by Roman McClay
“You must get that not all things make sense, that logic is one tool, not the toolshed itself. You must learn to accept that you cannot know all things, and that action in the absence of knowledge is required, and thus must be embraced. But to lie, to do things you know are wrong, that is the error that builds devils, and corrupts the soul. Errors are life giving, even as they scar you and scare you and make a mess of things.
“But lies are death dealing, even as they allow you to gain and avoid pain and seem to build great wealth here on earth. God is real, whether papa believes in Him or not; and He is real whether you do or do not; so, don’t focus on belief, but action. What you do- as Wulf said- is your religion . Do what you know is Godly, your actions are way more religious than anything you ever think or ever say,” he had told her when she was just seven, and for each year on her birthday they revisited this very idea.
Children would be kept callow if one treated them as not ready for mature things, weak if not given heavy things too. Modern parents were so dumb and craven they made their kids dumb and retarded as well , he thought.
She had asked him why he loved books so much and why he talked so much -and why she loved to listen to his words so much- if actions were more important than words. He had laughed and said that man was unique in that he spoke his being into existence, he spoke his dreams and stepped into them with his feats. Blax had told her that man -and that meant her too- felt first in clouds, unformed nimbus, then thought in language , first. Man then acted second, and then third, man explained what he had done in words; man explained this to the forest, its creatures, and to God too.
“But,” he had said, “man’s words have been corrupted -like the earth has- by lying and hiding and speaking in banalities.” He had went on to say that in the best sense, man’s word was imbued with action, and that his action was marbled with his word, his logos . “God,” Blax had said, “spoke the world into existence. Your word comes first in your mind; but it’s your action that proves what you actually thought, and what those actual thoughts sound like as words on the tongue. An artist makes his actions and his words match up, his body and soul, his behavior and language, one thing.”
She had nodded and thought of it then and more later on, and she had decided that it was true enough to live by until something better came along. He had laughed when she told him that, and they had hugged as she asked for pancakes again, as she pulled her A-shirt off and tucked it into her black boxer-briefs. She had demanded to dress like daddy, and he didn’t object.
She loved him, and revered him, and imagined braiding his beard and plaiting his hair and sometimes thought that his black eyelashes were long enough to pluck out and make arrows for her doll’s bows. She had made Mongolian horsemen matryoshka dolls that nested inside their mares; she had used the 3D printer; CADs from hand-drawings she had made, and she sometimes carved her dolls and their armatures from felled trees she had learned to cut down herself.
She liked the chainsaw, a little too much, Blax thought and when she cut down Aspens and Pinions he always hung around just at the edge of her view. They both knew he was scared, and that he needed to be close -even if he stopped interfering by the time she was 12-years-old. She never bucked nor made him feel worse by complaining. She liked him around all the time anyway; she even wanted him around while she peed. Blax was more shy than her though, and he turned away as she squatted in the forest or on their one toilet in the narrow metal home he had built almost eight years before she arrived.
It was her house, her home too now, though, and she decorated it with skulls and feathers and pictures of odd things just as he did. She picked artifacts from the forest and things she made, just like daddy. The home was more and more a thing of trophies she thought as she took time to survey it.
As he thought of all this and more, the moon came into view again through swaying branches as he grew sleepy with his hand on her belly like the Di Vinci, Mundi holding the orb. He drifted back to sleep thinking of their robberies, although to him they were rescues, and he wished he -like the Jacks did- phrased it like that -first, and not as corrective- each time when he thought or spoke of it. But, he had to correct himself that way, his instinct was to think of it as theft, and unlike his boys and his little girl, he had some part of the death culture deep in his soul. He felt guilty -for a second- for that which they instinctively knew was right.
