Modeled on the successful businesses of earlier evangelists such as Benny Hinn and Oral Roberts he integrated cutting-edge video technology and was one of the first to use television and the Internet to allow shut-ins to participate in services. This alone separated him from others who were not as visionary as he.
By partnering with commercial banks, he was able to obtain large lines of credit which he capitalized by making shrewd investments in the stock market. Passarelli was astute at identifying trends in spite of what the popular media was feeding to the unwashed masses.
He instinctively was able to find opportunities whereby he could quadruple his investment with moderate risk.
As a result of his success, he attracted many followers both religious and secular in nature.
An astoundingly handsome and charismatic man he had no trouble in bedding whichever woman took his fancy. He was fond of telling potential bedmates that there was no forgiveness without sin. He was able to convince them that it was never too soon to serve God on their knees.
His peccadilloes did cause him some concern early on in the formation of his ministries. But Passarelli took a lesson from the Bible and surrounded himself with devout, serious men who shared his vision.
Passarelli always traveled in the company of these 12 men. He named this inner circle his Disciples, not without a sense of irony. All of the men had come to him with various degrees of personal difficulties and travails, in which he was able to assist and turn to his favor. His Disciples owed him deep debts, and continuously watched over him and his activities. Any potential enemies were quickly identified and routed.
Investigative reporters were given boilerplate interview questions. Paparazzi were detained and their cameras and film confiscated or destroyed. If any of the women Passarelli entertained even hinted at exposing their union, they would be given an option of settling for a token amount, a sinecure position in the organization or would quietly be convinced that it would be in their best interest to not inform anyone else of what had happened.
Dr. Giovanni Passarelli had managed to extend the reach of the organization globally and had a fleet of private jets and helicopters at his disposal. The ministry was the technical owner of these assets; there was also ownership of oil wells, movie theaters, and three television stations, as well as other real estate, and also a yacht.
The ministries employed a platoon of lawyers and accountants to justify the expenditures and cash flow of the business. As a legitimate religious organization taxes were nonexistent. This allowed the rapid growth of the treasury for the ministry.
In spite of the advantages given to him Dr. Passarelli would still make a point of endowing chairs for universities, providing scholarships to disadvantaged youths, organizing and running summer camps for the inner-city children and opening halfway houses for wayward women.
All of this was carefully orchestrated and publicized with the most positive spin allowable to put the actions of the ministry and Dr. Passarelli in the best light possible.
Passarelli’s generosity and charitable giving did not go unnoticed by the leaders of other world religions and he was regularly invited to participate in all manner of ecclesiastical summits. He had published original works that he claimed proved the sticky dogmatic points at which the ministry diverged from other religions.
His research was impeccable, documented in all the major journals and substantiated by other authors, whom, of course, were subsidized by the ministry.
In the year leading up to the Earth and The Wave intersecting, Passarelli had been on a mission to expand and improve internal educational opportunities for promising individuals within the organization.
He was trying to develop a cadre of driven and motivated people who would not question their directives to perform certain duties. Working carefully with several psychiatrists and behavioral scientists, Dr. Passarelli had come upon a method of indoctrination that allowed certain of his employees the opportunity to put past demons to rest.
The initial program was tested at a maximum security prison near Lompoc, California. Many of the worst inmates were exposed to the program with varying degrees of success. The ones who completed the program in its entirety were given partial pardons as a condition of their participation. They then were brought into the ministry, where they were given specific instructions and sent on proselytizing missions to other prisons.
The success rate was not high. Only about 18% of the prisoners who participated in the program matriculated. But the results from this group were outstanding.
*****
The psychiatric conditioning produced nearly total obedience. It did not matter if the individuals were even put in harms’ way, they were able to repress their own feelings and emotions in order to obey and complete any mission given to them.
Dr. Passarelli chuckled to himself as he thought of how much such a system was worth to the militaries of the world, or to major corporations.
Of course, many of the prisoners were irretrievably damaged to the point of insanity. This did not concern Passarelli overtly, as most of the participants had been relegated to ignoble ends because of their sociopathic tendencies. It was this perspective that allowed him to rest easy with any perceived amoral or immoral actions.
Dr. Giovanni Passarelli had been asked by the Pope to graciously lend his presence to a conference of Cardinals in Rome. After consulting with the disciples and clearing his schedule he had decided to attend. He had asked two female members of the congregation to accompany him. They were excited and flattered to be asked along on such an important mission, and eagerly accepted his offer.
After assuring that his wife was comfortably ensconced at the Rome Cavalieri Waldorf Astoria, he made arrangements for the two women to occupy an equally lush apartment a short distance away from the proceedings.
Passarelli made sure that his wife well cared for and chaperoned on her many shopping trips and sightseeing tours of the city and surrounding environs.
Now, he was able to concentrate all his efforts on the seduction of the two women. This quickly bore fruit, and he entertained them for two weeks while ostensibly at the conference.
