Nine is a famiy.

Xanthippe Xeyos arrived in her office the usual way - she flew in from the west window.

As always when it was raining along her flightpath, she was wearing her hood with rotor-glasses. No normal human would ever use something like those, but the Woman of Titanium was not really normal, wasn't she?

She had felt the presence of the intruder from half a km away - however, the building security system was also aware of this visitor, too, which meant that this girl was likely not moved by bad intentions, or completely ineffectual.

The girl - now looking at a glass close full of starships models - was a Molly, one of an unknown number of clone-sisters among whom was Xanthippe's lover, The First Molly.

- "I hope that you have no problem, finding my office, Molly."

The short woman turned around, her face flushed bright red.

Xanthippe's mind registered the dance of the muscles below the brownish skin - this was Molly, all right, as she would be if her favoured past-time was running under the Sun with weights on wrists and ankles and not lying on a sofa, reading some old book. Xanthippe felt a wave of attraction for this "improved" lookalike of her lover - whatever this girl was, she didn't let out the same subliminal, homicidal tension of some of her brethren.

- "Uh, yes. When I entered the building, some nice woman asked me if I was here to see you, and guided me to this place"

- "I suppose you only heard the voice of this woman." - on friday afternoon, Xanthippe was usually the only one to be in the office, as local Earthlings had problems getting the 25 hours a week Anipos' Legation working schedule, and many so-called entrepreneurs kept getting angry when they couldn't reach the Legation secretary/liaison officer for Earthbound affairs in old plain office  hours.

Xanthippe had tried to explain - plenty of times - that Anipos Prime functioned under a strict 16 hours/week maximum allowed workload law - working more than that was considered "job hoarding", an offense punished with three months of jail for every supernumerary hour/week worked, and with the requisition of all "ill-gotten" wealth.

Of course, 16 hours/week was already more than the planet ecosystem could safely support, and should have already been reduced to 12,  if not for the fear that people would turn to hobbies even more resources-wasting than work, out of sheer boredom.

That being the case, Anipos workers were encouraged to slack off as much as possible... with scarce results. "Giving you best at work" was widely considered the best remedy to depression and existential ennuis, so the Anipos tended to assault their sixteen hours jobs like they were in a marathon.

In a galaxy full of long established civilizations that had to learn that there was no practical way to relieve ecological pressures through other-worlds expansion, the Anipos' choice wasn't even the worst scenario.

They still managed to keep their 600 millions inhabitants reasonably happy and busy.

Other worlds had simply written off whole underclasses and social strata - often, several billions citizens of them - through the institution of severely demanding policies for the release of reproduction permits.
Not as much "kill the poor" as "let them die off, childless". 


- "It was the building's automation control, Molly." - Xanthippe managed to keep any sarcasm out of her voice... the other Molly may be sophisticated players in "the Game", but this one was possibly made of a different material. Xanthippe shared her bed with another "different Molly", so she knew that it was entirely possible.

- "My name is Dana."

- "I thought that it was Molly, like your sisters."

- "Dana, call me Dana."

The young woman seemed distressed, in a very human way - nothing tingled on Xanthippe super-human senses.

- "So, who are you? A spy? An enforcer? An assassin? Don't tell me, an existentialist poet?"

The banterous question irritated the girl, which was fine - Xanthippe and the building still didn't perceive the host of odd forces and sensor probes that surrounded all of Molly's sisters. This one was either human, or had better self-control than any of her sisters.

- "I... this was a mistake." - And like this, she ran away - at less than 30 km/h. A speed that wasn't even worth the "paltry" adjective, for Xanthippe standards.

The Betan woman considered it for a couple of seconds, then stepped out from the window.

The black haired kid took some seconds more to come out of the Legation office building - she was fast, for a normal human, and continued half-walking, half-running, till the Legation building was well out of sight.

At which point, she bent against a wall and started crying.

- "So, you are not a poet, What do you do?"

Dana, startled, looked up, tears running her mascara and a question written in her stare - how the hell Xanthippe was there? Xanthi found her almost irresistible - a Molly with some deeper feelings? Oh, my.

- "I am much slower than your sisters, but so are you. So, who are you, and what do you do?"

- "I am an acrobat with the "Cirque Orferes""

- "Can you fly?" - the little woman shook her head - "No",  while cleaning  her tears with a hand, making even more of a mess of her face

- "OK, I can walk, and I'd like to walk you to The Bretwitch Canteen, two blocks from here. Would you accept to dine with me?"

The Molly looked at her, incredulous, then nodded

- "Good - and we will discuss what disturbs you so much."

The Bretwitch was a much younger institution than it stated in the logo  - it started as a Kosher Deli takeaway right before the middle of 21st century, and it wasn't the best place to dine in town.

However it was affordable, the cuisine was decent and it also had a great anti-paparazzi policy.

Most of the clients were mobsters, not above disappearing the photographer that took the wrong photo. Other clients were way worse, and didn't leave corpses for the families to mourn. Arguably, Xanthippe was among said others, profile-wise, even if she did not kill people directly. 

As in a badly written book, Dana's acrobat lover, a certain Simon, had fallen ill.

The illness was genetic, incurable and fatal - one of those 6000 or so ailments that were so rare that hardly anybody studied them, and virtually no money was invested in a cure. Unfortunately, a great number of these illnesses resulted from genetic mutations intervened after the lost of hyper-travel had fragmented the human Galaxy in its current form, some 50000 years before - no cures could be found on other worlds, as the rest of humanities didn't share the relevant mutations. .

Simon was the guy for whom Dana had bailed out of "The Other" organization.

- "Really? You simply took, said 'To hell with this', and walked out?" - Xanthippe was amazed - "No repercussions?".

- "I couldn't fly any more, or remember half of the days from before I left the group." - Dana looked out of the window, probably to hide the pain in her own eyes from the inquisitive alien - "It took me months, to learn how to move with only my muscles. 'It' had no reasons to kill me -  I was a good example of what happened when one left its service."

So, "it" didn't broke her knees... simply because it would have been redundant.

She fixed her glare on Xanthippe, suddenly - "I think that I would have killed me, if not for Simon."

Her eyes took on a liquid light, as if she was just one step from openly crying - which she probably was.

- "And he took you as a partner in the acrobatic act, too?"

- "Turns out, the `pale shadow of what I was is still good enough to learn to walk on a rope. I am small, but strong, and my reflexes are still good."

Xanthippe didn't vouch his ideas on this last detail - the tune-ups that made Dana's brain able to perform at "hyper-high speed" were the kind of biological machinery that couldn't really be removed, at least not without converting someone into a vegetal.

As such, while her body could have been downgraded to be only human (maybe), her reflexes were still - probably - very fast, bordering on absurdly rapid.

- "Why were you in my office?"

- "I have seen a gossip article in a magazine, you with your... last lover. The first of us" - the "real" Molly... Xanthippe had realized, at the very beginning , that none of the clones realized that "her" Molly, too, was a clone - possibly, one from a `previous batch.

An unmodified one, with no cybernetic black-boxes stuffed inside, who had been allowed to grow on her own terms in an adoptive family...  but the methylation markers, the telomeres shortening and other indices were there.

She was not the original Molly, either.

Most likely, the last one in a "control group" of "naturals" that had been dispersed and used - as base reference - to steer the development of the "souped-up" versions.

All of them, clones of the same girl, that likely was 11 when her material was sampled, some moment half the first quarter of the previous century.

It was, possibly, also the reason why they all had roughly  the same age - the bio-techs had found no indices that they were rapid-grown in a vat. 

That was a trick nobody, in the whole galaxy, had ever managed to pull satisfactorily - at least, not without extensive genetic modifications, liable to wreak systemic havocs down the poor kid.

The "Mollys" really were, all, sisters - twins.

But the "supers", for some reason, had convinced themselves that their "known" normal sister was, really, the source.

Xanthippe suspected that this shaped a lot of their existential narrative - in fact, "the Assassin" had hinted, in one of her late night incursions, about what could happen if ever Xanthippe made Molly cry.

To be honest, the Woman of Titanium slept badly for a week or so, after that... her relationship with the unsuspecting girl was a trilling, double edged challenge.

- "Do you want to meet her?"

- "No, I want to let my... former employer know that I am available to come back, if he can cure Simon."

- "Why coming to me? Just send a phone call to " - Xanthippe paused, while she reflected on it - "my office. I am pretty sure that 'it' wiretapped any cable in and out of it, the very moment that they were laid down".

- "So did the US Government, and the NSSSR, the United Nations Intelligence Directorate, the three Republics of China, Japan, South Korea, the EU Global Intelligence Agency,  the..."

Dana may have lost half of what made her whatever she was, before her escape to freedom, but apparently she still understood enough of "the game" to avoid the most obvious blunders.

- "Stop, I get it. Publicizing your former nature as an affiliate of the 'Greatest World Terroristic Network', among the fine listeners of my channel, would not improve your friend's health. Whereas, human intelligence around the legation is virtually nil, given the building's AI bad habits."

- "Nowadays, Intelligence agencies seldom invest more than a tiny percentage of their budget in 'foot soldiers'. So, entering the building was safer than calling on the phone, no?"

Not exact, but almost.

Xanthippe couldn't help but think that this was because most "global threats" surrounding the Legation, as perceived by the various nation-states, were not humans in nature.

Yet, it was a mistake... the 'bots in the space kept almost all their point-to-point links well away from the Earth space, but those of them that had longer maintained an android  avatar on Earth did met through them, at a couple of bars, and chatted about work.

It costed her a lot to discover this, and the old Russian operatives that stalked the two bars since she had pinned down their locations were her most conspicuous infraction to the Legation budget integrity,  but it was also the way she got most of her useful information on the "hidden alien threats operating on the planet".

What her chief then really did with her reports, Xanthippe had some clue, and she gladly ignored it.

If the boss preferred printed reports as toilet paper, it was not her fault.

A sudden, low buzz caught her attention. She recognized the ultrasound feed, from quite a few of her most worrying recent moments. "Razor", the most murderous of the "sisters", was near.

