[nsw-fic] The Devil Is In The Details...

[MsFicwriter]

Wow. I love this story more and more every time I read it!

[LDR]

“And the start for most Americans; suing MacDonalds because of a cup of coffee!”

 

Oh boy, this made me laugh so hard due to the sheer realism of it.

 

Once again, brilliant chapter. Thanks for the unintended humor as well.

[machievelli]

Oh boy, this made me laugh so hard due to the sheer realism of it.

 

Once again, brilliant chapter. Thanks for the unintended humor as well.

 

What was unintended? The only case that tickled me more was when California passed the 'three strikes' initiative where a third felony meant life, and the very first case was a felon who pushed some guy to steal his pizza slice, so you had 'felony pizza theft'

[machievelli]

Greed: The one level with the biggest change

 

Rhee leaned against the rear of the car as the elevator closed. Dawn touched a button, and a panel opened revealing a pair of cappuccino sized cups. She took one, handing it to Rhee.

 

“What's this?”

 

“Your favorite French Roast using Tanzanian Peaberry coffee with three sugars and a lemon peel special ordered.” Dawn commented, blowing on her own beverage. “I felt you needed some down time.”

 

Rhee sipped the drink, sighing as the caffeine hit her system. “So greed sounds like a free for all with all of the greedy fighting it out with those who waste money as if it were water.”

 

“According to Dante, yes. But really, what good would such punishment do?” Dawn sipped her own drink. “Saving and wasting are two opposites of the same coin as it were. When in need, people hoard, when they have enough, they use and sometimes waste. But define waste!

 

“Consider that throughout time there were those who were rich, and those who were poor. The poor as a class always see the rich as a horrible omnipresence that always are and always will be rich, and does everything it can to oppress those who might try to break free of the cycle.

 

“The rich; who have more turn-over than you realize, understand that they found some niche someone else isn't using to make money, and see the poor as too blind to understand that soon enough that niche vanishes and the rich slides into poverty and eventual obscurity. Think of all of those sports stars who rise, get multimillion dollar contracts, then disappear and you hear a few years later that they reappear flat broke.

 

“The difference between them and the rich the poor are always harping on is that the rich man spent money as needed to maintain their business, while the ones I am speaking of spent it on what they wanted and waste it like a child buying a candy store so he can stuff it all down his own throat.

 

“Americans remember this only it the abstract. The book Brewster's Millions was written by the American Novelist George Barr McCutcheon and printed in 1902. In the last century it has spawned a stage play, and ten movies counting the three made in India.

 

“The original premise was rather nasty; the main character inherits a million dollars from his grandfather, then his uncle left him seven million dollars; but there are several catches. Since the uncle did not approve of the grandfather's marriage, the main character can only inherit the larger amount if he spends all of the previous inheritance first, and do so within a specific time line, originally a year. All of the movies since 1935 covers what most Americans know of the plot, though the time line was shortened to show the differences in the value of money, first 60 days instead of a year, then in the more modern version, only 30, with the money that must be spent rising after 1985 to 30 million because of inflation.

 

“The film premise removes the uncle and his vindictive streak, but keeps the other limitations on how it can be spent.” Dawn raised her index finger. “The hero, or in one case heroine is required to demonstrate business sense by obtaining good value for the money spent, limiting donations to charity, losses to gambling, and the value of tips to waiters and cab drivers.” A second finger. “Moreover, the character is sworn to secrecy, and cannot tell anyone why he or she is living to excess. Working against the character are well-meaning friends, who try repeatedly to limit losses and extravagance even as they share in the luxurious lifestyle.” A third finger. “All of the money must be spent for items that cannot be kept; he or she must have nothing of value from the spending spree beyond their own resources.”

 

Dawn laughed with true delight. “The 1985 version was the best in my mind. The character blows it on a publicity campaign for the New York mayoral election. Since he cannot spend it on his own campaign for mayor, he instead spends it on having the people of the city write in 'none of the above'! As Richard Pryor says in a speech his character makes, why spend ten million dollars, what the other parties are spending; on an office that will pay only 50,000 dollars a year? Then he tells them 'because they know they will steal back more than ten million in four years'.” Dawn sighed, sipping from her cup. “I wonder when the American electorate will realize that simple truth. In the last 20 years the two main parties have spent an average of a quarter billion dollars each on the presidential campaigns every election. Why would they spend that on an office that pays less than a million a year?”

 

They both sipped and considered what Dawn had suggested. “So economics are all illusion?” Rhee asked.

 

“Not really.” Dawn said. “The science of economics is all created by humans, but it is too limited. It happens far too slowly for humans to understand without taking history into account. Let's take the Spanish incursion into the New world back in the late 15th century.

 

“Columbus sailed west to reach the Spice Islands because all of the trade in spices were coming the other direction, from Europe east, and the market was controlled by the Mongols and the Moors who had cut what was called the Silk road. While King John the Second of Portugal was trying to find a sea route to the Spice Islands, the Spanish Monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella funded the Columbus expedition because he used incorrect data; he said the world was round, but the distance was only 2300 miles to Japan, not the 12,200 mile it is in fact.

 

“Taking into account the distance involved eastward; sailing around the African continent to India, then on to what is now Indonesia, that made it economically viable to sail west if there was nothing in the way. So three ships are funded, and sailed west. Instead of finding the East Indies, they discovered the West Indies.

 

“Now why did they do it? As I said, pepper was a rare and expensive product, and it wasn't all. There was cinnamon, saffron, nutmeg, not to mention gold and silk. So when they arrive in the New World, they are looking for those, and especially for gold, which is low weight high return against everything but the spices. However there is no silk in the new world, nor are there the spices they are looking for.

 

“But the natives in what was called Hispaniola did have gold they had received in trade from further west. So another expedition sails further west, though it is not until the fourth voyage that Columbus reaches the actual continent. But every native they speak to points at a different portion of the new world. So it is not until Hernando Cortez reached the coast of Mexico that they discover the gold they seek facing the Aztecs.

 

“So almost exactly ninety years after the Spanish discover the new world, Cortez lands on the continent, burns his ships, and uses the natives on the coast as allies. Thanks to the Aztec religion, which had both Quetzalcoatl, a winged serpent that matches the European ships, and Kukulkan, an avatar who is white skinned and bearded, which the Aztecs are not, they believe this is a visitation by their gods, which allows a few hundred men armed with primitive muskets to defeat an empire of millions.

 

“The Aztecs have gold and silver in abundance, and the Spanish rip it from their holy buildings, melt it down, and ship it west. Further expeditions discover the Toltecs, Incans and Mayans, stealing their treasures to fill Spanish coffers.

 

“So for over a century the Spanish market is not linked to renewable resources, they are linked instead to money. But, as later history proved, having money does not produce goods. It allows you to buy them, but not produce them. When you are not producing goods, you must buy them, and since the man selling them knows this is true, he raises the prices. All of your wealth goes to other nations, and you are in an inflationary spiral you cannot escape.

 

“So you have the Spanish that are trying to return Europe to Catholic hegemony, spending money hand over fist while still not producing. Then you have one attack, Sir Francis Drake attacking Cadiz, and as an aside, destroying shiploads of seasoned barrel staves destined for the Spanish Armada which will be attacking England, the major holdout against the church in only a few months. Without the barrel staves, the Armada makes their barrels from green wood, which reduces the lifetime of the food and water in those barrels from years to only weeks.

 

“At the same time the British have created an entire revolution in naval design.” Dawn drew a ship in the air, the form hanging there. “All sailing ships before 1675 were the same basic design that had not changed in almost four hundred years; large castle like shapes fore and aft, excellent for defense, but poor for maneuvering in any real weather.” Her finger removed the forward castle, revealing a shape not much different from the warships of a century later. “Unlike the 'razed' deck ships that are easier to maneuver in bad weather.

 

“Thanks to bad design, bad weather, and bad food, the Armada was destroyed. While still the premier power in the new world, the European portion of their empire collapses. Within decades the English are now the world power. As Spider Robinson said in 'Mary's Place', 'Portugal and Spain couldn't beat France in a fair fight and anyone could beat France in a fair fight'.” Dawn drained her cup, and a fountain in midair and filled it again.

 

“Americans ran into this with the illegal immigrant problem starting in the late fifties. The illegals take jobs that most Americans feel are beneath them. Take the fruit industry in California. The state produces a lot of soft fruits for export. Soft fruits cannot be picked by machine; the period between being ripe and overripe is too tight. A fruit like strawberries, raspberries and blueberries go from ripe to overripe within less than two weeks. To ship California strawberries to markets to the east, you have to pick and ship them within days or they arrive already on the edge of rotting; it takes four days to drive a truck from California to Virginia, only a few hours by plane today, but you would almost double the cost for the same berries by plane. Like the market in Southern California for Maine lobster.

 

“So the 'illegals' supply the labor. You're not old enough to remember, but before Columbia became known as the primary source of cocaine, it was known as the leading producer of coffee.” She raised her cup. “Another product that cannot be harvested by machines. So they ran television ads with 'Juan Valdez', a smiling little man towing a burro who supposedly picked the ripe berries that have the coffee bean in the center of what are called 'coffee cherries'. While it was a nice 'oh look at what they go through to sell us coffee' spot, Americans failed to realize that poor little Juan was making maybe a dollar a day to bring down two hundred pounds of coffee, and the American market was selling it in one pound cans for just over a dollar at that time. If you're used to making that little and somehow surviving, why not bring your whole family and work for eight hours in the hot Southern California sun and make maybe fifteen a day each picking berries or melons?”

 

"Businesses and governments exacerbate this problem. England funded the Egyptians and Indians in producing cotton when the Confederates cut their exports in an attempt to force England to join their war. When the war ended, they immediately went back to the American markets, causing the new markets to collapse, causing both India and Egypt to default on loans that allowed the British to seize further control of those nations.

 

“Gandhi commented on it; that they paid an Indian peasant seven pence a week for harvesting the cotton in the forties, shipping it to England to process into cloth, then return the cloth to India where only the wealthy can afford it.

 

“Further, the industrial revolution caused millions in both the United States and England to lose their jobs. The Cotton Gin allowed the South to make Cotton the primary crop of the Southern United States for almost a century making slavery not only viable but necessary. The loss of their slaves drove the south deeper into debt as they tried to have poorly paid whites and blacks maintain the hold on their economy. It wasn't until the Boll Weevil devastated the South yet again, causing them to finally go to food crops such as peanuts that the cycle was finally broken.”

 

“That was a blot on our honor.”

 

“One that could have been corrected easily.” Dawn told her. “If the framers of the Constitution had agreed to end slavery in the near future, say within 50 years, the southern colonies wouldn't have based their entire economy on a crop that was so manpower intensive. If Jefferson, instead of writing 'all men are free' as he did in the original, and said, 'to have all men be free, no black born from this day is be considered a slave', the institution would have vanished. Not without problems, but without a war to finally end it.

 

“But as was expressed the the song 'Triangle Trade' in the musical 1776, the main supplier of slaves during the early 18th century was not the Europeans, but the Northern colonies. Neither wanted to cut their own economic throat first, regardless of the revulsion most Northern Colonial Americans had for the sale of other human beings. It all came down to money.”

 

She sighed yet again. “The economic backlash caused the race hatred of the past century and a half, and the worst part of it, is not the actual slave owners, but those on the bottom of the economic scale, both white and black. The whites because suddenly they have a competitor who is a lot of cases is more willing to work. The blacks because they are the ones being forced out of the job market because of their race.

 

“The modern blacks however seem to feel that no one with a lighter skin tone can understand what their ancestors had gone through. The fact that the Romans were buying and selling Northern Europeans as slaves, and that every nation in Europe used their poor first as serfs; people tied to the land and unable to leave to find better conditions; then as 'indentured' servants; slaves made so by law until their debts were paid. New world, Old world, third world, there are as many as 27 million people world wide who are slaves in everything but name even now because of laws

 

“You see, most of Europe got out of the slave trade around the end of the 18th century, but they still had those little menial jobs that needed doing combined with the first stirring of the industrial revolution that put millions out of work, and a population boom until colonization got into high gear. So while they could say 'we do not buy and sell slaves', they could tell a poor man with three children, 'If you sign this indenture, we will pay you and your wife to work to support those children'. That indenture rule while no longer common practice in the 19th century was still there until the early 20th century, but again disguised.

 

“Remember Scrooge's comment when he is pressed for a donation? 'Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses'? Between the time of James the First and Victoria, if you fell into debt, your property could be legally seized and you were thrown into prison until the debt was paid. You would languish there, unable to work unless you volunteered to sign over your life at a pittance per day and became an indentured servant, which is where the workhouses came in. As his next line states, his taxes paid for those institutions and he felt that was enough 'support' for the poor.”

 

She made the cups disappear, and pushed the elevator button. “So while people point at something and say, 'that is greedy' or 'that is wasteful, we are using a time line spanning almost seven millennia, where greedy is when a nation or citizen grabs too much, or seizes control of what they want. Or if they have access to it and waste it rather than perhaps giving it to others in need, or selling it cheaply. The Humanists of the 20th century unfortunately were influenced by Thomas Robert Malthus, an Anglican minister influential even today in viewing political economics and demographics.

 

“While his works pointing out that population growth causes a society to need more production are valid, his belief that no society has ever gone to war except where it will gain them that production or resources is specious. I can show you entire centuries where such is not the case. Being American, I will give you just your own nation's history.

 

“The Westward expansion? Yes, it was that European mindset that if you are not working the land to give you all it can, you are being wasteful, whereas the Natives, still in the hunter gatherer and early farming stages supplied enough for them, and saw no reason to change until it was forced on them. The American Revolution? No. England was trying to fund a war that had lasted almost a century already against other colonial powers, and thanks to a weak king and politicians who just wanted to make ends meet, the American colonists find themselves hit with punitive taxes to fund that war. If they had been given seats in Parliament, had their own citizens given titles as had been done in England, the war would not have occurred. Remember, 'No taxation without representation' was the first battle cry of that war.

 

“The War of 1812? No. The British, still fighting that war impressed American citizens to act as crewmen on their warships, something they had done for years when the fleet ran out of young men to grab off their own docks. Whether you were Irish, English, or American, you all spoke a common language. There are records of Dutch, German, even Spanish citizens grabbed for the same purpose, usually when they had been freed from capture by France, their primary enemy at the time. To be rescued if you were already a seaman meant you now had to fight for the British until they returned to their British bases, where they were paid for their services and set free. But they were paid, including prize money from their voyages.

 

“The Texas revolution? Yes. The primary reasons the American immigrants to Texas revolted was first because they wanted representation, but some of them also wanted to own slaves, which was illegal in Mexico. The Mexican American War? No. The two countries had been arguing about the border ever since Texas became a Republic. Also the territories of California, New Mexico Nevada and Arizona all of which had applied to become American Territories had borders that had not been defined. That ended with the Mexicans ceding any claims to the lands claimed by those territories, and selling a chunk that replaced a pretty much straight line from El Paso to the Pacific with the chunk from the Gadson Purchase.

 

“The American Civil War?” Dawn paused. “First, it was not a Civil War, regardless of what American History says. It was the Confederate Revolution, or as those who still sting the most from it, the War of Northern Aggression. If the Confederates had won, they would not have marched into Washington and claimed all of the land of both nations; they would have merely gone home and settled back in their own nation. The best and most honest name for it would be the War Between the States.

 

“Second, yes it was a war of finances, but not why most thought it so. The South held slaves, but the slave owners were less than one percent of the population. While the wealthiest on the whole, you could not have convinced the other 99% to go to war for 'their' rights alone, no more than less than the one percent of wealthy American colonists overall could have convinced the average citizen of the Colonies in the late 18th century to declare their independence from England. So while the idea that slavery was the reason played great to the average citizen of the North, it was a fallacy.

