wading through all these bodies were Butcher’s security men, whips and prods in their beefy gl= oved fists. Their black cloaks had evolved to meet the circumstances; they were = now full-length hooded affairs with elastic bands that kept the faces prominent, and featured bone-white crosses down the chests, backs, and limbs. That whi= te facial paint had expanded to cover the entire face, making Security’s visages, with those ominous dark glasses now like eye sockets, uncannily similar to death’s heads.

&= nbsp; “Here the New Messiah held court, haunted by demons and doubts and the natural afflictions of the aged. And here he handed down the edicts he claimed were= set forth by the divinity, while his conspiring circle of disciples—that somber group of barefooted men standing round him in the black hooded cloaks—entered his ravings in the secret ink of urine on the Black Book’s leaves, freely mistranslating as they went along. Those brawny= men with the prods and lashes are the elite remnants of his old security team, = the infamous ‘Butcher’s Butchers,’ seen here engaged in their holy work and favorite pastime: torturing those made demented by religious fervor. These guys’ predecessors were recruited from prize fighters and heavyweight wrestlers; = even in his early post-barnstorming days Butcher was fearful enough to require a= measure of viciousness in his protection. When he reached icon-status he had to turn over the job of hiring to team members themselves, and they engaged in recruitment tactics that were all-out contests of strength and violence. Underground competitions—fights to the death—were initially held for the New Messiah’s sake, then as gory entertainments to gratify the Butchers’ own egos and sick tribal impulses. Solo. Real Time.”<= o:p>

&= nbsp; The women began to dance and writhe. The torches’ flicking umbrae slid ac= ross their painted curves. Security plucked up random souls and punched them back down, engrossed in a strangely methodical form of brutality.

&= nbsp; “At this point it was still important to keep up an imperious front. Butcher to= ok his pesthole’s loveliest crawler for queen; a petite, pallid, manipulative brunette temptress he pet-named ‘Little Mother,’ b= ut who was known by the inmates as Black Mary. To please her, and to justify t= heir intimacy, he had her written into the New Faith as his divinely-graced pers= onal bodyguard. Then, when things got hotter, he proclaimed her the divinityR= 17;s chosen executioner. Little Mary took to her task with zeal, using rat fangs= as stilettos. This is the origin of all those legends about a plague passer, t= he underground’s notorious ‘Infector Mater.’

&= nbsp; “Butcher fell wildly in love with this little porcelain pervert, demented as she was; demented as they all were. I say ‘pervert’ because the woman wa= s a flat-out masochist, as well as a sadist. She could take as much punishment = as she dished out—the one thing she couldn’t take was sentiment. S= am could only gratify her with beatings, which were never quite ferocious enou= gh. The circle were into it, Security were all thumbs-up; the ambience was one hundred percent encouragement. Somewhere in there he lost it completely. Butcher had his little rat-queen nailed to a cross on the divinity-channeli= ng stage. There’s a real symbolism to this act, which I’ll show you guys in a minute. The people took to torturing Mary ritualistically, egged-= on by her ecstatic screams. The Honeycomb rapidly evolved into a bloody madhou= se.

&= nbsp; “When Sam couldn’t stand it any longer he took the only out open to him—he went into convulsions, claimed a revelation, and jabbered his = way back to the surface. In front of the whole hemisphere he announced that the divinity had commanded him to lead the world in a Final Crusade. Solo. The Upcoming. Still Motion.”

&= nbsp; And they were back outside, on what must have been a very cold, very dark night. Hundreds of generator-operated searchlights stood trained on Crystal Cave, painting one patch of the skin a brilliant white without increasing the room’s illuminative content a whit. Butcher was crouching amongst countless prostrated black-clothed followers, his arms wrapped round his to= rso. It didn’t require sound and motion to illustrate the mob’s wrac= ked passion: the faces around the= Group were maniacally contorted.

&= nbsp; “Accordi= ng to the New Messiah, ‘God’ had declared war on the ‘Devil<= /span>;’ the former being his omniscient perso= nal bodyguard, the latter being pretty much everything that didn’t confor= m to the niceties of Western religion. All technology was to be destroyed, along with everybody not of Butcher’s ‘Divine Phalanx.’ A cushy immortality would come to those who died in righteous battle, eternal damna= tion to anyone who hesitated. Butcher first commanded that the permanent National Guard encampments around New Nazareth be attacked by his hastily-organized Faith Catapult; essentially a mad dash of shrieking followers wielding any weapons they could jerry-rig. Incredulous troops were slaughtered in the frenzy, and many thousands of Butcher’s Catapult mortally injured in = the stampede.

&= nbsp; “The military’s retaliation was swift and panicky. Units of the Army and A= ir Force cut the faithful down in their tracks, causing an hysterical three-day mass exodus into the bowels of Mammoth.” He inclined his head and sai= d, “Solo.”