- "So, you hope that I pass the message to one of them? That you are ready to come back to the fold, in exchange for saving Simon?"

-·"Yes."

- "It is not going to work."

- "Why? ... I am sure that they already know that I contacted you."

- "I am sure that they already knew everything about Simon. I do not think that your 'Boss' can do anything for him."

- "What? No. It can do everything it want! It does everything it wants!"

- "Reprogramming a broken genetic code in an adult body is much more difficult than assembling a cyborg on a developing foetus, or embryonic genetic engineering. It almost never works as intended..."

- "No, don't say it"

- "... I think that, if 'it' had a cure, you'd already received an offer. He can't - Godlike may it appear, but it still has limits."

- "I said you to shut up!" - by the look of it, Dana would likely have beaten Xanthi's ass on the spot. Knowing her sisters, if she was still "amped up", she would had a good shot at it, too... somehow, the thought that she could not, not any more at least, saddened Xanthippe.

- "Thanks for your time. Will you pass my message, when you can?"

- "Count on it."

And with that, the little half-Asian was out, with her athletic step as enticing as "Xanthippe's Molly" lazy stroll was.

- "If you care to join me, the veal is marvellous, here." - The words were spoken plainly - after all, "Razor" probably had the same kind of hearing that Xanthippe had, able to listen a child  whisper in a storm five km away.
 
The new arrived moved the chair to sit, and Xanthippe looked up and stopped. This was "razor" - Xanthippe had decided to call this most murderous of  the "Mollys" with that name, because she often had a bloody sword on her shoulders - but the girl gave out no hint of her usual, "I shall slay you viciously" energy.

Without it, Xanthippe realized that she was younger, way younger than Molly, as this later was probably from a prototype batch.

Xanthippe suspected that fine-tuning the growth of a super-powered child so that she became useful, crazy enough to do what was commanded to her independently of the horror it represented,  but sane enough to not lose control and start killing on her own, was an art that required attention and luck. The second meaning that, for each sisters she had met many, many other had likely been slaughtered when they proved too unstable. 

The waitress appeared, to take a restaurant order, an eyebrow raised at the newcomer.

- "I have a penchant for twin sisters" - Xanthippe had long since learned that, on this planet, one could survive any embarrassing situation, as long as she was the first making fun of it.

- "Who doesn't? The difficult is getting them in bed together." - The waitress took their order, while "razor" continued to be flabbergasted.

- "It wasn't so bad a joke."

- "I am not used to people joking around me."

"Because you usually look like considering the fastest way to disembowel them, girl" - the thought didn't reach Xanthippe's lips.

Then, the leather-clad alien vixen considered the air that her potential assassin sported at the moment, and sighed.

Why the Hell even this had to be a clueless, naïve girl at heart? Xanthippe lived much better when she could simply file her under "crazy assassin bitch".

Xanthippe blurted - "Today you look much prettier than usual" - and it was true.

- " Do you really think that we can't help - what's his name?- Simon?"

Xanthippe attacked the veal - 450 calories that would take ten days to consume, with her absurd metabolism, or eight round trips to the North Pole at Mach 3 -  fully conscious that her thighs didn't really need any more fat, if she wanted to be able to slid inside her "leather" armour suit.

- "Do tell me, wouldn't your people already have offered that barter, if 'It' could fix the man?"

- "He is going to die" - "Razor" looked at least as shocked as her sister, which most definitely surprised the alien.

- "What is he, for you to care?"

- "He is someone that made my beloved sister happy - that made me happy, for a while, before I conceded defeat to Dana."

- "You still have feelings for him?"

The subsequent, prolonged silence eloquently answered "yes".

They finished the meal, exchanging barely a word, then walked out of the restaurant, together - the short, black-haired "potentiated" girl still lost in her thoughts.

They took the causeway across the main road, to the old Mulry Square.

The place, as always, was semi-desert. Near the centre of the triangular space,  "Razor" stopped, forcing Xanthippe to look back - the girl had a sad, sweet expression.

- "Simon, Dana - I love them both, dearly." - and with this, she jumped out at the ludicrous acceleration rate that was the hallmark of the "suppa-girls", being well on a suborbital path by the time Xanthippe lost her.

Xanthippe looked around - if anybody saw the scene, his or her brain hardly registered it.

The alien, whose take off were considerably slower - her maximum acceleration was about a tenth of the 500G or so that Razor and her sisters used habitually - repressed a bout of envy.

She considered the fastidious spectacle of the humans around the square, pointing fingers at her when SHE would take off, and decided to go back to the legation office the hard way. Walking.


Which would burn about 1 pico-calories of fat , in her stupid matter-energy converting muscles.


----


For some months, Xanthippe had no reasons to linger on the other "normal" Molly, her lover and their tragic history.

She decided to not mobilise any official resource, to check what it was of the two.

Apparently, the only result of the encounter was that, now, the "mob-style" menaces were delivered by the first Molly that she ever met, the stealthy young girl that Xanthippe nicknamed "Insider".

"Razor" was much better at it, probably being a fan of "Goodfellas", "the Goodfater", "Lucky Luciano" and "Life and deaths of Pasquale Barra" - Insider simply didn't emanate the right danger. Yet, "Razor" was, probably, simply unwilling to meet again someone who had seen all her vulnerability.

So, in her obliviousness, Xanthippe did not know that Simon Oersteheld, a famous acrobat, had died aged 32, because of a debilitating  illness, and did not prepare for the apparition of any grief-stricken, crazed acrobat female entering her suburban villa.

Like a remorseful thought, Dana appeared by the border of their big pool, scaring the hell out of the Betan, who didn't really want her beloved girlfriend to discover the whole clones business any more than any other of the involved.

The exception, it appeared, was Dana - was she there to shatter Molly's life? To punish her sisterhood, for not helping her lover?

In less than a second, Xanthippe was in front of the diminutive girl, realizing at the same time that she couldn't really force herself to hurt the poor woman.

- "Let me pass"

- "You know that I can't."

- "Why? So she can continue believing that she is the one and only Molly, an that there is nothing odd in her life?"

- "It seems a good idea"

- "Apart sharing her bed with the only accredited superwoman in the world?"

- "What do you mean?"

- "You got to her because you were tracking down one of us, no? Would she be happy, to know that she is just a replacement for the real deal?"

- "it is not like this" - A small part of Xanthippe, though, was telling her that it was exactly like that, which is why the super-strong woman lost control, for one of the very few times in her life. She gripped the trespasser's forearm, and squeezed a little too much, forgetting that this was NOT one of the much tougher than steel sisters of her lover. The sound of the acrobat's radio breaking filled Xanthippe's heart with horror.

- "Oh, my Gods, I didn't mean it. I " - she never managed to complete the phrase, as something emerged from the shadows and punched her away, with the kind of blow that would dwarf one from Mjolnir, the fabled hammer of the Norse god of Thunder, Thor. 
 
The punch  was an hook from high-down, given by a flying, much enraged Razor - Xanthippe landed in the pool, blowing half of the water against the house front, like a localized tsunami, while the super-resistant woman stopped the flight a good meter into the ground, after having broken through the  reinforced concrete wall of the pool.

For the first time in her life, Xanthippe lost consciousness without being in a Dojo with nullifying fields.

When she get back in herself - maybe fifteen seconds later - she steamed toward her enemies,  only to see a somewhat odd scene.

Two Mollys - one looked like "Insider", the other was a yet unknown sister - were keeping Razor from finishing her job. Dana was apathetic, her broken arm twisted in an odd way - a sight that immediately sobered up Xanthippe.

That was her doing .- a poor girl, bereft for the loss of her life's love, had made a mistake and Xanthi had lost it, and hurt someone that did not merit being harmed, just because that someone may had stepped onto a truth.

With her clarity back, Xanthi realized that the quartet was being illuminated, by a handheld torch of some kind. Their expressions were very much the ones of a bunch of deers crossing a highway, in Montana, in the middle of the Hunting season.

She turned back, slowly, and smiled at "her" Molly, that did not look very amused.

- "Do you know these women?"

- "Kind of, dear."

Xanthippe suddenly felt like some male protagonist of one of the old movies that Molly insisted on watching together, when caught by his wife with a host of scantly dressed girls, out of some ungodly coincidence.

Apart the details that they were all women, dressed up from neck to toe - it was a chilly April evening, and "supers" may survive skinny dip in liquid nitrogen, but they do feel cold like anybody else - that it was no coincidence that they were all together and that there was no sex involved, Xanthi was exactly on the mark.

As any of those fictional husbands, she was in deep trouble.   

Molly darted back and forth the lamplight, on each of her doubles and on her wife, and back.

Then,  she switched to the house - the water wall had broken inside, trashing the ground floor. Molly herself was dripping wet, which kind of prompted a secondary but intriguing question.

- "Uh,Molly, have you ever had... that?"  - the torch was, in fact, attached to the barrel of a pretty menacing gun. Not that it could hurt anybody there, apart Molly. And Dana.

- "Woman, do you have an idea of how many ass-holes send me messages, to tell me that they are going to convert me back to Earth cocks, ever since we started going out?"

- "12746, as of last week"

- "So, you do know"

- "Yes. Would you mind put it down? The only non-bullet-proof in this mess is that girl - she has suffered enough and I do not think that she is any danger."

If seeing Dana's broken arm calmed down Xanthippe, seeing a dripping Molly had the same effect on Razor.

- "May I suggest that we take the discussion to a more comfortable place?"

- "That's a nice idea, but, as you can see, our home  is a bit in disarray." - The voice of Molly was pretty dry.   Xanthippe wondered what her wife was thinking, seeing four sisters she knew nothing about, yet were familiar with her life-partner.

- "We have a safe house, down the road. It is big enough for everybody. And it is warm - we love warmth."

Molly looked interrogatively at Xanthippe, who shrugged.

- "Me, I am not sure, but they would never, ever harm you, dear, believe me."

Molly shook her head - "I should really have listen to my room-mate" - lowered her gun, and the whole group went to the safe house - flying.

The safe house was big, and it was warm. Very warm.

