Judgement

by Fergus Bannon

  It would help a good deal if the damn thing could express by analogy, but it’s not good at that either. Everything in the Cosmos is a special case as far as it is concerned. That much I have learned.

  I don't think Verity can take much more.

  She had set out to change the world covertly and it had degenerated in to a shambles. Everything backfired, everything became worse. At last, in desperation at a world getting more and more out of control, she had gone public and got many more people killed in the process.

  At least the gloves are off now.

  Mankind is reacting predictably to Verity's benign despotism. Like fundamentalist Christians, who lived with the idea that God was constantly watching and judging, self-consciousness, paranoia and neurosis has gripped almost everyone. Some have rebelled, committing terrible acts of defiance against what they regard as unjustifiable interference in the affairs of mankind. Verity and I search such people down and dispose of them in clinically perfect mirror images of their own crimes. When you see what they have done … it makes it surprisingly easy.

  In fact I always want to do more, to cause them even more pain than they caused their victims. Of course that way lies tyranny. I have grown to appreciate the Cloud's constraints on killing.

  The media is still a problem. They have plenty of legitimate things to complain about. Economies are collapsing, chaos and anarchy break out sporadically. We don not stop them reporting that. The truth is something with which we cannot tamper. We only stop the lies. Plates in printing presses are easy to change from 4-space and it presents no problem to make sure the copy checkers get the unchanged version. Broadcasts can easily be overridden with stronger signals. People who tell lies have, by definition, something to hide. It is my pleasure to expose them.

  Deception still goes on as usual. Such petty dishonesties will take generations to breed out, if at all. But on the more macroscopic level, in governments and multinationals, there is new openness being bred though, admittedly, through fear.

  Verity still checks on me: I sometimes sense her looking over my shoulder, sharing the viewpoints of my Cloud sections. At first the checks were every few seconds, but now I suspect she leaves me for many minutes at a time. She is burning out. I think she will kill herself soon.

  Then I will take her place.

  This is a war against ourselves. Who would you prefer to wage it? Stallard? Durrell? Any politician? They are the ones who got us into this mess in the first place.

  The power I have would allow me to indulge in almost infinite savagery and cruelty. We have all done something to some other creature, something we would not like to have happen to us.

  But you see I am a wishy-washy, neurotic liberal. I am one of the few people who would not apply retribution indiscriminately.

  So be grateful.

  I have not got long. In two hundred years mankind will be granted a brief time-window into the consciousness of a God. I am going to make sure man will not be found wanting.

  I do not care what it takes.

  THE END