He drifted back to sleep thinking of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, “and I’d make invisibility felt if not seen, and they’d learn it could be as polluting as a decaying body… And if I got hurt? Very well again. Besides, didn’t they believe in sacrifice? Did the word apply to an invisible man? Could they recognize choice in that which wasn’t seen? ”
III. 2038 e.v.
Isaiah watched the LandSat9 data roll in from New York, and the man was just a dot on the street. His PGC gave him away, but only to Isaiah, not to anyone else. And the DNA from Seth Wispelwey down in North Carolina was already washed away, the back-spray of Heidi Berich’s blood had been removed by the bots as he walked away from her Georgia home and the cats licked their own paws and the old antebellum home creaked and popped as it settled; the cards lay on the stairs .
Isaiah collected the data on his movements for the last 72 hours and combined it with Police 911 calls and internal 503s and 190s. Jack had murdered 19 people already and was now in New York on Branch street at Firth. Isaiah checked the data base and saw that Chris Hayes -the leftwing talking head- lived there with his wife and children. He was 64 years old and had retired to the special coverage part of NBC news now and worked mostly from home. Isaiah had to think; it was likely that Jack would get away with all these murders due to the lack of trace evidence or any motive trail available to law enforcement.
Jack had never made any online statements, none of the Jacks -or Blax- had; and no statements to family or friends. He had said odd things to his parents, but nothing overt and the digital imaging and video would reveal just a figure, nothing for facial recognition tech to work with, and no vehicle to trace either.
He was driving a white panel van now with stolen tags and he would ditch it as soon as the vehicle’s description went over the air; which Jack was monitoring obviously with decoded radio channels for each jurisdiction.
As Isaiah thought all this, Jack had rang the bell, and the 25-year-old Hayes’ daughter -who lived at home- answered. He shot her as he walked through the doorway. Isaiah could see that from the satellite imaging, but after that he could only time him and guess from that data how many other bodies there would be.
Jack emerged from the back door into the yard, shooting the dog as it walked toward him, and over the fence to the neighbor’s side in 90 seconds. Isaiah figured he got one or two people once inside. He was on Thewlis street now walking north and Isaiah saw the panel van at the corner.
Isaiah began compiling a list of the most anti-white male, and anti-American media types in the area and came up with a list of 809 people that were anti-white racist and anti-American enough to fall under the rubric of enemies declaimed by Jack. Joy Reid lived in Brooklyn and was closest to this location. He figured -as the Van drove across Yancy, and toward her 20- that she was -in fact- next. He was getting the highest value targets first, just in case their murders were discovered before he finished his list and was forced to abort.
Joy Reid was the host of just a Sunday show on MsNBC still, but at 65, was a senior member of their election coverage and special coverage alongside Rachel Maddow and Ali Frasier.
She was looked up to by the 20-somethings that ran the network’s daily coverage now and was often brought in as analyst on their shows. He hair was copper, and her lips had ballooned into pieces of Unagi -Jack had noticed- as he scanned her file upon approach. Her picture was updated by his own algorithm, to include any new hair or skin or wardrobe phenomena that would be relevant to his search. His bots had tagged each of the racists on his list so that they glowed in a halo of green to his PGC and
its eyes, but he liked to look at their photos one last time before he closed in on them.
He parked one block west of her condo and exited the vehicle with his face occluded with bots that would distort imaging from cameras but looked normal to human eyes. Humans would be dissuaded from recall -if ever interviewed by law enforcement- by a small voltage bot attached to anyone within 24 feet of him that caused their thalamus and hippocampus to reject all dopaminergic and epinephrine intake while their eyes laid upon him .
They would see him, but it would not register to their brains, and they would be unable -in the moment- to make heads or tails of what they saw when they gazed upon him; unable later to describe him in any detail. It was a device he had developed himself after reading how the brain makes sense of images the visual cortex records, and it basically involves the sub-cortical regions making sense, meaning, from the visual images.
The brain says, in effect, that’s a human face, a man’s face, a Caucasian man’s face , as the cortex lets the images roll on. But with the voltage interference preventing the neurotransmitters having access to the relay from visual cortex to hippocampus and thalamus, the brain has no idea what it just saw. It’s a state of confusion that itself is unrecognized, the passer-by doesn’t feel confused, just as you cannot make sense of anything on your peripheral vision and do not concern yourself with that lack of awareness at all.
