Apostasy Rising

by J A Bouma

  “Ok...” Alexander said, looking at Father Jim, who smiled in amusement.

  “Sasha, this is marvelous and all,” Father Jim encouraged, “but how does it work for us here and now? And what does this belt have to do with anything?”

  “To test his theory, Dr. Wilczek used an electromagnetic field, a massive ion ring that corralled calcium ions in order to get them to rotate at a steady rate to demonstrate that the translational symmetry of time could be broken. Decades later, researchers in California found that time crystals can break the time-translation symmetry over a period of time through the creation of an electromagnetic field and the addition of laser pulses. They were able to alter the phase of ions through time—revolutionizing how we perceive matter existing in time as it exists in space. The only problem is that there was little practical application for the new phase of matter.”

  Alexander raised a brow. “Until now?”

  Sasha smiled knowingly. “About a half-century after the original tests, others started building the pieces of the puzzle so that I could put them together a few decades later. And then the technology got small enough where I could harness them into this here belt.”

  “Sasha, break it down again!” Alexander exclaimed.

  Sasha stood. “Basically, the belt creates an electromagnetic force field strong enough to open a wormhole, bridging two phases of time and allowing you to jump phases along the fourth dimension backwards and then return at your point of origin.”

  Father Jim laughed in giddy exuberance at the concept, eyes bright with hope and expectation for how the device could serve the Church’s interests.

  “And the beauty is that, with this attachment, the neural core sensory receptor—” Sasha took the black yarmulka-like device and held it up, “with this, a person can record the immersive experience using their own brainwaves!”

  “Come again?” Alexander questioned.

  “This device receives transmissions from the brain that process information from the eyes and ears, all visual and aural light and audio waves received from outside. Like old DVD recorder on TVs from the ancient world. So the traveler can bring back their experience to the future world, like movie maker!”

  “Thank you, Lord,” Father Jim quietly mumbled under his breath as he held the device, almost like a Eucharistic loaf. He approached Sasha, grabbing his arm. “Sasha,” he said, an urgency percolating in his voice, “we need this device!”

  “What you mean, we need device?” he asked, brow furrowing as he pulled back his arm. He carefully took the sensory receptor from him and laid it back on the table.

  “I believe God has put you here on this Earth, in this moment, and helped you discover these things for such a time as this. We’ve not been completely honest with you, Sasha. Alexander saw the news report about your time travel discovery and told a secret gathering of leaders within the Ministerium of Ichthus about the news. We were meeting to address the catastrophes hitting the Church…” Father Jim trailed off, slowing down to make his ask. “And this is it. You’re it, you’ve made the discovery that we need!”

  “What need? What you talking about?” He looked from Father Jim to Alexander, his face registering displeasure as much as confusion.

  “We need to retrieve the faith from the ancient Church—retrieve the events and experiences of Ichthus’s ancestors to help the faithful in our day rediscover the historic Christian faith. Sasha, we need to use this device to go back in time to retrieve what the Church has lost, don’t you see?”

  Sasha stepped back, for once at a loss for words.

  “You’re crazy, Padre. No offense. You cannot just be coming here and taking my discovery!”

  “Sasha, we’re not here to take anything,” Alexander reassured, trying to calm his increasingly agitated friend. “We’re coming as friends asking for your help.”

  “But device not been tested on people before. And besides, it not for sale.”

  “But we need to go back and retrieve the historic Christian faith. The future of Ichthus depends on it!” Desperation and lust dripped from Father Jim’s plea in a way Alexander hadn’t seen before. “Sasha, you must help us.”

  “Sorry, Father. No can do.” He turned away to exit his private lab.

  “Why not?” Father Jim shouted after Sasha as he stumbled through the hidden doorway. “Why can’t this be a sort of experiment to further your own research? Think of all that you can—”

  “It is being too dangerous!” Sasha shouted, turning back. “Device never been tested on person yet.”

