ROBOTA- THE PROUD FLESH
‘’And except that the Lord hath shortened those days; no flesh shall be saved: but for the Elect’s sake, whom he hath chosen, he hath shortened the days.’’
-Mark 13:20
I
‘’There has emerged, it is apparent particularly within the ranks of Executioners who serve the Imperium in non-Prime Off World theatres but also among a coterie of Quantum Immortals who seem to covet personal political power, an unorthodox perspective on historical questions - this perspective is grounded in an arcane style of religious thought, and posits that the Third World War and the resultant megacide of over one billion human beings was ordained by mystical causes or fates, presumably wrought by a supreme being who saw fit to cleanse man’s dominions of regressive, dysgenic, and de-evolutionary features and tendencies by way of a massive and punctuated destructive event.
Consequently, a sort of inverted martyrdom is assigned to obscure figures within the political and military command and control structures of the combatant states of that singularly destructive conflict, premised upon the idea that the true motives and ambitions of these individuals were in fact guided by an extreme type of religiously driven, mission oriented purpose - and that in order to fulfill this aforementioned mission they successfully penetrated the technological and bureaucratic offices of the ancient states in which they lived for the exclusive purpose of acting opposite the stated goals of the ruling regimes; culminating in a conspiratorial program of annihilation of the existing global political structure by way of unrestrained planetary nuclear warfare that they themselves had carefully and deliberately instigated.’’
-Internal Memorandum, Bureau of Public Information, Terran Imperium. Autumn, 3005 AD.
LOCATION: F.O.A. POSEIDON, in orbit of TRITON
YEAR: 3033 A.D. (1050 A.W.D.)
DATE: NOVEMBER 9
On the 9th of November, 3033, ZARTAX was born under conditions of creative destruction. Victor Von Leers died to facilitate his birth on that date. Surgeon Minister Woldemar al-Husseini - whose imaginings and laborious expertise had facilitated the birth of ZARTAX - died by his own hand exactly nine years later; in delayed response to the consequences of unleashing ZARTAX upon his fellow man. LeMay Alexis Huber had commented on Husseini’s suicide, with a characteristically aloof disdain, that the Minister-Surgeons are a class of men who make a habit of avoiding emotional investment in human affairs to the point of callousness yet whom also tend towards a rather effeminate hysteria when forced to accept responsibility for acts, omissions, and executive decisions that entail consequences beyond the scope of their ordinary domain of responsibility.
Those who knew the sad, thoughtful Arab doctor vehemently disagreed with such a punitive assessment, yet they held their peace scrupulously. Taking exception to an opinion issued forth by Huber was not against the law, and technically it was not even insubordinate, it was however understood that indulging in that sort of sentimentality and tendency towards controversy was unacceptably similar to the grotesque and infantile customs that had eliminated philosophy and learned discourse from public and intellectual life, and that and was singularly characteristic of the decadence, rot, and concomitant tendency towards racial suicide that had extinguished high culture and meaningful human endeavor in the decades prior to Warday.
What is indisputable is that the grand ambition of Woldemar Mohamet al-Husseini was animated and given form by the weight of three millennia of collective human ambition. Thousands of years of man’s grandest designs and gravest mortal sins conspired to create ZARTAX. The cumulative weight of this historical phenomenon culminated in the events then developing as Woldemar al-Husseini, surgeon-officer of the Ministry of Surgery and Medicine, Directorate of Biomechanical Engineering, Epigenetics, and Applied Surgery, observed the broken body upon the levitating surgery platform before him.
The Surgeon was slightly aghast at the state of the subject. Not of course because he was susceptible to the ordinary shock that befalls uninitiated consciences upon seeing human bodies torn apart - be them pathetic mortal remnants savaged by seemingly impossible constellations of accidental wounds wrought by shrapnel or proximity to nuclear attack loci, or literally ripped into unrecognizable shavings of pulpy biomass by small arms flechette munitions of the sort utilized by Executioner platoons.
