Next History: The Girl Who Hacked Tomorrow (45 page)

“Are you done?”

Tharcia nods, hopes she got everything. The amplified chanting outside the walls grows louder.

“Alright,” Lian says, ‘if I win, that is if thirty-four or more percent of people decide they want things just as they are, I take you with me immediately.”

Tharcia gulps. “Wait! Wait.”

“What?”

“I get to see my mom.”

“
Her again. Do you know what a bother that is?”

“Some Supreme Angel you turned out to be.”

“All right! Do you agree? Say it!”

Tears start down her cheeks. The winged monstrosity
with a beak full of wicked teeth looms over her. She’s thrown her destiny to the unknowable desires of eight billion people.

“Yes I agree
, Lian.”

“Our bargain is made. There remains the detail about the voting. Lylit will hand
le that. Everyone will go to sleep, all across the Earth. Her demons will visit each mortal in their dream state and evaluate their wish, for or against. Those who do not sleep will be forced to act out whatever their basic urges tell them. Their deepest drives will be projected as reality. For some it will be beautiful and enlightened. For others, well…”

Tharcia wipes her cheeks, fighting for composure. “How are we going to
warn everyone?”

“I will start right now.
We’ll see one another tomorrow, Tharcia. I look forward to collecting on our little wager.”

“Little wager? Thanks a lot you big
wetsock. It’s everything to me.”

Lian says nothing, reaches out a claw. Something appears in his grip, a lighted network of gracefully-formed glass tubes. He holds it across his chest. It flickers
to life in neon red and blue. She sees the word
Salvation.

A scraping-
tearing sound. Lian’s feet expand, sharp talons rip into the concrete walkways, widening and pressing outward. The winged lizard is growing. A rush of cold wind. Tharcia scampers backward looking up at the misshapen thing as it stretches taller. Still growing, his head is 100 feet above the Pentagon’s top floors.

“I can see the Kennedy memorial from here,” Lian
remarks. His voice has a
basso
boom. The reptilian monstrosity balloons skyward. A whirling wind blows into the space as Lian’s enormous bulk diverts the breeze off the Potomac. Tharcia is afraid his enormous feet will crush her, they now occupy most of the courtyard, pushing before them a tide of shattered concrete and splintered trees.

Pressed
against the inner windows of A-ring, head tilted back, Tharcia can’t see Lian’s face, it is hidden above the curve of his massive chest. In her view are the towering pillars of scaly legs and between them a fat and wicked curved penis, a dangling hairy nutsack the size of an In-n-Out. She shivers.
Eternity with that? Oh whoopdee. Maybe Lylit will visit me every thousand years.

“Lian can you hear me?”

From hundreds of feet in the air, the massive voice booms out over the countryside, “I’m sending you home now. We’ll talk after the Sleep.”

“But Lian we haven’t…”

Tharcia stands on her porch in pink pajamas with cartoon panda bears, the exact spot she occupied when Lian first carried her away. She runs to her room and grabs her laptop, her tablet, her phone. A quick mirror check confirms that Vardøger is still with her. On the couch legs tucked under, Tharcia uses her phone, her laptop, checks her Facebook page, her Twitter feed, flips channels on WebTV, searches YouTube. She is alarmed at the many images of her with Lian, the videos, the hundreds of disgusting trash-o-rama articles. While she works, she speaks a name.

“Vardøger?”

“Yes, Peach Buns?”

“Good, we don’t need a mirror.”

“You perceive correctly.”

“What do you think will happen?”

Laughter like a toilet flush echoes within a husk of hardened flesh. “You have fucked the pooch big time, Sugar Bitch.” There is a new snarl in the little demon’s tone.

“Indeed,” she says absently. “Then tell me, what will happen to you?”

“I’m applying for the job as your massage therapist, Creampie.”

Tharcia ignores him and continues her frantic search. Every news source
depicts a single image, an aerial view of the Pentagon, an enormous winged form projecting from the center. Breathless commentators and news anchors relay voice traffic from military sources, confirming that the being who’s occupied the Pentagon courtyard for the last five days has grown abruptly to a height estimated at over six hundred feet. One aerial view from high above, a suspected Air Force drone downlink, shows the shadow cast from the huge figure stretching out toward the Pentagon helipad. The shadow finally fits. A wild tweet-blizzard flashes the image around the world:
The Devil at natural size.

T
he tweet-storm, blogs and texts follow the revelation with questions about the lighted sign the winged lizard holds. As of that moment, every web search anywhere around the world, for any imaginable term, brings back a single result, nine thousand million replicates of a single web page, a view of Lian in scales and wings standing tall amid the Pentagon, holding a flashing neon sign.

For Salvation Click Here

The many images on televisions, phones, tablets, laptops, music players and public news monitors, on every electronic device anywhere on the planet that can display a web page, are the same. When Internet viewers around the world click the bright lettering, up pops a brief explanation, a short list of dos and don’ts. Tharcia, like billions of others, clicks and reads:

Dear Human
ity;

This evening at six PM Eastern Standard Time, every person on Earth will go to sleep for 24 hours. Take yourself to a convenient place and prepare to sleep. You will be safe if you do this.

As you ready yourselves for sleep, think on this question: Are your immediate wants more important than the destiny of all life on Earth? Your dreams will do the rest.

Large ships and other vessels must be at anchor or on automatic control. All aircraft must be on the ground. This includes all military flights, all remotely piloted craft. Planes in the air will not be safe if their pilots are awake during this time. Manned spacecraft and orbiting vehicles must be on automatic control or risk destruction.