 

“The war actually began about the time of the end of the Mexican American War, when the United States government decided to follow the lead of other nations and declare slavery illegal. The South protested. So the Congress, which was controlled by factions in the North began a punitive process to get rid of Southern slaves. They started with Tariffs on Southern Cotton exports. This was a power under the original Articles of Confederation used during the American Revolution; and then under the Constitution which wasn't signed until after that war, given to the Federal government as a way to fund it.

 

“But as Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall said, 'the power to tax is the power to destroy'. Any free market economy depends on having as little taxation as possible. In the South there was little or no taxation within the states for cotton. But the instant you consigned that cargo to go north of the Mason/Dixon line, you were hit with it, and something like half of the South's production of cotton went to Northern ports to ship, whether to American factories or to Europe. The cotton shipped from the south itself was hit with even more. Like any business, the cotton growers, less than half of whom were slave owners protested. The reply? 'Get rid of your slaves'.”

 

Dawn shook her head. “Those who smoke these days face the same problem. If you buy a pack of cigarettes in the state of North Carolina, where about 50% of American tobacco is grown, you pay just about half a dollar a pack for one of the 'brand name' labels. But if you live outside of that state you pay not only state but Federal taxes on the product as well, and those taxes drive the price up to four to five dollars a pack. If you complain? The lawmakers merely say, 'stop smoking'.

 

“Now here is where the North compounded the problem. You see, neither the original Articles of Confederation, nor the Constitution requires a state to remain within the Union. When the Southern slave states threatened to secede, the North told them, 'you can't'. If the South had fought the North in the courts, demanding to be shown where it required them to remain, they might have won. However ever since the Supreme Court was founded, the seated presidents have been able to pad the bench by choosing people that will vote the party line whether legal or not. That is why the Dredd Scott decision of 1857 was such a farce. A slave sues in a Mississippi court in Dredd Scott Vs Sanford for the freedom of himself and his family.

 

“The chief Justice of the time, Roger B Taney, a supporter of slavery and intent on protecting southerners from northern aggression -- wrote in the Court's majority opinion that, because Scott was black, he was not a citizen and therefore had no right to sue. The framers of the Constitution, he wrote, believed that blacks 'had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever profit could be made by it'.

 

“Referring to the language in the Declaration of Independence that includes the phrase, 'all men are created equal,' Taney reasoned that 'it is too clear for dispute, that the enslaved African race were not intended to be included, and formed no part of the people who framed and adopted this declaration'. In other words, four years before Fort Sumter, the highest court in the land had already denied a black citizen the rights a white had from birth at the same time they are debating whether to jack up cotton tariffs even higher. That court had just received two new justices thanks to Benjamin Harrison who was president before Abraham Lincoln.

 

Dawn paused as the door opened. “What would you expect the South to do? As Tom Clancy in the book Executive Orders comments when the President orders a nationwide quarantine that is technically in violation of the constitution he had his character President Jack Ryan reply to the Press, 'The constitution is not a suicide pact'.”

 

They stepped out, again into darkness. They waited as it cleared. This, Rhee thought, didn't look too bad. No one was screaming, or being devoured. Instead the massive space was filled with people floating in mid air from floor to ceiling spanning a thousand yards between those surfaces, with her standing unsupported at about 500 yards from the floor. Then she looked more closely, and somehow she could see faces even at this range. The closer they were to the floor, the more they were struggling as if weighed down, or crushed. The closer they were to the ceiling, the more they gasped, and clawed at their throats as if they could not breath.

 

“Dawn, Rhee.” A woman walked up, and Rhee did a double take. “Belle Iblis?”

 

“Yes.” She bowed. “But it should be pronounced Bel Iblis. I am your mother's counterpart in Islam. Pretty much reduced to only a tempter in that religion. You might say this level of hell was my idea. Well, mine and Pat's.”

 

Another figure Rhee recognized Patrick Belleisle, walked up, making note on a clipboard.”We're falling off, Bel. Less than a thousand have cleared this level today, and we're getting more than that a day.” He nodded. “My name is really Belial, a Duke of hell according to Christian theologians.”

 

“If they are being intransigent, we merely adjust the pressure.” Bel replied. She spoke, and this time her voice carried like a bullhorn. “You all know what's happening. If you can't make up your minds, we'll adjust the pressure by ten millibars!” There was groaning or gasping depending on where they were in relation to the center. She looked to Rhee. “A bar is a measurement of air pressure, with one bar equal to the air at sea level.” She waved out even with them. “Which is what we are under now. But the further down you go,” she pointed at the people below them, “the pressure increases. The ones at the bottom there are under up to ten bars, the same as living under 330 feet of water; the same as having a man who weighs one hundred and fifty pounds sitting on every square inch of their bodies. But they cannot adjust to it as you would naturally, which has been done by teams lead by Jacques Cousteau.

 

“If you caught a fish at that depth and dragged it to the surface, it's entrails would be forced out of it's rectum and mouth. If you took a man, as if in a submarine, and breached it catastrophically, he would be smashed into something small enough to fit in a bucket.” She pointed upwards. “On the other end the pressure drops. Humans can live easily in pressures down to 900 millibars, the same as you have below 15,000 feet, but it becomes harder the higher you go. At the top,” She pointed at the few figures up at that height, “are under less than a millibar, less than two tenths of an ounce of pressure. The people orbiting in the space shuttle have more pressure on their suits when they step out for a space walk. Above 15,000 feet, 5000 meters, you normally have disorientation followed by unconsciousness. At that pressure, you die within less than three minutes; only because it takes your brain that long to know that you are.”

 

She pointed at one figure feebly struggling at the very heights below several others. “Kenneth Lay, our most recent acquisition. He used his skills to gerrymander the electrical situation in California under Governor Gray Davis; producing electricity inside the state, then sending it to subsidiaries as far away as Texas, then 'selling' it back to California at inflated rates which Davis signed off on. At the same time he convinced his employees at Enron to accept stock options instead of raises, and looted their pension funds as the corporation collapsed. When Enron filed for bankruptcy shareholders lost almost 11 billion dollars, and the attempts by both shareholders and employees to recoup was a farce. But he's only the newest. Those above him are corporate executives in what Eisenhower called the 'military-industrial complex.

 

“Your remember the movie Independence Day? Julian Levinson comments on the overspending done by suppliers?” Bel sighed. “The second world war caused the US military and the suppliers of their equipment to form a coalition that fed the war machine of that war and beyond. When that war ended, the coalition continued, fed by fear of the 'red menace'. The government through the military threw billions at their suppliers to come up with 'panacea' weapons to defeat a menace they did not even understand.

 

“Their suppliers realized that, and used it. So you had the government spending $900 for toilet seats in the 70s. Back in the 90s a National Guard officer in charge of repair of F-15 fighters discovered that the Grumman suppliers were charging ten dollars a unit for light bulbs you could buy at Radio shack for a dime each. In a comic strip of the 1980s a General is making a statement about something called the X-16-D, costing only 10,000 a unit. When the reporter comments that it's not bad for a missile, the general says, 'it's a sixteen penny nail'.

 

“Worse yet, because of the difference between the capabilities of the weapons of a war seventy years ago and now, the numbers needed aren't as large. When you buy anything mass produced, be it a car or a gun or a bomb or a plane, the cost drops with higher production numbers. The US government bought thousands of P 51s during the Second World War, and by the end of that war were paying just over fifty thousand a unit. The British produced the Sten gun and the price dropped from 37 dollars a unit in 1940 to nine by 1945. That is why an F 15 costs just under 20 million a unit now, and the F 22 that replaced it costs over 150 million each. The Flying Fortress which had a production run of over 12,000 ended the war costing 238 thousand a unit, while a single B2 bomber today costs 2.1 billion dollars a unit”

 

Bel's finger pointed angrily. “Those men, knowing that all of the research and development was covered, knowing the difference in the exchange rates for a dollar from 1940 and one from 1970, or eighty or ninety still sat there in congressional oversight committees saying 'we need to recoup our costs' as they demanded even more money.”

 

She slowed her breathing, then pointed. “At the bottom there are those who were misers, who took money and kept it to their bosoms, refusing to spend it. Some of them are still here from before the birth of Christ. There,” she pointed at the upper region, “are those who wasted money. Few remain from the pre-christian era now, but it has been two thousand years. Those who waste are always fewer than those who take through greed.

 

“There are few millionaires who made their money, or who were raised by such people to be responsible. No one here is being punished because he made money, merely if they did so in a way that hurt others for that greed. Most of the robber barons of America's expansion are here, as are Union officials who got into it for what they can get. “She pointed at a man about ten feet below them “Jimmy Hoffa. As bad as he was portrayed, he isn't even close to those who caused hundreds to die. The guards from the Nazi death camps who lined their own pockets from what they could steal from things confiscated from the Jews, the Swiss who ignored the fact that tons of teeth with dental gold had to be ripped out of human mouths as they processed it for storage in banks.

 

“A number of the rich who were second and third generation and members of noble families and political upper echelons are here, those raised to think that they are perfect for whatever reason. Kim Jong Il and his father are here because of what have they done to their own people.

 

“What they are doing is balancing what they honestly needed compared to what they had or wasted. It is a delicate process. They cannot merely throw the money they held or wasted at the problem. In every life they affected there is a point where the entire future could be changed. Think of a diamond beneath the cutter's blade. Just a small difference to one side, and you destroy the gem. To the other you end up making not one cut but two. A master can take a two carat uncut diamond worth perhaps a thousand dollars and create a one point five carat one worth over two thousand.

 

“They are learning what makes other people tick, and how their actions caused those others problems. Marie Antoinette,” she pointed at a figure about ten feet above head height, ”has regretted her 'let them eat cake' comment for over two centuries.” She looked at Rhee. “Back when mankind began making bread, they found that some things such as bleaching made the flour easier to make into bread and made light bread, the so called cake she spoke of. At the time she said it, 'cake' was something any noble could buy, but the bread the peasants were denied was made from whatever could be ground fine enough to make bread; from beans and lentils to grass seeds. The best analog of your era is the high priced 'designer' bread you buy at the store instead of a loaf of Wonder bread.” She looked up at the woman. “How many died of starvation when she made a joke of it?

 

“So it goes, life by life until you are done.” She moved to a man floating mere inches from the exact center of the room. “A merchant from China from 110 BC. He held grain from the Imperial accounts to give him money to spend on one of his concubines. He died a year later when the Empire found out and executed him for the death of five hundred people in Yunan province. He also caused untold deaths in other provinces by his actions suggesting that others could pull off the same thing if they were smart enough. The Mandarins were bad enough without little monsters like him.” The man floated down another inch, and gave a gasp as if he had not been breathing for several minutes. Bel touched him, and he vanished.

 

“He goes on to Fraud, then on to Treachery.”

 

“Then we're off.” Dawn said brightly. “So much more to do.”

[MsFicwriter]

Once again, masterfully written and explained!

[LDR]

I look forward for the next circle. Anger, I believe.

[machievelli]

I've been discussing the religious right with someone, so following this portion we have dinner and a discussion with 'Mikey' about the Apostolic Church...

 

Anger: Or what is worse; the fires of hate, or the cold knee jerk reaction?

 

Dawn walked into the elevator, leaning against the wall. Rhee waited as the door closed. “You were saying about the civ- War between the States.?

 

“Still on about that? It was fought for economic reasons from both sides. The South was sick and tired of being a cash cow for the Federal government, and the Union wasn't willing to let them go; it would have gutted the economy if they did not control the supply of cotton. No business will buy supplies if they cost too much and the idea that the South would merely take the cotton and sell it elsewhere if they gained independence really frightened them.

 

“In the law you have two terms that are considered either mutually balancing or mutually exclusive. De facto', in fact, and De jure, under law. In fact, or by law. In fact the cotton was owned by the growers, and could be sold as they pleased, and before that conflict, by law the growers could sell it as they pleased. When it came down to arguing, the government was unwilling to accept either.

 

“So they lied. When the southern senators and congressmen threatened to secede, the Federal government told them they didn't have that right. Yet neither the originals Articles of Confederation, nor the Constitution prohibit it. I liked Michael Shaara's view spoken by General George Pickett in his book the Killer Angels; The Union was like a private club where you had to leap through a few hoops to join. But once you had joined, there was no rule that said you couldn't leave.

 

“Like any club new members change the shape of the group, and perhaps members would create new rules that bother some members. But when that happened, no one had the right to demand that you stay as part of that club. But the Union disagreed.

 

“Since 1861 however, it has become both fact and law that a state may not merely leave if they feel put upon. That is why most of the remaining American Territories today refuse to have a vote for statehood. The Federal government has less authority there, and the territories fewer responsibilities. Taxation for example is less, since they have only a limited franchise, and tariffs are less for the same reason.

 

“Look at the economic damage done to the South by that war. Since Lincoln died before it was over, the steps he wanted to take were ignored, and the attempts by Andrew Johnson to limit the rapacious nature of the Northern States almost got him impeached. The South was first deprived of their primary work force for cotton, then told that they had to pay four years of back taxes in a lump, in cash, on the barrel head, with no time to even think about raising that money.

 

“Then there was that farce of 'forty acres and a mule' touted by the carpetbaggers. It wasn't like the Union could merely create the land, it had to come from someone else, and they fully expected to merely dispossess the growers and pass it off to the freed slaves with no problems in between. The fact that while a family can work that amount of land was accepted, there was no way a family could harvest the cotton grown on that land efficiently. They would need additional workers just as the big growers had, and that was now a problem.”

 

She sighed, pointing toward the door. “That is why everything from Greed down is what is considered an active sin; one where you consciously make a choice in your actions. The ones before were ones that are inherent in human nature, procreation and feeding yourself.

 

“But that period of your history is a very good way to explain why Anger is such a problem. But as for all of the following wars, for the record; The United States has fought ten wars, including two that were never declared. Of them all, only three were not only necessary, but also right.”

 

“The World Wars.” Rhee said.

 

“Wrong on both counts. The first was just another European war. It was mainly a family feud where the rest of the world was invited to attend. If the United States had gotten into every European war since it was formed they would have been in over a dozen; most of them for some really stupid reasons. The seated president while proclaiming that the US would not get involved treated one side as a valued ally, and the other was treated as a neutral is supposed to react. The British loaded tons of supplies sold by American dealers, and German ships were seized and interned. Under the proper usage of the law, both should have been seized or turned away.

 

“By the same token they were mistreated by that ally. Any American ship bound for Europe was stopped and their manifest was checked. If they were headed into the Mediterranean, and were going further east than Italy, or if they were bound for the Baltic, they were taken instead into British ports, and consigned cargoes for those areas were seized and sold to Britain regardless of where it was bound; an act protested by the neutrals in both areas of the seas mentioned.

 

“When William Jennings Bryan, then the American Secretary of State protested, they ignored it, claiming American businesses were filing false manifests for German Austrian or Turkish cargoes.

 

“The Germans were facing the problem that Britain was losing ships to the U Boats, but not as you might think from the Media hype of the time. Since ocean going submarines were a new weapon, the Germans were using what were called the cruiser rules. A merchant ship would be stopped by the surfaced submarine, and their manifests checked. Under those rules if it were an neutral ship carrying contraband, or a British ship carrying anything, it can be seized and taken into their own ports.

 

“However no submarine had the crew size necessary for prize crews. Under that law the ship can be sunk after the crew is ordered into the life boats. In the first month of the war, almost ten thousand tons of shipping were lost using these polite rules.