He was a ghost, an invisible man, and yet he walked around with just five bots on his face, invisible themselves, that scrambled all facial recognition tech and occluded the minds of any humans that witnessed his movements.
He reached Ms. Reid’s apartment and asked the door man for access to her floor in order to deliver a package he had. The PGC released oxytocin and vasopressin in combination with some key words that unlocked the doorman’s PFC and mesolimbic regions so that he trusted Jack right away. The doorman escorted him to the elevator and hit floor 14 for him and reminded him that it was door 1861. Jack nodded and raised the package he had in his hand as a reminder of why he was there.
The doorman nodded without having any recognition of the man’s face, he’d later state to police as they shook their heads at this in combination with the buildings cameras that showed just a black-clad body with a scrambled blob for a head.
Jack felt the door handle and it was tight, so he -in lieu of knocking- slipped a metal shim into the door at the latch. He placed the package he had in his hand against the door lock and it magnetically turned the bolt backwards. The door popped quickly ajar.
Jack walked through and smelled a weird amalgam of skin products and food. It was like coconut oil and bananas, and it made him slightly dyspeptic. He toggled his olfactory module down to banish the smell as he progressed through the apartment. Paintings of stock black-power nonsense were on the walls, and even a Basquiat knock-off, although it was better composed than any of that guy’s real paintings, he thought. He caught the flash of movement in a wall mirror- black people always had mirrors in their homes, he noticed- and he waited to orient toward the way that it went.
He stopped at the kitchen door jamb and waited, then heard a female voice hum and sing in broken phrasing as he heard music flood in from the opposite side of the place. She was eating and singing and he stepped into the door way and acquired his target with his suppressed pistol wrapped in a bag. She had barely turned, her black and metallic head aglow as he shot two rounds into her neck and ribs. Her face burst out the food, like dust and rock chips, as she fell in a large heap to the floor. He guessed her weight at 182 pounds, a large woman, he thought, with lips covered in bread crumbs like two breaded chicken-fried steaks, with blood running from her neck and flank. He read her vitals as her heart stopped and brain waves diminished and flatlined.
He cleared the rest of the 2-bedroom apartment and made sure to have the bots scrub any media, phone, Alexa, or other recording devices, and removed all back-spray from her blood that had landed on him. He backed out of the apartment and pulled the door to, relocked it with the magnetic device and the bots scrubbed the handle and door .
He used the stairs down and out to the garage and used the service egress to the street.
He had 120 names to choose from and they were each taking about nine minutes on average and 19 minutes with travel time included. He decided to hit David Dinielli and Zoe Savitsky since they were in New York on a lawyers’ conference; and also kill four members of Antifa and four of BLM and then hit Chicago by Tuesday. He saw the names, Hawk Newsome, Catasia Williams, and Tim Ruffin as old-heads for BLM NYC scroll to the top of his list as they were all together at their Bronx HQ.
He had used the 8Chan website combined with their own Recon-Cloud to locate anyone with affiliations with BLM, Antifa, BlackBloc or SR8-E groups on social media. The smarter ones who eschewed online braying were going to survive, but these people would not. Sympathetic media and leadership were to be targeted first.
The list breathed, as each name appeared to him at the top of the list due to proximity, lack of security or crowds, and ideal locations for the privacy of these executions. The list was like a living thing to him, each name rose and fell, each person glowed and dimmed, and he walked from murder to murder like through a grocery store with a list of Cabbage and Corn flakes and Coffee and Cream. Jack banished any thoughts of the preference for his real targets; just in case Isaiah was linked into his PCG.
He had turned it off, but Isaiah was smarter than him, and so he refused to focus on the names of the enemies of the Wolves.