  “You can test it on us, don’t you see?” Father Jim motioned toward him and Alexander, offering themselves as sacrificial lambs before the altar of Sasha’s god of Science.

  Alexander grimaced at that suggestion. They hadn’t talked about what they would actually do if the discovery proved to be true, if there was such a device or machine. Who exactly would travel back in time was not discussed. He certainly wasn’t going to risk his life!

  Father Jim looked and sounded desperate, like a man nearing the end of this life and seeing it crumble around him. He’d been a priest his whole adult life, having been married to the Church around the same age Alexander himself had betrothed himself to Christ’s Bride. Father Jim had seen Christ’s flock dwindle over the years while leading the Ministerium. People had left the faith; he’d seen people die for the faith. Now his friends were compromising the faith. To him, his legacy probably looked like a badly scripted and badly acted movie. And now desperation was taking hold of him in a way Alexander hadn’t witnessed before.

  Sasha shook his head. “No offense Father, but you too old. We don’t know the effects of time travel on body yet. Device need strong, healthy, young person.”

  Father Jim looked at Alexander with intensity. “My son…” He took a step toward his former student, pleading in wide-eyed silence.

  Alexander shook his head. “You can’t ask this of me, Padre.” His voice was soft and submissive, like he would have responded to his own overbearing father when he was alive. Father Jim’s “My son” pleadings had certainly worked before. It’s why he continued with the priesthood when he almost bailed halfway through the program. It’s how he ended up in Tripolitania to begin with. But this was a whole new level of pleading that Alexander was loath to receive. No way would he risk his life in this way.

  Father Jim stared at him, eyes tired from the trip, tired from struggling to hold Ichthus together. He lowered his head and nodded in resignation. “Yes, Alexander, I’m sorry. Forgive me for such an ask. I just don’t know what to do anymore.”

  Alexander pitied the man. The Church had been the only woman he’d given his life to, serving her faithfully through sickness and health, plenty and poverty, joy and sorrow until death parted them. Father Jim would have preferred to have gone first, but he feared he would outlive this lover. While Alexander was as equally betrothed, he wasn’t as enamored. It was more of an arranged marriage by his dead father than any maiden he’d consciously, deliberately pursued and chosen. Yes, he was smitten, though not as his former teacher. But that smittening was more at his father’s insistence than any work by Saint Valentine.

  A soft purr filled the silence. The thin glass mobile device nestled in Alexander’s pocket chirped for his attention. He broke away from the conversation with Sasha and Father Jim to find a concerned-looking Mother Kayo peering at him on the face of his mobile device.

  He pressed a pulsating green button, bringing the call to life. “Mother Kayo, what’s the matter?”

  “Are you near a broadcasting device?”

  Alexander noticed a flat glass panel on the far side of Sasha’s spacious study through the doors of the laboratory room.

  “Yes, but it’s not on. Why?”

  “Turn it on. You’ll want to see this. Your mission is now more urgent than ever.”

  Kimura Kayo faded from view. Alexander stuffed the device back in his pocket.

  “Padre, Sasha, Mother Kimura just rang,
” he announced. “She says it’s urgent. Something on the broadcaster. We should check it out.”

  Chapter 13

  The three moved back into the study. Sasha commanded his room to turn on the translucent slab of glass hanging above a large, ornate marble fireplace. They each took a seat in the couches in the center of the room.

  The OneWorld News logo spun on the face of the broadcaster before fading to a press conference already in progress. All three mouths dropped upon seeing Apollos Nicolai commanding a dais in mid-speech, the eyes of the world transfixed on their old classmate and student.

  “…grew up in the Church like many of you listening today,” Apollos said, his voice strong and steady, the camera transfixed upon him as he stood with hands behind his back. “I was a person of deep faith, having been raised by parents of deep faith. We attended Sunday services twice on the Lord’s Day and then again on Wednesday evening. We sang the traditional songs. We learned the ancient texts of Ichthus. We were tasked with converting our neighbors, colonizing people of other faith traditions, convincing people who had no faith. And I worked with intense abandon to win my friends and family and neighbors and strangers over to our faith…”

  “What is going on here, Father?” Sasha asked, voicing the same confusion that was percolating within Alexander.