Not even those cases where the face of a beautiful young man or woman had been destroyed entirely via purposeful frenzy of hacking, slashing, and chewing at the hands, blades, and incisors of Terminals (as those in the final phase of space sickness were colloquially known by both men of caste as well as commoners) was adequate to overcome the psychic conditioning and therapeutic-eugenic selection which allowed every Ministry ordained surgeon to lead an inner life that was entirely devoid of frailties of emotion and intellect that might compromise his ability to realize mission objectives on grounds of exaggerated empathy, or disgust, or horror. Rather, Husseini was stupefied by the fact that the body before him was still alive and respirating unassisted.
The Arab surgeon was well aware, being intellectually curious as he was, coupled with the fact of his information clearance level in addition to the statutorily dictated competence demands of his profession, that genetically enhanced and engineered humans who exhibited a magnificent ability to recover from mortal injury were (although far from ubiquitous) not uncommon subjects for a Minister Surgeon to find himself standing over in a bomb-proofed underground surgery or a makeshift field hospital-morgue hastily constructed in some Off-World prefect slated for Zone Assault or quarantine due to military emergency or epidemic space sickness. This however was something entirely different. Husseini instinctively discerned it.
The broken martyr laid out on the cold table, his breathing as deep and steady as a well nourished infant’s or that of a long term coma victim, was delivered to Husseini’s examination table by a precise movement of the cold hand of destiny - an essential movement of physical matter that was a constituent element of an immutable constellation of causal variables and discrete effects; processes that cumulatively implemented an eternal historical process - a process that the augur-mystics, cloistered as they were in their Venusian sky-city arcologies, would identify as the willful hand of the Creator revealed in the conspiratorial designs and affairs of men. Woldemar Mohamet al-Husseini, for the first time since he was a small child, uttered a solemnly desperate and beseeching prayer - swearing atonement before a just yet jealous Creator and beggaring forgiveness and deliverance in virtually the same breath.
II
Victor was lost in what must have been a fever dream - crashing through frozen obstacles before tumbling down onto the agonizingly unforgiving permafrost. He was restrained neither by bonds nor paralysis. yet his back felt as if it were about to break. Every joint, each discrete point of insertion in his brutally powerful corpus was utterly inflamed with pain - desperate, searing, morbidly injurious pain. In the blind-yet-sighted dreamscape of his mind, he was thrashing madly forward, colliding with walls of glassine ice. Emerging bile from his esophageal opening spilled forth an evil taste, exacerbating an already irresistible reflex to wretch over and over again. Unable to swallow despite the torturous presence of what felt to be a bolus of mucosa in his upper throat added to the vile symphony of intolerable sensations.
There was no reprieve - not even momentarily. Every window-obelisk of crystalline frost that Victor smashed merely caused his nerve endings to mercilessly deliver a binary shock-spasm to further batter his system. Cursing, irrationally, the fact of his (eugenically cultivated) inherited genome and surgically and biochemically augmented physicality for precluding the possibility of passing out of consciousness due to shock, exhaustion or non-mortal injury, as he longed desperately for reprieve. His body cried out, singularly craving the synthetic beta-endorphins that he, and every other Zone Deployed Executioner, was addicted to from their first day as a Temple Novice.
Accompanying the physical agonies of endorphin withdrawal was the fear - a primitive, mortal terror; an unendurable sensation, augmented exponentially over dozens of nearly-doomed missions, buttressed by millions of seconds of punctuated horrors witnessed, made psychically lethal by the screams of a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand victims. Men and women flayed while conscious, scalped as their eyes -widened by coursing adrenaline - rolled back seemingly with the blade as it ripped into the hide covering their skulls. Boys and girls - barely into pubescence - their softest, most delicate orifices being brutally torn to raw shreds by the engorged proboscii of Terminals, relentlessly thrusting into their bodies with the fervor of a rage that only the mindless idiot-berzerker can muster.
A fleeting glimpse of purposefully suppressed memory - of aiming his battle rifle at the temple of a girl child - barely past infancy, her delicate yet cherubic hands pinned behind her back, bound at the wrists by concertina wire. Victor, the young virgin-executioner, bears witness as the bound and doomed child is bent over a makeshift barricade of human-corpse sandbags, brutally manipulated at the base of her ivory-white neck by an impossibly muscular Terminal. Victor endures rage and sorrow for the final time in his human life as the mirror of his dilated pupils reflect and frame the radiation sick, blood-drunk man beast positioning himself to violate the child from the rear while slashing her throat to facilitate climax.
