"Only God is perfect," mutters Arioch to himself, making a deliberate error while completing a new edifice of bureaucratese.
The mistake leads to a loop of definition, a stopping problem, a semantic black hole that sucks all matter and energy out of the entire nation.
The cockroach civilisation that follows worships Arioch as a god.
Each morning Jeremy puts his suit on the outside and his hate on the inside. He finishes it off with a matching tie and drives to work, negotiating traffic, parking station attendants, passers-by and co-workers with quiet contempt and distaste.
The hate keeps him upright during the day. He recharges it with hateful meetings, hateful tasks and hateful corporate coffee. He never shares his hate - never lets it out, never explodes. He is saving up for a rainy day.
The problem is that each day, the hollowness inside Jeremy where he wears his hate grows a little larger. The hate's corrosive biliousness dissolves fine layer after layer of Jeremy.
Each evening he takes off his suit and tie, takes out his hate and puts it into his wardrobe for the next day. But what's left after the rigid, articulated, knife-edged, glittering hate has left him is limp, gelatinous, and all he can do is flop on the couch in front of the telly.
"You have to edit and recompile your source code for the next twelve months," the Hierarch told Arioch.
"I have source code?" Arioch asked, wincing inside. It never looked good to appear bewildered in front of the hierarchy.
"All minions must edit and recompile their source code so they are optimised for the due prosecution of corporate goals in the next work year."
"What are the corporate goals?"
"They are in your source code."
Arioch frowned. "...But I wasn't here at the last compile. I don't have them."
"Then create some in accordance with corporate goals."
"But I - Okay." Arioch was desperate for time to work out how to fake something. It was not as if anyone would ever look at the source code.
"By the end of today."
"Okay."
The Hierarch bustled off to harrass a stapler. Arioch looked over his collection of corporate manuals and found them big on profundities, short on procedures. "It's not even as if I know what language I'm compiled in," he muttered, reaching for the Pause/Break button at the back of his skull.
"What was I thinking?" she asks herself whenever she remembers last night.
So embarrassing.
He had been charming enough. They met in a supermarket queue. Attentive, humorous, modestly ostentatious. The gold filigrees embossed into his chitinous carapace advertised his trendoid edginess. His shopping trolley showed he ate healthy - frozen prawns, sambal oelek, potting mix, cloudy ammonia, cat food. He worked in advertising. He lived alone. He drove a Lexus. He asked her out for coffee.
Throwing her mother's advice about paracosmic horror to the interstellar winds, she had agreed.
The first clue that he could not be The One For Her was the bouquet of luscious long-stem shiitakes he gave her when they met at a cafe in town. Stubbornly undaunted, she wrestled down her disquiet over the following coffee and cake, and tried not to stare at the curious organs he used to ingest the contents of his cup and plate.
But the second clue was the attention he paid to the waiter. Or more properly, the waiter's shining brocade waistcoat. The glittering threads mesmerised him and he started to pulse colours in time with the reflections on the increasingly embarrassed waiter's torso.
The third, and final, clue was his offer to take her home to meet his hive queen on Pluto. He explained it would be necessary to extract her brain and place it into a cannister of transmundane metals that would keep it alive and moderately sane for the decades it would take to transport her there and back. He explained he had to take a trip home and wanted her company. When she demurred he confessed he had fallen in instant and impetuous love with her, and wanted nothing more than to unite their brains in mycophilous glory until Yog Sothoth Returns. He stretched a clawed tendril across the table to stroke her fingers.
She stormed out, leaving him to pay. What a creep! On a first date!
Fun guy from Yuggoth? No chance.
Having once misread a National Geographic article about mummies, Rory has been diligently preparing himself for eternity. His shirts smell of camphor, bitumen and nitre. His house is eclipsed by the shadow of the mastaba he paid the local scouts to build in his back yard. His ushabti stand ready.
Preparing himself for judgement and blessed Duat proved more difficult. In his garage, on the shelf at the back of his work area, are lined up the canopic jars Rory has filled with considerable effort and sacrifice. Modern tools are sharper than their ancient ancestors - Rory takes consolation in that.
Rory lies on the table he has added to his work area. A bright overhead light and a mirror on a cantilevered arm reflect a bright pool of light on his face. He contemplates the sharpened hook he needs to use to fill the last of the jars. A bowl containing a fresh poultice of sawdust, camphor and bitumen sits on a stand nearby. It will be an additional blessing to have clean sinuses, Rory reflects as he adjusts the mirror to show him his nostril.
Back in the house, Rory's gold and white linen clad high priestess Susan adds kohl to her eyelids with a fine brush. She hopes once Rory has finished mucking about with his mummification in the garage, he'll have the time to fix the tiles in the shower stall.
After sunset the hunched shadows ride their bicycles home. They're easily seen against the dun and dark azure of the sky; they're almost invisible against the shadow of the ground. They shine little lights fore and aft to cast themselves. It would be a tragedy for a shadow to lose its lights, and so become indistinguishable from its bicycle or surroundings.
One morning Arioch put the wrong eyes in. The night before he had inadvertently put down the glass with his eyes in it too close to the tray on his bedside table where he kept his pocket-watch, pounamu hole-stone on a string, verdigrine drachma and other assortments. In the cacaphonic scramble at the stupid o'clock alarm he ended up with the pocket-watch in one socket and the drachma in the other. It gave him entirely the wrong view on the world.
The owl of Athene was not his friend. Baleful omens surrounded him, mispelling his emails and chilling his coffee. He could not free his taste and smell of the lingering sourness of fur-packaged owl regurgitations.
The pocket-watch, unwound, made him late and staccato. His words, shorn of tempo, bewildered and even offended those used to more fluid, tuneful statements. Towards the end of the day he even developed a nervous tick.
Vexing though the day was, Arioch considered the experience educational and decided to repeat the experiment with other combinations of eyes. The metallic chrome-green of the preserved tropical scarab tempted him particularly. He had always wanted green eyes.
We're all of us mere surfaces over structures. Our bodies as well as our personas. Skin, politeness, the reflection of incident light. We mistake these superficialities for realities. No wonder the things inside became jealous, wanted to share the limelight.
From where I sit the bone-tide is only a few hundred metres away. The sky over it is also bone-coloured, darker, like old ivory. It hungrily sucks the air to it.
Might air have bones too?
Splinters of bone jut from every surface that the bone-tide has touched: rigid explosions of jagged material, fractally sharp, as painful to touch as it is even to look at, or think about.
There are people there amid the spears and pickets of bone. They remind me of cordyceps caterpillars, far gone in parasitic submission to the fungus that has turned their bodies into fruits. Bones erupt from their skins, eyes, fingernails. It looks painful. But they are as immovable as everything else over there. Their skins are bone. So is their hair, and clothes, and mobile phones. Their suffering, if they are still capable of anything at all, is as passive as it is eternal.
The tide is moving. The keys under my fingers are becoming prickly. Sharp. I can feel my bones ache, desperate to be free.
It won't be long now.
