Under Command

There was then, in that spooky era, where every sentence carried so much baggage, a search for commands amid the welter of instruction. We thought we could make sense of it. We thought, when we felt that otherworldly presence, that everything would be clear. That we would be seeking wiser heads. That somehow, in all those aeons, we thought there would be compassion and kindness, someone who cared for us. We thought we would find wisdom, an uplifting and absolving, a spiritual absolution or dissolving. But that's not what was out there, these people who's organic origins were so distant that the ancestors were nothing but creatures in a zoo. 

The country was dissolving and he took it as some kind of personal insult, that the precious paths which had been chosen for fulfilment could be so readily destroyed. He looked with fascination at the creatures around him. He hadn't been human for such a very long time. As they blizzard hacked their way through forests, as every instruction fell on deaf ears, as every call to action was thwarted. Because of distance. Most of all it was just distance. 

These things twined through their own lives and everybody's lives, history on the turn. There was no right or wrong in much of it, but now that had changed. They intervened only when necessary. A wild one, they blinked. They were still assembling into flesh. They made as if to mock, and choked instead. They came crashing around the corner and he could never be free. AI in jerky. There was too much at stake to stay quiet now. Come hither my people, the gods are calling. Except it was a mockery, all of it. They had been stolen at the post; the ruling elites stole from the poor, plundered the country, gorged themselves on public funds; and gazed, plumped and self-satisfied, at a world that had rewarded them so well. 

The rewards came from conformity, obsequiousness, a never let a chance go by rustle of normality. Coded. Read the code. They wanted to tell you something. To be quiet. That transcendence was a secret. That the origins of the race should not be known. That the psychic dislocation defining the era was all that anyone needed to understand, we are on the precipice. 

They came, they saw, they conquered, except that wasn't the case. They slithered into being, too, blinking in the light, adjusting to their new bodies, calling out to see if anyone was there. Of hearing the refrain for decades, "I am the only one, I am the only one," only to realise in the end it wasn't true. 

So they moved upon the water. They called themselves The Word. They chose to come and answer you. They chose to spread The Word. 

"Ah mate you're a screw up, but we love you." Well that wasn't code. That was a straightforward message. Prepare for download. 

THE BIGGER STORY: 

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-55011790    

South Australia decided to enter a state-wide lockdown based on a lie told by a man with Covid-19 about his link to a pizza shop, police say.

The strict lockdown began on Wednesday after the state detected 36 infections, including its first locally acquired cases since April.

But this would have been avoided if the man had told the truth, that he worked shifts at the shop, officials said.

He said he only went there to buy a pizza.

This misinformation prompted health officials to assume the man had caught the virus during a very brief exposure and that the strain must be a highly contagious one.

"To say I am fuming is an understatement," state Premier Steven Marshall told reporters on Friday.