He sent a subordinate disciple in his place, with apologies to the Pope, with specific instructions as to what he expected. Points of discussion were returned to him, where he would fire off additional clarification and guidance.
He would then give orders that subordinates would explore and investigate salient points of these arguments, providing citations and substantiating religious viewpoints to cement his position.
All the while he reveled in the sensual pleasures to be found in fucking two women at the same time.
Assuring them that their efforts would be rewarded in the next life as well as this one, he descended upon them as a wolf upon sheep. The depths of his depraved behavior knew no bounds, but the women participated regardless.
At the end of the conference, he had accomplished his goals.
*****
The next morning, Dr. Giovanni Passarelli was sitting at a café. He was enjoying an espresso, listening to the gurgle of the requisite stone fountain with its putti, and watching the pigeons come and go on their endless mission seeking seeds and crumbs.
He was just reminiscing on the debauched activities of the prior evening when he noticed a strange shimmering in the sky.
He paused mid-sip, the small cup of espresso poised before his moist lips.
The sound of the fountain and the pigeons cooing had ceased.
He saw from the corner of his eyes as the people began to change.
For several minutes, he was paralyzed, unable to move or speak or even breathe.
He thought he might have been suffering a stroke. But he was completely aware of his surroundings, and shortly was able to move from the table.
As he stood up and walked away, he barely had left the area when a car crashed into the place where he had been sitting only scant moments earlier.
The car
smashed into the side of the building and he noticed there was no driver.
Suddenly, a dozen more accidents happen as cars careened wildly out of control all over the Plaza. He ducked inside a building and decided he would take the opportunity to visit the water closet.
He was relieving himself when he suddenly noticed that the scar on his left hand that he had received when still a young boy had vanished. He stared closely at the hand moving it and turning it.
He inadvertently pissed along the wall next to the urinal, leaving a wet line.
He was not sure what to make of the realization that the scar he had gotten from cutting his hand on a piece of glass was no longer there.
Realizing that he had backed away from the urinal, he felt embarrassed and moved over to the sink to wash himself off.
He looked in the mirror and was shocked to see his face staring back at him. It was the face of a young man.
He was so startled he dropped the ornate glass container of soap and it shattered. He reached up and felt the edges of his face with his hands, rubbing and pinching at the skin.
He stood there, his fly agape, with his penis still sticking out of his pants. He noticed he was alone in the restroom.
He quickly straightened himself out, tucked in his shirt, and re-tied his tie. He exited the bathroom and was met with a scene straight out of Dante’s Inferno.
There was pandemonium everywhere. People were running to and fro not understanding why their loved ones had either disappeared or changed appearance in front of them.
There were an inordinate amount of teenagers and children, and very few adults. Yet the children and adolescents were apparently acting in a manner completely unlike individuals of those ages.
A bus suddenly smashed through the intersection taking out several cars in its path.
A young girl turned to look and was run over by a delivery truck in which a small boy futilely tried to reach the brake pedals. Her body tumbled 3 times and came to rest against the side of the fountain. The truck smashed into the fountain, breaking it. The girl’s sightless eyes stared up at the sky, as the water from the broken fountain sprayed her face and mingled with the blood oozing from her head.
Passarelli saw a huge jet aircraft plummet to the ground only a short distance away. An enormous explosion blew up three buildings on the north end of the Plaza. He began to run across the Plaza, towards the subways.
He saw mounds of clothing, shoes, purses and other accessories, bicycles that were lying on the ground next to empty suits and other things of which he could not make sense. He felt panicked and ran as if the devil were chasing him, ducking into a church. He moved to the front and knelt at the altar in front of a crucifix.
Now he was praying as he had never prayed before in his life for God to give him some sense, some perspective, some manner of clue as to what in the hell was going on outside. He did not know what had happened to him, but he knew that he was biologically at least 40 years younger. He could think clearly and understood intellectually that he was still alive and seemed to be healthy and in no danger. But he could not wrap his head around the concept that this had happened so suddenly and with no warning. “It must be the Rapture,” he thought.
He racked his brain for some indication in all the readings of all the religious texts to which he had been exposed for some precedent as to what had occurred. He mentally catalogued and reviewed each of the particular Scriptures and holy books, from the Gnostic texts, the Judeo-Christian Bibles, to the Zoroastrian scrolls and teachings.
He was a relatively learned man in the ways of religious dogma, and scoured his knowledge base of Confucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism and even many of the pagan rites to try to ascertain any possible correlation between what he had experienced in past events.
But Dr. Giovanna Passarelli was entirely ignorant of any connection between the prodigious writings of long-dead scholars and the current events in which he was an unwilling participant.
In the church, he had what he felt was an epiphany. He realized that all of the information at his disposal ill prepared him for dealing with the reality that he now faced.
Coming to grips with this realization, at the foot of an enormous crucifix of Jesus Christ, Passarelli sensed Divine intervention in his life. He was flooded with insight, and fell prostrate, crying and asking forgiveness. Huge sobs wracked his body, and he spoke in tongues, a violent shaking seizing him.
