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PREAMBLE: NON-STOP VIOLENCE
1.)
Shit 
. I’m enwombed again, just after I took a swing at Typhon, in his purple robe… Oh. Ow. That vorpal swordof his must have…Ow. Shame.I
liked 
that head.I remember dying. I think. Not important. I’ve died a few times already. Dying sucks. So does Respawn.I’m here in here somewhere. It’s
cold 
in here, or maybe that’s just the chill of self-awareness in my little bundleof morphing, as-yet-undifferentiated cells.Self-awareness too early, the warm rush of a formula in Logic that my old teacher Mandelbrot told me about,one called the Child of Destiny. I failed Logic the first six tries, at the Academy, but the sense of the formula stayedwith me:Every Thing interconnected in order to create One Other Thing. It can be mathematically proven.
 E Pluribus Unum
, if you will, or maybe
 Ex Nihil
. Not mine to say. From many…Us.How strange it must be for you Four, you Scientists, you smug lab-made Gods listening over the little mechashoulders of the Guardians and saying absolutely Jack Shit to us about it, thanks…How strange for you to hear this continuing deposition from one yet or sometimes unborn, a ghost who tricklesdown the centuries, into the ink of the canon’s mouth, and ear!But I
have
been born already, variously, as Man, Woman, Creature, Plant, kicked up and down the chain somany times already by the choice I made to follow my
amok 
cousin back in Time, and end the mis-begottencreature’s existence in every form, no matter who helped or what hindered, hell or high water, the Devil or the deepgreen Swamp…Got to stay with it. Got to teach these new cells to remember the Real.To everything, there’s a precedent, sparks of causality fanned by cold currents swirling up from the dark edge,beyond which starlight wavers weird like water, past what we can see…History doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Nothing comes from nowhere. I have lots of time to think about all this. Ithink. Down at the deepest wellhead of Dream.I remember that it was (is?) a bleak, cold winter when I and the other six of my coterie elected to leave Shang 2,the Shining City Beneath the Hills... in soul, that is, while our bodies still twitch and piss into catheters back thereeven now, and report back through optical fibers in our ear canals and foreheads. (The Guardians swab us down withsilver nitrous nanoracle goo, getting us ready for the next attempt.)I remember the day we all first plugged into the Tank, yesterday, a thousand years ago the day after tomorrow.Up on the surface of Earth, in the proud towers Mom’s prouder people build and hold, that black snow was falling,falling, falling past any prediction the Guardians could make.Even
they
throw up their eleven-million-apiece little metal mittens, past a certain point, and thus avoid the Killthe Weatherman syndrome all too common to Imperiums like my Dad’s. But at the time, it didn’t exactly take aweatherman to see the weather.I remember everything Mandelbrot ever injected into my head to prepare me for riding the wheel of death andrebirth with full knowledge of doing so, to trick my conscious field into remembering the Kabbalah of its uniquemakeup…I remember. But nothing, No Thing, could have prepared me for this reality. (By the way, I got the old memoabout where I’m popping out next, the John Brown gimmick. And I am
not 
happy…)I remember the first rotation, the first permutation my teachers ran the Tank through when we willingly pluggedinto it through the little interfaces in our ears and between our eyes that let out our Gifts, and change us from merelyAwake to… full Illegitimi, after we go through the screaming nightmare of Bastard Basic Training.I remember my first attempt in the Tank. I remember telefactoring back into some distant Scythian slave-ancestor’s body the very first year our Enemy roamed the Earth. (I think.)
 
 I remember Rome. What we did there to extinguish my cousin Typhon only drove his essence so far into thistime-track that we’ll never unravel his influence completely. We Bastards of the Universe had (have?) to ramp theTank forward, and forward, and forward AGAIN.Just to lose more and more of our original identities every time the Guardians running the tank in Shang 2 hurlour essences further down the stream, to return in new skins again, again, cursing the first twenty-odd years of existence until we can break free of the hateful cuckoo-nests where we happened to Respawn that time around.(
Sigh
) But we all got our stories, and I am the least among these.
 He closed his eyes, and the Dreamer dreamed on….
2.)
Arise, Dead. Judge and Be Judged. Let the pain wash off in the rain, and the hillsides outside Town erode ’tilevery coffin bobs upon the waves, backward, down the Mainline Canal to Lake Erie as the rocks rend and the gravesopen up, and the fierce flame of the Blessed Mother waits on the shore to catch up and carry away. Hide yourselvesunder the mountains. Fly from the wrath to come.Fly from the wrath to come. Sky’s on fire. Skies on fire. Above, the clouds wrack and rumble and roar Melville-loud, and a trumpet blows while all good people lie asleep.This is every green, verdigris-corroded brass clockwork figure in the Courthouse clock of dreams, all the all-but-useless armillary gadgetry ensuring that the bell never, ever tolls the right time, and rolls the trickling economicshitstorm downhill…Into the clockwork tracks of the railbeds, breeding monsters between the ties and out on the wet-lands…Into theplace Nietzsche will speak of where, when you look too long, Great Poison Swamp looks back out of your eyes, andleaves you trapped beneath its acid mere …This is the first book of Rock Springs, Pennsylvania, which begat its first Mayor, Hizzoner Andrew Horace, whoran unopposed for a second term after a possible opponent was found at the Wayne Street Whore House with one of each flavor, sticking into one with one sticking into him, and fingered by a Carmelite Nun who burst in the door andproceeded to wallop the Selectman down the stairs…And Hizzoner’s Administration begat the New Land Company, headed by twin politician brothers Jeb and WadeGranson (Coarse louts, both, not beloved at any local tavern. One of them once raped a girl, though it was neverproven which one…)And the New Land Company, and the Ehrend Foundry, both begat an influx of labourers from New York, andpoints East, which in turn begat new growth in the areas of…
 Ad infinitum, Ad Nauseam, Ad Aeternum, Ad Ardua Per Astra…
All just a web of random, mutant growth thatwent nowhere without direction, without the…But I dare not speak of that yet.It’s all here in the logs. I’ll come back to it as I am able, follow the Niagara Trail of my words southward into theChautauqua Valley to the Canisteo Stream, which empties into the West Branch of the Susquehanna River where itmeets the Monongahela at the steaming caves north of here that gave us the name Rock Springs, the hot slippery juices of the earthquake fault under Town…There is so little time. Fly from the wrath to come. None of this is written. All of it simply
was.
