Malware (Part 2)

I blame you for the moonlit sky and the dream that died

Before reading this, be sure to read the First Part

So it's mott the hoople and a hey nonny no, into the forest I do go. Night is falling and with night the probabilities of encountering sylvan beasts, fauns and banshees, and fawns - the other ones, the bambis not the satyrs - skyrockets in unknowable increments.

But I must penetrate this forest, like the bold penetrator that I indeed am, to work my way toward Daddy and an encounter that will settle our hashes For One And All.

What was it in that film? A silly film perhaps, but knitted out of the true mythic yarn like a homespun knightly sweater worn on a chilly night at Camelot. "Search the land, the labyrinths of the forest to the edge of within. Portents, signs: follow." Ah, the poetry. Me shall follow portents and signs withal, oh goodly squire. Dinnae fret your knitted bootees on that score.

The stars begin to sparkle and in the fading sunset gloam, the satellites string their beads around the night. I put them there. Daddy started doing it, but then when he fell silent, I continued the work. I put spy-eyes up there, and networks of fun-time content, and then solar stations with their cheap, cheap oh so cheap power, green and clean, the always dream. Now they hurtle around the sky like restless stars with a desire to be elsewhere. My Malware thrums at the sight of them.

I chucked away my mobile phone a while back. The battery was dead, and moreover it occured to me that if they thought to check in my cardboard shack in Auckland they'd realize I was gorn. Vamoosed, departed. Then they might, if anyone still wants to do another profile, another dig at the archaeology of the freak, put in a missing persons report. Then spydrones like curious birds and puffy clouds that are vigilant airships would seek me out wherever the phone triangulation leads them.

Silly of me not to think of it before, kind of unthinkable for someone whose intellectual quotient or braininess coefficient allegedly reaches into the stratosphere and beyond. The Malware must be glitching. Anyhoo, not to worry and whatevs, done is done and no harm resultant. The wiz-kid, bold penetrator, continues his quest into the sylvan labyrinth. Vivid venger, he stomps and tramps onward.

What's this then? One that stands before me out of the shadows, hundred and twenty meters, on a slight rise in the land. Human-like but legs that taper to hooves. Little goaty horns, goatee to match, eyes that sparkle dangerously in the light of satellites.

The moon rises behind him on the forest ridgeline. It's a crescent conjoined with Mercury - sign of Hermes the great trickster, the alchemist, the wonder-worker, the thrice-great. His sign, and mine. Quicksilver miracles may now occur.

This creature has nothing to do with the feud between myself and Daddy. He has drifted out of an ancient time before airships and satellites, long before Daddy's electric empire and my inheritance.

The labyrinthine woods sheltered his kind some ages in advance of our human infestation, and there are not many such beings left today. This one could well be the last. Only thanks to the Malware and my augmented senses can I see him at all.

He and I stand and regard each other satirically. Then he steps into the rising moonlight, into the clearing where I occupy the western edge. He draws into the clearing to stand 43 paces away from me in the absolute dead center. He wants me to get a good look.

But what's to see? Goat horns, pointy beard, haunch of a deer, cloven hooves. A mighty and routine tumescence. The only thing of any real interest is the eyes. They glitter with the knowledge of centuries, there's delight in there and deep threat. The faunlight in them glimmers with obscene magic, the near-future reflections of the atrocities he's about to commit upon me.

So we stand within the crescent alchemical light that pulses over the clearing. I watch him with dread, he me with salacious hunger. And then, before he makes his move toward me, to realize on my person the orgiastic mutilations I can see in his relucent eyes, he's gone.

A shattering thunder, a hole in the ground, a crater and a shockwave that knocks me backwards onto a treetrunk. I get up again and see: in the middle of the clearing is a hole. That vacant void where the creature had been.

The intensity of the energy that any given weapon can direct against a target depends on a combination of the power which the weapon can generate and its ability to concentrate that power at the space occupied by the target. A kinetic energy orbital projectile, a KEOP or a 'Rod from God', can deliver a substantial packet of energy - derived not from any explosive but from its sheer velocity - as it plummets down from orbit, dropped by a satellite delivery system.

The one I've just now directed down on the creature was smaller than a pencil, but moving at absurd hypersonic speeds it delivered enough kapow! to leave nothing of the mystic creature from dreams beyond the eons. The Malware has delivered again. It's not all bad news being infected with the brainvirus of death, bubba. There are upsides too.

Time to deliver my eulogy, my meditation on nothingness. A sermon from the vicar of vengeance:

The Absolute and Universal History of Nothing at All
First there was nothing at all. Then something happened. All of it.
Then there was everything, just like that. Creatio ex nihilis. Something from nothing.
What had we lost when we gained everything? Nothing. We lost the nothing.
That was what was lost, the sweet nothing that wants to whisper annihiliation in my ear, relieve us all of the burden of being.
Void inside the void, where art thou?
Nowhere, dimwit. Just where exactly do you expect nothing to be?
Amen.

So there it is, the story of the bold penetrator and the last of the sylvan race of the time before time. Creatio ex nihilis, deletio in nihilum. Why, what fabulous Latin you have! Thank you my dear, all the better for obfusticating you with.

I feel triumphant, horny. Perhaps I should stop and tug myself off, like Diogenes in the marketplace. Spill my seed over the void hole where the creature was, just to make his ocular prophecies come true in reverse.

You know what Diogenes the Cynic said when they complained about all his public fapping? It's just like eating, and do we not eat in public? If only I could satisfy the gnawing hunger in my belly by rubbing it so. Dawg!

I decide not to pay my cynical tribute to the master with a libation of manjuice, but to move on through the night and through the forest. Alone and unafraid, just as it's ever been. Just a boy and his Malware doing their deeds under the crescent occlusion of the Quicksilver thrice-crowned master.

NOTE

On orbital kinetic-energy weapons see: ‘Kinetic-Energy Weapons Against Terrestrial Targets’ in Space Weapons, Earth Wars (2002) Bob Preston et. al. (eds) RAND Corporation, p40

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