Razor distended Dana on the central sofa - that looked every bit as comfortable as much as expensive - and took her arm, pulled, and managed to compose the fracture., while Insider laid her hands on the sides of the acrobat's head. Probably the shock hadn't wore off yet, and the ex-super kept looking vaguely giddy. 

Xanthippe imagined that the "amped-up" girl could see the bones under the skin every bit as well as she did. When the black-haired girl continued her manipulations, till she managed to put back in place a solitary splinter, the Betan was sure of it.

The unknown sister arrived, with a  strange jar  that she left to razor, and went on to Molly

- "We gotta change you out of this"

Molly went away, more than a bit surprised, pulled by the enthusiastic little woman.

Razor took the content of the jar - seemingly, a greenish slime - with her hand, and laid it against her sister's arm.  The slime soon ran up and down the arm, and meld itself in the shape of a cast.
Razor made a sign to Insider and, in a matter of seconds, Dana was sleeping.

-"Psychic powers?"

- "Nope - we simply have the codes to reactivate her dormant implants, and command them specific actions." -  Insider was almost cheerful - "so, sleepy sleepy and pain locked out, while the nanos fix her bones. In a couple of days she will be as good as new."

- "I am sorry"

- "It happens - I have broken far too many bones not to know it"

Razor led herself fall in he second, unoccupied of the three sofas.

- "Sorry for my punch - you didn't completely earn it. She was looking for a fight, though she was right. "

- "Molly has seen you guys. What do we tell her?"

Razor looked Xanthippe for some seconds, raised her eyebrows, looking at once more childish and adult.

- "The truth, what else? Ignorance isn't going to protect her. After all, YOU jumped on her because of  us."

- "What if she decides that I really was using her to get insights on you people? What if she leaves me?"

- "I finally get to kill you, my dear, like you richly deserved."

The day after, much explanation was given -Xanthi managed to convince Molly of her innocence. Molly was intrigued by these unknown sisters, and decided to learn as much as possible, possibly from the most independent source, the "Sleeping beauty".

So, she decided to "haunt" the safe house for a while.

Of course, as any choice in life, it was bound to have consequences.

Like meeting her other five "sisters", and decide that she loved them all... at which point, Xanthippe finally knew in how much of a deep shit she really was. 

War

War is a sterile exercise, a waste of resources, and the source of a great quantity of pain.

It always been so, for all the length of human history.

Yet, there has hardly been a whole year without war, in the history of the world.

Or, if you like more restricted geographical scope, a whole decade without war in Europe, before the long peace period after WWII.

Why?

Is it a perversion of the human species?Yes, and no. It is an un- perversion of manhood.

In the past, I have wrote about these crazy idea of mines that the structured, complex society - anything with more inhabitants than the Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers village is bound to have one - is more functional to the female biologic imperative than to the male one.

Actually, the more structured and stable it became, less and less space it left to the original nucleus of men instincts, that would be... fuck anything in sight, and go on to the next.

This is coming to the point that, if one takes a step back and look dispassionately to modern western societies and much of their social discourse, the impression arise  that these are actually trying to castrate their males as fair as possible.

These do so by branding the strand of aggressiveness associated to their higher testosterone levels as inherently dangerous, curtailing the actual spaces of sexual extroversion allowed to males that aren't directly tied to female's sexual satisfaction , and generally downsizing the need for the male gender workforce by a crescent automation, both in work and in the state-controlled exercise of violence (police, the military).

The emphasis on drones may be seen, so, not only about reducing military personnel losses - though, it is argued that drones are a supremely inefficient use of resources, as the rate of unintended death that they produce is above 90%, they are not very reliable and they do not come cheap either - but also about reducing the dependency of military action on violence-capable males - currently, these are still the bulk of fighting units personnel...
Opening the ranks to women was yet another step in that direction.

The fact that the higher echelons of said societies are still, mostly, occupied by Alpha males kind of obscure this evolution, but it can't really hide it.

Modern societies are becoming more and more feminized.

The future is the metro-sexual male, no matter how many of our great-grandfather would spit on one, if they met him in the street.

It is not bad for the many males that do not really have high levels of aggressiveness, it is not bad for the Alphas that manage to get a handle of how their social system works and exploit its weaknesses, it is quite good for many women.

But this "feminine slant" of structured society has always been a source of frustration for a sizeable portion of men, the ones with both higher aggressive tendencies and less social clout, the ones that had less to gain and more to lose - in term of unrewarded violation of their base instincts - by accepting their society and its rules.

These have always been amenable, along human history, to take arms and go to war and, hopefully, get killed in the process...

To be honest, they mostly went to  Pillage, Arson and Rape (PAR) the hell out of some neighbour, for the sake of showing that they had balls.

I like to argue that, in many ways, the cruelty of war has grown alongside the development of societies, due to the increased efficacy of the weapons that they could build, but also to the increased level of stress that "order" imposed on this part of the male population.

Also, a multiple centuries long effort from the ruling classes to isolate the fighters from seeing the true consequences of their action - usually by dehumanizing their adversaries through ideological fallacies -  powerfully contributed to it.

So, during a few millennia we have gone from squabbles among neighbours where a lot of screams were shouted, balls were showed and little to no blood was shed, to the carnage of WWI and of its natural sequel, WWII.

Which is where the mechanics of "traditional war" broke down - at least for European countries, for some decades (but as witnesses are dying and losing weight, the same old idiocies that cause those bloodbath may come back).

Traditional war involved mostly professional  soldiers - men that would likely become thugs, otherwise, and often reversed to a thug life the very moment that they were laid off - that were allowed a great degree of freedom in their war action, occasionally being afforded looting or raping on the enemy population. Most of the deaths came through illnesses, though, but the actual PAR/Deaths ratio  was relatively good.

WWI was a conscripts war, that involved a much vaster strata of the male population and literally burned it on the altar of ideas that many of them hardly understood - the national ideal made not necessarily sense to all, back then... God knows most Italians, today, do not really get what Italy is, and couldn't care less about it anyway, for example; my German-speaking, stone carving great grandfather died without understanding why he was killing the very same guys with whom he had worked many a summer, and he was not alone in the sentiment - for little of no "remuneration".

The  soldier deaths and casualties were out of scale with the PAR allowed, which was nearly none.

WWII was essentially an affair of WWI survivors, getting from their own societies what they could not get from the war... the scarred veterans unwilling to let violence down were the backbones of both the Fascism, in Italy, and, later, Nazism in Germany.

The very Adolf Hitler was an example of them - a veteran that fought, with courage, in a horrific war and did not get much out of it.

WWII, on the other hand, was the moment were another mainstay of "traditional war" was lost - soldiers were held responsible for the crimes that they committed during war activities, no matter if these were done following orders. Before the Nuremberg trials, "I was following orders" was a widely accepted defence for many an indefensible action. 

Also, it was the final nail in the coffin for another of the tenets of "traditional war" - war among modern states proved to be a far nastier affair, for the societies that waged it, than any of the precedent wars.

The destruction arrived everywhere, the society was disrupted more thoroughly than it had ever been, and the very economy of he warring countries had to be centralized and bent to fulfil war needs (kind of... the 3rd Reich and Italy unsurprisingly failed to rein in their oligarchic industrialists with the efficiency the UK and USA showed; regimes always pays cash for the support they get), to an extent never seen before - or since.

"Modern war" proved to be such a sorry affair, that it could not be repeated any time soon, at least as long as those that had lived it were around and had any power to impede it.

However, not all the countries involved in the sordid squabble had to endure the same level of stress - it can be argued that the USA, for example, got it relatively lightly.

The USA lost 420.000 persons, during the war - 407000 soldiers, which is in line with the casualties of other countries that didn't participate in the Germany-USSR death-match,  and 13000 civilians.

It suffered no attacks on its territory that are worth mentioning, and ended the whole shenanigan in far better economic shape than any of the European nations. 

For the USA, in many ways, WWII had been yet another bit of "traditional war".

The Viet-Nam war became the moment where the USA had more of a taste of what a modern war is really like, in that it adsorbed a notable amount of its economic output, it deeply upset its society - courtesy of a not yet embedded-bridled media industry -  and it democratically exposed members of its younger generations from various strata (with some dishonourable exception) to quite a selected choice of horrors.

It must come not as a surprise, then, that the USA military recognised the danger and took a set of steps to "de-modernize" the country experience of wars.

The USA Military is today made up of professionals, and exerts a tight control on the narrative that reaches the USA people from the front-lines of the wars that it had to fight, doing its level best to downplay and justify the damages that these have done on the target countries.

It doesn't recognize the International Tribunal for War Crimes, nor is it likely to recognize it in any foreseeable future, and it reserve the right to be the sole judge of eventual war crimes committed by its- own personnel.

Undoubtedly, today the USA look like a country intoxicated by a potentially dangerous military culture that has done its very best to rewind the clock, back to an era where war "made sense".

It rest to be seen how long this state of affairs will last, and how will it come to an end.

I really hope, some time after I died, thanks...

Of the candidates to world's sole superpower, USA is still, by far , the best (unless the UE finally gets its shit together, but I doubt it).  

In The House of Noxon

Noxon walked inside the enormous hall, every bit the incarnation of a dimwit god as he had always been.
Its current Avatar had little or no autonomous mind, being really just a big android.

He had others, whose bodies were more humans and had a mind of their own, but over the millennia it had come to the conclusion that usurping a sentient being's body was to be eschewed,  and reserved only for when it was really necessary. Like, to have proper intercourse with one of the Abducted Officiants (AO).

Its current body thus was two meters fifteen cm of carbon nanofibres-titanium , mio-electric actuators shaped like human muscles and a thin, cloned Obsidian black skin. The face was a collection of wide features, based on a scar-less version of the long lost singer named Seal... Noxon knew all too well that its appearance didn't really matter.

The women in his house all had their reasons to be in its service, none of which had ever been its personality, its beauty or its sense of humour, and it preferred like this - it was an enduring trait of his first, human incarnation, the inability to accept that women could love men for who they really were.

It had influenced its decision to create, when possible, societies with little or no male citizens... it was just pain and deception spared to all.