It’s standing-room only on the
Titanic
at the End of Days, as the skies of all SpaceTime crack into pieces from the Future-Terminus backwards.But not for a few hundred more years in any time-track will that begin to be an issue. Until then, every Time, mySeven run after the Human Virus, the Crooked Man, Typhon Demarest… Hungry and desperate to throw him bodilythrough the two-second black hole of opportunity the luckiest of our Illegitimi troops of the Sacred City of Shang 2may singularly generate, in this endless war of temporal attrition that may never lead back home in Time for us.May. May. May. We may never get back home. In Time. All that’s been made mine to know, graven into myfrontbrain after bodily Death, before I start again with a new ancestral tele-skin at the moment of birth. (Damnedslow operating system, I know, but you get what you pay for...)
 
 ~None of this is written. All of it just
was
.I dream, I dream, I dream, this desolate dragon land in the dawn times, before the white man came, when eventhe Red People were new.I dream, I dream, I
dream
twenty-five square miles of the Allegheny Ridge of Appalachia, before even Romeherself rose on the banks of the Palatine.Back when the Old People, the tall people, the People of the First Snow, still spoke to the Red Man and Womanin dreams from their carven, fabulously crenellated sandstone tombs high atop the Mountain of Sorrows, on theBluff that to this very day oddly resembles the tip of a mighty pyramid sunken in the earth, too vast for human handsto claim…
3.)
None of this is written. All of it just
was
.On the eve of each New Year (the Monongahelas’ Feast of Ancestors) the local shaman and his ragtag-and-bobtail young torchbearer acolytes would don the masks they spent the whole rest of the year carving: burning andchipping them into fabulous shapes, staining them with the blood of gourds and maize and poke-berries, poisonsumac orange, the yellow of belladonna buttercup and alizarin crimson of deer’s blood thickened with the fat of thegreat black bear.Those masks, and the Feast-Day behind them, were the False Face Society acolytes’ one chance to cut loosefrom their solemn rounds at temple and barefoot-doctoring across the high passes, even unto Mohegan dwellings farin the North Woods, following the Pole Star!The Monongahela doctors and their acolytes were known by all Six Nations, up and down the war-roads of Penn’s Woods. Everyone needs to loosen their wig sometimes. Even them. Increase one’s responsibilities to thetribe, and the statement only grows more true. (That much about the Monongahela I have no problem understandingat all.)On New Years’ Eve, Old Crook-Staff and his wild boys of the False Face Society would drink until every starspun in two directions, then clamor at the deerhide-flap doors of any hogan they chose, and make merry, and swingfrom the sacred posts of the Long House.The False Face Society would piss on your fires, rut with your wives, tickle your kids out of bed to go raiseunholy hell, and generally make your life something you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy…Until you offered up something for the Dead, to turn like earth back into the light to feed the living.When you did that, when you stood upright before Death and offered part of yourself, Crook-Staff would call off his goblin brood, and peace would reign in the hogans for another year.To everything, a precedent. To Creation, Destruction, a time. None of this is written. All of it just
was
.The Monongahela Irrakwa (in that part of the world which came to be known as Callaight County, Pennsylvania,in the tongue of the Penn) left little record of themselves. FalseTime history from that FalseTime track speaks of anassimilation of the last dying remnants of that tribe into the Cherokee Nation in Andy Jackson’s time.FalseTime history calls the Monongahela a “lost” tribe, a decimation worthy of the Mayans in scope, if on amuch smaller geographical scale. FalseTime history is wind.The Monongahela were nomads, but they only migrated once more as a people after the white man came. Theywere visionaries, seers. The migration was a
diaspora
. They went down to their cousins’ lands to die.Before the white man came, that tribe of hunters, fisher-folk and herders once lived anywhere they felt likeroaming and building new temporary camps, from the Crossing of Three Rivers to the South-West of Penn’s Woods,far into the granite lands up North, and even all the way East to what came to be Lancaster on the Pike Road to theCity of Brotherly Love!In an earlier time, when they first came down from New England and Newfoundland and the nearly namelessnightmare countries close to the top of the world, the Monongahela found the giants’ ruins on the far west face of what will come to be known as Locke Mountain.
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