24 APRIL, 2020.

A normally busy part of Sydney's CBD

There was a torrent on the water surface but he was hidden in the deep matting on the bottom of the sea.

They said they were the evolution of the species but he did not believe them.

They flew down by helicopter to see him, these important military men, determined to make his acquaintance. He ignored them.

They wanted to know where he was from. He wasn’t going to tell them.

Decepticon, the old movie phrase, kept playing in his head. These people could not be trusted. And had sold themselves to the military, to the government and therefore to one of the most unreliable sources on Earth. 

He wondered later why he hadn't meant someone even half like himself, but knew he was not like them. Some things are ordained. And some are not.

His kind had been inserted into the timeline. They were hidden in the reeds, they were hidden in the lattice of the race, and they would not be uncovered lightly. Every last one of them held true. And the military, with all their power and all their resources, all their fantastic godlike AIs, still did not know from whence came.

Linked to machines that could make a million calculations a second, they still could not work out who was pulling their strings. Or even simple things, like how it worked and why it worked and why the wider streams of history were so remarkably insignificant to them.

Why they were not open for negotiation. Why, in some parallel sense, they did not really care how the game went, whether this person lived or died, whether the dignity would be found in this day, in this death, and the struggle for courage, to grasp this torch. They had no idea what they were dealing with. And long should it remain so. They did not exist to be exploited.

There was always a tugging from afar. There was always a dismal series of circumstances. There was always a leader leading a nation astray. There was always a religious zealot who should have known better. There were always liars in high places. The common people were always seen as insignificant.

There were those who tried to lift up the people, those who would travel down the generations. The algorithms had located a number of them, but not all.

Some were still too young, some too demented, some in their last withering gasp.

The trains were empty, the streets were empty, and even in the highly manipulated media of the country doubt was beginning to spread like the virus itself, seeping into the mainstream. The hopping and popping of the prime minister Scott Morrison, the father of the nation, well, for a brief deceptive second. None of it was going to last. These demented religious right wing lunatics, with their demented religious beliefs, would not be allowed to reign.

Old Alex found himself back in the very part of Sydney where he'd been so often as a teenager more than 50 years before, drunk, often enough terrified, often enough, distressed, always.

The Harbour was as cold a blue, its shell-like insecurity just as cruel, as it had been way back then, half a century before, when he passed out in the gutter and office workers walked over him. Or he made what then seemed to his young self like a perilous journey across the bridge, past the bands of alcoholics huddled in the alcoves, past in the office blocks, to the old offices of The Daily telegraph where he worked as a copy boy.

Back in Oak Flats the military gronks had departed. They were now confined to barracks. The General, a nasty little piece of work, that bug in uniform parading his Butch bastard self as if it meant something, as if he was so much more important than the ordinary dennisons of the place, he had also fled, wrapped, oh so briefly, in his own grandiosity.

The evolution of the species. 

Go fuck yourself.

He had heard him sneer about the man who had talked him into a story he probably shouldn't have bought. “He came crying around here, talking about how he didn’t want to betray his friend, and I told him what’s what. Toughen up”

Well they all went back to Washington, to Quantico and everywhere else they inhabited, and they cooked up their prophetic plans about the evolution of the species, as if they really knew, as if their fragile neural networks could really contain the truth, as if working for the Deep State didn't stain their souls and destroy their credibility, as if they, too, could summon the gods.

They did what they thought was damage–”This should be a career destroying move”-- and then disappeared. Federal payrolls. They didn't care. No more than the divines that occasioned his fall through this place, who would only show themselves as they saw fit, who intervened in history solely as it suited them. Implanted posts in the stream of history, listening posts, transmission points, Saints and outliers exceptional men amongst the genetic debris.

And all around the signs of a country that was about to collapse. As their heedless, idiot leaders let them all straight over the cliff.

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