Victor Von Leers, novice Executioner on his maiden Zone Assault - knowing the victim is doomed - prepares to spare the girl with the gift of death, delivered by a flechette that will penetrate her brain. She will die as purely as she lived. The flash of a tactical nuclear round and the scent of ozone and the sensation of heat upon the flesh of his face, despite being fully armoured in battle dress. The newly blooded killer-priest, the young God of death has not yet learned the icy detachment of his Apache and Aryan forebears; the aloof poise of the master-slayer that makes the Executioner a killer angel among ordinary mortals.
The armored and now blooded youth feels the firm but conciliatory hand of a brother executioner upon his shoulder as he regains his senses. His thumbs are whetted in gore, having been plunged into the eye sockets of the simian Terminal; the man-monster’s fate sealed when he continued to pursue coital assault upon the infant girl to whom an equally murderous, yet saintly, man-child delivered the gift of honorable death.
Deprived of the augmented capacity to suppress and sublimate an infinity-reel of atrocity, projected endlessly before the horizon of the mind’s eye, Victor’s inner constitution collapsed before the awesome and megalithic power of the Beast with a thousand faces. He trust back his powerful neck and silently screamed - only at that moment did the fallen Executioner come to realize that he was not asleep, nor was he awake and hunkered below ground level, enduring the blackness of Zone Assault upon a sunless battlescape, nor was he enduring the temporary blindness of exposure within a biotoxic battle theatre.
The realization of a new horror shocked him from the thrashing, desperate, and primitive trauma of endorphin withdrawal - Victor’s body was entirely broken and what he’d taken for the nitrogen ice layering the frozen ground of Triton was in fact the cold steel of a mortuary slab.
SEED OF CAIN - THE IMMORTAL HYDRA
’The number of different aspects that the face of a man has assumed may be taken almost as a physiognomical measure of his … genius.’’
-Otto Weinenger
‘“Serial killers do on a small scale what governments do on a large one. They [serial killers] are a product of our times and these are bloodthirsty times...You don’t understand me, you’re not expected to, you’re not capable of it...In the end, we all die and nothing really matters.”
-Richard Ramirez, the ‘Night Stalker’
I
’The phenomena that constitute what has come to be known - in scientific quarters as well as colloquially among all castes and classes -as ‘quantum immortality’ is in actuality no such thing. The assignation of floating signifiers, often obliquely related to esoteric topics of theoretical science, is a tendency born of conceptual biases - biases that emerged in the middle decades of the 21st century as the Third World War and its apocalyptic terrors remained in living memory; albeit as an aged pastiche of cataclysms, metaphors, and revelations.
The idea among learned men, in both government and scientific corridors, was to replace religious belief, and in so doing abolish the consuming and furious impulses that move men of faith to Jihad and myriad other modalities of pious cruelty, with a complete system of rational objectivity. Nevertheless, it was understood, then as now, that men and women, be them plebeian and vulgar or superior and exceptional, require edifying mythologies to accompany and give formative aesthetic qualities to ethical beliefs and systems.
Thus, early understanding of the potential of epigenetics and the realities and potential of the heritability of the discrete, individuated personal consciousness - and most significantly, the continued survival of such consciousness amid the death of a physical body, was imbued with a obfuscatory mysticism’’.
-QUANTUM IMMORTALITY, EUGENICS AND MILITARY TECHNOLOGY, Doctor-Professor Woldemar Mohamet al-Husseini, PhD, MD., 3017 AD
LOCATION: Chicago, Illinois, United States
YEAR: 1982 AD
DATE: SEPTEMBER 15 (WARDAY - 464 Days)
Bui Fang ‘’Billy’’ Wong contemplated the dried blood underneath his otherwise meticulously manicured fingernails. Billy was attentive to minutiae in ways that rendered him abnormal in relation to his fellow man. In fact, virtually every trait exhibited by Billy, be it as prosaic as a personal hygiene practice, an aesthetic preference, an eating habit, a manner of speech inflection or something as remarkable as the capacity to choke the life out of a perfect stranger, man, woman, or child (although Billy preferred women), with his powerful but gracile hands without a pang of remorse, was a testament to his abnormality.