  “I don’t know, my boy,” Father Jim answered softly, leaning closer to the broadcaster, squinting and straining at attention. “I haven’t the foggiest notion. But I dare say it’s the work of the Devil himself.”

  “…went to seminary, as my white collar will attest, devoting eight years to understanding the depths of my faith and how to share it with the world. And then six more years shepherding a community of faith in Germania in a tiny parish outside Berlin. I am a model of young Evangelical Orthodoxy—”

  “Evangelical my butt!” Alexander said in derision. “Pardon my tongue, Padre.” Father Jim glanced away from the broadcaster and smiled slightly.

  Apollos continued, “I stand before you today to say that this version of Ichthus must end. A new era of religious affection must rise to meet the needs of the 22nd century.” His declarations were met with thunderous applause from off camera. OneWorld News panned to a large amphitheater.

  “What the…” Alexander gasped. “Is that the Senate Assembly in the Solterra capital, the chambers for the seat of the world government?”

  Father Jim looked at him gravely. “Appears so.”

  “Why is a bishop of the Church taking the stage in the den of the Church’s enemy?”

  He shook his head as the applause died down. Father Nicolai continued, “A century ago, the world found itself at the precipice of similar changes as we do now on the other side of the Reckoning. At the dawn of the 21st century, the Church was forced to grapple with its existence in a postmodern world, a world that was unable to construct meaning out of life because it had lost the ability to construct great truths. Civilization ridiculed and devalued the great stories of the great faiths that had helped people for centuries find meaning and answer life’s burning questions. The Church answered postmodernity with a version of itself that worked well for the times, called the Prosurgence movement. It sought to progress the Christian faith into a generous orthodoxy and a new kind of Christianity in which practices like neighbor love were more important than doctrine, where following Jesus was more important than following tradition, where the measure of one’s faith was not the content of their brains but the content of their heart.”

  A number of audible Amens could be heard as the camera sat transfixed on Apollos, a commanding figure who was never shy for attention and sought the limelight at every opportunity.

  “What do you make of this, Padre?” Alexander asked.

  “He looks like he’s running for a bloody Senate seat!” Father Jim replied.

  “He is good,” Sasha offered. “Very, very good. I’d vote for him. Shoot, I’d even go to his church.” He smiled innocently, but it faded after receiving scowls from the other two.

  “But they failed to do what Ichthus should have done all along,” Apollos continued. “They failed to understand that its faith is but one manifestation of the one God, the God who is God of all. They failed to fully understand that the Spirit of God is at work through countless other faiths to bring about the salvation he has promised to humanity through his servant Jesus.” He paused, gripping both sides of the sleek glass lectern that commanded the dais as he scanned the hall.

  “But where Prosurgence failed in postmodernity, Panligo will succeed in ultramodernity,” he roared, face reddening with passion while Cardinal Weiss and other members of the Ministerium Alexander recognized stood behind, looking satisfied. The crowd rose to their feet in applauding approval.

  “One hundred years ago,” Apollos started as the crowds continued clapping. “A hundred years ago, Prosurgence took for itself the emblem of the ancient phoenix, that desert bird that cyclically regenerates itself from the ashes of its predecessor. How appropriate. Because early Christianity adopted the symbol of the phoenix for itself to symbolize the resurrection, the bringing of new life. Two centuries later, the phoenix rises again!”

  Behind Apollos, a curtain parted to reveal a large circular seal. At the bottom was etched a nest, made out of what appeared to be bones. Stretching upward, two intersecting lines bent at each of the ends ascended, surrounded by small flames—presumably a phoenix, rising up from the ashes and bones of its parents. Arrayed around the circumference of the seal were Latin words: Omnia est unum et unum est omnibus.