 

“So the First Sea Lord, a man named Winston Churchill ordered guns to be mounted on merchant ships . But he then violated international law, saying they were for 'self defense'. By definition a war crime. You see, in 1856, England along with the rest of Europe wanted to limit privateers, who could easily slide into piracy, so as of the Treaty of Paris, no merchant ship was to be armed, unless the nation doing so was building up their navy in time of emergency. Any such vessel was to be redesignated a Merchant Cruiser. A warship.

 

“But under those same cruiser rules, a submarine did not have to stop any kind of warship. Those could be sunk without warning. Churchill then compounded the crime by ordering merchant ships to resist capture, even if it meant ramming the submarine. But under even civil law, if a policeman stops a citizen and that citizen resists, he stops being just a citizen, he is now a criminal. Under military law that means you can now sink him to protect yourself. As Tommy Lee Jones in Rules of Engagement said in his closing argument, if a civilian picks up a weapon, he is now a combatant, and can be shot just like any soldier.

 

“It was a few years before the US used one document, the Zimmerman Telegram, as an excuse to go to war themselves.”

 

“Wait, what about the Lusitania?”

 

“Ah, I knew you'd bring that up. When the British changed the rules, the Germans changed them as well. While they had tried to follow the cruiser rules, it was not a promotional bell ringer if some merchant ship sank you, and the Americans were upset because the Germans were now sinking ships without warning. So the German navy in 1915; two years before war was declared, drew a line 50 miles from the coast of the British Isles and declared it a restricted zone. Outside it, they would return to the cruiser rule, and only sink ships that fired on them, but within it they would sink any ship of any flag with no further warning. This warning was published in the United States two weeks before the Lusitania sailed. So no one could claim they had not had fair warning that it could happen.

 

“The Germans had photographs that showed the mounting ring for six inch guns on that ship, and had already declared her a merchant cruiser, making her a legitimate target anywhere. But they waited until she was inside the Unrestricted Zone before sinking her. As much as the press calling for war claimed it was an atrocity, the proof that the mounting rings had been installed, even if guns had not been, was enough to back the German claim, so there was no vote for war that year.

 

“Then the German Ambassador entered secret negotiations with Mexico, suggesting that in the event of war with the United States, Mexico would attack them. Now.” She leaned further back, hand in the air, a finger raised. “Could the Mexicans have been considered a serious threat? No. They had neither the manpower nor the weapons to be more than a nuisance. In fact thanks to the ongoing rebellion by Pancho Villa, they were already that, but a minor one if you didn't live in the American Southwest.

 

“Could they get the weapons?” She raised a second finger. “From where? Most of the weapons sold and used at the time came from the belligerents themselves; the American ones for example, were sold to Britain and France on easy terms, and the Central powers were busy supplying their own troops, and didn't have a lot they could sell. Besides, they would have to load them on Neutral bottoms to even attempt delivery since their merchant fleets were devastated, captured or interned.

 

“Could Germany assist them if they did?” A third finger. “No way, if you excuse the term, in hell. The remaining German and Austrian fleets were bottled up, unable to move. While the Germans did have almost a dozen merchant cruisers, sending them to the Caribbean would have been a death sentence, and four of five merchant cruiser attacking shipping in the narrow confines of Mexico's western border would have been almost as bad, since a merchant cruiser survives by stealth. Yet this was sufficient to get war voted, but still the Americans were split on it.

 

“Woodrow Wilson takes the sedition act, which had been passed to stop people from complaining too much about what the government was doing before the war was declared, was expanded into the Sedition and Espionage Act. Originally if someone reported that you had made remarks disparaging to American policy, your mail was opened legally by the post office. If you had said something in that mail that was considered sedition, the post office 'lost' the letter. But under the new wording, you could be arrested and jailed. You no longer had the right of free speech if you protested the Government getting into that war. In fact the modern Patriot Act is built on that law, which was officially removed only in 1920.

 

“Really, what did the US get out of the 1st World War?” Dawn held up her hand, fingers spread, then folded her thumb. “They got peace, but the Central Powers only agreed because Wilson promised there would be no reprisals. But when he caught the flu before the treaty was arranged, he and the US bowed out.”

 

The little finger. “The French were able to make the entire procedure a rape of the Central Powers, shattering the Austrian empire. Then stripping away every foreign possession and little piece of Germany or Austria that had caught their eyes, conquest by law rather than force of arms. They saddled Germany with fifty billion dollars of war debt, but waited until they took every ounce of gold from the German government first. Did it, and made sure it would impoverish the German people for a generation or more. They rigged the entire arrangement by demanding that the Germans issue bearer bonds for half of it at five percent interest, and the remainder at 10 percent which were then handed over to the victors to disperse to pay their own bills. To give you an idea of how punitive this was, a bank only paid about one percent on your savings.

 

“Remember the movie Beverly Hills Cop? The main character's friend was carrying German bearer bonds, probably from the last of those. Only the fact that the US refused to allow demands for more reparations after World War II stopped the German people from being in debt into the next century; they finally paid it off in 1986.”

 

Ring finger. “They limited the German armed forces to almost nothing; ten thousand men in the army, six of the older battleships of the original navy with sufficient escort, nothing above 10,000 tons to be built ever, no submarines or airplanes. Yugoslavia had a larger army!”

 

Middle finger. “Then in an act that went beyond barbaric, they demanded that the Germans accept full responsibility for the war. Forget that Serbia murdered a member of the Austrian Royal family, ignore that it was Serbian troops facing the Austrians who fired the first shot, or that it was the entry of the British and French into the war as allies of Serbia that caused the Alliance between Austria and Germany to be invoked. It's all Germany's fault.”

 

Index finger. “The war caused the European economy to tank, causing the Great Depression, and the punitive measures laid the seeds for the second war less than 20 years later. Then of course, an avian flue bug that had grown in the US Army's boot camps, spreads through the troops in Flanders, and then through Europe and killed 87 million plus young adults because it causes their immune systems to overreact and flood their lungs.”

 

“Wait!” Rhee made a time out gesture. “The Spanish Flu was our fault?”

 

“Yes.” Dawn shrugged. “An flu that is so common that they detect it every year, though not as virulent now as it was then. This was proven in the 1970s in the world, though we down here had worked it out by 1924.”

 

“How did you do that? They didn't have electron microscopes until 1928!”

 

“We don't need no stinking microscopes.” Dawn grinned. “Remember in school when you'd get headaches using a microscope or a telescope?” Rhee nodded. The school nurse and several doctors had been stumped by the problem considering that she routinely pointed out paper clips on the floor of a classroom from half the room away. “Well your eyes are like mine instead of human.”

 

Rhee looked at her mother's eyes. “I don't see any difference.”

 

“All basic lens type eyes are the same whether you speak of a human eye or an octopus. We couldn't do our job very well if we were limited to the focus and range of the human eye. We Angels can see down to the microscopic level, and up to the macro level when we need to. All you need is training. If you wished, you could look at the surface of Pluto as if it were on the other wall of this elevator, or see an atom of hydrogen dancing on your pinkie. Now look at this.” Dawn handed her a small tube like they use for perfume samples. Rhee muttered something. “What?”

 

“I wish someone had told me when I was ten.” She grumbled. “I drew a picture, and couldn't explain what it was when I was asked. It was just three little circles spinning like mad as if they were attached.”

 

“Oh, the water molecule you drew?”

 

“Smart ass.” Rhee looked at the tube in her hand. “I don't see anything.”

 

“Focus.” Dawn covered her mouth. “Use the Force, Luke.”

 

“I repeat, smart ass.” Rhee huffed staring. Was the tube larger? She continued, and it seemed to be approaching her face. Then it was all she could see, and it was still growing. There was only a single drop of water in it, and she found her gaze drawn to that. It was dirty water, no, it had something in it. Suddenly she was looking at a hundred, no a thousand small ball shaped things swimming idly in the water. Soon there was only one, looking like she held it right in front of her eyes.

 

“If you look, you will see additional amino acids attached themselves at what your scientists labels the H and N points. Since several different amino acids could connect there, they came up with different numbers, so the 2009 variant is H2N5. But this one is what slaughtered all of those people back then. Now it is actually benign compared to the newer variants, every American who is not of African Descent is immune 80% of the time.”

 

“Why the disclaimer?”

 

“Oh, you'll love this, the whites were trying to avoid allowing black Americans from fighting alongside the white boys. So when people asked why they were assigned to secondary duties; digging latrines, kitchens, cleaning, the Command officers stated that tests had proven that blacks were night blind. You couldn't send someone night blind into combat, so they had other duties. They weren't in the trenches, or in the hospitals when it spread in that last relatively benign form.”

 

Dawn hit the button, and the elevator dropped. “I don't know about you, but I'm getting tired. I'm remembering how we worked, both above and below on what the hell had happened for five long years. We hadn't even seen the possibility of what could happen if nature threw in a curve ball we didn't plan for. The asteroid that slaughtered the dinosaurs was only the first we had to deal with.”

 

“The flood.” Rhee said. Dawn grimaced.

 

“The first tribe we were watching got a little too friendly with each other, and inbred too much. Within a thousand years, they were starting to show massive birth defects, so we put them down. The entire tribe lived on the eastern slope of the bed of what is now the Mediterranean. We got Noah's extended family into the Ark, and broke the seal on the land bridge at the Pillars of Hercules, causing a localized flood that killed them rapidly and humanely. What the bible says took forty days and nights took about as many hours.

 

“Now, Anger. Humans only see it in the microcosm, but it has as many shades as there are colors. But we here only worry about three variants of it. One is the white hot hate that drives the serial killer; the kind of hate that makes a man injure another just to attempt to reduce it any amount at all.

 

“The fury that drives a drunk to take on an entire bar, or to knife a cop just because he stops him. The kind that in war causes warriors to commit atrocities. It is the one all humans recognize and fear, for when someone is suffering through it you are nothing more than a target.

 

“But they are the minority here.

 

“The second variant is what most people define as a sullen attitude. The man who holds his frustrations inside until like a blocked volcano, you explode. The kind of man who walks into a MacDonald's with a machine gun and just shoots everyone in sight. Again, they are rare. As many as they kill it's minor compared to the last. Again, we had to create our own version of what is right and wrong, and just having the fully angry beating on each while the sullen pout in the corner doesn't really do it.

 

“The last is the darkest most evil for of anger, and the worst part of it is most who suffer from it never fell to it themselves. Those men are like the carrier of a disease, spreading it through entire populations. The largest version of it is not only insidious, it's still ongoing. It was fueled by taking two different works, one German, the other French, and combining them.

 

“The first was entitled The dialogue in hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, a satirical view of the French Government of Napoleon III, where all of the government's actions were seen as a plot to control all actions within the nation written by Maurice Joly in 1864. That work was later plagiarized in Germany with a final chapter added and released under the title Biamitz. But in the 1870s it was released in serial form in Russia, and finally put together in a pamphlet in 1903 under the name it is still known by.

 

“It became the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, 'proof' if you will of the International Jewish Conspiracy. While it has been proven again and again that the work is false, people will still hold it up as enough evidence to condemn the entire Jewish race. By minor alteration, you can use it to prove the duplicity of whomever you please.

 

“A legacy of hate spanning one hundred and forty years to date. But the worst of it occurred just seventy years ago in what was then Nazi Germany.”

 

“Look at the historical record of the German Jew in the same time. The primary poem used to fuel their anger against the British was named 'A song of hate for England' by Ernst Lissauer, a German Jew later roundly condemned by both Jews and anti-Semites alike. The first man to earn an Iron Cross in World War 1 was a Jew. The first German pilot to use a Swastika in that war was a Jew. When Adolf Hitler as a corporal was given the Iron Cross, the man who wrote the award was a Jew. One hundred thousand fought during that war, and ten thousand died for their 'Fatherland', a higher average than any other demographic of the German people at the time. By any standard you wish to use, they had proven the most loyal and brave of any in their land.

 

“Yet twenty years later the Protocols were required reading material in German schools. 'Wise' men were using them to point at every fault in their own society, and because it bridges all gaps, you had German Communists, already considered an enemy, even Churchmen reading and using it right alongside the Nazis. One of the most civilized nations on the planet went mad, and condemned five percent of their people to be converted into products. Into lamp shades, soap, candles, mattress ticking, slave labor, and eventually slaughter and use as fertilizer after cremation.

 

“And even today, no one beyond this realm even understands why, or is unwilling to admit it. Because in Germany at that time were three types of people.

 

“The first were the ones who merely saw the removal of those people from their society as a necessary evil. They did not know what was happening to them, only that they had been taken away. Then, there were the ones who did know, and like Lot outside of Sodom and Gomorrah turning their backs on what was happening. Then there were those who carried out that massacre, who slapped each other on the back about the 'good days work' they had done.

 

“And you still have the debunkers who say the Germans only did what had to be done, that there was no way the Germans could have been that brutal, or did not have the capability to murder and dispose of so many bodies. That claim that the Allies; most point at the Americans or Russians, claiming that they arrived at camps of well fed and cared for people, and murdered them just to blame the Nazis. That they did in less than two years what took the Nazis even longer.

 

“And the Jews are only the tip of the iceberg of hate. Every white man of the south that felt put upon blamed their problems on the blacks, and taught their children as if their claims were as true as the Protocols.

 

“That last we see as the worst. The ones that made hate a household word, and the removal of what you hate as simple as swatting a fly, and expending just as much emotion when you do. When Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il finish upstairs, this is their next stop. They have spent 60 years of their combined lives blaming every ill of North Korea on the Americans.”

 

The door hissed open again on blackness. They stepped out. For a moment as before, darkness was all they could see. Then there came a pounding like a pile driver slamming a post into soil. Then it grew, not one, but hundreds, thousand, no... Millions!

 

The scene began to lighten, and far overhead massive weights rose then fell. Below them were humans that went like a grotesque cartoon from upright, to being squashed under them. Then the weight would rise, the person staggering to their feet, and barely standing before it came down again. It was a demented engine with no other purpose than injury.

 

“We have few here from before about a millennia ago; communications wasn't fast enough for even the most inflammatory slogan to reach many.” She motioned toward one region where the weights were smaller, perhaps half of what the person being pummeled weighed. Yet a sledgehammer that weighs only a few pounds can still crush the bones of a person, and these were dropping fifty feet or more. If the man wasn't flattened, the body would stand there still until it had pounded him down to the floor strike by strike before their body snapped back whole and upright. “These are the slogan makers, the hate mongers, primarily. Jack the Ripper, Jeffery Daumer, Ted Bundy spent only a few years here each. But they also have to go through violence yet. These wrote slogans used by those who brutalized others, or their statements.” She pointed to her far left, and as her arm swept right, she quote.

 

“ 'Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius'. 'The Ends Justify the means'. The only Good Indian is a dead one'. 'When this war is over the only place Japanese will be spoken is in hell'.” She paused sighing. “When he arrives, Peter Arnette will have his own for his 'We had to destroy the village to save it'. It was a rewrite of a statement by an American Air Force officer who really said, 'it was a beautiful city, it is a pity it was destroyed'.

 

“I always feel like having a stiff drink after this level. Join me?” Rhee nodded. They climbed back into the elevator, and a moment later were back in the offices. Without asking Dawn poured a double for each of them. “Slanche.” She said tossing it down.

 

“So tomorrow after work we start on Heresy?”

 

“Yes, but I think there is someone better to explain that level.” Dawn went to her desk. “I know you like fish sometimes. Have you tried shark?”

 

“No.”

 

“Then this will be interesting.” She tapped a speed dial, then set it on speaker phone as she poured another drink.

 

“Hello?”

 

“Yo, Mikey!”

