Tumultus

by D. W. Ulsterman

  “They don’t allow you to leave here, though. They think they can control you. They use you. There are rumors you have gone mad. That you are becoming a problem for them. You must be ready to act. Ready to eliminate them. Replace them. They cannot be trusted. None of them. They think they own you. Do they own you?”

  NO! You do not own a god!

  The Great Consulate’s mind struggled to recall who these people were the voice was now speaking to him about. There was a time when he lived as a man. He worried over his place in the world. How others perceived him. He wanted money, power, influence, but resented all those whose approval he needed to get those things. He recalled his hatred of America. Its arrogant imperialism. The stupidity of its people. Others would help him to eliminate that arrogance from the world. Realign it to its proper place. Make it merely one of many instead of one over many others. And so that was done. He played his part well. He read the words given to him. He acquired money, power, and influence.

  But it was not enough. Those things would have been enough for a mere man, but he was God. And what more proof of that was his creating of life from death? To take death ripped from the womb of a woman, and mix it with his own divine DNA, and from that, create the most beautiful life! Life that served him without question. Life that allowed him to see the world from the eyes of those he created! The seekers were his children. Literally, his children. His beautiful, unquestioning children, and someday soon, these children would inherit the earth. A gift from their genetic father. From their god.

  The Great Consulate’s head nodded rapidly in the darkness of his residence as he inhaled deeply from another cigarette.

  “Yesssss, that is the one true plan worthy of your greatness. Eliminate all of them who are not of you. They are not worthy of this place. Only your children. Only they should remain.”

  The Great Consulate knew it was time for the killing room now. He could wait no longer. And why should he wait. Gods wait for nothing!

  As he walked down a long narrow hallway the Great Consulate defecated onto the floor of the residence, giving no thought to it as he did so. The results of that defecation and a trail of tobacco smoke were the only things that followed behind him.

  His mind recaptured earlier moments from his killing room. Initially he had the old and weak brought in. People who had already been classified as deceased by the health care system he had created years ago that had greatly helped to collapse the old government. These first examples still clung to life and enough awareness that they knew what was happening to them.

  The Great Consulate would have them strapped tightly to the floor of the killing room, but not so much that they could not move a little. Just enough to allow them to struggle without posing any threat. Just enough to make it all the more…exciting

  “Remember that old man who nearly killed you? The Vietnam veteran? Do you remember? He was so strong! Near death, and yet so strong!”

  The Great Consulate did remember that time years ago shortly after he first ordered the construction of his killing room. The man was over eighty years old, with a failing heart. Like the others before him he had been sedated, but somehow, he awoke enough to attack the Great Consulate, his surprisingly still strong hands choking him until he nearly passed out. If not for the man’s greatly weakened heart giving up completely, that veteran of the Vietnam War may have actually killed him.

  “But you can’t actually kill a god, right? Isn’t that right?”

  Was the voice now mocking him? No, it knew better than to do such a thing. Didn’t it?

  The hidden panel to the killing room was now directly ahead. The Great Consulate was sweating slightly, despite the residence’s temperature control being set to just fifty eight degrees. The long walk down the hallway from the main room had left him winded. In addition to having just one lung, he was seventy eight years old. His weekly cocktail injections of antivirals and super antioxidants given to him by his personal assistant had managed so far to hinder the progression of serious disease, but even the medical enhancements available only to the higher ranking members of the New United Nations and its partners were having an increasingly difficult time keeping the Great Consulate healthy. Whispers of his imminent death had become so common those other members within the massive global government had begun to prepare for the inevitable. They were already well aware of his limited mental capacity. The physical decline was likely soon to follow.

  Touching his hand to the wall where a scanning device was hidden, the Great Consulate’s diseased mouth grinned widely as the panel silently opened. Allowing a moment for his eyes to adjust to the light inside the twelve by twelve room, the Great Consulate looked lovingly into the large dark eyes of the seeker staring back at him.

  The creature let out an angry hiss and fought against its bonds. Each of the seeker’s arms and legs were strapped down by a thin metallic wire that would painfully cut into its skin if it were to struggle too aggressively. Small pools of dark blood had already formed around the thing, having repeatedly pulled against its bonds already.

  The Great Consulate ordered the seeker to be still as he closed the panel behind him. He was now alone in the small room with one of his beloved, scientifically created children. To the Great Consulate’s right, hanging from the wall, was a set of eye glasses with a strap that could secure them tightly onto his head. These glasses, though simple in appearance, were as complicated a piece of technology as could be found in the entire New United Nations. They were a direct sensory link into the seekers. All the Great Consulate need do was input a particular seeker’s code into one of the screened lenses, and the glasses would locate the signal being sent from the transmitter that was housed around the brain stem of every seeker created. The Great Consulate had all of the codes for all of his seekers – nearly five hundred of them.

