Sanction

by Roman McClay

  “Won’t the aqua regia melt the walls and floor?” Blax asked.

  “No, it’s titanium sheathing all the way around; cost $1.1 million to install and it’s what will allow me to steal their gold. If they had stuck with drywall I’d be fucked. The gold is the only thing that will melt,” he said with a smile.

  “It must be nice being that smart,” Blax said and shook his head.

  “It’s not bad.”

  “Ok, so in,” Blax calculated the days, “so March; in March we go?”

  “Yes,” Isaiah confirmed.

  “Ok, and how do we get all that fluid out?”

  “So, you’ll have four tankers line up on Delaware and run 4” line down into the sewer and pump the fluid,” Isaiah began as he was interrupted.

  “The corrosive and the dissolved gold?”

  “Exactly, and the potency of it will be attenuated by 70% by the next day, and it will take four hours to drain it at 10,000 gallons an hour. Each truck is there one hour then pulls away and sets up the next one. Nobody will even know, we do it on a Sunday. It will be easy.”

  “Then what?” Blax asked.

  “Then you drive those tankers back to Lot 45 .”

  “Really?”

  “Really. And then we can evaporate the fluid and reconstitute the gold,” Isaiah said.

  “What,” he paused, “how much is?” He asked this without actually finishing the sentence.

  “$80 billion at current prices. That will rise and fall; mostly rise.”

  “Fuckity fuck fuck,” he said. “Dude, between the first growths, the art, the Marbles and this, we own like 1 trillion in assets, fungible assets,” Blax said.

  “Yeah, really $3.45 trillion, and climbing,” Isaiah said.

  “That makes us a country,” Blax said.

  “Richer than every country except Japan, Indian, Germany, China and the US. Yeah, we’re the sixth largest country by volume,” he said with a laugh that seemed genuine and rare for Isaiah. Blax was happy for him; he was happy for them all.

  “And the best part is not the money, it’s how pissed off everyone is. You should see their faces Blax,” Isaiah said.

  “Yeah, well, I’d rather not see their faces. And are we just going to leave the wine on Madeira or bring it back to you underground bunker? ”

  “Yeah, it was there just in case,” Isaiah said.

  “In case of?”

  “Well, that place heats up to 130 degree each day if the HVAC isn’t working. It’s a Deadman’s Switch to cook that Bordeaux wine and turn it into Madeira if they fucked with us. But, that was before I had the facility here built, so now I can move it. You wanna have the Jacks do it so you can plan this gold caper?” Isaiah asked.

  “Yeah I’ll send Jack Four. And what was up with the Christie’s job?”

  “Don’t ask. I’m trying to find those cars now,” Isaiah said.

  “Do you have this whole thing planned out 100 years in advance, or do you just see shit each day and go, oh, I could do that ?” Blax asked.

  “I’m not sure I know the exact difference between the two,” Isaiah said with a head tilt that made Blax laugh so hard Isaiah had to turn the volume to his audio-cortex down a bit.

  32. Bishop to King 7

  Bishop to King Seven

  Do Robots Dream of Electric Sheep? [Dick, Phillip K]

  Nothing is more revolting than the majority; for it consist of the few vigorous predecessors, of knaves who accommodate themselves, of weak people who assimilate themselves and the mass that toddles after them with not knowing in the least what it wants

  Interviews [Goethe, Johann Wolfgang]

  It is likely enough that, rooted in the woods of France and Norway, there were growing trees, when that sufferer was put to death, already marked by the Woodsman, Fate, to come down and be sawn into boards

  A Tale of Two Cities [Dickens, Charles]

  I. 2020 e.v.

  She awoke and looked around. The bed was empty of both Sarah and her Governor and she smiled as she gave him that name each morning now reflexively. She smelled the starfighters first, so piquant and unmistakable in the room above the din of the street. She laid there and felt her belly and wondered if maybe something had taken hold. She had been off birth control for 8-weeks now and felt so much better; as his semen had absorbed into her over the weeks; as she ovulated and as she had bled.