 

He sighed. “You know I hate that.”

 

“Just my basic sense of humor, bro. What are you doing tonight?” She sat at the desk, feet kicked up on the desk.

 

“Just dinner a movie then bed.”

 

“You know my daughter is checking out the underworld.”

 

A long pause. “How's she taking it?”

 

“Asking questions, learning the ropes.” She sipped. “Could you explain Heresy to her for tonight?”

 

“You went through Anger and got upset again, didn't you?”

 

She sighed. “After all these years, you know me too well, Michael; thank you for being there. After five millennia being blamed for every ill mankind knows, I really hate being blamed for Dachau and Auschwitz.”

 

“Hey, I've had five decades of the same crap; being blamed for every idiot who uses 'god's will' as an excuse for mayhem.” He chuckled. “I'd heard she came to understanding, but is undecided. Has she...”

 

“Not yet. We both know that even if she followed Daddy Dearest's game plan we would have an aeon of cataloging before we are done.”

 

“No he prophesied only a millennia-”

 

“Be real!” She slammed down the drink. “If I am to do my assigned job, it will take ten thousand years to clear the present backlog. Let's not even get started on delivering the better part of nine billion more new souls in a lump. That's probably another million years just for my end before his 'perfect world' can start.” She closed her eyes as she stood, leaning on the desk with her fists. “As much as he thinks he can jump start it by taking every unrefined soul and spending a millennia teaching them again, it won't work. Both you and I know that. If he hadn't chosen humanity, maybe. But he chose the vessel, so he has to accept the limitations.”

 

There was a sigh. “Agreed. So what's the game plan?”

 

“I suggested dinner. You can explain the problem here better than I can, and there'll be no way Daddy can claim I have lied.”

 

“You know, except for Daddy Dearest, being called Daddy really ticks him off.”

 

“I know that, Michael.” Her tone was dead serious. “But if he's going to act like a spoiled brat, you know I have to fight him on this. That is why she didn't know until yesterday.”

 

“All right. Are you on speaker?”

 

“Yes. Say hello, Rhee.”

 

“Hello, Rhee.” The woman replied.

 

“So like you're mother.” He replied. “It's five PM local by my watch.”

 

“Five?” Rhee looked at the clock on the wall. “We were down there for hours! How can it be only a little after five?”

 

“God time, Rhee. How about eight?”

 

“Agreed.”

 

“And she knows you like shark. So I will place the order. Megaladon all right?”

 

“Like you said, you know me well. Yes. And vegetables from the same period.”

 

“Done.” Dawn hit a button. “You have plenty of time to relax and bathe first.”

[MsFicwriter]

Chills. Your story simply gives me chills. BraVA!

[machievelli]

Three out of six because all of the names of the board members are names given to the devil.

 

Six? I only remember four, and all are names for the devil. What were the two others you see? Also, as I pointed out, every name given to the devil is a title as are the ones listed here

[machievelli]

Talk about fun; first we have someone claiming to be Hurry posting messages to my stuff that no longer exist.

 

Then I write the next two segments in a week long monumental jag and find it's twenty five thousand odd characters too long. So I had to make a swift and dirty cut to make it fit.

 

Dinner with the Messiah

 

Rhee wasn't surprised that Fujiko was already notified. “The Messiah, here! We need new place mats and dishes!”

 

“Spare me, Fujiko. Is my bath ready?”

 

“Of course mistress, both shower and hot tub.” Rhee dropped her briefcase, which was fielded by the Zashiki-warashi before it hit the ground. “I will be there to wash your back in an instant.”

 

Rhee was beyond surprise. She headed toward the bathtub, stripping her clothes off, and every piece (she knew) being fielded by her servant. She reached the bathroom, and sat; less than a second later a sponge was washing her back. She sat there, allowing the ministrations of her servant as she relaxed into it.

 

The suggestion that she move into the hot tub was accepted, and she sighed as she relaxed in the hot water.

 

“Mistress, have you verified that dinner was cooked to satisfaction?”

 

“Honestly, Fujiko, I don't know how the son of god likes his shark steaks.”

 

“Neither do I, mistress, but the restaurant below must have served him before.”

 

“You are right of course. Could you call them?”

 

There was a pause. “Mistress, I am but a small fish in this pond. You are much more important than I, and would be best to ask such questions.” She looked back, and Fujiko looked abashed. “I am sorry, mistress.”

 

“Don't worry.” Rhee said, standing. Her robe was there, and she wrapped it around herself. She walked through the apartment to the phone. She dialed 1, and the phone was almost immediately answered. “My mother ordered dinner for two at my apartment.”

 

“Yes, Miss Lightson. Megaladon for two with vegetables from the same period.” There was a pause. “Ma'am, is this for... him?”

 

“Him?”

 

“Think of me genuflecting, Khristos?”

 

“Yes it is.”

 

“Oh good. He always likes his shark en Brochette. Is that acceptable for you as well?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“And he likes the older Retsina wines of that time. They are rather sharp with pine tar, would you like a more modern version?”

 

“No, I will try it. If it's too strong, I know where to call.”

 

“One thing, lady, his sense of humor is only two millennia odd old, compared to your mother's. Don't tell any jokes linked to Christianity.”

 

“What?”

 

“You can tell how mature a religion is by the jokes they will accept about themselves. And above all, don't call him Sonny Boy.”

 

“I don't understand.”

 

“One of the jokes I mentioned; a young priest straight from seminary, he's always nervous when he has to give the sermon, so the parish priest give him some advice. First, fill his water carafe with vodka, sip a few times, and go on with the sermon.

 

“The next week he is doing very well, everyone is riveted, and he knows he's getting the message across. Afterward, he speaks with the parish priest. That man says, 'a few problems. First, sip not gulp. Second, never say that God opened the full can of whup-ass on Egypt, or that God 'whupped on Pharaoh like a red headed stepchild'. There are ten commandments, not twelve, twelve apostles, not ten. When referring to Jesus and the apostles, it is not JC and the sunshine band, and never refer to the holy trinity as Daddy oh, Sonny Boy, and the Spook. Last, it was a taffy pulling contest at St Peter's.”

 

Rhee found herself giggling. “So no joking.”

 

“Right. Dinner at eight?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“Then I will leave you to get to it.”

 

She chose her sundress and Fujiko fussed around her like a demented hummingbird having her change into a blouse and skirt instead. Finally the little spirit judged her ready. “Would you like a drink before he arrives?”

 

“That would make a good impression, welcoming him in half hammered.” She looked over her shoulder. “Why is it that him coming here is driving everyone around me to distraction?”

 

“He's a big wheel up top, my lady. He was there from the start!”

 

“So was Mom, but you guys don't act this way when she's around.”

 

“But she spends more time here among humans than he does. I think he makes an inspection tour once a year, but your mother is always ready to pop in and check up on your people. She's the boss with the open door policy, he's like Howard Hughes never announcing himself.” The door bell rang, and Fujiko took off like a missile. Bemused, Rhee followed.

 

She wasn't sure what she had expected; a man in a suit like Loki, of maybe one of the visual representations you see on the wall of Catholic homes. What she saw was a woman she recognized in a flame red dress, and she stopped. “Mom? What are you doing here?”

 

The figure turned, then in what was obviously a man's voice said, “Gotcha!” Then began to laugh. As he did, the body changed, becoming a man in a turtleneck sweater and sports jacket. He was androgynous, looking good as a man, but one who could dress as a woman and look stunning. She remembered that an actress, Tilda Swinton, had been chosen to play Gabriel in the movie Constantine because every description of an angel implied someone more beautiful than handsome.

 

He looked at himself, still chuckling. “Your mother always suggested I should try a female form, get in touch with my feminine side as she would say. I knew that would shock you a little.”

 

“No sense of humor my ass.” She said.

 

He shook his head. “Just because she has been honing hers for almost a million years doesn't mean I didn't learn how to take a joke. After all, I had almost 34 years as a human. She started with only the first year or so back when Adam was there, and they were still pre-verbal.” He stepped forward. “I've been watching you for a few years, though you never saw me. I am Jeshua ben Josef of Nazareth.”

 

“Not Christ?”

 

He shook his head as they shook hands. “Christ is an anglicized version of the Greek Khristos, which is merely their word for Messiah, which merely means anointed one.”

 

“King.”

 

He shook his head again. “What everyone conveniently ignores is that high priests were also anointed. I was supposed to be nothing more than a teacher, not king or god, or even 'the son of'.” He handed he a bottle he had under his arm, and walked past her. “Nice place.”

 

“Thank you. She followed, setting the bottle on the bar. It was a dry white wine, and she opened it, pouring. He nodded his thanks when she handed him a glass.

 

“So they got it wrong?”

 

He chuckled. “I know your mother has already said it, but I will repeat, mankind could mess up a snowball fight. The reason she asked me to meet with you was because I am, you might say, living proof of what heresy is.”

 

“But wait! The Romans executed you for sedition and treason!”

 

“Because I had not said anything that was defined as heresy under their laws.”

 

“But how could you be a heretic under Judaic law?”

 

“As much as religion has grabbed the term for themselves, heresy has always been a political crime. It's when they want to punish you, but what you've done is not actually illegal.

 

“Perfect example; Galileo was tried for heresy because of his observations of the Solar System. The church, and therefore the government of his time had declared we lived on a perfect world, and God would make none that did not match this perfection. So every planet would have one large moon. But Galileo said there were two small ones orbiting Mars, four orbiting Jupiter, and gasp! Saturn had a ring!

 

“Rather than admit they were wrong, his studies were investigated by the Roman Inquisition, and they determined that what he said was supposition; observational error, not fact. When he published his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems - different views as to what was the center of the Solar System - it was judged by the church to be a direct attack on Pope Urban VII, and he's tried for heresy because he was spreading the word of Lucifer rather than the word of God. They force him to recant, and he spends his last years under house arrest.

 

“Socrates, nothing more than a philosopher was accused of heresy in a polytheistic society, and ordered to drink hemlock because he and his students are teaching ways of thinking that disturbed the Athenian government.”

 

There was another knock, and Fujiko floated in, a tray following her. She set the meal on the table, looked it over to assure everything was perfect, and floated out. Rhee sampled the meat. “Interesting. Why is it your favorite?”

 

“I tried Icelandic shark about 1400 years ago, and liked the taste and texture. But I wasn't going to suggest that for this meal.”

 

“Why not?”

 

“The way they prepare it. After catching the shark, they slice up the meat and bury it in sand for two weeks, then serve it raw.” Her fork had paused on the way to her mouth. He chuckled again. “This is pretty much what you would call shark kabobs. No sand, and cooked.”

 

“I haven't tried shark. Some people I know say humans eat shark to get even with them for eating us.”

 

“Megaladon never got the chance. They were extinct about the time we made the first Adam. Of course it would have been briefly exciting to see one.” He reached into the center piece of the table. “Picture something that looks like a great white shark, twice the length of the shark from Jaws, a mouth large enough to take everything from your head to your hips in one bite from the side, with teeth like this.”

 

She reached out, and took the white triangular shape from his hand. It was an isosceles triangle seven inches across and razor sharp. “I'm glad I never met one.”

 

“I understand. Nature is beautiful, but there are times a little distance makes it more enjoyable.”

 

“You said the first Adam?”

 

“There were three.” He had opened the carafe of wine, pouring a small portion in a glass. “This is Retsina, I would suggest just a sip. They used to seal the amphorae with pine tar, and I became rather fond of it during my life.”

 

She sipped, then held the glass out to be filled. “It is a bit sharp. Why three Adams?”

 

“We were and still are primarily non-corporeal. We can make a body appear as I did with this one, but it's not really us. Also none of us, even Father, have a life cycle remotely like your own. We are not immortal, since time has to end to prove we are, though we are long lived and relatively invulnerable. But being non-corporeal, we didn't understand the needs of a species like yours. We made the changes in the genetic structure, but the being was little more than a human shaped robot. First, we found that learning for your race was by observation and attempting to use that learning.

 

“We can pass information with the speed of a super computer, but humans need to learn to talk.” He waved a hand. “Oh your brains can process all of the data as we can. We filled his head with knowledge, but it was like filling the bookshelves of an illiterate, because among humans, knowledge needs a context. We had created the first Adam without considering that as a social being, he needed interaction to access the information we had stored. Think of a child reading the traffic laws, then putting him behind the wheel of a car without teaching him how to drive.

 

“The first died of dehydration. We didn't understand needing to eat and drink, and while full grown, he was still mentally a child, so he couldn't let us know he needed something, and we had never bothered to learn that the sounds he made meant anything. We were able to keep the second one healthy, but he died pretty much of loneliness. You know how a child needs the nurturing mother? Being cuddled, knowing he is cared for? We didn't have bodies, so we didn't understand that need and couldn't supply it physically. It was by observing the interactions among his tribe that we learned of that error. But we also expected him to be superior mentally to those that shared some of his genome. We could not just leave him among the proto - humans, because it would be like raising a puppy in a house full of cats. He would never really learn to be a dog.

 

“So Lucifer was assigned to occupy a form similar to his. She became what you might call another puppy to sleep with him and make him feel more comfortable. That was the analogy Lucifer used a hundred millennia ago when man domesticated dogs. She didn't understand that desperate skin hunger most species on this planet still have to an extent to this day. She was able to teach him by example what was good to eat, and how to make things by using hands similar to what he had, but to teach him how to speak understandably, she had to work with him to create language, because while we found we could read emotional context, we could not communicate with him without it.”

 

“So you were learning the need for a way to pass the information back even as you taught us to do so.” Rhee ate a slice of the shark. It was firm and tangy, with what would be called a wild flavor like any meat raised all naturally.

 

“Exactly. In fact one reason the first few generations in the bible lived as long as they did was because we were working on testing all of your new found capabilities to progress to the next stage of the experiment; having your new species interact with the world itself without our direct intervention. We also learned how to create physical bodies at need to interact with them. But the first errors crept in during that pretesting when we found that human curiosity could overrule other priorities.”

 

“The tree of good and evil.”

 

“Yes.” Jesus finished his wine, and held the bottle. Rhee lifted her glass, and he filled both. “None of us, with the exception of Lucifer, anticipated disobedience. It wasn't even as if the tree were really the font of good or evil; it was just a fruit tree now extinct, that we had found growing on an island that was sinking beneath the sea, and we had brought it there for examination.

 

“We put it down inside the 'garden', and like you would expect from humans, Adam and Eve ran over to check it out. When they did, the Angel who was supervising told them not to eat any of the fruit because they might die. When it was reported, Lucifer asked how the humans had reacted. He, as he was still primarily a man at the time, listened, then said, 'We had best finish our testing quickly. If it is there too long, they will eat from it'. ” He sighed. “Luckily for man, the first thing we did, as always, was verify it's toxicity. Man could eat the fruit safely. But we didn't tell them until later. After all, how many lab assistants tell the specimens what is happening?”

 

“Wait, you tested it? I thought the angels made everything at God's direction.”

 

He chuckled. “No, it would have taken too long. What we did was catalog them from microbes to the larger animals. After all, we had a functioning ecosystem to work with; all we needed was data on how the existing species would interact with humans. What was edible, what might consider you edible, that kind of thing. Once we were done with our analysis, an Angel went to tell Adam and Eve.” He grinned, and began to laugh uproariously, then leaned forward.

 

“The Angel arrives, and they act like a human child caught doing something they should not. Picture that you as a child had stolen a cigarette from your father's pack and taken it to your room to try it. You've just lit up, taken your first puff and then your mother opens the door, so you stash the evidence so she doesn't see it. Of course you're too young to understand that there is smoke still in the air, and you still have the smoke you have in your mouth. So you have been caught, and no amount of innocent expressions is going to cover this up.