Some of you may choose to remain awake. if you do, this is your fate:

There will be escalating mass hallucinations.
Deep instinctual drives will become reality. Desires, needs and fears within every waking person will rise up in unimagined ways. Sleepers will not be affected. If you choose to stay awake, you’ll have to deal with it.

I cannot be destroyed by your weapons. You risk hurting only yourselves.

The future is entirely up to you, as it has always been. You are participating in a shared decision about your planet’s collective destiny.

Best of luck, I hope it all works out for you.

Your Pal,

Lian

Tharcia’s phone goes. She looks at the name. Doesn’t want to talk just yet. Starts flipping through her voice messages, listens to several, deletes many, the hostile, accusing, fearful ones.
There’s a sweet and rather intriguing text from Althea, telling her to expect a white horse and a near-death experience. More surprising, a text from FBI Special Agent Stephanie Willits hints that a coffee date would be very welcome. Willits has some personal questions, no guns and badges involved. A text from Charlene, her pickup date of last week, suggesting that Tharcia dig a very deep hole and pull it in after her. Many texts from a variety of haters who have found a new target for their fearful rants. Delete, delete, delete.

Deleting
her way farther back in time, she finds texts and voice messages from the priest, that nice Father Tilton. She sits back and listens.

Towering 600 feet above the Pentagon, Lian’s red-rimmed eyes take in the sweep of Chesapeake Bay. At his feet the Potomac river flows southward to the Bay and onward to the sparkling Atlantic. Fires burn out of control at many locations in the population centers
, where street riots ebb and flow. Smoke lingers among bare trees in the wintry air. To Lian’s right the measured headstones of Arlington National Cemetery, and beyond that, halfway to the Great Lakes, the aimless scar that glaciers followed on their southward journey twelve thousand years ago.

Around Lian,
at five locations near the pentagram that imprisons him, clusters of antlike, terrified priests hurl their voices upward through powerful loudspeakers.

“Ecce crucem Domini.”
The words reverberate as rhythm-trance from the Pentagon walls. The chanting ceases, echoes fade. Each tiny priest kneels, one hand atop the head. In unison, the robed men sprinkle from canteens their holy water upon the ground. A single amplified voice rises up from below.

“What is your name?” The convocation
echoes the amplified words.

“Call me Lian.” The
basso
voice, in English, rolls across miles of countryside, echoes up into the cities and towns, down the Bay and out to sea.

At the first sound of the enormous voice, s
everal priests break and run. One of the RockMeBaby tour buses takes off, pursued by a straggle of robed figures. At that moment, a Volkswagen mini-bus bearing five Hindu priests pulls up. They get out and start chanting aloud the
Bhagavata Purana
, the Story of Krishna.

Head tilted back to view the enormous beast, the Chicago Archbishop speaks clearly and resolutely into his microphone. “Are you alone or are others with you here?”

“It’s only me,” Lian admits. “And the entire human race.” The voice echoes from the paved parking lot and stone building walls.

The Archbishop persists. “When did you enter the Earth?”

Lian strokes scaly chin with taloned claw. “It was definitely pre-humanity. I’d have to say four billion years ago. Plus.”

Several priests
gather around the Archbishop, hurriedly consulting between Lian’s echoing replies.

“Are we seeing this? Or is it illusion?”

“An enormously tall winged dragon or lizard.”

“How did he appear?”

“He grew out of the Pentagon.”

“The same one who’s been in there
all week.”

“Are we having a psychotic vision?”

“No.”

“No we are not.”

“It plays back on my phone.”

“Will the Earth accept that she is possessed?”

“What does that neon sign say?”

“We have prayed to God and to our Lord Jesus Christ. The Devil is a presence in
Mother Earth. Therefore he must be cast out.”

The discussion is long and heated. At last the Archbishop
turns to his microphone, looks up. “Are you prepared to free those you now hold captive?”

“I hold no one captive. Humanity is captive to the ego alone.”

The discussion around the Archbishop heats up again. Far back in the crowd, Father Gary Tilton’s phone rings. His heart lurches to see the name his smartphone serves up.
Goddess Culture
.

“Hello, Miss Tharcia?”

“Father Tilton, this is Tharcia Harrison.”

“Can you speak louder? Really noisy here.” Tilton walks hurriedly away from the loudspeakers. From 2700 miles away, Tharcia hears
a familiar voice in her phone.

“
Who just said that? Where are you?”

“I am at the Pentagon. Satan is here. Truly here. What can you tell me about his
presence?”

“Father Tilton. I was there until a short time ago.”

“What? Please speak up, the noise…”

G
radually, with repetitions for crowd noise and pauses for Lian’s booming replies, Tharcia makes clear to the priest what is coming.

“It’s on the Internet. Have you looked?”

“No.”

“Look now! The world is being asked to vote.”

“Hang on.” Tilton finds a web browser on his phone, quickly locates the page, clicks on Lian’s neon sign, reads. Yelling at the top of his voice, he runs to the podium where the Archbishop recites liturgy into his microphone. Shows the page to the cadre of clustered priests, digs his way through.

“Father, I have the girl on the phone. Satan’s
Goddess Culture
companion. She wants to talk to him.”

The Archbishop gazes at Tilton in
disgust. “She is unclean. We cannot…”

In vehement fury
Lian throws down a ringing cascade of words, as of massive steel plates upon the earth. “
I absolutely detest that unclean remark!
” Many of the priests duck involuntarily.

“It is all a mistake,” Tilton yells. “She was duped into it by lesser demons! She can make him talk sense
!”