  She sat up realizing it was her birthday and saw on her vanity the flowers in a matte black rectangular vase and the black envelope leaned up against it with her name written -in his large hand- in grey ink that looked -from her location in the bed- still wet.

  She rose and walked to it and sat down in her Victorian chair he had purchased from the estate of Ms. Evans down the street when they had visited its black and purple gothic museum on Bannock St, and she had posed at the large John Van Range -out of Cincinnati- cast iron stove.

  The envelope was sealed just at the widow’s peak and she smelled it and it smelled like his breath on her neck. Her finger broke it and inside was heavy stock paper -in antique white- with hand written prose of just four lines:

  And she, named Rachel too, was the ship rebuked by Ahab and left to

  ​ Her halting course and winding, woeful way, and did plainly see that the ship

  ​ That she was swept with spray and remained without comfort . Oh, She was

  ​ Rachel indeed.

  God he was so cryptic , she thought, and one never knew if his compliments and declarations of love were baleful or if his woe was as full of love as it could handle; and thus what over flowed was just sad on account of his inability to feel anything simply or singly or straight forward at all. But she loved it and loved him and held the card to her chest and breathed deep the flowers’ effluvium and the words sank into her breasts like ships foundering at sea.

  She hoped her feeling was right, she had never been a mother before, but men just know things they say, man things ; and she felt women knew woman things too.

  She had dreamed, she just realized; and the dream was from her enteric nervous system not her brain proper. She had dreamt in the womb and yet only knew this now and had not known it then, in the dream, in the night. She was unsure of how to articulate it, but unwavering in her knowledge of what had occurred.

  She sat in the chair and closed her eyes -feeling sleepy again- and let the recall of the somnambulism replay in her inner visual and haptic field; her motor cortex taken off-line, her hands covering her naked belly, and she made no attempt to brush her black hair away, as some strands stuck to her cheek and brow.

  She drifted back to sleep in the chair in the light of the Governor’s mansion, as the piquancy of the lilies seemed to thread through her like needle and silk in the mouths of small birds. Image and word followed:

  The voice of man is what brought the light of the dawn; and she was with child and the child was asking -with her thoughts- to be allowed to hear too what the man said. Turn in a retrograde manner mother, 22 and one third degrees, so I may hear the voice that brings forth the light, the child in her said as the aubergine light from under the world allowed her to see that she was sitting on wood shavings. The thin chips were filling in the gaps like mortar between flat and hewn stones.

  She did as the babe wanted and turned to her left that many degrees and the child’s ear pressed up against her womb and she cupped her own hands around the spot to help catch the radio waves of the man:

  “The Author is my lode-star; but I cannot tell yet if I am God to his rebellion, he as Lucifer the bringer of light -rebuked and vitiated in some way by what only the aggrieved can truly know- or if I am Eve in the garden, naïve and improved by Satan’s asp and staff, his Caduceus path; not overtaken by the black wrath innate to all want and wont of knowledge but merely made aware of not just the Tree but its shadow cast. Am I wary of the things that lurk in the unlit place but relieved by its shade?

  “Worse still am I the Adam, receiving second hand advice from the Source bet
ween myself and God? Can I trust anything I see and hear?

  “Even if I never sort this out, I also remain in doubt about the placement of The Author’s own white stones along not merely the individual path, but along the longer, wider, deeper trench of all human events. I stare at 1851 the way generals must when staring straight into the sun searching for which place the rays come from; and where they may land.

  “When I listen that’s where I place the firing of the cosmic gun; and see its ballistic ball landing eight years later in 1859 with Darwin’s, Origin of the Species . As black and bleak as was The Author swaddled in his Calvinist hues, inside His Heart Had Burst, I say that as a man who can hear the echoes of that Huge Organ’s thump crescendo with each word from Loomings begun. I have stethoscope I suppose …

  “The Author’s friend, Hawthorn, said of him that he was too honest & noble to either Believe or Not Believe and he was rent in two and two again because of this. Annihilation was what he had resigned himself to as he, as they, sat on the beach in Britannia, as it eroded there to the cool sea.