 

“So, caught, Adam immediately points at Eve and says, 'She did it!'.” It wasn't until we checked with Lucifer that we discovered that Adam, like a child caught at it, blamed her.”

 

“So they were cast out.”

 

“The timing would suggest that, but we had reached the second stage. We had learned everything we could from them under laboratory conditions, and they were supposed to rejoin their tribe so we could continue the experiment. Of course that initial stage caused some problems. We had been doing all of our research right there before them. Like a doctor dissecting a frog in a room filled with frogs in cages who can see that.

 

“When they returned to the tribe, they did communicate enough to tell the pre human and later proto humans what they had seen, though they had no more understanding than a frog in a cage. During that initial test phase, a lot of our research in the field was also done without considering that their forebears would be able to watch. So think of a tribe in what would later be called Mesolithic-America. A tribesman has died in a manner that seems strange. Perhaps he ate something poisonous, or succumbed to disease. An angel sees it happen, and does an autopsy. The tribe watches from a safe distance to see something that is manlike but definitely not a man perform this. So later on, when they have passed this on to their children, they think 'god' or the plural form wishes some kind of sacrifice.

 

“Of course we had never considered that either. The first we knew of it was when Abel, instead of delivering a ram for us to examine, killed it and delivered a sacrifice instead by setting it ablaze. Of course we had another problem, because early man had eyes that saw through a broader range than modern humans, so he thought it was supposed to be burned.” At her blank look he placed his hand over a piece of shark on his plate. A haze of light appeared between the meat and his hand. “To someone who doesn't know better, it looks like a fire, doesn't it? That was the genesis of blood sacrifices.”

 

They finished the meal, and Fujiko whisked the plates away as they finished the retsina. Rhee poured brandy for them both, and they adjourned to the living room. “After several thousand years we noticed that even those we had initially sequestered had slipped into it. The Jews started out with a pretty good grasp of what we wished, but their time in Egypt tainted their belief system. When Moses got them as far as Mount Sinai, they 'assumed' first, the God had a physical form, and second, that they needed something to focus on to have him there to speak to; an idol and a sacrifice. At this point, Moses has gone up to speak to 'god' though it was actually one of the angels he was conferring with. We had thought to merely hand him an instruction book as it were, to tell them what god wanted. He comes back and they've already made an idol, sacrificed animals to it, and were generally partying down after what they thought was a job well done.

 

“So Moses, on instructions from the angel who is invisible yet present, shatters the two stone tablets, punishes his followers, and returns to the mountain and comes down again with the Ten Commandments.”

 

“Robert Heinlein suggested that in a Stranger in a Strange Land.”

 

“He was right. The first set assumed the Jews were mature enough to start working alongside us on the observational level, and they had proven incapable. We conferred, and Father asked Lucifer, the only one who had enough human in her to really understand the species, and Lucifer suggested a waiting period. Hand the Jews instead a list of admonitions, let their nation evolve further, then try again.”

 

“Her at this time?”

 

“Yes.” He sipped reflectively. “We hadn't consider that gender would even be involved. But humans noticed what we did not, that females go through several days where they are not normal by human definition.” He saw Rhee's looked and chuckled, shaking his head. “Linked to reproduction yes, but to the specifics of the difference between man and woman. When a female becomes fertile for the first time was a high point in a young girl's life. She is now no longer a child, but a woman capable of bearing children. Among ancient peoples this was their day of womanhood, just as the first throes of puberty for a boy was when he became a man. So most religions had those separated. The Jews, who I know best, called it Bar Mitzvah, and Bat Mitzvah. You see, you were expected to be more mature after your specific ritual ascension. But Lucifer, as a female, was able to insinuate herself into the tribes not of our specific test group. She was the one that found the underlying cause of the schism in those tribes between men and women.” He drained the snifter, and she refilled it silently.

 

“But Lucifer also pointed out that all of the adults in the group would still have that mindset of the old ways they had learned in Egypt, so they had to be removed. That is why they spent the next forty years wandering. As they were, we chose where they were going, examined the wildlife and other food sources, and created the dietary laws the Moses listed in Leviticus.”

 

Again she looked confused. “They probably didn't cover that in the church you went to, but the primary reasons for the dietary restrictions were by reason of disease, though humans didn't work it out until germ theory was the norm. When you only have a fire from whatever vegetation could rip from the ground, or the dung of your herd animals that has been dried, you cannot spend time roasting the meat to the proper temperature to assure all diseases are killed. Trichinosis is mostly the result of eating undercooked game, bear meat, or home-reared pigs. Tularemia is caused by eating rabbit at the wrong time of the year. Shellfish were banned, like the rabbit, because part of the year they are safe, but using a lunar calender it is hard to figure, so we just made them all forbidden. Among Europeans since the advent of first the Julian Calender, then the Gregorian, they use the old saw of not eating rabbit or oysters in months that have an 'R' in them, saying, 'only during the summer'.

 

“It goes much further. Nothing but hoofed animals with a cloven hoof were exempted because until the advent of Mad Cow's disease, they could be eaten safely raw if need be. Camels, though they were safe, they were also the primary beast of burden, so they were exempted. Fish without scales, birds that eat carrion or were predatory, all reptiles and most insects defined as inedible. Predatory animals and scavengers were removed from their diet because they could eat contaminated meat and pass diseases to men if not cooked properly. All meat of acceptable animals to be inspected by a shochet who slaughters, then examines the meat to assure it is safe, and meat and dairy products were not to be combined. That was on a village level, the milk could easily be from the mother of the animal being cooked.

 

“One vector we considered was blood born pathogens, where you could get a disease from the blood, or organs like the liver. Blood itself was not kosher, but liver if cooked over an open flame was. So until modern processing made it safe, no blood sausage.”

 

Rhee looked at the now empty table. “But you just had shark...”

 

He drank, and smiled. “Rhee, I have not been a Jew for over 2,000 years. I don't think they have the right to complain. But think; the Jews as a separate race still exist because the Jews who went into slavery against all odds and tribulations maintained those laws.

 

“In fact up to this day, the Arab nomads use the same method for building fires the Early Jews did; as you went along, everything that had not already been eaten by your herds along the track behind you was ripped up for later fires, and all dung is collected. In the 1920s the British showed that it was this habit that causes most of the North African and Saudi deserts to remain desert. All they did to prove it was fence in a square mile of desert and not allow the Arabs to strip it. Any grass that had not already been ripped away was able to grow, and if irrigated, any number of crops can grow as well.

 

“We ran those early tribes through the desert in what is now the Sinai, the Saudi Arabian Peninsula, and Jordan as described. Once the first generation had died, we led them back to the Jordan near Jericho. Now here is where things began to diverge, fact from history. Look at the propaganda system used in modern North Korea. You have sixty years of the people there being told that only the intervention of the United States, not the UN, caused their Great Patriotic War to fail. Two entire generations that would now fight to the last child if the US invaded them again.

 

“Humanity now knows this because they have seen the aftermath of such intensive indoctrination with Germany, where a lot of those who survived that war as children still believe that the US never had an aircraft return from a bombing mission because of how powerful the Luftwaffe was. We had forty years to use the same techniques on these people. 'God' did not say 'slaughter them all' as the bible says. It would have been done because it was ordered. They were told to dispossess any who resisted. But even then there were others who were not Jews still living there afterward. Modern Israel is still 20% Arab, and so was ancient Israel.

 

“But that 'Caedite Eos' was later inserted for only one reason; because any problems they had internally were not God's fault, it was due to fallible man not obeying orders, so later actions that were unnecessarily brutal could be praised. King Ahab for example allowed his wife Jezebel, who was daughter of King Ethbaal of Tyre to practice her own faith. She was not trying to lead the people astray, and never did convince her husband to join in the rituals, though other temples to Baal were built by those who still remembered their own faith. It was like a modern Arab sheik allowing his women in harem pray to the Christian God. But this was still where 'god' at the word of the priests, chose who would be the next king. When Ahab died, the throne passed briefly to Ahaziah, who 'fell from a great height', and did not survive. It then passed to Jehoram for 12 years. The prophet Elisha then supposedly had a soldier named Jehu - Actually from Judah, not Northern Israel who was serving in an allied army - anointed as the new king of Israel instead because he was devout.”

 

“Supposedly?”

 

“The author of the second book of Kings describes that, while the captains of the Israelite army were assembled away from the king's eyes, the prophet Elisha sent one of his students to this meeting. This student led Jehu away from his peers and anointed him king in an inner chamber, then immediately departed. So someone claiming to be one of Elisha's students did it, not the prophet himself.

 

“Do you think anyone succeeding in a coup is going to admit they were violating the law in search of power? The Temple had been trying to remove the temples to Baal for decades, and neither Ahab, nor Ahab's sons was willing, so 'god' first assured the eldest would die from an accident having reigned for less than a year, then through a prophet chose another when the new king was also resistant. But at this time, Judah was under king Ahaziah, who by purest chance, was Jehu's half brother.” He paused, letting her consider it. “What you have is one of the first military coups ever recorded as 'god's' will.

 

“In a coup the first thing you do is eliminate all of the possible successors, so Jehu had the Joriam killed, then rode to Jezreel to confront Jezebel. Here again not only history but even the language changed at 'god's' behest. You have a woman, daughter of a king, princess in her own right, Queen by right of marriage, mother of sons who were kings. Her eldest son dying in an 'accident', one son who was king murdered in the coup as he lay injured after a failed battle. She was warned, could have fled to her father's court. Instead she decides to act as a queen, not a refugee or outcast. When the army under the usurper arrives, she is dressed in her finery, her face made up as was the custom of her father's court in the throne room of her own palace, surrounded by her courtiers; pretty much daring them to murder her as well.

 

“How she died shows how popular she was with her own common people. Jehu doesn't banish her, doesn't have her face the legal punishment for idolatry, which is public stoning, doesn't merely kill her himself, any of which would have caused a popular uprising against him. Instead he forces the courtiers to kill her to save their own lives, and throw her body from the window of the palace, then proclaims that it was her own noblemen who killed her. Then he spreads the rumor that the reason she had gone to all that cosmetic effort was because she had attempted to seduce him.

 

“That is why the term 'painted Jezebel' means a whore today. The same method a few centuries later was used to demonize Judas.”

 

“Wait!” Rhee leaned forward. “Judas didn't betray you?”

 

“Heavens no! Among all of the apostles, he was one of the most loyal. But he was easy to set up. Modern theologians have come up with what you might call a conspiracy theory linked to Judas. You see, he was the one I had put in charge of the financial arrangements during our three years in Judah. We were constantly being given monies and goods by the townspeople I was instructing, and his complaint when Mary Magdalene used a myrrh oil on me rather than selling it is their primary reason to point the finger. 'we could have sold that and given the money to the poor!' to which I replied, because I knew what was going to happen, 'the poor will always be there, but I will be here only a short time'. While no one said who had complained, who else but my accountant who was also assigned to give anything over our expenses to the poor?

 

“Supposedly, he was embezzling, I was about to catch him, and later when we went to Jerusalem, he again is supposed to have told the priests where to find me when it would be just myself and the apostles so the Sanhedren could have me arrested. They followed him to Gethsemane where we were, and when Judas kissed me, they burst in like a modern day SWAT team. Once I am in custody, a man comes forward, releases Judas first, thanks him for his service, and gives him a bag saying 'here's the 30 pieces of silver we promised you' and 'escorts' him to safety before releasing everyone else.

 

“Who would believe him when he denied complicity afterward?” He sighed.

 

“During the Communist rule of Russia, they had a term for it. Absorption. They used it to first demonize, then kill Trotsky, to assure that while the people resisting the Germans during WWII, any group that they found did not have the right reason for doing so; any non communist fighters were blamed when another such group was caught and executed, and painted the Chetniks as pro German assigned to eliminate any of Tito's supporters. In fact the Partisans in Yugoslavia did their job so well that less than a year into the war, Britain had cut the Chetniks supply lines from the allies, throwing all of their support to the Communists.”

[machievelli]

If you are reading this segment and are confused as to what is happening, take heart. I had to divide the posting in two to cram it all in. Just go back one.

 

After Dinner Discussion

 

“So you were guilty of Heresy?”

 

“If you mean that the teaching I was doing was disturbing the priesthood, oh my yes.” He set down the snifter. Fujiko suddenly rushed in, hovering expectantly. “Coffee, please.” He had barely finished the request before the Zashiki-warashi was back with a tray and two cups, cream pitcher, and sugar bowl. “Coffee with cream, three sugars.” She said handing Jesus his cup. “And you mistress, use four sugars, but prefer to put the cubes in yourself.”

 

“Excellent, thank you.” Jesus said. Rhee thanked her as well before the servant hustled out.

 

“Now, to understand what happened, we have to look at the political situation. The Romans had made what was then Syria Palestine a client state in 37 BC and pretty much ran it. They chose the successors to both Herod the Great, the Jewish King and Annas, who was high priest before Caiaphas. In other words, puppet rulers within both the priesthood and the monarchy itself.

 

“The priesthood is broken up politically into four groups; the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Essenes, and the Zealots. The Pharisees were the more open minded of the parties; they accepted resurrection and a lot of the precepts that later found their way into modern Christianity. To them I was an interesting teacher with some new ideas.

 

“The Sadducees, were like the modern Religious Right. The word of god is supreme, all else is schism. They hated me because my teachings were leaned more toward the new ideas the Pharisees supported, and away from 'the word is all'. The Essene were more like modern theologians. They looked at what I was teaching, and tried to fit it into what had already been written.

 

“Then you had the Zealots. They were closer to the violent right wing fundamentalists of Islam. 'It's not right, rip it down and start over from here' being where they were owners of their own land ruled as they wished to be ruled. Have you ever seen a movie named Monty Python and the Life of Brian?” She shook her head. “Perfect example at least of the Zealots, splintered movements that would raid in the countryside yet avoided direct confrontation and fought among themselves more than they did against Roman authority.”

 

“Why is that?”

 

He looked at her. “You must remember, that the Romans were a lot like the old Communists when it came to dealing with rebellion. Once they claimed a territory they never gave it up willingly. If they saw a rebellion starting, they came down like a hammer on it. There had been enough decimations ordered for the common people of Judea to avoid even showing signs of it. If a caravan was slaughtered, they would send in the local cohort of the legion. They would go to the closest settlement, village, town, city, take all of the men, and you must remember that this meant every male child who could walk; line them up, then go down the line and kill every tenth man. They would then warn the survivors that the same punishment would be carried out if it happened again, then leave.

 

“The Russians did something similar in Beirut in the 70s. The country is in a meltdown because the terrorist groups in the country keep getting civilians killed the highlight the 'horrible Jews' to the south, and when the government tries to repeat Jordan's success of September of 1970; driving them from that kingdom's land, the terrorists and their allies turned on the government.

 

“One group decided that the situation was ripe to make a little money with a little time honored hostage taking, as the Arabs have always practiced it. They kidnapped a foreign citizen, delivering a manifesto claiming he or she was one of the 'vile oppressors' who were supporting Israel. After a few tense weeks of negotiation, they released the person after getting the ransom they demanded. It worked so well, that they did it again and again. Then they foolishly kidnapped a Russian.

 

“Within twelve hours, a KGB team was on the ground in Beirut. Within twenty-four hours family members of every leader of an actual terrorist group, all supplied by Russia, or known to them by intelligence are seized. The Russian informed them all that their person was to be returned unharmed, or the hostages would be returned in as many small boxes as they might need if they cut them up, and had only twelve hours to do so.

