Yes, son. You read that right. In the !@#$ing brains, several !@#$ing times, with very big !@#$ing guns.
Of course, we had to shoot him in the brains with very big !@#$ing guns because the clone that SQUASH had made of him was something like 500 feet tall, macrocephalic, and really !@#$ing bad tempered. And we didn't really have time to try and reason with it, and appeal to what little remained of its better nature, because Ben Franklin, who'd accompanied us for "science" (to get !@#$ing laid in Vegas at Christmastime) had decided to shoot it in the junk with that giant electric rifle he used to tote around "just in case," once it became clear that it was stomping down the Strip to smash casinos for Communism.
Yeah, that was one !@#$ of a weekend. I'm not even going to get into what we did with those robot Playboy Bunnies Hefner talked us into talking along for the ride. But the good news is that, after a few shots in the right place, and a few really quick actions to minimize fallout, we not only saved most of Las Vegas, but Christmas as well. And everyone had a !@#$ing good time.
Some more than others.
"Live hard until you die, die well and then you fly," Morrison sang to me the next day, after I came into his penthouse suite and simply marveled at the levels of !@#$ing excess he and Ben Franklin had cobbled together in the day since we'd all parted company.
I thought I could get into some !@#$ing !@#$, son, but those two had me beaten pants down.
And looking at Jim, sitting there and smiling at what he'd wrought, just for !@#$ing laughs, and my somewhat horrified reaction to it, a little piece of me knew that someday soon I was going to be standing over his gravesite, pouring a bottle of good wine down into the freshly-dug Earth and wishing him well on his journey.
He never could stick around long, apparently. And while I didn't always want to believe it, given how well we worked together, at times like that I just !@#$ing knew.
So now, here on some alternate Earth we haven't even !@#$ing cataloged yet, in what might be their year Three !@#$ing Billion and a half or some such, he's serving me flute after flute of what he claims is wine fermented from grapes digested and !@#$ out by !@#$ing dinosaurs, and we're flying up above some fantastic but highly !@#$ing dangerous anti-city on a hover platform that looks an awful lot like something from some crazy-!@#$, 80's science fiction magazine cover, and trying not to spill our !@#$ing drinks as the anti-city's defenses try and shoot us the !@#$ down.
"Dance on the fire, (REDACTED)," he says, not even worried by all the flame and hot metal that's trying to bring us down: "It's not even trying, today. It knows, man. It knows."
And yeah, I guess it !@#$ing does. The Sun's been stuck in the same place in the sky for the last six hours, the cracked and crumbling moon's gotten closer since I got here, and the "adellites" are falling down to Earth, their sorry and sad sales pitches for things I've never !@#$ing heard of turning to multicolored sparks on the way down.
The music's just about over, here, son. This old and crazy world is about to die.
And the Lizard King's the one who gets to turn out the lights.
* * *
Okay, son -- you !@#$ing got all of that?
No? Well, back the !@#$ hover platform up a bit. This one's a !@#$ing doozy.
A day or so ago, I went into the deserts North of Choibalsan to get good and mind-!@#$ingly drunk, after receiving the worst news I could have ever gotten. But instead of being able to have that skull!@#$ing go according to plan, It gets !@#$ing crashed by Mongolian Shamans intent on letting my recent ghosts give me a !@#$ing pep-talk. And once I've dealt with a few of the usual suspects, the free-floating ghost of the Dragon comes along, and tells me some things that even I had no !@#$ing idea about.
And, one amazing !@#$ing bout of long-overdue ghost-sex later, I wake up here, at the !@#$-end of time on some parallel world I've never !@#$ing heard of, and here's my old buddy, Jim Morrison, just waiting for me.
Well, back that up a bit, though. It's not actually Jim Morrison, son. It's the idea of Jim Morrison, or what he stands for, or what he's always here to do.
He's walked a thousand different worlds, in a thousand different times, being a hero, or a villain, or whatever that reality needs to get itself back to !@#$ing normal, again. And then, when his job's done, he shuffles off that mortal coil, the better to take another face from the ancient gallery, and walk on down the hall.
The last time I knew him, as Jim Morrison, he was... well, we covered that already. And he died in a !@#$ing bathtub in Paris, his body essentially falling apart from all the !@#$ing, godlike abuses he'd heaped on it in his short but highly eventful time as a two-fisted, spell-slinging, psychic band-aid for the 60's.
And in that bathtub, as he lay dying of a stupid !@#$ing overdose (of all the stupid !@#$ing ways for someone as great and powerful as him to die) Jim looked across the worlds, and saw some small boy with eyes like fire looking back at him, wondering what the !@#$ he was seeing, and why someone would ever let themselves get that run-down.