For the most part, it was right -. these women didn't care for it as a sentient being.


Ye, all of this notwithstanding, it could not help but use some of the most iconic male figures in its memory as a base for most of its full android interfaces, and similarly good-looking humans as full-biologic appendices - currently, the house hosted two of them, a male and a female - the male, very similar to a scaled down version of the android. 

Some time, Noxon though that creating beautiful avatars was an error, as it had helped foster the wrong sentiment in some of the AO.  Some of them - Diem Mira, Lucy, Anya - seemed intent of well overstaying their mandated kidnapping, simply because they didn't want to part its company.

In many ways, it was a troubling thought for the entity that was once known as the 'god'.

The man that had created it as a recipient for his uploaded mind, fifteen thousand years after his death was still uneasy, any time he was presented with proofs that he had fucked up his only real, human life for nothing, Just because he couldn't overcome his childhood "women are all whores" programming, he had spent his eighty years eschewing female companionship... yet, craving it.

Something had arisen from the depth of its automated systems, to alert that a generational ship had been detected travelling toward the local star.

The message came through an emergency, simple radio waves connection, so it had taken nearly twenty local years to the news to ford the 136 petametres that separated the damaged surveillance probe from its still hyperlink-capable brethrens.

Noxon had kept the link with the wide galactic net-space open, but it had never seen any hint that somebody had ever sent such a ship in their direction. Unfortunately, this really meant that the civilization responsible of this colonization effort was one capable of keeping massive secrets, i.e. not only one with a tyrannical government - the galaxy at large had more than its share of those -  but one whose tyrants commanded actual respect from the population, and not just fearing conformity.

And none of these, in Noxon's personal opinion, was anything more than a sore, on the butt of the universe, that needed being wiped out with extreme prejudice.

In other words, chance were this was just another another bunch of ass-holes looking for a  way to be exterminated...

Though, to be sure of this, it should really send a personal agent to evaluate their civilization, to prepare the right action.

There is always a meagre possibility that the new arrived could be amenable to integrate into the local society without doing something so nasty as, say, try to re-establish the widespread presence of males.

If it was impossible- small how it was, the little red sun could swallow floats of generational ships with hardly a solar flare.

To send a spy on the incoming vessel... the main issue for Noxon was, who to send?

It should have been someone new, without bias on the aliens from previous encounters, that could accept a moderate level of physical enhancement without developing any psychosis, and was young enough to be able to accept and evaluate as objectively as possible - someone not too much Noxonian, to say so.

A waitress appeared - a true waitress, that had been contracted to work in the hotel that the villa resembled - carrying a tray with a set of sandwiches.

Noxon distractedly picked a mortadella one, while it let its non-sentient subsystems screen all the women in his observation list that were not too deep in "The Service" - mostly, members of the "Twelve Great Officiant Syndicates".

It found just the right girl, a bit young, but stubborn and fiercely independent... just about what it was needed to act as an objective observer.

A side of its mind kept arguing that shoving the damn bastards inside the Sun was the best solution,  - but it was such a JVH action that Noxon found it absolutely abhorrent.

Alas, it should really have done it.

Conceding the benefit of the doubt to these newcomers would prove itself a great mistake.

Oh, God?

Sincerely, I cannot really stand the discussion "God Exist / No, it doesn't", nor the similar and often associated  "Evolution is crap".

On one side, I realize that lovers of the sciences may as well forget any effort to make understand to fundamentalists why a theory is scientific, how epistemology  works, why a falsifiable and testable - though not necessarily experimentally verifiable - theory may be science, even when destined to be proven wrong some day in the future, while an untestable truth surely is not.

Let's spare the effort - it is wasted.

On the other hand, I do not get what many fundamentalists want from science, either.

I really pity those that, to validate their faith, feel the need to demonstrate - really, just shout out of their lungs, usually -  that any scientific knowledge in contrast with this or that detail of their theology is false or impossible to be tested experimentally - which is pretty much the norm for every "historical" science, from geology onward - and, thus, anti-scientific.

If all that is needed to upset them is some researcher, that doesn't see the need of the existence of God to explain the processes that he studies, they should understand that indeed great is THEIR sin.

Their, not the one of the scientist that disturbs them.

They prove to be persons whose faith falters as a strand of grass in the wind, and they do not even realize what risible limits, out of their narrow minds, they attribute to the power and the creativity of their God(s).

If it exists, it would never be so dumb as to leave clues around for science to prove its existence.

if it did, faith wouldn't be anything more than a simple acknowledgement of demonstrable facts - and even someone like me cringes at the idea of such a loss of grace.

In the name of Noxon (Part 9)

[Extreme S&M Ahead - do not read if you do not like very bad things done, on very nice women, for the sake of the voyeuristic pleasure of a petty and utterly idiotic divinity]

By the way, chance is that, if you know me from other venues and you have followed "Noxon" till now, this is just what you were waiting for, my dear bad boy/girl/divinity.

---

Sarah Westerhoos was on the superior deck of one of the new Officiants' boats - her Granny Padma hadn't exaggerated. The electric engine hardly made any noise or vibration. The boat was travelling, leisurely, inside the old channel that went from the ancient waterway of the Sassa river to the SassaFrakka Ziggurat.

It had been two years, since her sister Emily had been abducted by the entity known as Noxon - Sarah had lost any hope of ever seen her twin again, unless she could get inside the house of Noxon in some way, and the only one she knew of was joining the Officiant and endure all that she could, on top of a Ziggurat.

This was going to be her first ascension as a full Officiant - she had already survived things that, only a year before, would have seemed impossible to her, and soon she was going to face more.

In her hand was a leash, going to the collar of one Called, a little daughter of Sassa's middle-low bourgeoisie that looked every bit as young as her 19 years, and maybe even a bit more.

Sarah considered the fact that her follow-up was just one solitary, so-so girl, but she realized that she could not really complain about the prudence of the local Church's chapter.

After all, she was an oddball, to say so - someone that had a very personal and outside-box reason to enlist.

No matter how consistently she would pursue her Officiant career, the old women that organized the rites were bound to be suspicious of her, for a long time. Persons with her kind of stake in the faith, in fact, were known to be prone to suddenly lost interest and decide to leave the service, be damned its carefully designed social whiplash; and, even if it was seldom acknowledged, this tended to have an effect on the girls that had been introduced to The Service by them.

Sarah sighed - she felt that she had gone a long way, but a lot more was still in front of her.

Her sigh inspired another one, at her back - she darted a glance above her shoulder, to see the young girl - Meri? - reflecting her own unsteadiness, multiplied by a younger age and an even shakier vocation.

The young Sassian was not an incredible beauty, either... why exactly had the Old Bastard - this was the name that Sarah had chosen for Noxon - decided to summon this slightly chubby kid, among the millions of women in the Great Sassa Area?

They arrived at the Ziggurat landing pier, way before she had started to fathom that mystery.

Sassa's Ziggurat had a staircase of the full, traditional length - 1024 steps, each 17 cm and some mm tall, a whole 175 metres of climb.

At least it was a modern ziggurat, its stair twisting up its front side - a long, slow climb and not the muscle-breaking, steep vertigo of more ancient designs.

Sarah was not sure whether this was really better - "The Walk" takes a lot more, on these low-slung slopes, and she fully felt the gaze of half the city on her, as she couldn't use the bulk of the stone pyramid as a shield. On the other hand, the cramps the old ones can induce in even the most physically fit - and better trained - women were the stuff of legends.

Yet, "The Walk" was only one hour or so of a very long day.

She started, nudging a light strap to the leash going to the little Sassan's box-tie central knot.

They started at the slow cadence of the tambourines, drummed by their companions along the stair.

Soon, she was only vaguely aware of the city, or even of the small girl in her tow - she became lost in the almost-trance she had long studied for, in the months after her induction.

Near the end she realized only vaguely giving the leash to a priestess, on the half-last plan of the ziggurat where the inductions take place.

She went on to the last stretch of steps, her mind almost a blank slate with no human concerns.

On the plan, the first women on the sides were recently inducted novices, preparing themselves for their first climb.

Inside the inner square, older women looked with mild interest - these were active duty officiants, who had already done the walk - and who would still do it in the future, plenty of times. Finally, inside "The Cube", there were only four priestesses - officiants that had decided to remain in the Church when their twenty years of service were over.

They were her torture team, and she had met with each of them many times, during her training.

The older ones were Gea and Gaia, married officiants from Fillandia, with that region classic feature of Ancient Africa and the pale skin that came with generations of the little sun available in high Antarctic areas.

As many married couples since the dawn of the species, they had grown to resemble each other, in some uneasily describable way. The younger ones were Nichelle, a tanned girl with epicanthic folds from Fraglbar, and Jenna, a tall RedHead from Grassyrainland.

Sarah was already down, in the vast realms of sub-space, in the trance that would allow her recently revealed masochist nature - she was, indeed, one of the few, lucky "naturals" - to transform the storm of pain ahead into a strange, calm and pleasant serenity.

That had been a great surprise, in her post-induction training - she liked the right pain, at the right moments, produced by the right persons, in the right way. A lot of "in the right", but she liked it - when it was well administered, and the priestesses of Noxon accumulated years of experience, from her side of the altar, before moving to their current one.

The ritualized pain didn't give her the cataclysmic climaxes of some of her companions, but it was already much better than for others. She had a chance, although slimmer than the one she'd fancied entering the service, of reaching up to the 'god' great white house, and be able to ask to the old bastard - "where the hell is my sister?"

When the youngest priestesses greeted and undressed her, it felt just - natural. Nichelle, Jenna and her had rehearsed these moments plenty of times, in the weeks leading to this moment.

The knot of tension that had managed to maintain itself, deep, deep inside her eased and dissolved when the two older priestesses extended their hands, so that she could be guided to the altar.

As the ones in most Ziggurats, it was a mobile structure, at present looking just like a one step tall platform at the centre of The Cube - she raised herself on it, sat in its centre by cross-folding her legs in a lotus position and then distended, till she remained lying, her arms and legs well spread, her eyes looking the deep blue-green of the morning sky.