  All is One, and One is All.

  “Every so often,” Apollos continued, “Western culture and the rest of the world affected by the West, has gone through a time of rebirth. As the ancients called it, a renaissance. Christianity is no different. A century ago, Prosurgence transformed much of the Church—Protestant, Evangelical and eventually Catholic and Byzantium, as well. And five hundred years before that you had the Great Reformation. Before then, the Great Schism between Eastern and Western Christianity. And then prior, the end of the classical era of Christianity and transition to monasticism and medievalism. And, of course, year zero of Ichthus was the birth of Jesus, the holy prophet of God.

  “I am here to announce the unveiling of Ichthus’s next phoenix-rising moment, the next moment of rejuvenation and resurrection of the Church through an act of reincarnation: The formal, decisive alliance of Christianity with the other religious traditions, and the marriage of our faith to Panligo through a formal dissolution of Ichthus. Today, the Church is no more, living on through a reincarnation in Panligo!”

  Father Jim stood, white as the sands of Father Zarruq’s homeland in Tripolitania, shaking from the declaration, from the gall of the man in pixels thinking he could dismantle what has survived and thrived for over two millennia.

  “Well, that was unexpected,” Sasha said.

  “Father, he can’t do this!” Alexander shouted.

  “He just did.” Father Jim stared at the haughty, defiant image of Father Nicolai, smiling and triumphant.

  “But—”

  “Shhh, my boy! Listen.”

  The applause died down once more and Apollos continued. “Throughout the ages many in the Church have recognized the movement of God’s Spirit in other religious traditions. And we representatives of the major sects of Ichthus believe it is time to put that belief into action. It is time that we set aside our differences and recognize that much more unites us than divides us. A God-consciousness is alive and well in every human being, a feeling of absolute dependence upon forces greater than ourselves compels the human spirit to reach out in love every single day. Whether Buddhist or Hinduans, Mohammedan or Ichthusian, Israelite or Alkebulanist. Deep in the heart of every faith shines something good. There is a saving drive toward peace, goodness, self-control, integrity, beauty, duty, and charity. And as a Christian, I believe it is high time we lay down our arms and join hands in pursuit of the universal human ideal of love. As one sin
gle religious identity. No, better,” Apollos corrected himself. “As one human identity. And Panligo is that identity. The word is derived from a combination of two words. Pan, Greek for ‘all,’ and the Latin root of religion, ligar, meaning ‘to bind.’ This new religious order made for our ultramodern 22nd century will bind together people from all over the world as no one has before. All in the interest of serving the greater good by seeing God’s Kingdom come and will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Will you join me?”

  The agreement roared through the broadcaster as the camera panned away to reveal a rousing standing ovation in solidarity with Apollos Nicolai before cutting to Max Bacchus, hair dyed a flaming red with matching jacket chattering on about how exciting the development was for the Republic. Sasha told the broadcaster to silence itself.

  The three men in Kiev stood and sat in speechless silence, an antique clock ticking away somewhere on a shelf behind them.

  “Apollos is no pope! He has no ex cathedra authority,” Alexander raged. “Padre, we must do something, return at once to Byzantium—”

  “And do what, Alex? Excommunicate him? Denounce the move? Insist that Ichthus is very much alive?”

  “Well…” Alexander was stumped for words. “All three!”

  Father Jim turned toward him and looked down at Sasha who was slouched back deep in his recliner. “We could do that…”

  He paused and shook his head, then slouched into the couch himself. “But you just heard the man. He spoke for the Church along with representatives of the major Ichthus sects. Evangelicals, Protestants, Catholics, and Byzantines shared the stage with Apollos and Cardinal Weiss. As far as the world is concerned, as far as Solterra is concerned, the Church has been dissolved! She’s bound herself to Mohammedans and Israelites, Buddhists and Hinduans under the banner of Panligo, in a sort of religious stew.”