A wretched clockwork city of the damned, where angry faces spit syllabic invocations of ancient curses. I saunter down sideways streets toward vanished blessed houses. I fall sick and Doctor Baker attends me. I hear him talking to my new guide, Amu, out in the other room.
“I think Stevenson should be consulted,” he’s telling him. “The patient has gone rogue.”
As soon as he leaves I’m calling Amu in and saying, “Get me a real doctor! The guy’s a quack.”
“He’s very knowledgeable,” Amu counters. “He’s good, I tell ya.”
“Yeah, he’s got a great writing arm.”

Another doctor is consulted and the verdict is piles. I’m bed-bound for several days and then the infection clears up and I’m back on my feet, ready to fight the sea serpents that have emerged.
There was an endless parade of parties, some designed by my faction to draw out our enemies. We had an aborted fetus celebration, the little bastards hanging from the ceiling by nooses. The Creationists turned out to a person and protested. They tried to bomb the place but there was a sting set up by another agent and the plot was foiled by the corrupt police department.

And now it’s the old time religious hour, with aging ministers prying for money in televised wankery.
“The prophets died for sins that were not even of their own blood. And now three hundred have died in fiery car crash in big city highway roundabout.
“Man is a an ibid, a sinkhole. Jack off ghosts whisper in ears, ramrod straight. We hope that you understand the severity of what we propose here.
“Step right up boys and girls, ladies and germs, and take a spin on the all knowing all loving singing and dancing cry of innocence. Only eight dollars to a head, twenty-six pietas to the raging hard on built of enemy installations.
“They say shoot your way to freedom, intravenous and orgasmic, but they are riding high times of forgotten half life double doses. We stretch em and flay em, peel the skin back off the sinner and you get a red man. Red through and through, communism being a form of atheism. We reach back to former times of plague and resistance, when sinners sought to take the stone. Well we’ve beaten them back only so far, they’ve existed against us for millennia now and we have to take steps.

"What I propose to you is that sinners are the blight and drain on society and that a lawless culture is their ultimate goal. There is a faction out there dedicated to truth at the expense of spiritual understanding. We are doing all in our power to break them of their cursed dogma but they are rebellious to the truth, the real truth. Faith is a weapon used to determine the destination of your soul.
“We pay lip service to respect of other religions but I think we all know that is wrong. Our true feelings lie against them, not for them. Truth is truth and faith is faith. Truth and faith have no place side by side because faith is truth and truth is not faith. There is the way and the light, there is what can and can not be seen. We are committed to a principle of faith in action.
“So when we say that suicide bombers are to be expected of lesser religions, we only reconfirm our faith. Because age is long and telling and our age predates most things in this world. But there is a maker, you see?”
There is a cry of agreement from the gallery.
“We have to wipe out the unbelievers. We will not use suicide bombers, we will use faith. Faith aided by technology, the very thing they’ve promoted their whole life. Fitting justice sealed by faith.”

But this is interrupted when a faction overtakes the television station and begins broadcasting their own program at gunpoint. I can’t place who they are, possibly even one of my own group.
“The one and only Son of God was a cheap carnie hustler. He demeaned himself daily by performing these so-called miracles, these wretched abortions of God’s natural order. And I ask you, did God make a cripple just so his son could cure him? And, if not, was his son fucking up the natural order of things?
“Jesus saves us all from bugger all. He can cure the clap with one hand on the crotch, that’s a power worth having in a society of whoredom and unpassaged afterbirths. What they don’t know is that Jesus was a firm believer in drugs as a mind expansion gateway. Or they know and aren’t telling because of the danger that their followers will see through their lies. I ask you, when you learned Santa Claus is not real, did it occur to you that other people may tell lies for their own purposes?
“And I knew Jesus then, oh yes, a cheap impersonator spreading his own sickly breed of insanity in atavistic antipathy. Loved the people? Like fuck. Hated the people. Hung with whores and beggars, thieves and violent persons. Did he love them? He loved everyone enough to die for no one. We don’t believe in Jesus because he loves us, we believe in him because he cures us. He gives us hope. Well no man is an island and hope is for other people.
“Wasteland times of violent rum runners. We don’t worship anything because we are loved. We’re constantly handed shit on a platter and told to love it. So we pray. And God has the divine plan in which he’s dedicated the next millennias to follow his path. Everything’s planned. This means that he will not change anything. Why are you praying? You’re imposing on God by asking him to change his plan. I say death to anyone that prays on the grounds that you’re pissing God off.

“Not that we believe in God. We see him as a symbol for all that’s gone wrong with the world. More people killed in his name than by anything else in this world and yet you say he loves everyone. He’s a millennia old father figure that has created a special place of pain and torture to send anyone that doesn’t follow the ten rules laid out by some cult leader thousands of years ago and he’s ready to send you to this place to burn for all eternity. But he loves you.”
And then we’re on another person and he’s shouting out: “Buddha? God damn food addict! Why, that fat fuck has been preaching the beauty of freedom from desiring while eating with six hands at once. Eats his own fat after a while. We’re talking complete metabolic shut down. Turns around in a room full of junkies and starts criticizing their addictions while feeding his own. Says to them, ‘Don’t you understand? I know the way to inner peace.’
And the people line up in shell shock, operational exhaustion, all downing pints of raw ether and walking on raindrop post-natal foreign shores.