The altar was raised, till it was at the correct height for the work of the priestesses. A scream came, from the platform below the great square - the little Sassan hasty training hadn't been thorough enough, and she could not manage to attain the state of mind necessary to withstand her induction with some pleasure.

Gea held Sarah's hands, while they waited - together - for the other priestesses to come back with the tools to be used on the nearly new officiant - and for what was going on, some five meters below them, to end.

Soon, the screams turned to almost inaudible sobs then, after some long minutes, a new sound reached their ears - the Sassan was a screamer, and announced to the whole universe that she had finally come.

By then Gaia had come back, and now the two older clergywomen stood at her sides, each one holding one of her hands and slowly caressing her body, while Jenna and Nichelle placed the trays and prepared for their role as assistants.

The beholders along the causeway had already started to disband - what was now to happen was not, supposedly, for human eyes.

However, the Church never bothered to press any city council into changing its zoning laws, so even this Ziggurat was now surrounded by stupidly high towers, whose last floors offered a view of the events as good as the one that The God had.

Her eyes to the sky, framed by the thin stainless steel beams of "The Cube" (even Fraglbar Ziggurat had finally moved away from the ancient reinforced concrete Cube structure), she couldn't care less about the little women that had taken a day break to watch her, from their offices and flats in the towers.

A priest surged from the lower platform, to signal that the Sassan had been finally inducted in the service and, thus, it was finally time to give the 'god' its main course.

The four priestess stepped near Sarah, and each of them placed a leather cuff to one of her aft articulations - wrists and ankles - then locked it to the Yttrium frame. When all these were firmly in place, they trapped her to the frame with leather bands at knees and elbows and, finally, the assured her hips and her chest.

When they were sure that she was fully confined on the small frame, she felt the the large stone plan of the altar disappear from below her back, while the uncomfortable, small beams of the double-y shaped "Yttrium" support maintained their position.

The altar continued to go down, its hydraulics hardly emitting any sound, till it became just another stone in the pavement, barely distinguished by its enormous shape and the design of the "under-Yttrium" - a large, double-y shaped slab of the same rock as the altar, that levels to the ground when the altar is closed to the ground - in its middle.

The priestesses donned their gloves, then the younger ones made a step back and assumed a waiting position, similar to the box-tie start.

Each of the older priestesses went down, with a hand, inside her legs - one of them started teasing her anus, while the other inserted two fingers inside the vagina.

They continued to warm her up for a while, as they had done plenty of times during the rehearsals, them signalled Nichelle to take place between her legs and replace them, while Jenna took a specular position, in front of Sarah, and lowered the support of the Officiant's head protruding from the Yttrium frame, opened the front of her priestly robe, and placed her vagina in a position where Sarah's tongue could gratify her.

Or, at least, try to - Jenna hadn't assumed that position for her own pleasure.

The older women took a medium length leather flogger and, each on her side, moved two step away, to have Sarah's body at the right striking distance.

They started slowly, and increased the intensity of their strokes for the successive twenty minutes, before changing to a heavier cat of nine tails, with whom they continued for other twenty minutes, before switching to a final 5 feet bull-whip.

Every few minutes, Gea and Gaia took a pause, so that Jenna could offer some water to their patient, and switched arm.

At the end of that first hour, the body of Sarah was covered with whip marks, and blood dripped from some small cuts.

Jenna, whose body had acted not only as a further humiliation for the much younger colleague but, also, as a shield, didn't fare too much better - many of the strokes given with the non-dominant hands by her seniors had gone astray, and impacted on the arms womb and legs of the younger priestess.

Similarly, the forearms of Nichelle were now full of whip marks.

Now that the whips had stopped, Sarah could appreciate that the hands of this latter had fully entered inside her... a sensation that she had discovered to be quite satisfying, during the preparation weeks before the rite.

The priestess then extracted both hands, first the one inside Sarah's rectum, then, partially, the one in her vagina. When the thumb came out of the young woman, the priestess started using it to rub, suavely, against Sarah's clitoris.

Nichelle continued her stimulation, till Gaia took her place, in hand a powerful, spherical head vibrator.

The old woman continued to stimulate the young Officiant, with the machine and her own hand, till Sarah came. Then, the altar platform was raised again, and Sarah was - temporarily - freed from her numerous shackles.

A new girl arrived - not a priestess, another officiant not much older than Sarah - to take care of her during the half. hour rest period, helping cleaning up the body of the former Windy Valley inhabitant, and keeping her well hydrated.

As she sat in her lotus position, feeling her colleague fingers running all the length of her body, Sarah couldn't help but imagining Noxon - the 15000 years old bastard - looking at the spectacle, with a glass of wine and a Mortadella sandwich in hand, or something the like.


When the four priestess returned, Sarah promptly lied down again, this time facing the stone.

A heavy leather hood was placed on her face, though it let her mouth open, for her to scream - or to safe-wording out of the ceremony.

A heavy, rugged corset was put on her, covering the whole of her belly and back - a necessary shield, to safeguard the kidneys and the surrounding tissues from the stroke of the whips.

In the following hour, the four women pretty much repeated what they had done to the front of Sarah's body, reiterating many hits on her exposed ass to compensate for the dangerous areas they had to avoid.

They left Sarah, barely conscious, to the cares of the small Officiant.

For more than an hour, the exhausted girl was allowed to rest, in the shade of the Cube automatic cover, then the last leg of her ordeal commenced.

They freed Sarah, and helped her to seat, on the raised altar's border.

Then, the altar closed down completely, and they helped her to stand when her feet touched the ground. Soon, the square inside the Cube was fully flat, the altar and the frame just pavement irregularities at its centre. Lifting hooks descended from the winches on the cube's top beam, and Jenna and Nichelle locked Sarah's cuffs in them.

The beaten girl's legs were completely unsteady, and she would have likely fell down if left alone. The last rite that the dices had declared for the young Officiant was an "optional" one, that Sarah was authorized to refuse but decided to take it anyway.

The electric winches lifted Sarah's body till she remained just on the tip of her toes, and she begun to cry. Jenna reached for her and, with her tallness, managed to kiss the tortured girl on her mouth and whispered her "Be strong, it will end soon".

For this breach of protocol, the redhead would be whipped harshly, once back to the Officiants House.

 The unnamed Officiant brought, from the recesses of the ziggurat, a final set of contraptions, and disposed it on the top shelf of one of the trays.

The first tool appeared to be a small, inflatable cylinder with two conic terminals,  a bit like a big silicone suppository with a thick tube protruding from one tip.

Next to it, a stainless steel, well sized speculum, and than an oddly shaped dildo, with a sizeable hole traversing its whole length, then a stainless terminal with a one-way valve and a lock-plug, and one battery operated terminal-clamping machine.

Gaia inserted the speculum in Sarah, then arranged its screws so that it fully opened and exposed the young woman's uterus cervix.

She then took the inflatable gizmo, showered it with lubricant and proceeded to force it through the cervix's neck. Soon, only the black silicone tube remained in sight, protruding from the body of Sarah.

Gea kept caressing and soothing Sarah from behind, as she had started to do the very moment that the little Officiant had brought the new tools from the service rooms inside the ziggurat.

Gaia then slid the tube inside the oddly shaped dildo/holder, and proceeded to move this up along it, till she placed the misshaped clump of silicone inside the stretched body cavity.

She then removed the speculum, all the while keeping the newly placed holder in its position. She knew that its top was modelled on the young woman's cervix mouth, as well that its silicone gel would morph itself over the next few days, as daily injection of more compound would enlarge the holder toward the inside.

Nichelle took a set of leather strands from the tray - her and Jenna managed to assemble it, connecting its pin joints, around the hips and waist of Sarah, revealing its nature as a tight-fitting harness. With a bit of awkwardness, them and Gaia finally managed to complete the set-up, fully locking the various silicone contraptions inside the womb of the officiant.

Lastly, Gaia glued shut all the joints using a self-hardening resin, on each joint applying the Seal of Service.

The strands of the harness really were just nice covers for carbon fibre tapes, able to withstands thousand of kilograms of tensile strength. Once fully hardened, the resin was, likewise, among the most resistant plastics known to woman.

By the end of the day, Sarah would have needed specific tools to remove the harness, and the uncomfortable pieces of synthetic biocompatible materials that this kept firmly inside her body.

Gaia then took, from the tray, the last final pieces of the puzzle - the battery operated clamping machine, who could also cut the nano-carbon woven silicone tube, and the special one-way valve and socket plug assembly. She cut the tube - which could also act as a one-ton life-line - and proceeded to clamp the one-way valve-plug on it, again using the multi-ton strength of the battery tool.

In the meanwhile, Nichelle inserted a more normal butt-plug inside Sarah's ass, and then attached one tensor of a Y-shaped leather frame to one hook in the back of Sara's leather corset, the centre of the frame to the screw protruding from the butt-plug, with a small butterfly bolt and, finally, when Gaia moved away, she passed the two final strands of the frame on the sides of the Venus mount, to two rings in the leather corset,

While this anal plug would be retired, at the end of the day, the material in her womb would be left in placer, as every of her days hereafter would start with a generous quantity of saline solution, forcedly inserted inside the inner inflatable, to expand her womb.

The physicians who would supervise the expansion process, as well as her menstruations' suspension, would be the only ones authorised to remove her harness and proceeded with the necessary hygiene and health maintenance activities. 

The purpose of this all was to use the, by then enormous, balloon inside Sarah's belly to suspend her upside down, in her third full officiation, six local months after.

Gaia then attached a small saline pump yo the inflate plug, and proceeded to place the first half of many a liter inside Sarah. The saline was at body temperature and, among the sensorial assault that the session had brought on the young woman, it went nearly unnoticed.

The winches hooks were lowered, and finally Nichelle and Jenna helped the nearly destroyed Sarah walking out of the Cube squares, down the first ramp of steps, and inside the hidden rooms of the Ziggurat, where the paramedics of the Service were waiting for her.

