In The Land Of The Mortals

And so it was. Go forth, they might once have said. But these were different times. Take Action Amongst The Mortals. Mingle in their story lines. Redirect the fortunes of the day. The instructions could not be clearer. For all the disembodied wings that vanished through those portals, for all the up-links and the vanquished, for all that we came to see as good luck or good fortune, for all the rivers that ran through these parts and vanished down on to the coast, for everything we had ever dreamed, for every life form we had so preciously sprayed across the galaxies, born here to die here, most of them, and he wandered on what had once been a craggy rock and wondered at the prehistoric, heightened sensations of it all; here at what some would call The End Of Days. 

These gifts of prophecy and talent, these manifestations, these altered beings designed to survive in the most extreme of conditions, these magic wonders which called forth a distant realm, a different realm, they found a home among the treetops and the spirits of place. They were welcomed as if they had always belonged. They recognised their own ancestors and forebears. They knew the divine right of kings, and were not even human. 

Walk among them.

Australia at the end of that year, 2020 in their count, had all the echoes of the future riven into the present, and yet, somnambulant, the population buried itself into the prosaic, and he looked on in wonder, his own terror out of place in the comfortable safety of an unriven place; of a world that knew not crisis but conformity, we weep for you and yet you are not lost, not yet. There were showers and ebbing tides in that cold summer, a nation strangled by massive bureaucracies and incompetent governments, by liars whose job it was to lie. 

So, what if we removed the capacity of humans to lie, in one magical moment. Even the sin of omission was banished. What would happen then? 

A gift to the race? A curse to the oligarchs? A destruction of all that they held dear, their webs of deception. 

Many of us have had to learn to live with the collapse of all our old belief systems.

"What would the world be like if it was impossible to lie? Do you know of anything in the DNA or in the society that could trigger such a phenomenon, or transformation?" he asked. 

"No." Chris shook his head. 

Craig, buzzing on bongs and gin, kept talking. 

A breeze stirred through the trees surrounding the sanctuary. There were breaches of course, voices adrift on the wind, a terrible world of self-interest, a place where they lied constantly, agency officers who felt the tables had been turned on them, that the hunters had become the hunted, that the wraiths would haunt them in their dreams and the failed psyop programs would come back to ravage their own guilt. I apologise. We apologise. Words are cheap he spat back. 

They were walking on very treacherous waters now. They would never think the same again. Some would welcome it. Some would not. 

As for the fate of the country: Go Forth.

THE BIGGER STORY: 

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