Perhaps even more rarefied than his compulsive, if complex in motive, bloodlust was his mnemonist’s mind which, from the time he became fully literate at just under two years of age, facilitated his equally fervent compulsion to consume, analyze, interpret and remember with perfect recall massive volumes of data with such precision that those few people who had occasion to bear witness to Billy’s intellectual habits were prone to misidentify him as either a savant or, if they were intellectually primitive, some type of shaman-magician. Billy Wong was neither of these things.
Billy Wong was the son of a doomed Nung Chinese mercenary (whose destiny was to be unceremoniously slaughtered by teenaged executioners in the blindly zealous service of the Khmer Rouge), and a Montagnard woman-child who (much later in life, as she entered middle age in a land that was as strangely barbaric in its own way as the land of her birth), came to believe that Lucifer had been granted ingress to her body and to this world when she had been impregnated by Billy’s father, in all probability, so she reasoned, as punishment for the grave sins committed against God and man by the latter - Sins that cried to heaven for vengeance, sins so depraved that even the fact of Billy’s father meeting the Creator upon being blinded, castrated and skinned alive by the Red Khmer could not equate to sufficient atonement.
Billy, like his long suffering mother, was a refugee - afforded passage to a country that had identified and nurtured the killer instinct of his father and rendered it precise in the Godless manner that all successful Governments condition men in furtherance of their own perennial sins. Billy was an autodidact who had mastered the English language within three months of his arrival upon American soil at age fourteen - and in so doing had eradicated any nuance of an accent. Billy was a dropout who had left school at age sixteen despite having accomplished a perfect score on both of his college entrance exams.
Billy was an addict - he required heroin to live, if not physiologically than metaphysically; to find himself in withdrawal was to find himself cast into an actually tangible, as well as conceptual Hell. His existence was ordered, bound to, and defined by this never adequately satiated need. Billy was a slayer of women - his desire to possess a woman, to penetrate her, to experience her physicality and psychic traits in extremis completely, and ultimately to take her life and thereby own her - body and soul - for eternity: this was the only passion extant within the inner blackness of Billy’s mind that competed successfully with the voracious demands of his narcotic addiction.
Billy scraped the final dried remnants of reddish and ochre hued secretion from his left index fingernail with a poorly constructed folding buck knife that he’d shoplifted from a convenience store in Chinatown. A glossy, confederate flag decal was affixed off-center to the handle. Billy’s attention was singularly drawn to the saltire at the center of the standard - he had always been transfixed in a peculiar fashion by geometric shapes and representations; his mind incessantly tracing the symmetry, or lack thereof, of objects and organisms and the spatial relationships between them, as if he were taking notice of the limits of physical reality at all times and instinctively, unconsciously positing himself outside of such boundaries - imagining himself as without extended physical presence, representing an ethereal demonic essence, a death-god with the power to manipulate matter around him - to pass over or through concrete or steel to penetrate, crush, pulverize, slash or severe bone, tendon, flesh, ligament or cartilage.
It was moments such as those, when he felt he was emerging before a metaphysical vista that the cold and monolithic brutality of withdrawal sickness was most sharply and intolerably felt - it dragged him mercilessly from the radiant warmth of sanguinary mania and hurled him into a domain of suffering so absolute and unremitting that it overwhelmed the human imagination.
It defied reason to consider, as Minister-Surgeons often pedantically declared, that such a pure experience of pain could be generated merely by bioelectrical impulses and nervous system responses. Billy felt the early pangs of the ever familiar agony - sweat beads were slowly slithering between his shoulder blades, leaving a trail of what felt to be slimy frost in their wake. A strange tingling ache in and around his Adam’s apple jolted him slightly as he swallowed hard upon glimpsing his, haggard and Stygian in pallor, visage in the tarnished mirror abuting the sink over which he was wearily hunched.