On a veranda of a very nice villa, in one of the few tropical islands still untouched by mass tourism, a seven feet tall Obsidian man and a chubby, five feet girl looked at the scene, as reproduced by a way beyond the state of the art 3D vision system.

Both were avatars of the 'god', however, this usually didn't override their original consciousnesses when it observed the rites, one of the few times in which each was sure to be itself - and one of the few occasions in which they had to talk, to communicate.

Around them, about a dozen of naked women, almost all with marks on their bodies, some wearing the same kind of harness enclosing Sarah, or even more outlandish implements - one of them a Protasian with no arms.

The Abducted Officiants were discussing the spectacle from their perspective, though some were simply crazily masturbating.

- "So, that is Emily's little sister?"

- "Twin - the four of them were born in a couple of hours. She is ten minutes younger than her older sister."

- "Oh, girls, won't our spy on the alien ship make a fuss, over this?"

- "Why? Her sister has the same right that she had, to consecrate herself to us. Emily has nothing to say about this, really."

- "More on the point, if this sister grows enough, should we ever get her here?"

The tall man stopped, while the armless woman stepped in front of them and, gracefully,  sat with a perfect rendition of the Officiants' Lotus cross-fold - a movement that the Protasianne, Diem van Tinh, had invented forty centuries before, when she still hadn't been abducted by the god.

- "That is not your choice" 

- "No need to use that tone, we are just... us - what we think  does not really matter."

- "Maybe... it is customary that we are the ones that decide to ascend an officiant. Us, the council of the Forever Servants."

- "Noxon has no reason to allow to his presence someone who is bound to be so critical as that lass."

- "Unless everybody is mistaken, that is precisely the reason why she has entered the service. Am I wrong?"

- "Uh, no - No, you are not Mistaken."

 The change in the big man voice pitch signalled that Noxon main consciousness had taken control - the gold-tanned woman ignored it, as it was inconsequential. Her artificial arms arrived, navigating the room like some weird animal or the semi-autonomous small robot that they really were, reached their owner and dressed on her. Diem preferred to have her arms attached, when she talked with the Old Bastard, as she knew that the ancient A.I. had never really overcome its original human upload preference for Italian-style mimicry

- "So, when she will have earned it - soon, if this fist performance is a clue of her level of commitment - we will invite her here, and you will take her dress-down like a man, and not like a stupid divinity."

The last word was almost spat. Not for the first time in 5000 years, Noxon wondered how could it have been so dumb as to reprint its ancient collection of comics - Oink and its "Confront your Gods" message had made lasting damages to its godhood pretences.

Yet, erasing the abductees and their culture would have been... wrong like the plans of JVH for the inhabitants of Madian, Noxon's measure for unacceptable levels of divine ass-holeness.

- "Of Course - when she will have earned it."

Diem stood up, proud as ever, her nipples even more arrogant than ever

- "Vâng!"

Noxon looked at the 4000 year young arse as she went away, and felt that she was every bit as lovely as the first time that she climbed Nijistrim's Ziggurat, one of the few with developmental malformations in a society completely based upon the use of genetic engineering.

The substance that had produced that generation of teratogenic damages was long forgotten, and Noxon knew that it was right, but at times it wondered if the spunky 'Namese would have been so outspoken, hadn't she had to fight the unwanted pity of the "normals" in her youth.

Noxon considered the Westerhoos sisters conundrum....

Finally, some fun.

The Man That Wanted To Be God

(The title is based on John Huston's masterpiece "The Man That Wanted To Be King"  - if you can, watch it. If you can't, because you are allergic to all filmography made before 2005... please, shove your fist up your arse and, once it is firmly logged up there, try to open that hand as much as possible; no reason in being an ass-hole by halves.) 

What have you thought, when you were kids, and they +explained you the concept of God?

Chances are, you didn't really think much.

Or anything at all... Most if not all of that stuff really makes no sense for a kid, but you were smart enough to know  that you couldn't say it out loud or your parents would get upset and tried to re-explain it to you, at which point you usually said "yes, I understood", or not - in which case, let's go for another roun

Of course, I was a bit dumber than you, so I continued saying that it made no sense  to me long time after the moment when I should have learned to shut the fuck up, and just fake it.

Only, it make sense - after all, using the Anthropic Principle and a multiverse with infinite combinations of physical laws, in regards to the chain of coincidences that has allowed to our spaces to exist till now is really not very different than postulating the existing of some superior entity that was interested in creating life.

I do not think that either theory is, really, falsifiable - so, either is an equally unscientific though, after all, somewhat reasonable hypothesis.

The one that you choose for you is a matter of tastes or - if you prefer - of faith (unless one day some actual prove of the existence of a multiverse will be obtained, in which case, the Principle becomes a scientific concept - the weak point of science is that, if new information contrast it, scientific theories may have to be fiscatded, or restricted to be useful approximations) though, to be honest, imagining a single entity (god) reeks a lot more of anthropocentrism than the Anthropic Principle does.

(After all, if the universe was completely different and molibdenum-based starfish aliens observed it, they still would come up with the same principle - "The universe seems designed for us, simply because it is the one that we are able to observe").

However, in my great youth and absolute lack of humbleness, my reason for the gigantic WTF that forever prevented me to attain religious peace, was this:

"Why him and not me?"

What makes "god" more worthy of respect than me? Because it created the universe? Really?

Why couldn't I do the same? At least, theoretically, potentially... if it is at all possible, some way must be there.

And if he created the universe, why did he such a shoddy work?

In general, why should I believe that God is and will always be better than me, even in the case that I became a real nice human being?

(instead of the pile of crap that I am now... but, when I was a kid, I was entitled to think that I could be able to grow up a gentle and generous person. In truth, I  derailed and imploded in full Hikikkomori only at 33, when I came to the conclusion that I could never get rid of and the internal prison my education had confined me in and, thus, life was useless anyway.) 

It must also be that my parents never managed to grasp the concept of positive reinforcement -  they never managed, really, to grasp most of what makes life, uh, life - and, as a result, their idea of God was really an ass-hole that spent his time crawling up everybody's arse, to keep people well in check, steady in their place.

That being the case, I may respect a policemen  - maybe... even the most democratic country has thought-police, and these I would gladly see all fired, or doing some real work like tracking embezzlement  - but sure as hell I do not love them, nor can I love the policeman-God of my parents.

But, mostly, my issue was "why him and not me?" - why should I accept a metaphisic entity that all but guarantees that no human can ever be the best. Do any of us have any need to be humiliated even more than what laical life already doles out, that they need yet another authority to bow to?

If it was actually possible for any cognizant entity to create life, why I had to bow to it.... And why could it not be me? After all, back in the day I thought I was as good as anybody else. Turns out, it is not really so...


Over time, I accepted my limitations   - as if I really could - I  am not going to be Dr Hell (from Mazinga Z)  or anything else but, I  also understood that there are some attainable ways to be a Minor God.

Creating works of narrative, that describe or hints to other worlds, with different social arrangements and values. Bibles of alternative realities, if one wants. So,I set forth, starting with the small things - world-building and short tales.

Unfortunately, I started with all the best intentions but, let's be honest - an author can't really be much less cruel than God.

Persons read, or look at drawings, to forget the shit in their existences, and eventually to feel better about their crappy, crappy, crappy lot in life.

The simplest way to do so, is to give one's characters even more crap, to shove one on each other, than the average reader has.

Which really leads to making the life of these characters at least as miserable as ours...

No matter who it is, god is bound to br an asshole.


______________________________________


     With affect.

                  Noxon, the Lord of Nothingness


 

Ode To An American

If I read the statistics page well, yesterday a courageous American (USA) has gone through All the posts that I published here.

I do not dare to imagine the kind of bad-English-induced  headache that (s)he must have had  afterwards.

In any case, my thanks, anonymous friend.

You made my day, in an otherwise very bad one.

The Sphere

Prisoner 753 stared at the place from whom, she hoped, the food was going to come.

Over time, she had understood the geometry of her cell... it was a white sphere, internally coated with Teflon, rotating over bidirectional rollers, about five meters in diameter.

It was completely white, with led lighting inside its mass.

It looked like an infinite white space, and she couldn't find its limits in any way, as the sphere moved with her. Whatever she did, she was always at the bottom, in an apparently infinite white space.

Every now and then questions came from the walls. She answered all of them, as well as she could.

In a way, she felt that she earned to be a prisoner - her memory was full of atrocious things that she had done, any of which was punished with years of jail, life imprisonment or death, in most of Earth's countries.

From any legal point of view, however, her detention was arbitrary, and it was really  violating the very laws of the USA and the 2056 U.N. convention on human rights - not that the U.S. had deigned to sign it.

Agent Harmon was looking at the big show - as he called the special detention centre - with badly hidden disgust. In many ways, what he was seeing was the incarnation of the very reasons why he had joined the FBI - to catch who did this kind of things to others.

In a year, nothing had changed inside the cell... the woman known as Keisha Lawson hadn't tried to escape, had always been collaborative - as much as she could, Harmon noted drily - and she had never lost her mind.

- "And that is the most worrying factor, the very reason why we cannot release her."

Pedro Morales, PhD., M.D. concluded, before realizing that he had to delve more into the details.


- "Every precedent test subject had suffered a psychotic crisis, by the third day of solitary confinement inside the sphere. There are no clues, in her behaviour that suggest, that she is any less stable than she was when we placed her inside. Her body may be only mildly modified, but her mind is definitely not human."

Harmon looked at the scientist, with the cordiality of a mongoose meeting a cobra.

- "So, she's a though nut to crack, and you want to keep her there till she cracks, because as long as she does not crack and goes nut, she proves that she is not a she?"

- "If she is not human, she has no rights and her detention is entirely legal, Special Agent Harmon."

Harmon suspected that an entire galaxy of slightly different human forms, many arguably much more different from the human baseline than their prisoner, would probably object to this syllogism.

Unfortunately,USA and aliens had a contentious relationship ever since the times of president Trump, way before the galaxy gave the word its current context.

Harmon was here only to visit the girl, before going on to make his final report and recommendations to the Attorney General Office - he was not there to pick a fight with someone that had mastered the difficult combo of being a scientist and a bigot.

