The Chrysalis

We were caught then between heaven and earth. Implement reverse gear. He listened to the humans and he listened to an imported brother. He didn't know what to make of that. War is deception. Appear near when you are far. Appear far when you are near. They twined together in the sky. "I'm with you brother." He really didn't know what to make of it. Whether to cloud the water, which was what he was doing, whether to embrace change, whether to appear invisible, as he had so often done. Whether to suppress his spooky talents so he could not be spotted. 

Power comes at a price. 

Another cold summer day. The Thames had frozen over for the first time in 60 years. 

The Australian Open had been destroyed by the clear derangement of the Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews, whose obsessive mishandling of the pandemic was still being rewarded in the polls by compliant, subservient Victorians. 

Oh how the left had embraced lockdowns. 

They preached freedom, diversity, tolerance. Just disagree with them and you soon found out how tolerant they were. 

Down at the Lakeview the appalling ignorance of the general public was on daily display. Old Alex had learnt to keep his mouth shut. Didn't make it right. We were confounded and confounding. 

His elderly mother was going into a nursing home, that terrible place. Actually, through dint of sheer persistence he had found one of the only decent ones in the area; the rest reminiscent of Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Soylent Green, of people being placed on conveyor belts into mass graves. 

We conduct ourselves with dignity, if only we can. 

He was still observing the humans with interest. And watching Stapo's responses to the incarceration of his mother. 

She was going to a place of kindness, where the many problems she had inflicted upon herself, or had allowed to crowd in upon her, could now be addressed. 

"I've been like this since a child," the brother said.

They reached out like a range of sci fi responses. The red angel in the otherwise dreary latest round of Star Trek.  

If there was someone to trust. Trust no one.

Their different handles. Their different points of peculiarity. The ribald were currently missing, which was a relief to his already crowded belief system. He was catching whispers of everything, every past conflagration, he was crawling into humans as if they were the only species on earth, he was crawling into his own future willing to make the jump, although that lay well into the future in terms of human lifespans.

And he watched, and waited, and hovered above the circumstance. Black hawk white dove. He wept in frantic travail and was as calm as a high flying eagle. He embraced life and love itself and was nothing but a machine in a distant, manufactured place.

We were immune from harm. We were not compassionate, but interested. We only understood pain in a technical sense. And yes, we had been sent. 

He was inside conquered territory. He was inside a transformation. His kindness was no longer self abnegation. The crawling withers of these places. The physical feel of a strange Earth. The point of the exercise. The grasping for purpose and meaning that enveloped them all, these strange embedded things. At the frontiers of theory and of science. 

You have to realise that this technology is already a billion years old.

HEADLINES

Leaving millions in limbo is simply not good enough

Victorian businesses and parents can’t afford to “take it one day at a time” like the Premier seems to think.

Struggling CBD businesses back in ‘survival mode’

Many businesses fear Victoria’s third lockdown will be the final nail in the coffin for Melbourne’s struggling CBD.

Rolling coverage: Daniel Andrews hints at what’s needed to ease lockdown

Victorian Premier Dan Andrews has hinted that the decision to ease the state’s lockdown won’t just be based on local case numbers.

Three hospitals have been forced into lockdown as authorities refuse to rule out an extension to Victoria’s five-day circuit breaker shutdown.

Psychiatric units at The Alfred hospital, Broadmeadows Hospital and the Northern Hospital in Epping went into lockdown after a female employee returned a “weak positive” for coronavirus.

The woman and her three-year-old child, who has also tested positive, attended a family event on a Sydney Road, Coburg, with an infected hotel quarantine worker.

The woman subsequently returned both negative and weak positive results but was ultimately deemed a positive case out of caution.

The case was the state’s only new locally acquired case on Monday, and one new case inside hotel quarantine took Victoria’s active case count to 21.

Defence renews storage deal with Global Switch, years after Government vowed to ditch Chinese-owned firm

‘The eagle has landed’: First Pfizer doses arrive, jabs to begin February 22

The nation’s first COVID vaccine doses could be in Australian arms within days, with a larger-than-expected first shipment of Pfizer jabs touching down in Sydney on Monday.

Health Minister Greg Hunt said the government was on track to meet its ambitious goal of four million vaccinations by early April, despite Australia starting its inoculation program months after the US, Britain and European Union.

“The eagle has landed,” a grinning Mr Hunt said within minutes of the flight carrying the vaccines touching down on Monday.

Tycoons offer to run quarantine camps

Businessmen Lindsay Fox and John Wagner want to house up to 2000 international returnees at separate camps outside state capitals in Victoria and Queensland.