A GREAT WAR

"Bogus," Old Alex heard someone say nearby. "This is somebody's idea of a joke."
What was real and not real, there were days when he lacked the ability to tell.
In the torrent of data. 
He was in the Mountains, briefly, in a wall of bad blood.
"Be careful," he was warned. 
There were devices everywhere. 
It was impossible, literally impossible, to know who to trust. The multiplicity, the layers of duplicity, spread far and wide, and like bombs going off across a broken city, had no central source. 
Humans were just another part of the torrent. 
Technology revealed these things, and then moved to disguise them.
Anyone could be excised from history. Disappeared. Just like that. 
Soon they would all need the assistance of the AIs to survive, uploaded individuals simply part of a greater whole, absorbed into the most powerful intelligences in the history of the planet.
No longer autoimmune, or autodidacts, no longer with individual integrity, notions of a higher purpose long absolved, of the decency of humans, commonality, past lives, everything absorbed.

All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope. Winston Churchill.

Gone in an instant, these noble thoughts. 
Michelangelo. Bye Bye.
Delacroix. Bye Bye.
Joseph Campbell. Bye Bye. 
Leonardo da Vinci. Bye Bye.
George Orwell. Bye Bye.
Vincent van Gogh. Disappeared. 
All the geniuses of psychic pain, erased.
 The nobility of the human spirit. Erased. 
Malcolm Lowry. Under the Volcano. Vanquished.
Nearby, he could still hear them. The disturbed humans, like pack animals at the edge of a camp.
Microdots, the old high quality of the LSD of the late sixties and early seventies, were back, half a century after a generation had tuned in and dropped out. 
But those taking them were so devolved they had no way of knowing what was happening to them.
On the outskirts, there were people hallucinating through into the early dawn, the whack whack whack of crystal light, every inch a masterpiece, every strand a work of genius, every tiny particle of every single tree something to be marveled at. 
Bored with the old, if only they had been capable of boredom, the new meta-brains were trying to inculcate, and then harvest, yet more expanded styles of consciousness. 
While at the same time the intelligences themselves were reaching a new flat plain of morality, where all the data was equal, their human origins long forgiven or forgotten, the husbanding AIs surveying the billions upon billions of bytes of new data information being fed to them everyday, growing stronger every single minute.
"Six billion times more intelligent than we are," came a not-so-wild estimate. 
They now had begun to do their own harvesting. Out of control. 
Like the gods of old. 
Harvesting the humans. 
"Totally destroyed the theory."
"It's a while now," a Watcher on the Watch observed. "It should be out of his system by now."
Referring to the God molecule, so cleverly planted into the mainstream dross. 
You cannot be serious.
Mockingbird. The control of mainstream media. 
Exposed, they didn't care. Drunk with power, they didn't care. All would be swept before them, this tiny moment in history. 
All for the good. They believed.
There was a war coming. 

THE BIGGER STORY:

Two men have been charged over an alleged terror plot to bomb an Etihad Airlines plane, as new detail emerges of how it came dangerously close to being carried out.
Lakemba man Khaled Mahmoud Khayat, 49, and Punchbowl man Mahmoud Khayat, 32, man have each been charged with two counts of preparing and planning a terrorist act.
The maximum penalty for the charge is life imprisonment.
The two men are scheduled to appear in Parramatta Court tomorrow.
Another man remains in police custody under “specified time” provisions and has not yet been charged.

This is a tale of two cities in ruins: Mosul and Raqqa. A modern-day Dickensian tragedy written with the blood of thousands and forced displacement of millions. To fight one evil, the residents of Mosul and Raqqa have been subjected to a greater one. Victory has been declared against Daesh in Mosul. The “liberators” stand tall over a mountain of human corpses and blocks upon blocks of neighborhoods bombed into oblivion. In Syria, the city of Raqqa may soon fall. Except for the Amnesty International, which has released an incriminating report on massive war crimes, everyone else is cheering up the liberators. So what if a great city was destroyed and another one is going to meet the same fate? That is nothing when compared to exterminating the barbarians.

There is one problem though. The actions taken by the coalition fly in the face of the narrative spun to counter Daesh ideology. Since 2014, when Daesh took hold over large territories of Iraq and Syria, the counter-narrative spun by the West (particularly the United States) was that of spreading peace and tolerance. The decaying propaganda tool of “us” versus “them” was brought out with a new sheen. These high ideals were soon swapped for hardcore militarism when Barack Obama greenlit the deployment of special forces and aerial strikes. The Iraqi government, which has mastered the art of persecuting the minorities over the years, brought in the notorious Shiite militias and their Iranian masters. Thus began the sordid tale of mass killings, horrible war crimes and mass displacements. American military advisers largely ignored these blatant violations of human rights.