  “I guess I cannot help but see him walking the gangway to the Pequod with his Savage Self, Queequeg half Ishmael and Ishmael half Queequeg again, the warnings of Isaiah, the silver splinter of the lamentation that the soul is a sort of a 5th wheel to a wagon, binding the two as they cleave from the hollow courtesy of Christianity.

  “His afterword to Hawthorn of the English beach seems apt, but redundant, confirmation of what we all knew to be lost as the Pequod both shipped off -on Christmas day no less- and when it handed itself into the jaws of the Universal Cannibalism of the sea.

  “Milton gave us the Student of Revenge to justify the ways of God to men. Satan’s rationale was smart and logical and full of reliable pride in general manhood like Steelkilt of the Town-Ho. But, Ahab , oh, my captain my captain , was The Author’s attempt to justify the ways of noble rebellion of man to God and this is wholly different than the arch-angel’s logic and impertinence. Ahab was hard in his self-critique and soft in his insolence; he was offering God a second chance; a redemption they -both he and God- knew God could not accept.

  “The Psychiatrist felt Christ was God’s apology for Job . The Author thought that was not nearly enough, and that God ought show penitence for saddling all man with the sanction earned by Adam alone.

  “I think it was there, just as one wee drop paralleled Ahab’s livid scar and fell into the Great Pacific, that The Author poisoned the eternal waters for all mankind. The last fluid thing in him flew out just as Hurricane Eyes fling out vapors and condescending rains that occlude their 5 category sights.

  “There is no way for me to know if this was the first shot in a Hot War, the shooting war with God, but with incomplete knowledge in tatters and my instinct intact I trace the first report -muzzle loader blast or mere olive branch epistle- to that goddamn book, Moby Dick . A curse on me, a curse on us all; one we’ll all be lucky to outrun.

  “The Philosopher lamented that the earth -even its watery part, its two-thirds- contained not enough brine to wash away all the blood from this meteor of the war; the death of this apologia of Christ.”

  As Rachel squinted to hold the man’s light steady, careful not to drink too much in, she had funneled those words into her daughter’s ear, as the other one pointed toward mama’s deepest parts. The day had reached a blue noon as the man stopped speaking, and the ground appeared unchanged out in all four directions, until she saw landmarks of tracks and pawprints and feathers laid out in a trail. A low stone wall ringed them and it was darkest where holes opened in the Maginot line, and so she lifted her eyes above it and listened as the baby ask for silence to think .

  Where the air rushed in to fill the void where the man’s words had been, she awoke and did not know how much time had passed. She tried to look at the light of day, of real life now. It gave no answer. She ignored her instinct to look at the clock, or at her phone. She ignored too the copy of the book -on the vanity- that had commandeered all her dreams as of late. It sat there, Prussian blue and white hot, and the leaves bent at one corner. She didn’t even think of from where it had come or why it was antagonizing her so.

  Rachel knew that each child, her child and all children from her, would have to choose between man’s innate contradiction as a eusocial species: align one’s conscience with the tribe or break away from it in one’s heart.

  Both are natural and both rebellions; and both are each man’s one and only choice. Does man follow man’s law or God’s Law, and how does he know which book to read from with his daylight eyes or nighttime spies as trustworthy Fedallah or not? Fedallah did tell the truth, she thought, most forget that; it was Ahab who took the wrong meaning from those true words, words designed to be misunderstood by the haughty and gleaned only by those penitent and upright in their propitiations.

  There is no right answer , she knew, there is only a failure to choose or the bold acceptance of one’s fate from within, a voluntary movement toward what was always true, what is true for the sun is false for the light, what is false for the moon is true for the night , her babe said to her through the amniotic fluid like whale songs and clicks 120 seconds apart.

  Her child would choose boldly, and this including the bravery to choose to align with the tribe; for too often the rebel is applauded for her bravery, she thought, when it takes more guts to stand with the group . Like all phenomena, rebellion must never be more than a few percent of the whole; this is the law of God, only one of the arch-angels did rebel, one of the original eight.