Passarelli arched his back, and his head and feet were the only points touching the floor of the ancient church. The light flooding in through the stained-glass windows painted weird mosaics of color on his face. Almost in a seizure of ecstasy he screamed. Collapsing from exhaustion at the exertions that he had unexpectedly experienced, he went unconscious.
*****
Dr. Giovanni Passarelli lay in the church for almost 10 hours undisturbed. No priest or nun came to his aid, and, in fact, no passersby saw him lying at the foot of the altar.
He twitched fitfully, dreaming of the devil, the fires of Hell, of being pushed off a cliff into a lake of lava, of feeling his brains explode out his ears and his eyes pop from the heat. He saw angels driving spears into his body and then ripping it to shreds with chains. An enormous white light judged him and found him wanting. He wailed in dismay and shame, humiliated in the eyes of God. He begged forgiveness, felt himself falling again across an immense gulf of space and time. He saw the birth of the Universe, not as a big bang, but as the excretion of some unknown Cyclopean creature with tentacles all over its face, and wings of hardened leather.
Satan himself took an ax and slammed it hard onto the top of his head splitting him in two. His greasy entrails slid down his legs and pooled into a slimy mess into which his eyes dropped. He could feel rats gnawing his brains, and worms eating his innards.
Then, a hundred naked women appeared and began to urinate and defecate over his corpse. Each one was more beautiful than the next. They would do their terrible business on him and then turn into hideous fat hags, with boils and sores covering their bodies.
They stuck their arms into each other’s mouths and vomited all over the festering, hacked up sack of meat that was all that was left of him.
Then they began to laugh and point at him.
They made disparaging remarks and comments about his penis size, his lack of intelligence, the fact that he was a loser, his appearance, that he had no money and would never amount to anything. They told him he would never ever again feel the touch or warmth of a woman and was incapable of love. They accused him of having relations with children, of drowning kittens, of slaughtering animals, and of bestial acts of total degradation.
To his chagrin, he could not deny a single accusation. His tongue had been cut out and rammed into his rectum. He could taste the inside of his sphincter.
It tasted like Death.
Another bright white light encompassed him, and this one was comforting. He suddenly realized that he had a choice. He could go with this light into eternal peace, or he could return to the festering decayed refuse that he had been.
Dr. Giovanni Passarelli opened his eyes and screamed into the darkness.
*****
MOJAVE CALIFORNIA, SPACEPORT USA – FIVE WEEKS POST WAVE
Sir Richard Branson sat in the left seat of Spaceship Seven. The modified carrier aircraft White Knight III was almost to the launch point, at fifty thousand feet AGL.
He had not felt this alive for decades.
Branson laughed out loud, from the sheer joy of being a young, vital man again, and at the absurd turn of events that had shorn forty hard and fast years from his frame.
He had a renewed sense of purpose.
And, he had now a great mission ahead of him – to rescue the love of his life from certain death.
What more could any man ask?
His eyes scanned the glass cockpit readouts of his creation.
All the readouts were nominal.
The copilot, who was used to Sir Richard’s
occasional bursts of eccentricity, rolled his eyes a bit at the laughing man sitting next to him in the cockpit of their spaceship.
Sir Richard spoke to Miss Moneypenny, the onboard AI of Spaceship Seven:
“Miss Moneypenny, please engage start sequence. Authorization Code is “VIRGIN””, he said, smiling. The voice recognition software would prevent anyone else from using that particular code word, but his ego and vanity demanded he pursue its logical path.
Subsequent to his having been affected by The Wave, Sir Richard had a relatively tedious time of convincing the AI that he was indeed, himself.
The program had continuously balked at his younger-sounding voice, on certain phrases.
He finally decided to simply reprogram the pertinent areas.
While parsing the lines of code, he identified that a snippet of Chinese malware code had made it into Moneypenny, through its inclusion as part of a Mandarin Chinese translation API.
“That’s what comes of taking shortcuts,” he muttered to himself.
After fixing the code, he impishly added a line that could serve as a canary if a similar event occurred. He had added a line from the animated series, “Mr. Wong”.
Now, if something happened, he would hear a message in Wong’s voice. He laughed, thinking it highly unlikely the AI would ever utter it.
“Sir Richard, sequence started. Launch in ten …nine…eight…seven..six”. As the AI counted down the seconds, an audio feed began on the ship’s speakers. Music streamed from the onboard NAS, and Peter Gabriel’s voice started to blast out of the sound system.
“Hot DAMN!” exclaimed Sir Richard. The monitors began feeding him all the pertinent flight data, intercept trajectory, and velocity information. His co-pilot braced herself as the automated systems continued their inexorable countdown to launch.
“Five…four… three… two…”
Peter Gabriel blasted from the speakers, reminding him about the electrocution of simians.
“One…ignition!”
*****
Spaceship Seven detached from White Knight III, and the rocket engines roared to life.
Terminal Reset Omnibus: The Coming of The Wave Page 22