And the= y were caught in a riot. The observatory was filled with bright daylight, the air clotted by confused voices, the artificial horizon made fuzzy by the all-out frenzy of uncountable scrabbling followers. Flesh was scraped away by rock = as men, women, and children squeezed screaming into Crystal. In the apparent distance, a few fighter jets and half a dozen attack helicopters circled for additional run= s. The Group stood riveted as a pair of copters swept over the mob, spewing bullets that left pockets of humanity flopping. Amantu instinctively threw = up his arms as a hammering column of lead tore through him and passed.

&= nbsp; “= Back down below,” Mack said while the slaug= hter raged around them, “Butcher h= ad to fight in the dark. He was a lousy general; almost every command he ga= ve ended in a massacre. Solo. Stop. Meanwhile survivors continued to pile in, = one on top of the other. Eventually they blocked off the entrance and turned the place into a wailing asylum. These interconnecting caverns are enormous—according to Solomon over three hundred and fifty miles long, and in some spots deep beyond measure. There were myriad uncharted breaks to the outside world, flues and the like, where locals were able to set up sup= ply lines from the cities by tunneling around troops. Many of these excavations comprise the root system of our present-day Colony.

&= nbsp; “The Army blew the blocked entrance to grit and poured inside. Butcher’s people retreated one cavern for every lost battle, while he muttered and pa= ced like some lunatic commander in a besieged bunker. Yet despite their New Messiah’s delirium, or maybe because of it, they continued to fight savagely, relying on ambush, a secret code based on echoes, and a selfless = will to engage that awed as much as frustrated the advancing soldiers. They were driven back by an antique, gasoline-based gel called ‘napalm.’ = No one knew for sure if it was tunnel fever or tacit agreement—and Solom= on is unable to pinpoint a direct order for me—but when the faithful wer= e at last pressed into an unbelievably vast blind chamber, which also happened t= o be a natural crude basin, the troops, who were only to use their napalm as a m= eans of prodding, turned all they had on Butcher and Company, incinerating the l= ot on the spot. I won’t try your stomachs with that visual. The g= ale of data produces a highly distorted playback anyway. Solo. The Aftermath. Zoom Out.”

= New Nazareth on a dreary autumnal morn.

= Files of body bags on stretchers, winding up a temporary road out of Crystal, en route to a series of makesh= ift hospitals separated by columns of troop transports. Helicopters hovering li= ke dragonflies. Teams carrying out black-draped crates and litters heaped with miscellaneous items.

= “= All of New Nazareth was placed under quarantine. Uncounted survivors, guerrillas and the like, escaped into the hills, where they took to digging out tunnels in earnest, eventually hooking up with the= supply lines and bringing in refugees from the cities. See all those boxes with the black covers? They contain cribs. Secure vaults were discovered in the dept= hs, peopled only by nursemaids watching over infants in black swaddling cloths. Notes, written in urine on soot-coated rags, were pinned to these cloths wi= th messages like, ‘Please let little Nehemiah walk with the Lord,’ et cetera. Solo. Stop.”

= The grim picture froze. Mack looked at the Group thoughtfully. “= Solomon tabulated the body bags, using Fast Motion= in a temporal Zoom mode. Forget exactitude:&n= bsp; over five million, seven hundred and thirteen thousand were carried = out over the course of eleven weeks; all burned beyond recognition. The troops = were buried in a hush military ceremony in a place called Virginia, the infants = put up for adoption on military bases. Butcher’s followers were interred in various paupers’= cemeteries around the country. It was all highly classified.

= “= The government was hard-pressed for an out, and admission to genocide was definitely not an option. Solo. The Messiah Commission. Still Motion.”

&= nbsp; Seated at a broad table against the skin’s southern face were seventeen dour= men in age breaks measuring middle-aged to quite elderly. At first blush they presented all the appearance of colleagues posing for a group portrait, but closer examination exposed a panel of fuming arbiters going out of their wa= y to avoid one another.

&= nbsp; “Take a hard look at these very exclusive gentlemen. The Commission was assigned = to find a single, unassailable solution that would mollify the public, exonera= te the government, and permanently prevent a recurrence of disaster on this sc= ale. Finally admitting defeat, they narrowly passed a vote to solicit the assist= ance of a logic program. All pertinent data were entered. The program was unable= to process the illogic of faith, but it established the condition of fa= ith as the lynchpin, and demonstrated that this condition’s insane consequences were made inevitable by an ages-old mindset under the mounting pressures of a burgeoning population. The Butcher explosion was cited as me= rely the initial catastrophe in a projected series of social cataclysms. The only-human commissioners were forced to beg the program for a livable solut= ion, and the program responded in the time it takes to point a cursor:

&= nbsp; “With Biblical references already deleted from record, with Butcher and his Tsuna= mi followers all carbonized, and with the only people still shouting hosanna quarantined under military guard, the logical step was to delete those quarantined, establish means to obviate further religious influence from outside our borders, and rewrite history—a better history; one without smiting and persecution, one teeming with sane, dispassionate heroes. Something more palatable to subsequent generations. When prodded, the Commission’s new digital tutor even offered up an improved version of reality. It simply removed everything rel= ated to religiosity, and left the great works of science and exploration intact.=

&= nbsp; “Yet that removal amounted, cumulatively, to thousands of years. The program, considering the way historical events were chronologically patterned, inven= ted alternate causes and concerns. Prominent contemporary novelists, dramatists, and artists were commissioned to fill in the gaps, and their completed new history is pretty much the one we’ve grown up accepting as factual.