 

“So as hour thirty-four of this 'tense negotiaion' arrives, the man is returned unharmed, with an apology. History does not record who had taken him, but those who did so arrived in Limbo around hour thirty-two.”

 

“To the Zealots, I was the Messiah, even though in Acts the Sanhedrin mentioned two others that had claimed the title and been caught and executed by the Romans before I arrived on the scene. All they waited for was for me to proclaim myself, and they would raise public support for their own Holy War. But I never suggested that I was.”

 

“So first the immaculate conception-” He laughed so hard that Rhee had to stop.

 

“Why should we have gone to all that trouble? Humans knew what went where and why after millennia of practice. You have to remember that the four gospels were not written by the men themselves, and most of what is in them is pap.

 

“Look at the target audiences for these Books; the first part of Matthew goes through my purported lineage to prove I was supposed to be the rightful heir to the throne of Israel. In other words aimed at the Jewish population. Mark, where I used the most parables was aimed at the Greeks, still the premier philosophers of the time. Luke, where they focused on the miracles I was purported to have done, was aimed at the Romans, because he was the only one of the twelve that was also a Roman citizen. Finally John, which again was aimed at the Jewish population, pushing for rebellion.

 

“So you were born normally.”

 

“Yes.”

 

“And the miracles?”

 

“Except for two, all created after the fact. I did raise an old friend from the dead because I was sorry he had died, but he hadn't really been dead. He had been found after spending the night outside in cold weather, and was hypothermic. As most people will do, they checked his wrist and found no pulse, so he was believed dead and sealed in his tomb. When I arrived after his burial, I was distraught, and went to the sepulcher and called to him during the hottest part of the day. He awoke, began pounding on the stone, and it was removed and he was 'miraculously' brought back to life. If it had been properly sealed, he would have been truly dead.

 

“At the Wedding feast in Cana, they ran out of wine, primarily because thirteen men only one of which knew them, me, showed up at the wedding reception. Since it was all our fault for adding ourselves to the guest list, I corrected the problem. I rather liked one wine I had sampled elsewhere; had the servants crush some local grapes, strain the juice, and made a large bowl of it into wine. When it was served, the guests complained because they had saved the best for last. It is still common practice throughout the world to serve the best wine you have first, because later in the evening, when the guests are tipsy, they are merely drinking because there is wine left.

 

“Remember that Fundamentalists claim I made grape juice, as they claim there is an admonition against drinking at all. But think; if I went to a local supermarket, and brought back say eight different bottles of grape juice, how would you tell they had saved the best for last?

 

“So yes, one real miracle performed.”

 

“So born naturally. What about your early life?”

 

“Did I discourse with the priests at age eleven, yes. Did I wander in the desert for 40 days and nights confronting Satan? No. First, when the bible uses that time frame, it merely means 'he wandered off for a long time, then came back still alive'. I did speak to Lucifer, but she wasn't there to tempt me; she and I delivered my report of my first 30 years spent as a human and worked out what needed to happen. We were looking for ways to alter Judaism of that time to what had been wanted originally, and to allow those teachings to go beyond their borders in bring as many humans as possible back to the path Father had wanted.

 

“But I didn't approach the priests because those in control didn't want to appear in revolt, and those who were not would immediately take whatever I said as either evidence of blasphemy, or evidence that they were to start their Jihad. Instead I gathered common men, and began teaching them instead. When my own followers started using terms that would guide me to follow one of the already formed views, I guided them away from those thoughts. Even went so far as to create the term, 'get thee behind me, Satan' when Simon also known as Zealot suggested I had enough popular support to start a revolt” He shook his head. “Lucifer has never forgiven me that. That's why she calls me Mikey after the boy in the old 'Life' Cereal commercial. 'Let's get Mikey to try it!' 'Yeah, he hates everything'.”

 

They both laughed.

 

“So for three years I spend all of that time in the Galilee, teaching the common people. Of course the priests find out what I am doing, and keep trying to trip me up. 'How should we pray?'. One asks.” He sighed. “I had never dealt directly with humans on their own level, and the prayer I taught them is, according to Heinlein like the Muslim Shahada, 'he witnessed' in Arabic. Literally translated into English, it is the phrase; There is no god but God, Muhammad is the messenger of God. Saying it publicly is sufficient to have other Muslims to accept that you are of their faith.

 

“Look at what is now called the 'Lord's prayer'. Our father who is in heaven, blessed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done on Earth as it is in heaven'.” He paused. “No Muslim ever made a more sweeping act of submission to heavenly authority. Anything that happens in your life, from skinning you knee to being tortured to death is what God wanted to happen to you.

 

“'Which commandment is the most important?'. Love your neighbor as you do yourself. 'Should you pay Roman taxes?'. Give to Caesar what is his, and give to God what is his. 'This woman is an adulteress. What should we do?' Let him who is without sin cast the first stone. Every point is well within the law, so they couldn't use that.

 

“Meanwhile I have a lot of supporters. As Simon the Zealot said when he suggested revolt, there were fifty thousand from around Jerusalem itself listening and learning from what all of us are teaching. Enough to the untrained to appear like a massive army. The priests that want to get rid of me are afraid. Oh they can try to make a case for blasphemy, and later during my 'trial'.” He made sarcastic quotations marks, “They use my answer to am I the Messiah, 'So you have said' as proof.

 

“But first, the trial was illegal. Instead of being held publicly by day before the full seventy-one members of the Sanhedrin, they held the trial at night, with only the lesser Sanhedrin present; twenty-three. Sort of like the 'quorum' of the senate used as a justification of the assassination of Julius Caesar. Perjured testimony was offered, but under Judaic law, there must be two witnesses to a crime, one who saw, and one who heard, and they hadn't gotten the two together to agree on what my 'crime' was. Using my words as proof is like Cromwell at the trial of Sir Thomas More where he uses More's silence as proof of rebuke of the king, even though under English trial law of the time it was, 'qui tacet consentire videtur', he who is silent is taken to agree, or silence implies consent.

 

“Now here the ones trying to kill me had problems. The Romans required the Jews to have Roman authorization for executions, regardless of crime. They were in fact the only occupied peoples to have such requirements. Thanks to stoning under Judaic law, the Jews had more executions per year than the entire Empire combined. So if you wished to stone someone for Blasphemy, the Romans were required to agree. That had reduced it to only about half, but still. So they had to drag me before Pontius Pilate, the Prefect.

 

“Pilate was only the fifth Prefect, but had studied Judaic law well. While allowed to execute people for blasphemy, anyone who knew the two differing laws would see that the Sanhedrin's case was a sham. He refused to sanction the judicial murder, telling the priests that they had to authorize it through the king, Herod Antipas.” He sipped his coffee. “The Romans had dozens of nations with a hundred odd non-Roman Gods, so there was no Empire wide punishment for Blasphemy. If you look at every race conquered in the last century before Tiberius there were almost a thousand definitions of 'blasphemy'. None of which, except for Judea, requiring Roman intervention.

 

“So the priests dragged me before Herod. But again, the plot failed. Herod did not see proof of blasphemy, Herod could see that it was a contrived condemnation, but was unwilling to deny the religious claim. At religious demand he passed it again to Pilate. Now here is where they rigged it. Herod had denied their claim of blasphemy, but not of sedition. So the Sanhedrin changed my crime to something that was a crime under Roman law.

 

“Pilate still refused. He ordered the punishment for petty sedition, public flogging. But the Judaic church demanded execution. Pilate finally agrees because the Sanhedrin claims my crime is not blasphemy, but sedition.

 

“You see, under Judaic law, the punishment for blasphemy is stoning. The most democratic of punishments; every man is to pick up a stone and throw it at the victim. But what if they support the accused? American Military law considered this with the advent of cartridges. One man per firing squad has a blank cartridge; you can aim and fire without feeling that you were party to judicial murder. The Judaic church cannot accept this; I am too popular for that to work. But if the Romans do it for sedition instead? The locals have no real say, or blame.

 

“But even the Romans left loopholes. First under Roman law, the locals can ask to have you released. The priests short stopped this because most that supported me thought I had claimed to be the Messiah. 'If he is the Messiah, he doesn't need your help'. So they ask for Barabbas, a career criminal instead.

 

“The other was the fact that if you were to take a man down from the cross, they were exonerated of their crime. Again, the priests prevailed on Roman authority to have guards posted.” He shuddered. “No punishment ever before was as horrible as crucifixion.” He stretched his arms out even with his chest. “They usually tie you to the cross, though I was nailed up with 3/8” spikes through the palm and through the feet. This is worse, because if they tied you, you could use your own blood to try to loosen the ropes and escape. But with nails through each hand, you have to either widen the hole, or rip your flesh across the hand to the nearest finger to break free.” He pointed at his own palm, then at the web between the middle finger and ring finger. “From the moment you are hoisted into the air, your own muscles are against you.

 

“The muscles compress your lungs until it is a struggle to breathe, and after a few hours, you are almost suffocating. That is why it was common practice to break the legs of the victims after a few hours, which means your weight pulls you down, and you suffocate that much faster. I did not have to go through that. I left that dying body before they did so.”

 

“You went though that horror?”

 

“No, less than an hour before I left my body. Then of course we had the resurrection. But that started the whole mess.”

 

“What do you mean?”

 

“I had not come down to start a new religion. I had come to tweak an existing one and bring it back to what it was supposed to be. Then prepare them to go forth and teach it to the rest of humanity. Once that had been done, the human race could have stepped in and taken our place as the primary assistants of Father. But again, free will took a big bite. Christians succeeded in failing more efficiently than the Jews ever did. There is an old axiom that Logic is the best way to go completely wrong with complete confidence, and they did just that.

 

“First, the original disciples were busily spreading the word inside Judea when a man named Saul of Tarses was assigned to deal with them. Saul caught a flu strain that put him in bed for several days, and as does happen rarely with some forms of the flu, went through a mental shift. Instead of the persecutor of the new 'faith', he became one of the chief proponents because he attributed his getting well to a fever dream where I chastised him.

 

“Except for Luke, Paul as he called himself afterward, was the best educated, and he like any intelligent man watching a less competent group attempting things, he stepped in to help them, and eventually became the leader of those who left Judea to preach. He did some excellent work, and his letters to the various groups that had begun and to his fellows make up about half of the New Testament. But while he and the others are spreading the teachings, someone had to be left in charge back home, and they had begun forming the backbone of what Paul and the others were building.

 

“With the access to more modern cooking methods, the dietary restrictions were pretty much unnecessary, so they could eat what they wish, but the 'Council' in Jerusalem was still hung up on how Judaism had done it, so they were demanding that the new followers in other nations adhere to them, and that they had to be circumcised as well.

 

“They got hung up on authority. As I was dead, who had assumed the mantle of high priest? They used one verse where Peter was talking to me taken out of context, to decide that. Peter and I had been talking alone, and he was the first to work out that I was not to be king, but to be high priest. He came to me alone because he wasn't sure how the others would take it.

 

“He said pretty much 'You are to be anointed as high priest', though the verse merely says he acclaimed me Messiah. But again, the term merely means anointed. Only assumption would have made me king, an assumption he did not even suggest. I told him he was correct, the first to realize the difference, and I told him, 'As you are Peter, upon this rock I will rebuild the temple'. He told the others, and after they had already gone out into the world the 'council' was going over all that had been reported during my own ministry, writing it down to study and interpret just like any group of theologians. But they decided I couldn't have meant what I said. Messiah must mean king, so Peter was mistaken. Then they came up with the idea that I had made Peter the chief of my followers on that day, and that I had meant to rebuild 'my' temple.

 

“Right after the first Roman-Jewish war, the first book of what is now the new testament was written, the book of Mark. This was because the first group except for the Romans my followers had direct contact with were the Greeks; and the evangelists, Peter and Mark, who had been sent there were having problems dealing with the Socratic tendencies of their hosts.

 

“But Mark was already dead, martyred in Alexandria several years earlier. What we have is a collection from several other lesser apostles; John Mark, Mark the Cousin of Barnabas, and Mark himself, along with a lot of older works that were added in. Enough philosophical debates to keep drawing in others and have them discuss for decades.

 

“The Book of Luke was written not long after; around 75 AD and is the first to be known to be historical rather than an eye witness account, as the author states he himself did not witness any of the miracles or preaching by me and it isn't until the Acts of the Apostles, also authored by him that he begins reporting actual witnessed events. It is also the first accepted gospel that was written by a Gentile, for Gentiles. Luke was not one of my chosen twelve, he was actually a relative of Paul who joined him when Paul became on of my followers. Unlike a lot of others, he died of old age in 84AD.

 

“The book of Matthew was pretty much a collections of statements I had made that was compiled at the end of the first century and used the Book of Luke for some of the grounding. Matthew himself preached inside Judea and the surrounding countryside for fifteen years before he left. We,” he motioned to himself, “know where he went, but humans have no record of it beyond his martyrdom. Again, he was long dead when his 'book' was written.”

 

“Where did he go?”

 

“Actually he was intending to go to Britain, the furthest outpost of the Empire, intending to work back toward Rome. But he died near modern day Lyon when his caravan was attacked by bandits.

 

“The Book of John is one of the only ones that can be attributed to the author named, but it was at the end of a long life. He attributed a lot of things to me that never occurred. I never claimed to be either God or the son of god, beyond 'we are all sons of God'. In fact some claim this book was actually written by Lazarus and he used 'John' as a pen name so people wouldn't link it to his own resurrection.

 

“So, we have the end of the First Century AD, or as they call it now CE. All of the evangelists are safely dead, and there is no one who is a living witness to my life. As you can see a lot of discrepancies have crept in but here is where it gets ugly.

 

“The church, dealing with the Romans has the problem that A: they are pagans with all of their idols, and B; are authority driven. Unlike the Greeks, who actually had temples in their cities marked 'For the unknown God' so people who visited could go their to pray to their god with not even a generic idol, the Romans expected a God to have an image. Eventually the Roman Christians began wearing the Crucifix.” He looked at her sadly. “A man forever being tortured to death became my symbol. They had undone five millennia of work by us in less than a century. Even the modern day cross worn by so many Christians, including yourself, is almost as bad. Back in the 1960s the Beatles were reviled by a lot of Christians because John Lennon made an offhand comment that to American youth the band seemed more important than god. Now follow that analogy. Lennon was murdered by a man who had bought a copy of one of the last Beatles records; but there was talk that they might get together again. To assure it would not happen Mark David Chapman shot him on the eighth of December 1980. Yet I do not see Beatles fans wearing a revolver around their necks in memorial.

 

“And Christianity took everything I said, and changed it. It was no longer man as a species who was steward, it was they themselves. They fought war after bloody war, conquest after bloody conquest in my name. Raped less technically savvy people across the planet of their resources be it gold, oil or land, all in my name, and every naysayer was castigated. Suppressed the truth in my name, tormented people for crimes they created in their own minds in my name.” He was furious. “And when they arrive before the throne as is said in Matthew 7, verses 21-23; 'Not everyone who says to Me, 'Lord, Lord,' shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. Many will say to Me in that day, 'Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?' And then I will declare to them, 'I never knew you'.”

 

“Do you know how long I had to put up with murderers with blood still on their hands? Priests who tortured confessions, then used those confessions as proof of guilt? Sent thousands on crusades for what? Land they could freely visit in peace. 'Princes' of the church who dined well during famines, who took vows of celibacy and had their own concubines? That rewrote Joshua so that everyone 'accepted' that Africans were born of Ham, and therefore, rightfully slaves, that even today subverts my words, and what they freely acknowledge as 'God's' word to justify what they do even now!