The washroom of the Pal-Waukee Matinee Theatre was perpetually filthy and evil-smelling, but it offered Billy a warm and comforting familiarity, as well as practical safety - the theatre manager on duty had never once disturbed Billy when he was injecting himself with heroin (either to pre-emptively stave off or to deliver himself from the terrible sickness) in the privacy of the one toilet stall with a functioning, if flimsy, door lock). The theatre also constituted a convenient, and reliable, refuge on the not infrequent occasions that Billy had to recourse to pilfering merchandise from store shelves or making off with car stereo decks in order to fund his insatiable habit and he had reason to anticipate that one of the myriad police patrols may be casually seeking to take him into custody.
Regardless, Billy had commenced the habit of spending the hours from late morning, after procuring his daily fix, until the afternoons and early evenings taking in double-features at the Pal-Waukee.
The theatre was a grindhouse that specialized in slasher and Mondo features, while exhibiting an occasional foreign feature so as to preserve the fiction of the establishment as a venue for arthouse selections - Midwestern cultural preferences in the 20th century dictating that the taboo upon the exhibition of actual pornography (outside of the cloistered masturbation hubs of properly urban Rush street shops whose stock in trade was exclusively such material), the Pal-Waukee’s proprietor settled on slasher and vigilante-themed pictures as the most regularly featured weekday reels.
Of the currently featured movies, Billy’s favorite was Halloween II - in recent days, Billy had viewed the double bill of Halloween II and The Exterminator no fewer than four times; finding the former to be particularly stimulating on grounds of the relative verisimilitude of the depicted murder scenes coupled with the fact that the actresses in the aforementioned portrayals were frequently nude. In contrast, he often welcomed slipping into narcotic stupor by the time The Exterminator played following the intermission reel change - Billy did not find narrative portrayals of revenge driven violence to be cathartic - violence extricated from sex was an aesthetic nullity; something that appealed to vulgar dilletantes, in his estimation.
Billy considered himself an aesthete, a romantic, and a student of murder - the taking of life constituting a zenith of human experience, and something that could not be extricated from its self-contained merits. Any man who had the need to couch his bloodlust in a redemptive moral narrative or to extricate the act from underlying eroticism was a man utterly unworthy of the experience.
Billy had been eagerly anticipating what that evening would bring - anticipating the hunt as the credits for the production of Halloween II rolled to the gleefully saccharine strains of The Chordettes Mr. Sandman. Just as his arousal was burgeoning to the level requisite for preparation of the night’s activities, the sickness emerged furiously - it had arrived quickly and eagerly on this day, with a cruel urgency that was unusual. A genuine panic took hold as a sharp and unforgiving cramping laid siege to Billy’s guts.
On the occasions that he was too addled by the sickness to steal or otherwise prowl the streets in search of relief he would cloister himself in a corner abutting the kitchenette of his mother’s tiny apartment in Little Saigon. On such days his mother, due to a combination of abject fear of her son and abiding loyalty to her sole offspring, would lay out a bedroll and tend to him as he writhed and cried out in agony.
As he gripped his lower belly and faded in and out of momentary fever-dreams - visionary episodes in which Billy would endure a psychic journey consisting of terrifyingly bleak blue-white tundras, oceans of frozen nitrogen beneath alien skies dominated by Neptune’s rise, and these landscapes stalked by creatures more savage than himself opposed by machine-men - the exotically hybridized anatomy of whom for reasons not rationally explicable afflicted Billy with a desperate fear that caused him to whimper aloud and tremble.
It was during these moments that his mother - a primitive yet sublimely insightful woman who was capable of discerning phenomena that purportedly civilized peoples could no longer perceive - knowing as she did that the belly was the seat of the spirit-element within man and that dreams were the domain of the ethereal world beyond, visible only to the third eye - would burn incense and pray over her Luciferian son, appealing to Christ, the Father and the Blessed Virgin as well as the ancestral spirits invoked by the Shaman among her mountain-dwelling forebears, so as to ward off the evil that possessed her son and stalked her home like a Stygian fog upon the blackened water when Billy was present. Consciously unbeknownst to her, mankind severally would face judgment within months - although the historical purpose and resolution of the evil manifest in her progeny and bloodline would not be revealed for another thousand years.