So Jim smiled, breathed his last, and let go and became God. And so he became that boy, who is this man, here, who's come to meet me and take me on the mother of all mystery rides.
His real name's a string of DNA sequence codes and some honorifics, but he prefers to be called by the title his people have given him. Here, in this time and place, Jim Morrison's become the man they call More, on account of his being able to see, do, and ultimately be more than what's commonly expected, much less !@#$ing allowed, of people in this time.
And today, More's ability to work beyond those barriers is going to enable him to directly affect this world's future as it teeters on the edge of apocalypse.
As for why, or how, he hasn't quite explained that yet. He hasn't even made his mind up whether he's going to save it or destroy it, yet, and the way he laughs about it I think he kind of digs that.
Oddly enough, after a few flutes of this dinosaur poop wine, I'm !@#$ing digging it, too.
No? Well, back the !@#$ hover platform up a bit. This one's a !@#$ing doozy.
A day or so ago, I went into the deserts North of Choibalsan to get good and mind-!@#$ingly drunk, after receiving the worst news I could have ever gotten. But instead of being able to have that skull!@#$ing go according to plan, It gets !@#$ing crashed by Mongolian Shamans intent on letting my recent ghosts give me a !@#$ing pep-talk. And once I've dealt with a few of the usual suspects, the free-floating ghost of the Dragon comes along, and tells me some things that even I had no !@#$ing idea about.
And, one amazing !@#$ing bout of long-overdue ghost-sex later, I wake up here, at the !@#$-end of time on some parallel world I've never !@#$ing heard of, and here's my old buddy, Jim Morrison, just waiting for me.
Well, back that up a bit, though. It's not actually Jim Morrison, son. It's the idea of Jim Morrison, or what he stands for, or what he's always here to do.
He's walked a thousand different worlds, in a thousand different times, being a hero, or a villain, or whatever that reality needs to get itself back to !@#$ing normal, again. And then, when his job's done, he shuffles off that mortal coil, the better to take another face from the ancient gallery, and walk on down the hall.
The last time I knew him, as Jim Morrison, he was... well, we covered that already. And he died in a !@#$ing bathtub in Paris, his body essentially falling apart from all the !@#$ing, godlike abuses he'd heaped on it in his short but highly eventful time as a two-fisted, spell-slinging, psychic band-aid for the 60's.
And in that bathtub, as he lay dying of a stupid !@#$ing overdose (of all the stupid !@#$ing ways for someone as great and powerful as him to die) Jim looked across the worlds, and saw some small boy with eyes like fire looking back at him, wondering what the !@#$ he was seeing, and why someone would ever let themselves get that run-down.
So Jim smiled, breathed his last, and let go and became God. And so he became that boy, who is this man, here, who's come to meet me and take me on the mother of all mystery rides.
His real name's a string of DNA sequence codes and some honorifics, but he prefers to be called by the title his people have given him. Here, in this time and place, Jim Morrison's become the man they call More, on account of his being able to see, do, and ultimately be more than what's commonly expected, much less !@#$ing allowed, of people in this time.
And today, More's ability to work beyond those barriers is going to enable him to directly affect this world's future as it teeters on the edge of apocalypse.
As for why, or how, he hasn't quite explained that yet. He hasn't even made his mind up whether he's going to save it or destroy it, yet, and the way he laughs about it I think he kind of digs that.
Oddly enough, after a few flutes of this dinosaur poop wine, I'm !@#$ing digging it, too.
* * *
So the story is this, more or less.
They know it's the year three billion and something, but they don't !@#$ing know what happened before about five thousand years ago, apart from weird-!@#$, contradictory histories from religious texts that read like really !@#$py science fiction novels. However, in spite of all the contradictions and crazy bull!@#$, they understand that the Singularity is what always winds up !@#$ing killing them.
What's the Singularity? Jesus, son, don't you !@#$ing read anything but funny books?
The Singularity is the point where we seamlessly mesh with our machines, to the point where no one can really !@#$ing say where we end and they begin. It's the age of self-generating Artificial Intelligences with souls, and backup copies of your mind. It's when we can turn ourselves into streams of data and beam ourselves out into space, or back or forth in !@#$ing time. Total cybernetics, effortless telepresence, and nanotech that's lightyears ahead of where we are now.
In other words, it's when the whole of Humanity finally becomes !@#$ing immortal. And apparently we just can't handle that !@#$ without going ape!@#$, blowing ourselves up, and destroying civilization as we know it.
So, in this time and place, humanity has been harshly limited. Amazing levels of technology provide an easy, carefree life for all people, anywhere, and they're kept endlessly amused with an endless !@#$ing sea of intelligent distractions. But no one's allowed to invent anything new, or come up with any new concepts, or even make up new !@#$ing words or turns or phrase, because that might lead back to the day when humanity reaches too !@#$ far and dooms itself with the wrong invention.