 

“People who ignore the punishment listed in chapter 19 of Deuteronomy where it ends 'and a life for a life' as not relevant in a modern world and forces American courts to waste decades before a man can be executed. Who use the phrase 'cruel and unusual punishment' as if any modern form of execution is. When that was written, slow strangulation was still a punishment, breaking on the wheel, drawing and quartering, stoning, all death penalties punishments still in use.

 

“Compared to 'a short drop and a sudden stop', which is cruel? Making some man live with the idea 'when it's all done, we execute you' would drive me insane in comparison. Men, the ones who do not carry the child telling a woman that no matter how she ended up pregnant, 'god' wants her to have that baby.

 

“People that determine what I should look like.” His face changed, and she was looking at a man who could have been Osama Bin Ladon's brother. “When I looked like this when I was alive. Is a Born Again Christian or a Baptist going to accept this?

 

“Your mother suggested a movie to me named 'Oh God' where the father comes to earth, and picks some poor man as his prophet. After being forced to endure an entire test written in Aramaic, and writing down 'god's' responses, the man to told to go to a televangelist and tell him to stop putting words into God's mouth. He does so on nationwide television, which leads to a slander suit in court.

 

“Desperate, the man calls god as his only witness. As the judge and opposing council lambast him for his hubris, God enters the courtroom, give a small sermon on what he feels man should know, and departs. The judge is stunned when the court recorder has nothing on her machine, the tape recorder back up is blank when God speaks.

 

“And the first word's out of the televangelists mouth? 'Then there is no proof he was ever here!'.

 

“But the writing of John in Revelations made it worse. He predicted the end of the world, then that 'There would be a new heavens and new earth'. Up to that point, the peoples of most of Europe still had at least a token reverence both for life and the world about them. Throughout history there was no massive destruction of resources except in time of war. So people could return, resettle and go on with their lives. The prayers of thanks for what you ate before Christianity were aimed at the souls of the animals that had died to provide it, and to the Earth for supplying the vegetable portion.

 

“Constantly through both parts of the bible, man was labeled not as 'master' of the world, but merely the steward of it; someone who takes care of the property of someone else. But as your race reached the industrial age, it changed. Surface mining, ripping up the land to get the minerals you wanted from it began in the 16th century, and reached horrific proportions in America in the last century. Greed became the most important part of society because even the church, who collected tithes from the companies as well as the workers wanted the monies. But if John was correct, it was no problem.” He waved his hand, “'God' would put it back to normal after Armageddon. Add to that you developed scientifically far faster than even Lucifer had thought possible.”

 

He set down his coffee cup. “Like Lucifer, I have read a lot of authors through the years, and she directed me to one in particular, Heinlein; Specifically his Expanded universe. In one of his articles, he draws a diagram with four lines.” He drew a graph, then drew in the four lines. The first three were slightly steeper incremental climbs. But the last went up steeply, then suddenly shot almost straight up. “He asks the reader to decide which of the lines shows man's technological development. Almost everyone chooses one of the first three, but he points out that the last, is in fact what technology has done.

 

“Humans went from horse drawn vehicles to motorized vehicles in less than four thousand years. The went from the first 'cars' capable of less than 60 miles an hour to the common car of today that can easily reach over one hundred miles an hour in less than thirty years, and to a car capable of breaching the sound barrier in only eighty more.

 

“They went from the first crude drawings of possible aircraft of Da Vinci to the first actual flight of a powered craft in less than five centuries, and went from the fight at Kitty Hawk to supersonic flight in under fifty years, then to multi-sonic flight in less than ten more.

 

“Everywhere man has used science to work with the basics they learned from the past, the capabilities have grown exponentially. From the microscope of the 1590s to the electron microscope in less than 340 years. From the first crude telescope of Galileo to the Hubble in less than five hundred years. From hand crafted machinery to mass production using parts in less than two hundred, and to the assembly line in just over a century later.

 

“But more disturbing to us all; from the bow, crossbow and sling to the first guns in just under 5,000 years, from the first guns to the first accurate rifles in five hundred more, to rifles capable of killing a man at over a mile's distance in less than two hundred more. From siege engines like the catapult to the bombard in less than 3,000 years, to modern artillery in less than four hundred to ballistic missiles in less than 200 more.

 

“Then worse. From gunpowder to the Hiroshima in less than five hundred years. This combined with aircraft capable of carrying 'the bomb' went from prop driven bomber aircraft to jets in less than ten, to making them smaller so other aircraft could carry them less than ten more, and at the same time the yield for these weapons went from 10 kilotons for the Nagasaki bomb to what the US called the 'Tsar Bomba' of October 30th, 1961. Nikita Kruschev had labeled it 'Kuzka's mother', which is literally translated into English as 'we'll show you!' That bomb was designed to be capable of a 100 megaton yield.” He picked up his cup again, leaning back to sip. As it moved from his lips, Fujiko was there again, freshening the cup.

 

“Within ten years of the advent of gunpowder as a propellant, man stepped beyond what his natural reflexes could do when it came to surviving on a battlefield. All animals, including man have what is best called a 'surrender' reflex. You cannot escape, you can only leave your survival up to the opponent, being an animal or other men. It is that reflex that freezes an animal when it cannot find a way free so that death is more swift. With humans, it is throwing down your arms and hoping you enemy will show mercy.

 

“Remember the film version of Robinson Crusoe entitled Man Friday in 1975?” She shook her head. “It turns the story on it's head. Friday and his friends have come to an island to gather food. They are attacked by what appears to be a madman. If fear of his life, Friday uses a simple knot to bind his own hands, and the lunatic, who is actually Robinson Crusoe, thinks he is a captive, and frees him. That is the surrender reflex in action.

 

“But what good does that do when the enemy can kill you from at first yard, then to hundreds of yards away? Or in the case of nuclear weapons half the world away?”

 

“What does that have to do with heresy?”

 

“Because anyone who speaks against technological advance is castigated. Like Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park waving off the things the scientists have created with the words, 'But your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should.' How many post apocalyptic movies and books over the past century start with man doing something that causes massive repercussions? Nuclear holocausts, biological weapons, in the most recent version of I am Legend altering a microbe to create a cure for cancer that leads to the annihilation of humanity,”

 

“Like the Stand.”

 

“Which was more 'Judeo-Christian Armageddon' than actual post apocalyptic. The end is caused because 'god' want to separate mankind into the evil and the good and even there, the line is blurred. The policeman who arrests the 'evangelists' that approach the Las Vegas group is not evil, he is merely one of those who yearns for a return to what is past. Stu Redman who survives of them is not a biblical patriarch, he is like his opposite someone who wants to survive, and unlike his fellows, does not have to preach and die a martyr to do so. Glen Bateman is merely an educated man who recognizes the enemy first, and realizes what is to come for his fellows.”

 

Jesus leaned forward. “We both above and below have been expecting your race would destroy yourselves for the last forty years, and don't know how you have lasted as long as you have.”

 

“The future is what we make of it.” Rhee commented.

 

“Excuse me?”

 

“You both keep quoting authors and movies to me, that is a quote from a Japanese Amine I like. The administrators of the City of Olympus tell the main character that their primary computer, Gaea has predicted that mankind will destroy himself in 75 years. To that end they had created a virus that would render mankind infertile, and the entire premise of the movie is that only one person, Deunan Knutt, the daughter of the virus' creator can find the one thing they need first. As a stabilizing influence, her mother had also created a less volatile species of man called bioroids, humans in every way except they are not ruled by emotion, and they cannot breed. In fact without a life extension procedure, they will die rapidly. But when she developed the bioroids, she also created a virus codenamed Appleseed which would not only give them reproductive capability, but also a normal human life span.

 

“But only Deunan knows where Appleseed is hidden, the memory locked away after the trauma of her mother's murder in front of her eyes when only about five or six. They discover it, and with this in hand, the plan to destroy the containment vessel starts off. During the fight to save the race, the ones who had set it in motion try to reason with her, that man had outlived his usefulness. Her reply? 'We have to believe that life is what we make of it!'.” She sipped her own coffee.

 

“We may kill ourselves off. Our Father knows we've tried often enough. But what she said, I agree with. As long as we are willing to resist those trying to kill us off, We have to believe that life is what we make of it.”

[MsFicwriter]

You continue to amaze me, machievelli, and your portrayal of Jesus is brilliant. Instead of sounding like a fundamentalist Christian preacher, all fire and brimstone, he is rational and wise. Not only that; he is compassionate, speaking with Rhee the Antichrist as if she were not to be condemned. Indeed, in the Gospels Jesus only railed against the hypocritical Pharisees and the money-changers at the Temple. He did not condemn the Samaritan woman at the well, the woman caught in adultery, or Zacchaeus. He loved them all.

[machievelli]

removed

[machievelli]

You continue to amaze me, machievelli, and your portrayal of Jesus is brilliant. Instead of sounding like a fundamentalist Christian preacher, all fire and brimstone, he is rational and wise. Not only that; he is compassionate, speaking with Rhee the Antichrist as if she were not to be condemned. Indeed, in the Gospels Jesus only railed against the hypocritical Pharisees and the money-changers at the Temple. He did not condemn the Samaritan woman at the well, the woman caught in adultery, or Zacchaeus. He loved them all.

 

I have Irving Wallace to thank. He created what I called the police report on Jesus, when you ignore all of the miracles (None were repeated in any of the other New testament books) and come down to 'he lived, spent three years preaching, then went to Jerusalem'. Like the Illiad, where the book compresses ten years of war into the last two months.

 

As I mentioned to you in PMs, Jesus did not come here to create a new religion, he came to tweak

[machievelli]

Heresy: Or, Remember to keep your words sweet, so that they will taste good if you have to eat them...

 

The second day of work was a lot like the first. She got so immersed that she ate lunch at the desk again. This time she ordered a fish sandwich of Megaladon cooked on skewers with pineapple from the Philippines, Mango from Indonesia, with a spicy tartar sauce. The girl on the phone snorted. “As if that's hard.” As she considered it, having patrons from both heaven and Hell explained the assortment if the crowd knew what to ask for. Out of curiosity, she had asked. They had used Hell's ability to go into the past, when whalers had torn off the blubber and whale bone, leaving the meat to rot. So they had access to several million tons of meat to garner. Which explained why it Japanese businessmen in New York frequented it constantly.

 

She was working on a tricky translation from Ukrainian when the phone rang. “Lightson.”

 

“Daughter, all work and no play makes you more like Dad.”

 

“Mom?”

 

“Who else calls you daughter?”

 

“No one.” She admitted. When will you be here?”

 

“As soon as I'm finished changing.” As she spoke, a hand caught the phone, and hung it up.

 

“You did that last time.” Rhee said, turning, then she froze in shock. The woman was no one she had seen. Her skin tone was the deep bronze of a beach bunny. She was wearing a purple and red sheath dress that only covered her from her more than full breasts around her back, with attached sleeves that started at her biceps, without a neckline, split down until it ended just above her pubic triangle, then opened again below her knees into a split full length ankle skirt.

 

In fact, the only thing that stopped her from flashing anyone must have been superglue, because gravity did not have a chance to keep the flesh concealed. Her hair was pure white, falling to her knees in four tails, with the upper portion pulled back through a red and gold metal cornet. In the center of her forehead was a red star of David with red five pointed stars on each cheek, and her eyes were violet.

 

“Who are you?” The woman laughed, and Rhee recognized her mother's voice. “Mother?” The woman laughed again, holding her sides.

 

“Gotcha!” The woman spun. “What do you think, daughter? You haven't forgotten what tomorrow is?”

 

Rhee considered, then looked at her. “Halloween?”

 

“Exactly!” Dawn replied from that new face. “My favorite holiday in America is Halloween. While the Catholics and Protestants condemned it in Europe until the late 19th Century, Americans celebrated it anyway. And it has grown beyond what anyone could have imagined. So at my house on Long Island I carry it to the extreme. If you will allow this face today? For tomorrow it will be handing out candy.”

 

“Sure, Mother. But can you tell me what face it is?”

 

“Oh silly me!” Dawn's voice caroled. “There is a Japanese Anime entitled Ah My Goddess, and in their second season, they introduced their version of me, the 'Ruler of Demon Kind'. Better known as Hild.” She spun. “It's better than Little Nicky with Heaven and Hell mixers, though Hild is mother to a half goddess in the series. But for a day, I will be this woman at my residence.” She spun again. “Shall we go on?”

 

“Feeling better because Jesu took it on the chin for you?” Rhee asked.

 

The figure froze, then turned. “When I took over, the level was filled with those condemned by the church for nothing more than speaking their minds. When the church ordered the Albigensian crusade, they weren't fighting Arabs, or Jews.

 

“They were fighting their own people because they wanted a choice. To decide for themselves what was important in the bible. If it had been a mere peasant revolt falling into apostasy, it might have been what the Church claimed. But it was the nobles, the men of the church themselves, and the peasants combined. The men placed over them by God were telling them that the church was wrong. That the church was picking and choosing what the bible said, and the only way to fully understand the bible was by reading it cover to cover, debating on what it meant. They all wanted to understand God's plan, not what the church said God planned.

 

“So the church ordered them all slain, and I was supposed to be punishing them!” She looked at her daughter. “The church wanted blind obedience. Whatever god had given you, including free will, it didn't matter! Like Father himself, they wanted only willing obedience, but skewed by what they 'thought' god meant, Which boiled down to 'do what we tell you'.”

 

Dawn motioned, and they walked toward the elevator. “When I finally took over full time down there, I changed it. Heresy is speaking and acting in violation of God's will, but as Michael told you, it has historically been used as a political weapon more often than not. So we turned it around.

 

“Here, heresy is defined by the speaker changing the rules to prove their contention.” The elevator opened, and they entered it. Dawn pressed B2. “Because of that, most of the ones consigned there are politicians, leading scientists through the ages, and only a few clergy.” The door closed.

 

“Why them?”

 

“A perfect example is the last term of President Clinton. The Reno Justice department filed a class action suit against American gun manufacturers, claiming that they were at fault for every gun death or injury. If the weapons had not been manufactured and sold, they claimed; criminals would not get their hands on them to commit crimes. The people who committed those acts, whether accidental or intentional, were ignored.” She waved her hand, and a stool appeared. Then she waved again, and a Colt .45 appeared in her hand. She jerked back the slide, then set it on the stool. “I defy anyone to make the gun fire without picking it up.

 

“But their contention was heard in court, and failed. It would be like filing a similar lawsuit against the automobile manufacturers world wide stating that all of the deaths and injuries caused on the highways was due to the availability of vehicles, and the root cause, drinking or unsafe driving habits are incidental to it. But as many a lawyer has told me, no matter how stupid your premise, you can find a lawyer who will file your suit, he will find a judge willing to hear it, and you can find a jury willing to accept it as truth.

 

“When that suit failed, they then turned to statistical analysis. The problem with it, is by choosing your data, you can prove anything. There's an old logic puzzle that sums it up. No cat has eight tails, fact?” Rhee nodded. “Leaving out the Manx breed, all cats, have at least one more tail than no cat, fact?” Again Rhee nodded. “Therefore all cats have nine tails.”

 

“But that's not true!”

 

“Of course not. But I have just proven it using logic, have I not?” Rhee considered, then nodded slowly. “What the Reno Justice Department did was release a study that stated flatly that over two thousand children were killed every year in hand gun related incidents. A shocking figure if taken at face value. But first, they drew the line higher than most would accept when they defined 'children'. They drew it at age 20, because you cannot legally drink until you are twenty-one, which is what a lot of Americans consider the difference between being a child and an adult. So four years of your life where you are legally considered an adult, at least in a criminal sense, were lumped into it.