= “= Since the Commission refused to accept the liquida= tion of Butcher’s followers, t= he prog= ram recommended they remain quarantined. It thereupon invented a mysterious vir= ological factor, what became known as the ‘Messiah Plague,’ to justify an enforced isolation, projecting that, should these ‘carriers’ be allowed to die out naturally, the condition of religiosity would die out wi= th them. In the meantime, the ‘well’ public would be told that the ‘ill’ Colonists’ religious declamations were the natural result of an insidious, but completely contained, brain fever. As stipulate= d by the program, the government would keep up the necessary propaganda—qu= ashing rumors and caramelizing facts—for as long as it took. According to the culled probability curves, Butcher’s divinity would, in time, go the = way of all rabble-rousers.

&= nbsp; “The vote was seventeen over naught for revision on these terms.

&= nbsp; “Gentlem= en, I’ve come to appreciate the Messiah Commission’s members as gen= uine heroes. Their regard for the betterment of our species far outweighed their personal wants. And, even though suicide was officially condemned by their deity, they’d made a pact.= With the votes tallied, all seventeen sucked cyanide in a black-draped war room = made up as a house of worship.

&= nbsp; “Of course, the dying-out of Butcher’s followers didn’t solve a thi= ng. They’d passed their beliefs onto their children, and when the youngst= ers grew up they smuggled in new converts from the cities. The Colony developed= on its own underground, sequestered and provisioned by the government while it kept up the incurable disease ruse. But it’s a funny thing about time. The brain adjusts beautifully. After centuries of repetition fiction ‘becomes’ truth. Even today, men thought to be snatchers are sh= ot in cold blood by perfectly sincere agents. Mothers still spook their childr= en with stories about carriers under the bed. Drunken teenagers still sneak in= to the Colony with guns and razors, still tell stories about fights to the dea= th with subterranean zombie armies. Even though the Messiah Plague was yesterday’s news four hundred years ago.

&= nbsp; “Yet, you know, in the end that damned program was right. Men have come to favor their intellects over their passions. Our children grow up fascinated by the real rather than the imaginary. There’s room for both humor and beaut= y in the grand mosaic.”

&= nbsp; Abel pushed himself to his feet. “But, Titus—humor and beauty aside, intellectual honesty prevents my accepting this notion of citizens wreaking havoc on their own civilization. Show me a war, show me a campaign—show me any time in history where so many people have behave= d so violently in concert.”

&= nbsp; “YouR= 17;ve got to absorb the psychological impact of this Bible-expunging thing, AJ. Imagine, as a comparison, all science wiped out, without the least vestige = of evidence to show for centuries of heroic research.”=

&= nbsp; “New calculations could be made. New heroes would arise.”

&= nbsp; Mack nodded, more to himself than to the room. “Well, there was one thing the Commission hadn̵= 7;t counted on, one thing the program wasn’t able to deal with, one thing even Samuel Butcher wasn’t ready for. As a matter of fact, millions u= pon millions of vigilant men and women were caught completely off-guard.”=

&= nbsp; “Of course they were.” Abel’s teeth glinted under the house lights. “And that would have been . . . because?”

&= nbsp; “Do you remember that vision I mentioned earlier, the one that precipitated Sam’s abrupt elevation to Messiah-hood? Solo. Vision One. Real Time. = Full Pan, Short Zoom. Observer’s Vantage, two-second delay.”

&= nbsp; And they were back outdoors on a black, searchlight-shredded night, locked elbow-to-elbow in a mob that stretched as far as the skin could capture. No= w an incredible din—some kind of singsong chant—was cut off mid-vers= e. The projections surrounding the Group jerked to the northwest, their eyes bugged-out and their jaws hanging. As though choreographed, men and women on all sides simultaneously fell to their knees. The effect went out in the mo= tion of ripples, and within seconds projections horizon-to-horizon were flat on their bellies facing a skull-shaped hill two hundred apparent-yards to the Group’s left. In a hastily-cleared space atop that hill leaned a wate= ry, free-standing figure. It was indisputably the figure of a man, as opposed to something manlike; the limbs were of human proportions and the bearing upri= ght, though the spread arms and limp digits gave it an impression more of hanging than standing. Knees were closed, the pelvis sunken, the chin resting on the chest at a bad angle. It was a posture of complete submission to suffering,= of spirit crushed, of life run out. In the area of the head could be seen spik= es corresponding to rigid tufts, or perhaps to brambles or shards. The only indication of clothing was a series of lateral planes suggesting a rude clo= th around the region of the loins. The phantom glowed dully in the night, so unstable it looked like it would phase out at any moment. Two seconds later= it was hit by a hundred searchlight beams.

&= nbsp; “Solo. Stop.” Standing knee-deep in groveling humanity, Mack turned to Abel = and said, “Because, Josh, it sure as hell looks like old Sam delivered.”

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