Now, I think I hear you getting it, son, but just to be sure? More is the one man who's dared to stand against the Multitude, which enforces the Code of Stability. He sneaks into people's lives and gives them little ideas, and then teaches them how to make it seem as though they haven't actually had the idea, or else it's been there all along. Either that or he plays with reality while the Change Police aren't looking, and then skips away before they can do anything, other than answer for the fact that the world took another step closer to One O'clock on the Doomsday Machine.
And best of all? His work is done almost entirely on the spiritual plane, through magic, which transcends the need for computers and cybernetics altogether. He's taught entire cities to leave their bodies and play in the astrals, and the fact that some cities do better than others is sometimes attributable to the fact that he taught them to make their own !@#$ luck.
Unfortunately, things have occurred that he either didn't see coming, or didn't move fast enough to avoid.
The first problem is the sprouting of the Anti-Cities. Remember when I said that humanity was beaming itself out into space? Well, some of those Electronauts finally made the return trip back, and returned to a world that didn't match what they'd left. Faced with the wrath of the Change Police, they elected to take over the high-tech facilities of the cities they returned to, and turned them into massive processing plants, keen to take all their inhabitants and transform them into the sort of people the Electronauts left behind.
Thankfully, the Change Police pulled out some of their forbidden technology, allowing the cities to throw up EM shields to keep Electronauts out. But now you've got giant, carnivorous Anti-Cities marching across the landscape, seeking to dock with other cities and spread their antiquated and illegal way of life.
And no, son, the fact that most people, in spite of the crushing grey philosophy of the Multitude, are actually happy with what Stability brings them, means abso!@#$inglutely nothing to the Anti-Cities. They're wanting to make Earth the way it was when they left it, and too bad if the cattle doesn't want to become hamburgers.
I looked down at the one we flew over, not long ago. It looked like paradise for people who think 80's sci fi role playing games were the best thing ever, but I really didn't like the screaming of the soon-to-be-converted.
(Call me !@#$ing old fashioned, but I figure techno-immortality should be a matter of personal choice.)
The second problem? Well, you remember how I said that the Sun had stopped moving, and the Moon was getting closer? Well, funny !@#$ story, apparently. For some reason known only to Null, the great grey and motionless god of the Multitude, Earth has stopped spinning and the Moon is about to crash into it.
The good news is that the cities are advanced enough to keep their populations alive indefinitely, even if the world becomes a !@#$ed-up ecological mess. The bad news is that the Moon's impact will effectively crack the planet in half, and will wipe out all life, even the cities.
Worse news? Unlike the Anti-Cities, which have their own, intriguing and forbidden forms of energy collection, the cities cannot move. They are literally rooted to the ground, as they're tapping heat from the core. So they can't go !@#$ing anywhere but sideways, and then to pieces, when the moon hits.
And as for the third, well... you know how they always said Jesus would return just when we needed him most? Well, word from where Israel used to be has it that a certain presence has re-appeared, there, and is calling out to his sheep to return to the fold.
Oh, and apparently this isn't the nice hippie Jesus we all read about in Sunday School. While the religious texts aren't quite so clear about this world's Christ, word has it that he took that flaming sword talk pretty !@#$ literally.
Put it this way, son. He didn't run the moneychangers out of the Temple. He whipped the people up into a mob and had them rip them limb from limb. Then he put their still-living heads at the bottom of the temple's staircase, and made them beg forgiveness to all they'd wronged for three days and nights.
Yeah.
So saying that More's got a lot on his !@#$ing plate, right now, is putting it !@#$ing mildly. But here he is, ferrying me back to his desert hideaway, and preparing to help me with my !@#$ing problems for some weird-!@#$ reason.
And isn't that just like him? I swear he'd pause in a !@#$ fight just to find beauty in a cloud, or discover some poem buried in the back of his head. Such is the way of warrior poet magicians, I guess.
And hopefully he's got some more of this fine !@#$ing wine, because I think I'm going to need a truckload to get through this !@#$.
(SPYGOD is listening to When The Music's Over (The Doors) and having some... er, what was that !@#$, again?)
And isn't that just like him? I swear he'd pause in a !@#$ fight just to find beauty in a cloud, or discover some poem buried in the back of his head. Such is the way of warrior poet magicians, I guess.
And hopefully he's got some more of this fine !@#$ing wine, because I think I'm going to need a truckload to get through this !@#$.
(SPYGOD is listening to When The Music's Over (The Doors) and having some... er, what was that !@#$, again?)
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