Everybody was free to spend their free time as they prefer, but Harmon was pretty sure that the mess had an ulterior purpose. The chiefs of Lawson, of whom she could really say very little, had led her to fall in the USA Government's hands.

As for why... the thing that made more sense was that, now they knew what it was going to be their likely treatment, their other operatives would disregard completely any suggested defection.

It was so obvious, that Harmon had difficulty believing that any of his superiors could fall for it, yet here she was, long after it had been virtually proven that she had nothing more to say.

Still imprisoned, without trial or even any intention of indicting her, as it could reveal the existence of yet another foreign secret agency, operating on the US soil, well beyond the control of the US government.

Which, of course, was a bad  idea, in a day and age where the American public was already questioning the value of a federal government that couldn't rein in the Alien invaders of Earth ,or their robotic puppets.

Let said public know that there was not one, but two more powers-  even more aliens than the E.T.- that operated virtually freely on US territory,would probably result in yet another tumultuous season of unleashed populist nationalism, that the country could hardly afford.

Even if the fact that said agencies had none of the qualms, in using violence, as the Anipos and their robots probably justified the panic.

A new right wing government would hardly change anything, of course... the scientists were adamant in their evaluations, two hundred years to close the technical gap with the Anipos technology - the one seen during the war, and embodied in the 'bots - maybe less, if the social environment changed and the talents that today went into programming social media - and stock market automatic tools - could be lured back to much needed, but low-income, activities like basic technological development and theoretical physics.

Until then, whatever the leaning of the President in charge, the US Government had to play ball. Like almost every country on Earth had to do with the US, after the fall of the Soviets, for about seventy years.

Harmon stopped at the sobering thought - this was how the operatives of half a century of rogue states had probably felt, angry and impotent at openly pursuing the real interests of their nations, because these infringed those of the world only hiperpower.

Forced to use crappy and unreliable surrogates, like financing terrorists or pursuing soft power approaches, financing cultural institutions.

He picked the microphone, and started interrogating the prisoner.

At the end of that day, its frustration was as hard and headache-inducing as it was the first time that he met her, her lapses infuriating for both.

He turned in his report, and was happy that, for other four weeks, he would be spared that pain.

One week later, his task group operated a sting, to catch an elusive network selling stim-records of what could only be called snuff-actions.

The technology was alien in origin, and allowed to memorize a subject's experience from his or her point of view. Two US senators had died of an heart attack, when they had switched from the assassin's to the victim's stimuli feed.

The technology hadn't been forbidden yet, though its near-narcotic and addictive characteristics were quite obvious, because of a powerful lobbying from the Hi-Tech transnational that had commercialized it.

The political implications of the deaths being complex enough, the best course of action was infiltrating the ring and RICO its components for the crimes committed producing the stim-records - the violation, brutal beating and final dismemberment if two young women.

Interpreting a wily snake of a would-be smuggler, Harmon was intimately happy, back at delivering to justice people that richly deserved to be arrested and charged for their crimes.

If the American dream had died with the middle class in the 4th industrial revolution, there was still truth, justice and the Apple Pie, worth fighting for.

His inner happiness died when he met the producer of the material.

- "Chief Special Agent Harmon, I suppose."

In front of him, stood an older and much colder Keisha Lawson - a sister, if the prisoner ever had one.

- "Clone?"

- "We all are. How does my sister go?"

Harmon reviewed all of it, under the light of this revelation...

- "Don't you know?" - he asked,his tone strongly implying incredulity.

- "Yes, I know, but I'd like a second point of view."

- "She is holding up all too well, considering."

- "They are ever going to free her?"

Harmon realized something that chilled him to his bones

- "Has she ever done something?"

- "Fifteen years as kindergarten teacher, then your marines killed our pacifist princess, and she was swamped by a flux of someone else's memories."

- "Kindergarten teacher?"

- "Yes, then, a technical glitch, and she believes to be an amnesiac operative... and some part of us wanted to see how things would turn out. It is proving... illuminating."

- "Are you going to kill me?"

- "Why? - You clearly believe in your work, you will try to get the poor innocent girl free. You will become an embarrassment for your superiors, that need that woman to be the most dangerous terrorist on Earth."

- "She is associated with your organization."

- "Associated by being born a slave. Nothing more."

- "Why? Why the cloning, the modifications, for a teacher?"

- "Genetics makes for just a rough sketch, then life refinishes it with large strokes of hazard. She proved incapable of suitable levels of violence, in-utilizable as an operative, so her black boxes were removed, leaving only what was needed to keep her under surveillance. A mistake, as it left her open to the glitch that sent her to Washington."

- "I am going to arrest you, and your colleagues." - Harmon meant it, with all his heart.

- "These records are made completely of simulated material, the two models are alive and well and ready to appear, if called to witness before a jury. The technology is perfectly legal, and I think it will stay legal for a long time, its potential for social disruption notwithstanding. Those two senators accepted to assume their risks, when the change point of view menu was prompted. The worst I can risk is some fine, and being sued by the families, if they do not mind exposing their beloved relatives as perverts that died,  for the pleasure of experiencing the brutal killings of two teenaged girls."

- "Not to mention, Marine - the last time a battalion of you met one of us that knew you were coming, it almost lost its battle flag."

The black woman started scribbling, on a small bloc that she took out of her purse. She continued for about a minute, before handing a sheet covered with minute scripts to the petrified - controlling its rage - Harmon.

- "These are the true identification data of the woman in that fish bowl. It should be easy for you, to demonstrate that she is, indeed, Kira Lawson of Canterbury , Connecticut, and that she has spent all her life as a teacher, there, with only one fine for entering a city centre on a bike - pedalling - as her rap sheet."

- "She was a green nut, never used a personal powered vehicle. Well, none of us does, really - but that's because we go by matter-energy direct conversion. Nuclear is underpowered, by that standard."

- "Why do you give me this?"

- "I thought that you needed some help self-destroying your career."

And, as that, she was gone. The memory of his hidden recorder was blank, and Harmon looked at the little paper with very mixed feelings.

He read,  and re-read it over the next few days, than he asked a meeting with his director.

It was not going to be the end of his career, but sure it was going to be one long hassle.

At the same time, knowing that his worst enemy thought that he would do the right thing, no matter what... if this was to be the end of his career, it was a good enough epitaph.

In The Name of Noxon (Part 8)

The dream arrived, right when Emily thought that she had finally figured out what to do with her life.

Granny A. could go on, extolling the incredible virtues of the Service of the God Noxon, but Emily knew better - law school, a degree with top marks, internship at "Gordanova&Daughters", then being a regular in the study for about ten years, till they made her a partner and she'll make a ton of money and have a trophy wife - maybe one of those Extra-gorgeous Daughters of Noxon -  with whom to have a bunch of trophy kids.

That night, the dream had started pleasantly enough... she was in a great villa, in some place in the planet narrow tropical band, a white-cream sand beach in sight.

The kind of place she wants to buy, whence she will become a successful politician, after the career in legals.

The girl came in, 18 years old, crispy as Protasian can be when they spend their days under the sun - too young to be a presentable trophy wife, but surely one to become a great womb-mother, in another couple of years.

The girl had a sweet expression, that Emily had trouble accepting - every woman so endowed by genetics had her way to exploit her beauty, and many a calculus behind their smile.

She knew it far too well, as she was one of them - grand daughter of two officiants and daughter of a black guard -  and SHE  was coldly counting in her good look,s as much as on her hard work, to prop her future career.

Yet she could not feel it in the young girl - she seems like she really did not care that she was stunning, which was even more stunning, but in another way.

Truly innocent beauties were the stuff of legend, of fairy tales or pub evenings. Nobody ever saw one in real life; this should have tipped Emily about the fact that she was in a dream.

The kid brought her on a great terrace with an enormous pool.

From there, Emily saw the sea, not distant and some twenty metres below her feet, she then turned to look at the house... it seemed an Alva Äalta design, executed far more flawlessly and with better material than most and replicated two or three times.

White birds, similar to big swallows, flew over the steep stairs that descended to the sea shore.

Evidently this was a hotel, as not even the most fabulously corrupt politician could get that rich without catching the eyes of law enforcement... so, this was a vacation? A pity.

If Emily was being too rational and analytical for a dream, she didn't care.

She just enjoyed the sun, the peace, the luxury of the place, savouring the moment when she would be able to afford it in real life. T

he girl - a waitress? maybe... usually, the ones in the youth hostels and cheap B&B that she had seen were not so impressively humble - came back, and announced

 - "The master will meet you shortly. He is eager to confer with you, on matters of the uttermost importance."

Emily cringed at the archaisms, and to the use of a male pronoun for someone who could speak with her.

It was not uncommon, for very obnoxious women ,to usurp the ancient word, even if they were not one of the couple of hundred humans that still had an y chromosome.

Of course, those unhappy soul never left their preserves in the planet's two man-serrails.

The only males on the planet were animals, like their house large k-cat - the only one able to beat Emily at chess.

Smarts as some of them were, they couldn't confer with her... maybe; she always wondered why nobody tried to teach to k-cat to use a keyboard.


The beauty pageant lowered her eyes - really? - as she started introducing their arriving host:

 - "His Grace, Lord of Nothing and Master of the Orbital Mechanics, Commander of The Officiants, Defender of the Biosphere, Designer of our Humanity and Culture, Original Colonizer of our World, Noxon the 'god' "

 - "Oh, crap, no!" - the words escaped Emily's mouth before she managed to get a grip on herself. T

he enormous, black... male? - man, masn was the word, smirked.

Emily wondered how many thousands women had that very same reaction, in five thousands years - more or less than a hundred?

 - "Is this, A Call?" - Emily's voice creaked.

If it was, her life projects were over - famously, one was not compelled by secular forces, to follow the path chosen by the 'god'.... it simply kept badgering her till it drove the poor woman, literally, crazy.

Once in the Service, her legal career would become impossible.

