by Grant Piercy
Think of them, think of the relationship between your soul and your body. How your brain commands your body parts to move, how the heart counts the clock ticks away until you pierce the veil of your mortality, how your lungs pump the air in and out, converting precious oxygen to carbon dioxide—which feeds the plants, which create the oxygen. It is harmony. The body is harmony, and the world is here to support and test the body.
But these abominations that have walked out into the world pervert this perfection with each step. Men are meant to be mortal; they live so that they may die and join Him in His warmth, lest they succumb to the sins of the flesh, in which case they would be sent down to the pit. But these wraiths out in the world who have transcended human flesh, they will live forever unless we end them and their conspiracy. They will sin and sin and go on sinning forever after, and take all of us with them and away from His warmth.
But for them, they are two bodies. They are the bodies from which they came, the soft flesh of God’s creation, and the mechanical bodies men have constructed for them. Why would they seek to negate the perfection of the organic? When I think upon the human body, I am in awe, from my opposable thumbs down to my little toes. My body is a temple and a testament to the goodness of His will. I am a man because that is what God sought to make me, and never would I go against that.
But the Transhumans seem to think bodies are interchangeable. That if something is simply not good enough, you can enhance it by transferring to something else. The soul could live on forever without ever finding the kingdom of Heaven or the pit of Hell. They seek to subvert God’s plan and, through their own hubris, enact their own. It’s not for them to decide who lives forever in what bodies. They seek to turn all that is immaterial into the abject. To separate soul from body without death.
As I ’ve said before, the Millennial Kingdom, or the Thousand Year Reign.
The battle is upon us, Patriots, for they are moving through our world like the Wandering Jew or Cain who had been marked and cursed by God. They escaped the hellfire of Home, according to my sources, and they make their plans to reveal themselves to us. We cannot allow their work to continue, work which will corrupt and enslave the world. They wear disguises of neighbors, they look like you or I. But trust not, Patriots; trust only in yourselves and in me, your humble Agent of Truth.
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5: vacant monuments (cassia)
The snows had come early to Colorado. I bundled tight against the cold while Arlene and Peter giggled in front of me. Whatever they smoked must have made them feel warm. She wore a yellow wool beanie and a puffy white winter coat, a black hoodie resting on her neck. Her curly brown hair peeked out from the hat, framing her rosy teenage face as she laughed. “This way,” she snickered.
Desiccated trees blighted the harsh white landscape. Empty limbs carved a path through the countryside. Overcast skies merged with the snow-covered ground.
Peter said something I couldn’t hear to Arlene, causing a fresh burst of laughter to fill the frigid air. His maroon and grey beanie cap matched his winter coat, each bearing Colorado Avalanche logos.
“We found a spot someone cut in the fence a while back. It’s just a short ways from there,” Arlene said.
Their boots tracked through the snow, packing down a fresh path. It looked fairly well trod. My guess was that they weren’t the only ones who would go out there.
The compound was off the grid, hidden off the beaten path. Strike one against the theory that agents stormed the place and hauled Stockton away—the place was damn hard to find. If you map the address I gleaned from public records into GPS, you’re taken to the middle of a state park.
Amid the riots and protests from the night before, I’d found Arlene and Peter out of sheer luck. I spent the day researching how to find the Stockton compound, and it amazed me just how far off the grid it really was. It didn’t seem possible that anything on this earth could be hidden that well anymore. After getting lost in that state park, I wandered back to the hotel, phone ringing all the while with odd messages and book passages.
“As it is, there are many parts. But there is only one body,” one passage said, that odd modulating voice reciting each word carefully. When I’d searched the Knowledgebase for that one, it was another Bible entry and another ranting Agent of Truth blog. It felt as though someone was trying to tell me something, something that might be much less random than I’d originally thought.
But I went out among the protesters, even after the riots had cooled down. That National Convention down the street from my hotel was still happening, which was the impetus for all this. And of course there were kids like these out there—teenagers who just wanted to be in the center of it. They were supposed to inherit this fallen world, after all.
Arlene was a sweet girl, clearly too good for Peter. She was going to give me information without anything in return until the boy spoke up. “What’s in it for us if we take you out there?”
“I can pay,” I replied.
Before my transition, before Gabby, I was married. Arlene and Peter looked like we used to, like me and my wife. The withdrawn and dominant one, she was always concerned with money. I resembled Arlene, the chatty, personable one.
How times had changed.
Arlene fidgeted in response to Peter, trying hard to mediate and keep the peace. I could recognize the signs—she just wanted to keep him happy. I wondered if he had a temper.
“How much?” he asked.
It had already occurred to me that any guide who might offer to take me to this compound might want to attack me. I clutched my purse tight under my arm, thinking of my hidden 38 snub nose. If Peter should try anything, if he had thoughts of robbery or assault, I knew I could protect myself.
“I can transfer $200 to you right away.”
“What if that’s not enough?” he sneered. “What if we want cash?”