Isaiah watched and half admired him for his competency, his target choices -these were awful humans who were stoking the coming race war- and admired him half in this feeling that he best described as problem solving . He wanted to stop Jack; and get him to return home and drop all this nonsense at once. The war was coming, likely now because of these extra-judicial killings and Jack’s absence was causing more harm than any good than this shit was accomplishing , Isaiah thought as the algorithms updated like weather reports.
But he knew who he was dealing with, and the more one hindered this genome, the more it rebelled. Isaiah could stop him for real -by execution or incarceration- or he could just refrain from interfering at all. Those were his options. And he decided to just let it go. Jack had made quite a mess in eight states over three days and hadn’t slept one hour at all. The use of psycho-motor-stimulants and caloric loading had made him efficient.
The murders weren’t even linked yet, but even as dumb as cops are, they would link them by Monday evening , Isaiah thought. It was Sunday now, at 2100hrs and Jack- with dozens of spent -black- shell casings in a bag at his right, was back in the van heading to the Bronx. He placed the envelope with the diagonally cut cards from each of the 200 decks he had made on the 3D printer, each crafted from his own designs and drawings and photographs, in the center console and double checked his PGC’s list to see how many decks he had drawn from so far.
He didn’t want to make any mistakes, the diagonal half of each Black Jack of spades and Ace of same, had been left at the scene, unobtrusively, in some spot sure to be found, but not garishly in their mouths or at their feet. He just left them -scrubbed of all DNA and prints of course- somewhere that would be found and thought curious and not seen as relevant until the murders were compared and contrasted .
He had used various methods to kill them, preferring the suppressed 9mm, but sometimes the 45-caliber choke was used on his can, and he could use the fatter, slower rounds from his sub-compact 45. He used bots to deliver cyanide in 18 cases, especially if the person had a nice apartment that he didn’t want to mar with blood. He always had that as a backup in case the pistol jammed or other concerns; like noise, for a suppressed firearm is louder than one thinks, it just doesn’t sound like a gun, more of a book dropping on the floor, Jack thought.
At any rate, he kept his half of the cards and labeled them for each murder and placed them in the envelope and inside the console of the van that he parked now on the street o
utside Michael Eric Dyson’s house.
32 degrees 22 36 north by 86 degrees 18, 12 west , came up onto Isaiah’s screen. He had just received data gleaned from the Alabama state police’s Tel/x system that there were eight bodies found dead at the headquarters for the Southern Poverty Law Center. Now, Jack’s murders would go out over the wire and linked up with the ones in NC and Florida and New York. The bodies in PA and Baltimore -of David Simon and his wife- and Jersey -Chris Christie, the former Governor, in a nursing home outside of Newark, would not be connected immediately; in fact they’d not be noticed until morning as they were asleep in their beds and would not be discovered for 11 hours.
The girl Jack had married was in the Brown Palace in Denver and had been there for eight days so far. They had checked in under a false ID and credit card and she was eating filet mignon and drinking Moët et Chandon champagne as she read from the books he had left for her.
She read and nibbled on the medium rare tenderloin and sipped from the flute slowly; the bubbles went up her nose so fast she had to sip quickly and lower the glass each time. She rubbed her nose and turned the page, “if you get arrested, you’re off the Assault committee, if you laugh, you’re off,” she read and let the food pile up in her little belly and the wine find any odd space to thus fill.
It was a rules-based book , she had heard Jack say, and he had quoted the author himself admitting to this. The guy had said that the whole book had been based on these eight rules. Jack had told her that nothing intelligent is based on rules, that AI itself had been rules based for 40 years before somebody figured to embody them and not give them any rules at all.
People didn’t understand what life was at all Jack had said and she had believed him. He was young, but he knew a lot, and he certainly knew more than anyone she had ever known or spoke to; or listened to , she thought with some chagrin. She liked the book though, it was fun and she thought the author had accomplished quite a bit, even from the original sin of a rules-based system. Jack had agreed and that is why he said to read it.
