A Novella - Sardonic Surveillance

 Chapter 1: The Lexicon of the Line

The television doesn't broadcast news anymore, it broadcasts a new state religion. On September 20, 2001, the frame fills with the wood paneled majesty of the House Chamber but the atmosphere is pure coliseum. Buckaroo Bush steps to the podium, his posture stiff with the sudden terrifying gravity of an accidental emperor. When the words drop they don't sound like American politics - his words sound like an ancient totalitarian edict wrapped in a Texas drawl. "Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists ...!" The Chamber erupts in a frantic terrifying standing ovation, a collective tribal roar demanding blood. Right there the space/time continuum of the Republic rips wide open. The nuance of human civilization is incinerated in one sentence. You are either a loyal subject of the 'crusade' OR ... you are the enemy.

Outside our house the sky is a blank terrifying sheet of blue. For days the commercial airliner contrails that used to scratch across the horizon are entirely gone. The silence of the upper atmosphere is deafening. It's a physical manifestation of a nation holding its breath, a ghost town that lets you know, deep in your marrow, the gears of a massive hidden machinery have begun to turn. The air feels thin, wrong, pregnant with a malice that hasn't yet found its target.

By October the waiting ends and the "games" begin. One month since the smoke cleared from Manhattan and the first boots are on the ground in the dust of Afghanistan. The CIA's dark-ops paramilitaries are already trading suitcases of cash for alliances in the Hindu Kush, unleashing a new century of high tech slaughter. They call this strategy, they call this defense, but your mind flashes backward through history smelling the same old sulfur. It's the return of the grand human sport ... the games of absolute evil, the likes of which our world hasn't witnessed since the industrialized slaughter of the Second World War. The trap is sprung, the surveillance state is born, and the crosshairs are slowly turning back toward home.

maelstrom -

ominous -

soldier -

socio -

ghost -

an apple core tore holes in the reputation of a real genius ... gone now and unable to defend his life's work and creation ... what was once upon a time is no longer ... now there stands the shell of a monetary greed monster fixated on the "bottom line" and nothing of which this apple once stood for ... 😐