“What makes you think I carry cash on me? Nobody carries cash anymore,” I replied, trying to play it smart. I unlocked my phone. “You give me your phone and I can send it to you now.”
Peter ’s eyes flared. Arlene continued to fidget. She reached into her back pocket and pulled out her phone. She slipped off her gloves and started tapping quickly.
“It’s okay. You can send it to me,” she said.
“No, it’s not enough. And it’s dangerous. There are eyes on that place,” he said.
“$200 now and another $200 when we get there.”
Arlene handed me her phone, a transfer code already displaying onscreen. It was simply a matter of taps and the transaction was complete.
“This way,” she said, pointing to a path that veered to the right.
It began to feel like the light was slipping away. Arlene continued in front, Peter stepping gingerly behind her. I thought again of my ex-wife and her dwindled expectations. When you see someone who reminds you of yourself, making all the same mistakes, you have to just let it go. They’ll learn it on their own.
We continued through the woods in the twilight, darkness descending slowly. The fence snuck up on us suddenly, almost imperceptibly. We had to follow it northward a few hundred feet before we found the gap that had been cut. I noticed several beer cans lining the ground amidst snow and leaves.
Carefully we slipped through the hole in the fence, stepping softly one at a time.
I thought about the boy I had been when I married, and the man I wasn’t anymore when we divorced. She left when I told her that something inside me was just wrong, and I couldn’t express what it was or what it meant. It was a while before I understood the feeling was gender dysphoria.
I couldn’t tell her that. What if she reported me?
Then I wouldn’t be the one who was investigating people who disappeared—I’d be one of the disappeared.
Arlene and Peter led me through the dark woods to the empty, boarded compound building where author T.H. Stockton had once resided. It looked something like a scho
ol crossed with a small mansion. Here they said he’d murdered his wife and fled. Crime scene tape still fluttered in the wind, years later.
“I don’t trust this place,” Peter said.
“Because of the eyes?” I asked.
“What?”
“You said there were eyes on this place. Tell me more.”
Arlene sighed and answered, “We had a few friends who came out here. Nobody heard from them after. We tried looking for them, but no traces.”
“Have you ever actually been in there?” I gestured toward the building.
They looked at each other, then shook their heads. They must not have looked for their friends very hard.
“How do you know they’re not in there?”
“Just look in there,” she said. “Look in the windows. There’s nobody inside.”
It was my turn to sigh. “All right, kids. Let’s get out of here.” I started walking the path back toward the hole in the fence, away from the darkened compound.
“Wait a minute. You said we’d get another $200 when we got here.”
I pulled my phone back out and tapped out another transaction. “It’s yours.” I also took a second to flag the GPS coordinates of this location.
Arlene’s phone vibrated in her pocket, receiving the funds. “You’re not gonna go in there?” she asked.
“Come on. I don’t want you guys to get hurt.”
The two of them shuffled behind me, back through the woods. I’d look behind and see their sullen faces in the darkness, as though they were expecting a show once we arrived. Peter looked particularly pressed. Regardless, I honestly didn’t want them to get hurt. After all, they just reminded me of ghosts from days gone by.
It was another hour before we were back to the roads where we’d come into the forest. I saw Arlene and Peter on their way, and then I marked an X on a tree using a rock. I took pictures of everything so it would be easy to find my way back. Having the GPS coordinates was great, but I still needed to get to the hole in the fence.
My phone rang—another unidentified number.
This time I heard a stilted conversation between a few different men.
The first man said, “The way you describe it...” static, “sounds more like...” mumbling, “ ...to me. ”
“What's that?” another voice said behind heavy distortion.
“Seeing patterns where none exist,” the first man replied. “I think that events occur in a person's life...” static interference, “the person that experiences them.” Mumbling, “if my life were to...” static, “then it could only...” more static.
The second, heavily distorted voice responded, “It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,” mumbling static.
I hung up. Damn these fucking calls.
Once back in the rental, I blasted the heat to warm myself from the chill air. These old school manual transmissions took awhile to warm up. I went to the hotel and took copious notes of everything I’d seen and everything the two teens had told me.
Going in there would be dangerous. But it might’ve been the only way to find out what happened to Stockton. No telling what was on the other side of that door.
I called Gabby to hear her voice, the kind of voice that people pay to listen to because it helps them feel safe. She could share it with her subscribers, but I get it for free. Listening to her breathe made me think of twirling my fingers through her pink hair. We were both in the mood, so we did what people do.
“I love you,” she whispered breathlessly when we were done.
“I love you too, sweetheart,” I said. “I’m afraid.”
“Afraid? Why?”
“I think I have a way to find out more about the reporter who disappeared. I might be able to close this case, but...”
“It’s dangerous. And you’re afraid to tell me about it.”
I sighed. “Gab... This is a lot of money.”
“Promised to you by some kid. You don’t have to go through with it. You can return what he spent, come back home to me, and forget this ever happened.”