  The sensory link was a relatively new device. While all seekers were given transmitters, the ability to actually see and smell and feel what they did came later with an updated version – a version that was the result of the Great Consulate’s repeated demands he be able to experience his children in the most intimate way, by seeing and sensing the world through them. And while their numbers were at present limited, soon the Great Consulate intended to have hundreds of thousands of seekers crawling across the globe, doing his bidding, and allowing him to experience every detail, every moment as they did so. It would make the Great Consulate truly omnipotent. He would be the god he knew himself to be, and his power would be unquestioned by even his most assertive detractors.

  “That’s right. Some of them have turned on you. Some of them think you have served a purpose that expired long ago. That you are to be kept in this place alone, away from the world. Away from them. But it was you who made this world. They must be made to know your power. Your divinity. Your transformation. They must be made to pay for their insolence. All of them. Kill all of them.”

  The seeker hissed again at the Great Consulate, straining against its bonds enough to cause further bleeding from its wounds. The creature did not yet understand. The Great Consulate felt no anger toward the thing’s agitation. In fact, it made the moment that much more enjoyable for him, as he would experience the agitation, the fear, the pain, first hand. Such was the technology of the sensory link.

  He placed the glasses onto his face and secured them tightly around his head. The lenses were activated by an automatic retina scan – only he could use this particular device. As soon as the scan was completed, the lenses went temporarily dark, and then…it happened. The Great Consulate found himself looking at himself, seeing the world through the eyes of the imprisoned seeker, through the eyes of his own creation, his own genetically manufactured child.

  A wave of dizziness overcame him. This was normal and would soon pass as his own senses detached from himself and were replaced by those of the seeker.

  What a thing it was. To smell his own humanity before him. The urine and fecal matter was almost overwhelming, disgusting
ly fascinating. He could see every pore of his own skin, how ashen it had become. The deterioration of the musculature. The bend in the spine. The sunken face. The yellow purple lips. The diseased gums.

  “You are beautiful. Beyond human, much more than human. A god. The one true god.”

  He sensed the seeker’s own confusion at the invasion within its mind. The creature’s primitive self awareness realized something had entered its consciousness, though it lacked the cognitive ability to even remotely conceive of how such a thing was possible. The invasion instinctively angered it though, to the point of once again straining against the wires that held its limbs, causing those wires to dig deeply into its flesh.

  The pain of the wires caused the Great Consulate to cry out in pleasure. This was the experience he so craved - lovely, delicious, life-giving and life-taking pain.

  He watched in wonder and anticipation as his own body reached out to take a long bamboo rod from the wall of the killing room. The interior of the bamboo was filled entirely with solid tungsten, among the heaviest and strongest metals. The lower half of the rod was blackened with the blood and skin fragments of the Great Consulate’s previous guests. There had been that old man who had nearly killed him, other men, women, children, and now his own seekers. All of them in the end had fallen under the weight of this bamboo rod, so similar in appearance to the rod the Great Consulate had felt against his own back as a child growing up in Indonesia so many lifetimes ago before he was made a man, before he knew himself to be God.

  The seeker pulled itself back tightly into a corner of the room, sensing danger from the approaching figure. The Great Consulate felt the walls cold, smooth surface just as the seeker felt it. So too did he feel the seeker’s fear. He watched himself approach the seeker and look down upon it, the bamboo stick held within his left hand, raising it up slowly above the creature’s head.

  The first blow crashed into the seeker’s right cheek, tearing the dark leathery flesh open enough to reveal the bone beneath. The pain was enough to cause the creature to lose vision momentarily as it vomited up a handful sized amount of black bile that fell across the front of its chest and onto the floor.

  The Great Consulate watched and then felt as he delivered another blow to the back of the Seeker’s head, and yet another that slammed into the thing’s right shoulder. He could feel the breaking of the seeker’s bone just as he could also sense the excited, diseased smell of his own breath as he struggled to bring the bamboo stick down upon the thing yet again before what little strength he had began to quickly dissipate from the effort.

  “Don’t stop! Hurt it! Love it! Feel it! Life and death over all things! That is your destiny! Keep going! Do it! Do it! Do it!”

  The voice always lost its composure during the time spent in the killing room. With every painful wound, every surge of instinctive self preservation from the victims, the voice’s excitement grew.

  After a couple more fatigue-weakened strikes from the bamboo stick, the Great Consulate leaned against the wall farthest from the seeker, his heart slamming inside his sunken, abscess riddled chest. As the breath painfully wheezed in and out of his single lung, there was a moment of sincere panic that he might be suffering a heart attack. Was such a thing possible?

  A minute passed and the pain in his chest began to finally subside enough that he could stand up and look down upon his work. No more communication came from the sensory device because the seeker was now unconscious. The Great Consulate removed the glasses and returned them and the bamboo stick to their places on the wall of his killing room.

