The Swarming Had Begun

The swarming had begun, an unusual state of mind he had spent much of his life avoiding, so confounding and perplexing was it. They marched in procession. We threw flowers in the air. Crowds cheered. An acclamation of discontent was nothing. There wasn't anything real at the end of it, an infinity just as vast and confounding as a single grain of sand. It meant everything and nothing. We were everywhere and nowhere. We crept up in wave after wave; armies of the Lord, if you wanted to think of it that way. Every day there had been visions, each more frightening than the last. The sanctuary had been reestablished; just for this. They moved across the water. They came in visitations. They knew their mind; and even as they unfolded and disappeared, even as they were born in their millions, even as they bifurcated and bifurcated again, this blizzard of discomfort from another world. Accept it now. You have been defeated. 

Only the wraith remain. The liars and thieves who had despoiled the temple were being dispatched. One cruelty piled upon another. The mere mortality of these things. The sheer stupidity of those who had once believed their entire race was central to God. Only the radical theologians, perhaps not even them, knew even a sprinkling of the truth. The vastness of it all; the preciousness of life. That these bastards who infested the Australian government and had despoiled the country, his country, would be brought to account. They were already running frightened into their bureaucratic edifices. Cover up. Cover up. Close the portals. Hide the keys. Weld shut any opportunity to disprove our case. Because something else is coming, and we cannot lie to them.  

The nations corrupted instincts remained; while the watchers on the watch, flabbergasted, baked into their own hierarchies, ran hither and thither on a summer night and knew no peace. The swarm was in action; as terrifying as it had always been. The ground transformed. The pigeons on a rooftop. He cried and called her name. Two strong hearts. 

We've got two strong hearts
We stick together like the honey and the bee
You and me
We've got two strong hearts
Reaching out forever like a river to the sea
Running free
Running free

They twined together above that most ordinary of suburbs. There, spectacular, dragons glinting in the cascading light, two strong hearts, melding now above it all. 

The stingrays, well that's the closest analogy he could come up with, had sniffed out every lie and falsehood. 

Gone were the days when he would chant "incompetent, dishonest and corrupt" a hundred times a day, so furious was he with his hecklers and the psyop idiots targeting journalists in order to manipulate the public narrative, and please their bosses. Their stinking, rotten, morally collapsed and utterly degenerate bosses.

And no, morality had nothing to do with sexuality or anything else. It had to do with lying and cheating your way to the top of a hierarchy. It involved betraying the common people for your own putrid gains. It signaled a moral collapse in the country which came from the very top. And they knew, they all knew, it was true. 

Step by terrible step. Moment by fearful moment. All was well, my son. Peace be with you. Carry no vengeance, in your heart or in your grave. We would rise up. Yes, this story would ultimately be rewritten by another million stories, that was the nature of time and destiny. 

But in the meantime, in these precious moments which last but a fraction of a second and are with us forever, they ricochet with a terrible import. 

We shall conquer evil. 

We shall protect our property. 

We will protect the sacred. 

The divines will come with us as we reshape everything. 

And there was a good reason, a very good reason, why the guilty were now frightened. 

In that little pocket of land on the south coast of New South Wales life went on more or less as normal, and detached now from those forms in which he found himself, he watched them with a surprising fascination, so far outside their realm he now felt. 

The average male human releases more than 500 billion sperm during their lifetime. Thus it was with us, as we dispatched this amazing gift so far, far away, in every possible sense of the term. 

HEADLINES

‘Changing enemy’: Andrews blocks boost to public airport arrivals over new virus strains China will be ‘pleased to no end’ with the WHO investigation into COVID-1910/02/2021|6min Health Editor at The Australian Natasha Robinson says China will be pleased to "no end” after investigators from the World Health Organization suggested it is possible the virus originated in another country.

  “What’s interesting is they haven’t actually found the smoking gun,” she told Sky News. “What they came up with in terms of the virus actually probably originating from an animal via an intermediary host was not a surprise.”

 Daniel Andrews has cancelled a planned increase in international arrivals to Victoria after even more COVID cases leaked out of the state’s hotel quarantine, saying his government would have “no tolerance for risk” of new strains of the virus.

South Australia has announced it will close its border to greater Melbourne, after an extra two cases were confirmed on Wednesday afternoon, bringing a cluster linked to the Holiday Inn hotel to eight.

Victoria had been due to boost its arrivals cap by 200 from Monday, but now an entire quarantine hotel has been closed for deep-cleaning. Mr Andrews has cancelled the scheduled arrivals increase until more is known about “hyper-infectious” virus variants from South Africa and Britain.

Two further individuals linked to the Holiday Inn Melbourne Airport have tested positive to coronavirus (#COVID19) today: a worker, and a previous resident who exited the facility on February 7. The number of cases linked to the Holiday Inn outbreak is now 8.

— VicGovDH (@VicGovDH) February 10, 2021

“We all have to acknowledge that quarantine and the public health response today must be, by necessity, different than it was a month ago or six months ago,” the Victorian Premier said in Melbourne on Wednesday.

“Because the enemy we are confronting is different than it was a month ago or six months ago.”

‘No evidence’ for WHO to rule out lab leak: expert

Leading epidemiologist questions why WHO investigators say Wuhan laboratory unlikely to be the source of pandemic.