“Now Shiva and Vishnu and Ganesh and all the others are sitting around one day comparing number of arms and elephant trunks when they hit on the idea of using cows for their own purposes. We make cows sacred and then nobody eats them, they’re thinking. No one wants to eat them because they know six ways to kill a man with one touch. This is their line of reasoning and they sweeten it by saying that you’ll come back over and over until it’s all taken care of. New life forms, new areas of expansion, mental and physical. Imagine, having the crushing weight of a cow.
“Vishnu says to Ganesh, ‘You seen my keys? I had them when I drove out to the lake with the kids. Maybe I left them in the car but damned if I’m gonna swim down to the bottom and fish them out.’ That’s the mindset of these leaders. And they’ve got Vishnu strapped to a cart, Jesus complex taking the form of the cow, as it were, and he’s saying, ‘I can’t pull this thing, it’s too much.’ And they shoot right back at him, ‘You’d be surprised what you can do when you’re being flogged.’

“Now Taoism is not a creation myth at all but a whole belief system built on an examination of right and wrong as concepts. I submit to you that beliefs are outdated, antiquated, useless. A whole belief system and for what? To be a moral person? Is that the American way? If you don’t like to pay taxes, you revolt and win your freedom. If you don’t want to do the work, you just steal a person and make them work for no money. Makes you the richest and most powerful institution in history and everyone looks to you with shining waves of admiration.
“Belief systems are not all religions are. They are creation myths because people are afraid of thinking that everything developed over time. As Buddha once said, “He ain’t drunk, he’s just Irish.’
No fucking class to anything anymore, bunch of junkie wasters making their own rulebook then breaking every single item in it. But what do you do? You turn back time and say that everything will get better? Do you, fucking Christ, you move onward. Onward towards the abolition of marriage, the destruction of church and state. An anarchic revelry. Sprawling mess. Imagine no laws in the city, all the buildings remaining. Would we lose our sense of decency? I ask you, ‘What sense of decency?!’

“And don’t even bring up Mohammed. Mohammed’s a prat dealer of smut. They say the Titanic sank because it’s rudder left no turning capability. Well, let me tell you about Mohammed. If he’d built the Titanic there would have been no rudder because he would have set up the iceberg to be in the way. He was set on everything. He loves the fact that there’s death and destruction everywhere. What do you expect from someone that preaches covering the female form?
“He was made up by the people of Mecca to attract visitors. Imagine him sitting there making his Surrahs. ‘I believe now I’ll whack out the unbelievers. Sure, we’ll call them infidels. Christians do it, you believe what they believe or you’re against them. Jesus, the lout. Reproduced as non-Arabic to degrade us, can’t even claim him as one of our own anymore because that’s a white person religion.’ Mohammed throws back his drink and says, ‘I think we’ll outlaw this drinking too. Expands the mind and causes euphoria.’
“You understand what he’s saying. Euphoria must be dished out in small doses, always with the suggestion that you have to thank your ruler for whatever little happiness you have, just like in feudalism. The extra sensory attention of a distressed eight year old, that minute before Stevenson cuts out the intestinal track to use as a party decoration. It is the large plate of shit you eat daily that is meant to prove there is a creator. You’re supposed to be thankful for that, like there’s something great about living a mundane and pious life. You’re the donkey and that’s the carrot and the stick is your faith.

“Well we say there’s a new father figure in town and has been for some two hundred years. The great corporation, the masters of the universe. They have all the power and all the money. They’re competing with churches for your business, promising almost the same thing the churches promise. Let’s examine the similarities and the disparities. Church says this life may be shit but there’s the beautiful afterlife that will provide all you’ve ever wanted. We can come back to that subject later. What I want to tell you about corporate promises is that they say ‘Your life is shit now because you don’t own this wonderful accessory or furnishing.’ Maybe you even pray to God to own this piece so that you can be happy. And we’ve already discussed praying. What’s praying accomplish?

“Now, as I was saying earlier, the afterlife must be full of fucking and drug use and drinking and all the other things that you’re not supposed to do in this life. These are the pleasurable activities of our life and we’re refraining from them to get into this mystical other world where we’ll be happy. It follows that doing these things will make us happy so obviously that’s what we’re working with now. Heaven is the place where you can shit on a person’s chest and say, ‘Thank you, Lord.’
“Facts are hard to come by in religion because science has no place in it. Religion was created as a substitute for science in those dark times before science was conceived of. And it follows that there is not a single reason that anyone should believe a fucking word religion says now that science has explained everything. “That is why we must rely on fact above all else. That is why we must, without doubt, destroy belief systems along with the creation myths. Everything is permitted, all moments will be imbued with authority. Destroy everything, every vestige of the life we know and lead. Become new, become reborn. Born again in science and anarchy. So throw out God with the stomach tuck and Buddha with the Mohammed aftertaste and we will crush those in our way with no remorse because EVERYTHING IS PERMITTED.”