 

“Second, they ignored the circumstances. They took accidents, crimes where you are caught in it by circumstance; such as drive by shootings, crimes committed by these 'children' where they ran afoul of the police and were shot by the police, and gang killings where street gangs chose their youngest member to pull the trigger, usually on another 'child'. If I said 'people between toddler and 20 killed by guns from all causes, it would be the truth, but is not as hard hitting.”

 

The doors opened, and they stepped out. Like Anger, this had millions of people, but they were strapped to chairs, heads jammed back so that they were staring at the ceiling. There were tanks filled with boiling liquid suspended above them. Some small, maybe the size of a fifty-five gallon drum, but one man had a tank the size of an ultra-large crude carrier, what is called a supertanker, suspended above him. From each tank a hose ran down until it was just above their mouths, and their mouths were jammed open so they would not close.

 

As she watched, the liquid, a nasty yellow poured down, filling their mouths. As they screamed, their mouths were jammed closed, and they writhed until they finally swallowed. Then the process was repeated. A man in 15th century garb was standing by the man with that huge tank above him, patting him on the shoulder as his mouth was jammed open yet again. “It is your own fault, Senor Goebbels.” He looked up, then walked toward them. “Dawn I assume.” He looked at the costume she wore. “In my day you would be declared a harlot wearing that.” He then looked at Rhee. “And they would declare you an abomination for wearing men's clothes.”

 

“Different times, Miguel.” Dawn laughed. “Rhee, meet Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote. Miguelito, my daughter Rhee, the Anti-Christ.” They shook hands, “Who is with you today on this shift?”

 

“Benito Juarez.” He replied.

 

“Why him?” Rhee asked.

 

“Both he and Benito were accused of Heresy because of something else they shared. They were both tax collectors who looked at the Catholic church, and thought of all the tax revenue they could collect if they were taxed like any other large organization. Miguel actually faced the Inquisition in 1597 because of his statements regarding that thought; though it was later claimed that it was due to discrepancies in his records. He also wrote The Labors of Persiles and Sigismunda which was an historic-philosophical condemnation of the counter-reformist Catholic Church. That time he wrote using a code so that the church had no proof he was actually satirizing them.” Dawn smiled. “Explain it to her, Miguel.”

 

“As she has probably already told you, here we punish those who rewrote the facts to support their ideas, and then used that to foster other falsehoods. Benjamin Spock for example, who suggested limiting corporal punishment because of 'possible' psychic trauma. That led to hundreds saying that any corporal punishment caused it. All ignored the Bible where in Proverbs 13:24 it says 'a man hates his son that spares him punishment for misdeeds. Rather you should chastise him at need' as you would say today, 'Spare the rod and spoil the child'. Those who more recently define any form of corporal punishment as abuse; that claim any form of discipline is abuse, they are or will be here.

 

“Did you know the definition of 'child abuse' has changed drastically in the last century? In the past it was unnecessary or excessive punishment. Society judged that if a child was unable to assist in the necessary work of the family or village, the parent who inflicted the beating would himself be beaten. But that was directed by a court of law, not the opinion of the person watching as it is today.

 

“And modern children know this. If they were bad and are punished, they can call the police, and accuse the parent of abuse, and the police will act on it as truth! The courts even assume the parent guilty, all on the word of someone who is a child!

 

“Along with them we have the person who created the concept of 'juvenile delinquency'. Even I, who died five centuries ago, understands the term is an oxymoron. By definition, juvenile means immature, not old enough to accept adult responsibility, but delinquent implies that you are not living up to your responsibility. How can you be both? But in your country you have an entire layer of laws and courts that deal with this every day, and have since the 1950s! Why else do you think what you call gang bangers hand a weapon to their youngest members? Because nine times out of ten, they are tried as a juvenile, and get juvenile hall rather than a real prison or execution, and when they turn 21, this hardened murderer has his record sealed, and is released as if nothing happened.

 

“Every scientist that skewed data to defeat what they called the Star Wars defense plan, that did so to defend Nuclear Winter, even those who take every person killed due to your Gulf wars and lay them all on the doorstep of your own nation. Or the Legislature of Mississippi back in the early 19th century that voted to declare the value of Pi was really 3. But there are more and even more insidious ones.”

 

He walked down past a man with a tank only the size of a 5000 gallon tank like you would see on a tanker truck. “The ones back in the 30s came up with the slogan of making the rich pay their 'fair share'. That in the 80s told the people of California that 50% of all proceeds from the scratchers and lottery would go to the schools, but only did so verbally. When it had been passed then they turned around and said, '50%, no, we said 15%'. Those that have said for the last 40 years that not voting for the two main parties is 'wasting your vote'.

 

“Your government lied about what the law said about the rights of your own states. Your Federal Government for example lied when they said the South did not have the right to secede. There was no bar to leaving the Union in either the Articles of Confederation, or the later document called the Constitution, and only force of arms gave them that right. But they could not let the south, with it's resources desperately needed by the North go their own way.

 

“The judges that ignored crimes while punishing others.” Cervantes turned to face her. “Your nation extolls the virtues of the Nurnberg War Crimes trials, but did you know that in the last 160 years, there has been exactly one set of trials that was not only legitimate, but also completely legal? That was in 1919 when a German general and his Chief of Staff were tried and convicted or ordering the execution of French prisoners.”

 

“Only one?”

 

Cervantes held up his hand. “Henry Wurtz, commander of the Andersonville POW camp during your war between the states. Conditions were bad, true, but he did not create them, he has handed them by lack of supply and brutality within the compound. He begged the North to resume paroles of prisoners just trying to cut down on the overcrowding in his own camp! Every 'crime' he was later accused of came from the perjured testimony of one man who was not even in the camp! Over two hundred witnesses in his defense, most of whom had been in the camp were not allowed to testify.”

 

He snarled. “Your nation has always loved conspiracy theories; Wurtz was a recent Swiss immigrant, unlike the 'gentlemen' who commanded other camps on both sides of the war that were as bad if not worse. He was chosen so that after convicting them, the Union could then try to get him to swear that the Confederate government had told him to be brutal. He refused to countenance that lie.

 

“The Boer war? General Lord Kitchener gave verbal orders to shoot captured Boer commandos. When there was an outcry, he had four Austrailian officers tried, convicted of war crimes, and two were executed. Yet he violated British Military trial law by refusing to attend when subpoenaed because he would have had to admit his own complicity. He then failed to have the sentences reviewed in London. The two executed were entered into the British Army's Red Book; where such sentences are sustained before execution, but in their case, only after they had been shot.

 

“Nurnberg? Your own Supreme Court Justice, Robert H. Jackson, who acted as American Chief Prosecutor said in his opening arguments that a trial like it had never happened before. Legally that makes it ex post facto; you cannot legally try someone for something that was not a crime before, or hold a trial using new rules, which they did. Before that such crimes were punished by the country that had committed them, not someone else. They denied the accused so many rights under your own laws that if it had been held in your own country, the trials would have been appealed immediately if they had even been able to find a judge willing to hear it. The right to know you are being charged, against self incrimination, of council before questioning, all denied.

 

“You know they always say 'I was only obeying orders' was the most common phrase used in that trial, but it was not. The most common was when a defendant would point at similar crimes committed by the Allies, and the Judges would reply, 'we are not on trial, you are'. If you want a conspiracy, look at America, which is not even part of the war yet discussing with England how to handle the war crimes trials to follow. As much as your nation values Justice, they give very little of it to others.

 

“That ignore the intent of the 2nd Amendment of your Constitution by claiming the word militia meant they were referring to what you would now call the National Guard.” He laughed. “Madison, the one who framed and pushed for the amendment had some really harsh words for those politicians as did even those in opposition to it's inclusion during their debates. Anyone who has read the Federalist Papers, which were articles and essays by the men who wrote your constitution knows otherwise.” He saw her blank expression, and took pity on her.

 

“When your Constitution was written, the men who did so had several centuries of examples of where a government; be it ordered by the Church, or ordered by men, oppressed their own people. They argued constantly for your people to be armed; having a standing army was incidental, because for the government to use that army against their own people, they must first remove the right to defend themselves. Back then, you had a trained officer's corps composed of officers that had fought in your revolution, and those to come from the soon to be created West Point Academy. The common soldiers, however, came from the citizens. Your historic 'Minutemen' came from the people themselves. It was pointed out that at the time, the Federal Government could raise and equip only 20,000 men, who would face half a million if the Federal government tried to force the people to accept bad government policies. The odds mentioned are still as true today. If your people actually decided to fight the government, even with the disparity in armaments, the government would lose.

 

“Until 1903, every military unit not part of the Regular Army raised to fight were done on the state and local level, even funded at that level, with only a pittance being paid by the Federal government. It led to large, but sometimes cumbersome forces due to the lack of uniform training down to the level of the states. But the Militia Act of 1903 had the Federal Government taking control of it. Since then, your army is composed of the Regular army, the army reserves, and the National Guard. But unlike before, to be a member of the National Guard, you had to swear the same oath every Army officer did, removing you as an instrument of state policy, and making you a part of the Federal service.

 

“So it was that on June 11, 1963 when Governor George Wallace of Alabama called out the National Guard to stop the Desegregation of the University of Alabama, all it needed to force him to withdraw was an order 'federalizing' the National Guard, and ordering them to withdraw so that a Federal Court order could be delivered to Wallace, ordering him to stand aside.

 

“It is that same argument used on the personal level today. If you want to carry a gun, join the military. They are constantly whittling away at personal rights by trying to force your average gun owner to take classes to prove they can handle a gun safely, to force common people to undergo the same kind of review that a police officer, a person trained in the limited use of force, must undergo.

 

“Worse yet, if a criminal you have captured or shot is not dead, he can sue for the injury and psychological trauma. Not to mention they look at the person shooting, and decide by their sex how much force is excessive. If a man fires more than two rounds, it is excessive. If a woman empties the gun into him, it is not.”

 

“What's in the tanks?” Rhee waved overhead.

 

“Boiling Alphabet Chicken soup actually.” Cervantes looked up. “Better than the boiling lead we used to use. Every time someone parrots a slogan based on lies, that much liquid, about a bowlful, is added. Our friend Goebbels over there, author of what is called the Big Lie, is being punished for every lie he broadcast to the world during WWII, and for everyone who used his words to keep their people fighting a losing war. Some of those lies still used today by apologists and hate mongers.

 

“We have the clergy that ordered the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, the ones who rewrote portions of the bible to allow slavery, or destruction of artifacts of other cultures to 'save' their people from apostasy. The list goes on.” He looked at a modern watch. “Shift change. It has been nice to meet you, Rhee.” The elevator opened, and two other men came off it, taking the clipboards and lab coats from the departing shift.

 

“James Scopes from the Scopes' 'Monkey' Trial. And Galileo.” Dawn identified. “The start of the shift is busy. Let's go on.”

 

Violence: Or, you reap what you sow...

 

The elevator door closed. Dawn pressed the button. “Only two levels today, my dear. I have to get ready for the party tomorrow, so we will start up again Thursday.”

 

“The party?”

 

Of course. Like I said, Halloween is my favorite holiday, and a lot of people who work for me, both up on Earth and down below come out for the party I throw that morning.”

 

“Why in the morning?”

 

Dawn laughed. “Because we run a haunted house for the young. I've been voted best for the last 20 years because I have real demons, vampires and werewolves, ghosts. Etc running around in it.”

 

“Real vampires and werewolves?”

 

“Every actor or actress that has been a vampire or werewolf who is below is invited as their characters. Since there are almost fifty renditions of Dracula alone, there are a lot of them. I also invite everyone who ever wrote stories about the creatures. So you can watch the vampires pretending to dine on people ahead of you, then ask Bram Stoker what was his inspiration for Dracula was, or Sheridan Le Fanu's for Carmilla, a lesbian vampire.

 

“Once darkness falls, it is all for the kids, though the haunted house is still open for all who wish to visit it. The vampires then are kind to them, and we even have dire wolves and wolves that let them pet them all day. From the first we have had black panthers for the movie Cat People with people who turn into them. It has always been a lot of fun for every child aged six to sixty.”

 

“The next level is violence. How has it been changed?”

 

“Compared to those above, not a lot. The outer ring is still where those violent against people and property go, but we punish the incompetent military leaders and politicians who caused the slaughter of civilians. They are immersed in Phlegethon, a river of boiling blood and fire, to a level commensurate with their sins. For people like Joseph Stalin, that means up to their hairline.

 

“The middle ring is supposed to be suicides who are transformed into gnarled thorny bushes and trees and then fed upon by Harpies, or profligates who destroyed their lives by destroying the means by which life is sustained and are perpetually chased and mauled by ferocious dogs. But we've made it those who caused such suicides from their actions. After all suicide is condemned because according to the bible, God will not test you further than you can stand; yet as you can see from life, it is man inflicting the torment, not Dad. As for the wasteful, they get what they deserve.

 

“The inner ring is where blasphemers, sodomites and usurers are trapped in a desert of flaming sand with fiery flakes raining from the sky. But unless their blasphemy led followers to hurt others, we have ignored them. As for sodomites,” Dawn gave a raspberry. “If someone removed themselves from the gene pool, whether male or female, I didn't see punishing them. As comedians have said, every gay means one more for the straight men and women. As for usurers, they get what they deserve, especially if such acts hurt another including a suicide. As it is, I do not think they are punished enough.”

 

The door opened on a scene literally from hell. There was a moat running to either side, with water that burned like over polluted rivers. Men submerged in it screamed in agony. Beyond it over a bridge was a plain filled with thorn bushes, with the belling of hounds, and the screams of the tormented. Beyond that with another bridge was a desert with flecks of flame as if just hit by a phosphorus artillery barrage.

 

Dawn walked halfway across the bridge to the Minotaur who stood guard. “Below us is every man who led troops to needless deaths. Alexander Haig of World War one fame, who expected his troops to march ahead dressing their ranks as if it were the Napoleonic wars. Generals on both sides of the American Civil War who knew there were ways to save their men's lives, but used ancient tactics instead of trying the new. Darius and Xerxes who allowed thousands of their men to be slaughtered trying to conquer Greece. Name the incompetent, and he is there. Every politician who has ever administered the deaths of civilians for whatever reason, from Subotai and Tamerlane to Albert Speer who used the death camps to build German industry during the Second World War, to Pol Pot.”

 

They walked down the bridge to the second ring, where the dogs sought their prey, and the bushes and trees screamed as they were torn apart by those struggles. Then across the last bridge where mobsters from American history writhed in torment along with every dishonest banker or lender through ten centuries being tormented. Dawn pointed a few by name, but Rhee was caught up in the agony they suffered.

 

“Couldn't you have come up with differences here?”

 

“Of course we could. However the ones who are in this and lower hells are the real dregs of society. The ones who have caused suffering merely because they wanted to, or thought they had the right. There are changes below, but this we left alone.” Dawn motioned, and they went back to the elevator.

 

Once back in the office, Dawn motioned. “As I said, tomorrow the employees have off with pay. You may rest if you want...”

 

“But?”

 

Dawn turned, and Rhee could see a yearning in her eyes. “You can, if you wish, come to the party.”

 

Rhee sighed. “I have barely accepted that you are my mother, and Halloween has never been celebrated in my adoptive home-”

 

“I understand.” Dawn replied, though Rhee could tell she was hurt by her refusal. “Then I will see you Thursday afternoon.” She gave a finger wave, then vanished.

[MsFicwriter]

Is Hitler in Phlegethon, too? By the way, nice change from boiling lead to boiling alphabet chicken soup!

[machievelli]

Is Hitler in Phlegethon, too? By the way, nice change from boiling lead to boiling alphabet chicken soup!

 

Actually he isn't done on Heresy yet...