Powerful as they may be, ex`Twenty-Years Officiants tended to keep a behind-the-curtains profile, as having a suspected prophet as an attorney or - worse - a lawmaker seemed, to many and not just outside churches, an affront to the integrity of the churches-state separation, one of the tenets that kept the world from spiralling into never-ending, wasteful wars.

The huge black smiled - perfect teeth and sparkling eyes, for the first time in her life Emily wondered whether had it been a mistake, for her culture, to segregate away the males.

 - "Yes, it is."

Emily awoke screaming, ran out of her - and her twins - room, down the hall and up the causeway, to Granny A bungalow, whose door she banged with all her might, till Granny and Aunt Cezanne opened it.

Emily told them of her dream, hoping that the two ancient women would reassure her, telling her that it was just a simple dream brought on by self-suggestion.

At a point, Cezanne asked Emily to describe the birds that she saw, and the young girl did it, very vividly.

The old Officiant smiled sadly - she remembered those same odd frigates from her own Call. If Emily was hoping that this was just a dream, she was probably wrong and, in a couple of days, a pair of Priestesses would arrive from Sassa, to bring little atheist Emily to her fate.

She and A exchanged meaningful glances, and Cezanne lied through her teeth to reassure the girl that they loved so much - Emily needed to sleep well that night, if she had to endure the kind of crash training that often followed these extempore Calls.

Granny A managed to escort the little one back to her bed, and kept her company for a while, till an exhausted Emily fell asleep.

On her way back, she was a bit surprised to see the light still on in their little house .- she expected Cezanne to go back to sleep.

It was not so unusual for their kids to dream the Black Bastard, when she started to re-tell her service tales.

Cezanne had always maintained that the best thing was sleeping over the fuss, and see things calmly in the morning ,after a good breakfast.To date, she had been right and none of the calls had been a real one; after all, she was herself a "Called", so she knew what she was talking about.

- "I didn't think that my tales were having this effect on this generation resident sceptic - dreaming to be called"

 - "It wasn't your tales, or a dream." - Cezanne said it plainly, as if it was an obvious fact.

Granny A felt her legs suddenly weak - she had never thought that Emily, of all "her" kids, would enter the Officiant Service - not unless Granny really moved wheels and got her drafted in the Five Years levy.

A Call... Noxon was one sarcastic bitch.

 - "Are you sure?"

- "I remember those birds, I have looked for them, as a clue to. where the 'god' has his Villa. They are from a small, uninhabited archipelago in the middle of the Medium Sea."

- "You know where Noxon lives?" - A. couldn't keep the surprise out of her voice.

- "No, only where he goes for holidays, and where the abducted Officiants reside. I do not think that it lives, really."

- "So, is it true? It didn't sound as any Call I heard of - no swooping three days orgy, no whips, rotating dildos, incredibly tasty food, no promise of Earthly and un-Earthly delights, nothing!"

Cezanne eyebrows furrowed, in that way that A, a century after meeting her, still felt endearing.

- "No, it was a Business Call"

A. found the concept preposterous - "Business? From the 'god of practical pranks'?" - she had heard of these, but they were nothing more than another of the legends in the service.

- "Yes. I do not think that it will be a couple of priestesses, to show up to bring her to the 'god', tomorrow."

They went to bed, but neither of them could sleep, and continued arguing about what to do till dawn.

The day after, the new arrived had the looks of an officiant from the Green Island - auburn hairs, tanned skin with dimples, green eyes, perfect white teeth with in a mouth with plumpy and pout lips - and the muscles of a black guard, but surely not the age of a priestess.

More troubling, as she was talking to them and explaining that she was there to take in charge Emily, her feet wandered off the ground.. and refused to go back and touch it, for at least five minutes.

In the Noxon's mythology, there was only one category of the 'god's servants who could fly - "The Messengers".

They were to be dreaded as much as they were, usually, beautiful.

Cezanne and Granny A. were the strongest humans in town, easily as strong as twenty normal women - a Messenger was, to them, what they were to the general population.

Her presence was terrible -the hyper-human could only be there because Noxon wanted Emily to become a Messenger herself, and Messengers... Messengers, the legend was, killed people, and a lot of.

Usually, in accidents - having 500 times the strength of a person, all but their most controlled exertions broke bones, ripped arms out of sockets, crashed windpipes, tore ligaments.

It was suspected that allowing the Messengers to have meaningful, yet safe, human interactions was the real reason why Noxon abducted - and enhanced  - some of the officiants, making them much stronger and incredibly more resilient than base humans.

Once she was one of them, Emily could never come back to the broader society.

The messenger took Emily's hand - with extreme care, like it was fas ragile as crystal, realized Cezanne - and, looking the young girl in her eyes, drove her into a small dance, inebriating and apparently careless.

She continued till she hold completely the attention of the short brunette, and then they were twenty metres up,  in the air.

- "We are flying!" _ The scream came, terrorized, then the Messenger started flying around, and the screams soon turned into laughs and giggles, and then, into THAT kind of giggles.

On the ground, Granny A. squeezed hard Cezanne's shoulder, in a fit of spite.

- "Emily is going to follow that bitch!"

- "At her age, had someone offered you to fly, would you have said no?"

The Messenger came back, and Emily was on the ground again, in a complete state of exuberant enthusiasm.

She could not stop herself from running around, then went to Granny A. and to her womb-mother, that had finally managed to get back from work.

- "Have you seen? Have you seen? She flies! She can fly, and she say"s I can, too!"

- "If so you chose." - The voice of the messenger came in, hovering in some creepy space between matter-of-fact briskness and velveted suavity.

Mary, Emily's womb-mother, started crying, because she knew that Emily would  soon go with the beautiful - monstrous - stranger, and be gone for decades.

The young girl hugged her mother but then, when the Messenger called - "I have to go. Do you want to come with me?", she kissed her, Granny A and Cezanne, said goodbye to her twin, and then ran into the beautiful flyer's arms.

And, finally, she was gone.

_______________________________________________

Emily stood in the middle of what used to be the house's back garden.

Fifteen year before, when she was a head shorter, she had left this place in the arms of a beautiful woman, that would soon become her companion.

The house was still standing then, and her mother and grand-mothers were crying her departure.

She was crying too, today... the One True God militant soldiers from the generational ship "Great Revenge" had stormed the place, used their  electro-mag rifles to kill her grannies,  and then raped her sisters, mothers and nieces - like only men can do.

It was all her fault, because she was the one that had suggested Noxon to let the new colonizers reach the planet - there was space enough for another half million of persons.

She had not understood how would their patriarchy react to the fate of men on the planet, or that they would refute so adamantly to adopt the techniques of reproduction engineering that could have allowed to painlessly reduce their numbers to an acceptable level in a couple of generations.

Nor had she realized that they would  attack the fully pacifist planet, with a military might that had been designed to subdue war-crazy tribes and an almost psychotic hate.

Finally, she never thought that they would exterminate, in the most atrocious possible ways - after all, those women loved pain, no? - as many Officiants as they could lay their hands on.

The death toll on the planet surface had surpassed the million, when Emily - and the other messengers - convinced Noxon to take a more active role. The entity had never interfered in the civil wars and political upheavals on the planet, not once, in all its millenary history. Church is church and state is state.

For a second, in the night's sky, a bright star showed were the Generational Ship was orbiting.

A pellet of fifty kilograms of anti-uranium, a sphere of some 17 cm of diameter with absolutely no active energy sources and as cold as the outer space, impacted on the Generational ship anti-meteorite shield, fragmented and continued its travel... as an anti-matter plasma jet

It annihilated its way inside the two billion tonnes spaceship external anti-radiation shield, converting other fifty kilograms of normal matter into about 9 exajoules of energy - 2,15 Gigatons of TNT.

It wasn't enough to destroy the massive ship, but it damaged its aft defences, so that the successive, one tonne brick of anti-matter passed undetected  by the now non-operational "big asteroids" active defence system.

Ten minutes after, a new star appeared - far more brilliant - and, this time, the 43 Gigatons explosion managed to completely rupture the hull.


It also converted enough, of the ship mass, into hot gasses that it changed its orbital dynamics.

Emily knew that many of her space-worthy  brethren were up there, saving women and child girls from the wrecked ships internal shelters, while enormous thrusters would come in, from beyond the ship  original defensive perimeter, to tow the wreck out of the planetary orbit and into the sun.

As for the men and boys of the ship... she looked around her, at the ruins of what used to be her home, and thought about what hey had done on the planet in the last six weeks.

She couldn't care less about them.

It was all her fault - she thought, for a second.

- "Don't be stupid. I should have just ignored your recommendation, woman. It's my fault."

The voice sounded inside her head - for five thousand years, Noxon had never used the full extent of its communication capabilities, with the women under his command.

Now, all of the Messengers, the surviving Enhanced Officiants and many, many volunteers were all connected inside a mind network, with the shifting conscience of the alien 'god' at the centre.

This was giving the resistance army the same kind of tactical advantages that the invaders had, at the beginning, with their body armour gears and fully integrated headsets.

The same microscopic robots that were responsible of restructuring  a small portion of their brains to allow them access to the common mind-space, and to handle the kind of dual-tasking that it required,  were also "enhancing" the bodies of most volunteers.

Some of them already approached the strength levels of the "abducted", and were a match for a male in powered armour, in strength, but much faster.

Tactically, the invasion force was hopeless, now that the ship was destroyed. 

- "Sung-Tzu: if you want an enemy to surrender, you must give him an alternative to fighting to death."


- "Who cares?" - The answer resonated from inside a hundred thousand female skulls.

Emily took out of the pockets of her "tactical suit" the ceramic knife that she had come to love, and went down the hill, where the rest of her platoon was rounding what was left of the company that had invaded her home-town.

The surviving inhabitants of the city had gathered , and started carrying away the bodies of the citizen that the soldiers had violated and killed.

She looked at the defiant men - soon, they could not call themselves "man" any more.

She reached the first, grabbed his manhood inside the trousers and cut it away, the subtly powered knife requiring only a fraction of her inhuman strength to go through the fabric and the human tissues.

By the end of the month, of the fifty thousand soldiers that had descended on the planet, no man survived.