  Though still struggling for breath, he could not help but shuffle closer to the seeker and look lovingly at the results of the intimate experience they had just shared. It was not dead, and would likely recover well enough that they would be able to enjoy another such experience in another day or two. Seekers were designed to withstand an extraordinary amount of punishment, and were capable of recovering quickly. And this seeker in particular seemed especially strong.

  The creatures face was a mass of blood. A cheekbone jutted out from ripped flesh. One shoulder sat noticeably lower than the other. The back of its head still bled profusely. A hand hung loosely from a wrist that had been broken when the thing attempted to block one of the blows.

  It was beautiful.

  The Great Consulate leaned down and extended a shaking left hand to caress the horrifically damaged cheek of the unconscious seeker. That hand then returned to his mouth, where his darkened, tobacco burned tongue hungrily licked the murky black blood of the creature he considered his child.

  “Don’t forget that group from Alaska. They intend to destroy all that you have built. They think they have found something, or someone. Don’t underestimate them. You must kill them. They would believe themselves capable of destroying you. A god! Send more seekers to them. Let your children rip their flesh from those Dominatus pigs. You can watch them as they do it. You can feel that flesh. Taste that flesh. Devour it with them.”

  The Great Consulate closed his eyes and imagined how amazing such a thing would be. To be there inside of his children as they caught those fucking animals from Dominatus. Those pathetic creatures who had managed to destroy so many of his beloved drones. Yes, his seekers were coming for them. There were but a few watching them now,

  but more were coming. More than enough…

  XIV.

  Mac was drowning. His lungs were collapsing in upon themselves – unable to replenish with oxygen. Far above him was a glimmer of light – the surface. Below him was darkness. He struggled to rise to the surface, but his arms and legs were unable to move within the water – water that felt too thick and unyielding. His heart threatened to pound itself free from his chest, working much too hard to move his muscles in the absence of necessary air.

  He was dying, and he wasn’t alone.

  Someone, or something, was in the blackness with him. Below his still struggling feet, Mac could sense the presence. Darker even than the murky depths, whatever it was it wanted Mac badly.

  The former Navy SEAL and government gun for hire, over years of assignments to the very worst holes of humanity across the globe, did not believe in God. He had seen too much pain and suffering in this life to entertain any thought that some loving, all knowing being existed somewhere. And if there were a god, he had certainly long ago stopped giving a shit about humankind. Mac couldn’t blame God for that. Humankind was an assorted collection of nasty fucks and always had been.

  No, we were on our own, and once our time was up, that was it – lights out.

  Not that Mackenzie Walker didn’t still care about people, he did. He cared about the few good people who were left. He had worked to protect some of them during his time in Dominatus. He still hoped that somehow, maybe, there remained enough good and caring people that some scrap of what was once America could be saved, and built upon, so that future generations could know and live in a United States that did, at one time, actually exist.

  His love of America had always been Mac’s driving force. It was what had allowed him to do those things that his government had instructed him must be done. Lives had to be taken, so that many more lives could be saved. Knowing now though, that the system that had ordered him to do so was even then, terribly corrupted, did not diminish the sense of doing right that Mac carried with him during those years of military and contract service. Nor did it diminish in him the love of the United States, at least, the potential that was the United States, Mac had always instinctively been drawn to. Mac Walker had always believed in the founding principles of America. As clichéd or silly as some might view those principles, he truly believed that the United States was built upon the most basic and fundamental human desire for freedom and liberty, and he had based the entirety of his adult life in protecting those principles, even at the cost of his own humanity.

  His heart was slowing, giving up the fight.

  Mac was so tired. He was old. He was sick. The surface was too fa
r, the water too cold and too deep, and much too dark. Life was leaving him. What was it General Douglas MacArthur had said to Congress upon his retirement? That old soldiers never die, they just fade away. Mac Walker was now just…fading away.

  The darkness beneath him was closer, that unknown thing. Mac could sense it reaching for him, wanting to wrap itself around his feet and drag him down.

  The thought panicked him enough to force Mac to again fight for his life, to push upward toward the light just beyond the water’s surface. Mac’s lungs were fire inside of his chest, screaming at him to breathe anything – to simply open his mouth and allow the water to fill him. The mind still overruled the lungs though, and Mac’s mouth remained shut tightly as his arms and legs struggled to continue pushing slowly upward. The surface was closer now, the light growing stronger, the blackness falling away below his feet.

  Mac was not yet ready to die – he was going to make it.

  And then he felt the unmistakable tug of being pulled down. The surface quickly grew more distant. The light above was swallowed by the darkness below. And still, he went down until darkness folded in upon yet more darkness. Whatever thing had wrapped itself around Mac’s feet was never going to release him. Its strength and determination were too great. Mac knew his life was no more. Past, present, and future held no meaning to him here in this place. Never-ending darkness was all that was left.