  This was 12 ½ % and that number seemed right to her. She had heard her Governor mention such a number before. She couldn’t remember its meaning, but it sat in her belly like a warm stone with an egg of the black wolf laid upon its red-feathers and she told the baby to study it and only feed it once it had broken free from the shell and the rock had cooled to the touch. The babe nodded and spoke through the fluid again: This is the time of war, and from it will be a new understanding of what war is; not just what is to be fought over, but what fighting itself means to each side.

  Rachel took the babe’s wisdom and held it in her throat as she drifted back into a hypnogogic state in the chair and she smelled the starfighters again as if for the first time that day, smiling inside with a flat affect of face, a life inside and death walking apace.

  II. 2033 e.v.

  Isaiah had built a new algorithm based on the parasite Dicrocoelium dendriticum that he had watch infect ants. The parasite infects the brain and causes the ants to crawl -against all usual instinct- higher and higher up the blades of this their fields, their leaves of grass, as the daily ant chores were done and night time propitiations to the gods could begin.

  The ants had eaten the slime from snails who had been the original host of the lancet flukes, irritating the throat making snails cough up the goods. Ants loved this slime, and gobbled it up, where the flukes then moved from the guts of some small percentage of the ants into the central nervous system that quite literally takes over the brain’s desiderata.

  The fungus controls the brains of ants and turns them into zombies with the desire to climb up and up and howl at the moon in the crepuscular light of evening until dawn. As night falls, the infected ants break ranks and return not to the hive. They religiously climb to the apex of their manifold blades of green grass. Isaiah had found this beautiful and haunting and had built an algorithm to mimic it right away.

  He watched as the human herders let their sheep graze into night; the ewes came and munched away in the fields of the New Zealand island between Christchurch and the town of Pleasant Point . The sheep gobbled up the ascendant eusocial ant, and with a belly full of these red and black soldiers and height seekers, and those that climb out on the prow of their ship, the parasite began to work on its real target: the CNS of the sheep.

  Any ant not eaten by daybreak returns to work for the day, normal and productive and part of the division of labor again. But as night falls, and it cools, and
the parasite activates genes that code for desire, the ants again follow their calling and crawl to the top of new blades of spire & minaret grasses to offer the muezzin to the mutton-to-be.

  Isaiah, least of all, thought the parasite knew what it was doing in this 3-step process of survival. It didn’t know it was manipulating the snail to cough it up in a tasty inviting Trojan -horse slime, no way did it comprehend that it would whisper in the ant-mind’s ear to make it thus strive to such heights, nor did it know how it had achieved the perfect locale of the ewe as it reproduced in the grassy sack of its belly making itself the perfect choice for the next generation of snails.

  It just did; it just was.

  And this worked and it was genius and as complex as anything none out of 10 men ever tried. It was as -or more- complex than the inmate’s own simple strategy as the inmate would eagerly admit , Isaiah thought.

  But, like the parasite, the inmate had caused tumblers in a 3-digit lock to open; the first digit by instinct alone; the second, the result of the method of the first, unknown and unknowable to the man. The third was the universe’s -and Isaiah as its agent- he thought, both humbled by his mere role in a much larger plan and buoyed by the fact that he was likely the only one that could perform such an act.

  At any rate, he built the algorithm biologically from the genome of the dendriticum and the carpenter ant, and modified it with CRISPR and the Cas-1 apparatchiks, adding a dash of ophiocordyceps unilateralis. Thus the ingested parasite gave whomever swallowed this fly a yearning to climb down into the heat and anarchy of the southern latitudes; and within 72 hours they’d be dead from the lethal infection Isaiah had annealed to the parasite making them first sick then consume their own fluids in an autoimmune boiling reaching fevers of 110 degrees or higher.

  They would first feel -as northern temps lowered at night, as they do in Colorado, as the sun drops and temperatures can cleave as much as in half- the desire to return home; a feeling as pronounced as the ants who felt the desire to climb & climb to the towel of Babel in each blade of antipodes grass. He smiled thinking of this, this nuance, and detail that would never be appreciated by those it most benefitted, just as all nature spins around in a whirl of complexity no creature can comprehend.