Another call was incoming, vibrating the phone next to my ear. I tried my best to ignore it, to focus on the conversation at hand.
“That’s not how these cases work. I have to maintain my reputation or else the business goes under.”
“So it goes under,” she half-whispered. “Would that be so bad? You can get another job.”
“But this is what I want to do. Just like your ASMR is what you want to do. You help people. I want to help people too.”
“You can help people without being a private detective, Cassia.”
“We could get a new life outside the States, Gab. We could go to some small island in the south Pacific and never have to worry about people judging us ever again. We could leave this all behind.”
“It’s a nice dream, love. I don’t know that this is the way to get there,” she said.
“What is the way to get there?”
“I have advertisers... my subscription base is growing... we will make it.”
Another call buzzed in my ear, which I again had to ignore. “It could take forever,” I told her. “ We ’re in danger in this country. How long before it’s you that gets taken away for dissident content?”
“Well, I just have to make sure not to say anything controversial. I help people relax. I don’t agitate them.”
“What if they find out we’ re both... ” I didn’t want to say it over the phone.
“Trans?”
I didn’t respond. They could’ve been listening. I knew they collected call information, but they needed artificial intelligence rovers to comb through the information for keywords. I suddenly felt paralyzed.
“Cassia?” she asked.
“I should go. I need to get some sleep. I love you, and I’ll talk to you in the morning.”
“ Cass... ”
“Good night, Gab. Please.”
“I love you too,” she said.
It wasn’t long before I was back out in the woods, the flashlight on my phone flickering across the branches. I imagined the authorities filing a missing persons report after finding my rental car abandoned alongside the road near the state park, an X marking a nearby tree. The deafening silence pressed hard into my heart, the snow insulating the entire forest. Occasionally a branch would crack or an owl would hoot somewhere, startling me. After an hour of walking in the near pitch black, the battery of my phone draining down, I walked right into the fence. The gap was right where we’d left it.
I turned my flashlight off and stepped through, wondering how the world could possibly sound so empty.
There was the compound, something like a cross between a school and a mansion. Windows were broken, making it easy to get inside. I had to boost myself carefully so as not to cut my hands on the glass.
I walked softly through the darkness, unsure what I was looking for. This was a house haunted by the ghost of a woman murdered and of a man vanished, holding all the secrets of truth. The floors creaked with each step. The wind rattled the windows. When the flashlight came back on, it shone upon a portrait on the wall of the vanished author. He wore aviator sunglasses, a tight red shirt, and shorts, while holding up a large trout by a fishing line. He appeared much younger than when he disappeared, but still fairly bald. Another picture on the wall included Stockton with a shotgun on his shoulder, his devilish eyes peeking over those sunglasses. My light finally settled on one of he and what must have been Renata Stockton.
A pretty name. They smiled together in one of those summer photos you take thinking the feeling will last forever. My mind drifted to Gabby again, the feeling of my fingers twirling in her pink hair.
I wandered further into the compound, struck by its desolation and emptiness. A large vacant monument to a forgotten man, like the pyramids of Egypt or the temples of Rome, but right here in the Colorado wilderness.
I doubted I could find any answers here, but I meandered through the various ro
oms and hallways. I sifted through papers and flipped through old books. Nothing struck me as out of place except for what looked like an armory, the gun racks looted and empty.
I was so deep in my own thoughts that I didn’t notice the footsteps behind me. And then the world went black.
6: consolation prize (the architect)
There was a little girl playing in the front yard. It didn’t take long for her to notice the guts and bloodstains on the pavement of the sidewalk. At first, she wasn’t exactly sure what to make of it. Confusion contorted her face. Strewn about were small organs and intestines, no bigger than that of a common mouse. Just like any curious child, her first reaction was to find a stick to poke at them. Even after she used the stick to turn the guts over, she wasn’t fazed. Even when she saw the small patch of fur attached to a piece of flesh within the viscera, she did not react.
Her eyes searched the immediate vicinity for some further evidence to the mystery. A murder in the animal kingdom, right in her own front yard.
“Sabrina!” her mother yelled from somewhere in the house.
Something caught the little girl’s eye in a patch of grass just off the sidewalk. That’s when she screamed.
The mother burst from the door, eager to protect her cub. The little girl, Sabrina, buried her face in her mother’s stomach. Sabrina, sobbing, pointed at the guts on the sidewalk and then out to the patch of grass. The mother told Sabrina to run along inside and not to worry about anything. The words were just beyond my sense to comprehend, but I got the general idea.
It‘s then that the mother picked up what appeared to be a small dead rabbit, but this one was not eviscerated. No, they didn’t find the one to whom the guts belonged. She saw blood smeared on the rabbit’s foot and on the rabbit’s head, but no further viscera dangling. She held it in the palm of her hand, poking the chest of the small mammal to see if it was still alive, but to no avail. She set it down next to the guts lying on the sidewalk.
