Why Here? Why Now? Why You?

The words moved and shook and slithered their way across waters, and he was shocked, still, at the feel of air as it moved across his skin. We were coming to get you. We were coming to seize you from the fortress. And instead, you want to take the entire fortress; to move here, to live another life, to be born again in flesh and blood, to forget that out there was not just a transitional, transactional, nirvana style peace, but warring gods and deceptive entities and a slithering away, surrounded by danger. And so it was that they moved very careful. I'd be quiet if I were you, keep quiet, very quiet, but the problem with silence was that it narrowed the field of those who could exploit you to the adept. And they were not who he sought. 

The blessings were many and varied. The intelligence was frightening, anything but loveable. The places they settled, here on the edge of this magic lake, here in this spiritual outpost made more magical by its long history of isolation, the faces that reared, the swarms that flew, the ways we tried to communicate, the distances we had to overcome, time distortion just one of the many obstacles to overcome. Nothing was certain, not at this level. Nothing could be intuited that would make sense in the morning. He longed for love and was embraced by the infinite but in all that squealing, wrenching flesh, all he could hear was the old song, "What's love got to do got to do with it, What's love, a second hand emotion?" 

And so they laughed and chattered and fell about bemused, and we talked dribble across millennia, all the better to confuse you with. 

To make better sense of this experience, well there was no making sense of something that could crawl across time and space and communicate across what had been previously thought to be impossible distances; it wasn't just birds flying backwards, it was his own creeping sense that time was flowing the wrong way, well, a different way, and if we had loved you as much as we said we did, we would never have let things deteriorate to this level. 

What, watching all the oligarchs being swept aside? 

Watching the men in high places say their prayers out loud?

If it had only been those monasteries, if it had only been those blood soaked palaces, and the beauty of the gardens where he would stride with his latest love interest, when his affections would tilt across ever more expensive flesh, because they always brought the best to him and knew he could be easily distracted from military conquest; well because he loved and lusted and was loved and lusted after in return, when everything was in a high kingdom and the lectures on hierarchies that would festoon his later lives of no meaning, because he was at the pinnacle. In a place so brief and distant it was almost impossible to find among the timelines.

He watched a distant place. He knew they were establishing perimeters. He knew there were others. Conquest. Stealth. Invisibility until the very last moment. All of these things combined to make him very dangerous indeed. Easily dismissed. A crack whore of old belonging well down among the fallen angels. Here in derangement, easily dismissed. 

He laughed a crooked laugh; and watched as those extraterrestrials came slithering down trees and moved among the waters; and told him, be calm, be calm, just not becalmed. The more dense the code, the more advanced the algorithms, the more multi-layered the encryption, a different encryption to any they had seen before, they knew now, they knew what was happening. 

What happens tomorrow?

Tomorrow they land. 

Even to the most abstract of theoreticians, it was an extraordinary day. 

THE BIGGER STORY: 

No jab, no fly – that’s the message from Qantas boss Alan Joyce, who says proof of a coronavirus vaccination will be required before anyone can take a seat on an international flight once they resume.

Mr Joyce said a vaccine would be “a necessity”, once they became available.

“I think that’s going to be a common thing, talking to my colleagues in other airlines around the globe,” he told the Nine Network on Monday night.

Qantas’ international flights have been all but grounded since earlier in 2020, when Australia closed its borders to overseas travellers.

Mr Joyce has previously said a vaccine is key to the Australia’s national carrier resuming flights to destinations such as the US and Britain, where the pandemic is taking an increasing toll.