~ a short story
“The consortium convened to converse of and cultivate unto the changing conditions on the climate to the climb of the coerced citizenry.”
Seven entities gathered. A vampire, an archangel, a bobbit, a Decepticon, a faerie, John, and Nyarlathotep. A cabal of wacky characters that nevertheless each put their pants on one leg, or tentacle, at a time. The only thing more mad than their minds is the relative normalcy of their daily schedules. Would you believe me if I told you “The Crawling Chaos” takes the bus? Or that Dracula is addicted to Yoo-Hoo? (Spiked with blood, of course). Megatron and Saint Michael share a lovely hate for all the others on the council but put on a cooperative face for the sake of their continuous control; they also go to erotic book clubs together. John has never emoted and Cleo, the faerie, actually started out as his childhood imaginary friend, an androgyne-tulpa-daemon escaped from The Phantom Zone, also known as the collective unconscious. Oh yeah, and nobody ever has or ever will look Bob in the eyes.
If someone were to… well, let’s not.
Here, today, they gathered into a “Consortium” of sorts to take the world. Not under their rulership — which they already grasped, for long now, with a firm and unthreatened grip — but toward something new. They consorted for an ideal unity to go with our oppression. Us. Ours. The people’s. You and me. Yeah. This is important, so listen up.
Their intentions with this are neither evil nor good; their goals are not for favoring this nation or that. The entities are gathering and dictating for the future, that’s all. A future, continuity in the face of coming crisis.
You see, these monsters were thinking ahead, unlike so many of us. Ahead ahead. Far into the aeons, with the power to materialize that future realm with their own will. “Were.” That’s right. This already happened. More on that later.
Oh yeah, “Why?” you ask. Why would these freaks wanna save us?
Honestly, I don’t know. Don’t worry about it. What is, is.
So, let’s get this straight:
The Consortium would only have to meet once.
The Consortium made choices now that would resound throughout time and space.
The Consortium did not need the military, or a disease, or assassinations or market-making world-shaking economic moves of any kind to accomplish its goal.
Out there, they only needed the pages of a book. They needed our screens and streetways, the microphones and cameras on our phones, access to the public squares, physical and digital. They sought our smiles and frowns, hearts and minds.
That’s all anyone ever needed.
People don’t believe or follow or die for ideology or even for gains and pleasures, not really.
We do all that for stories.
So, the Consortium began to write a story.
It was full of immaterial experientia and abstract, holy exactitudes and damnations.
The story contained everything that was the human condition; their tale stretched to the limits of mythic possibility, the heroes and villains, monsters and their slayers — once read, understood and shared among the community — set to comprise a new age of impassioned creative endeavor in the populace.
Not only that, but a brand new spirituality would be endeavored toward birthing into our world at this late hour. Something that would never fade. A powerful ethos of interdependence and actionable compassion and a seven-generation view focusing on building well-being for the unseen souls of a time yet to be.
Through their story, the Consortium deigned to craft an immortal visage of a future ideal for humanity to gather around and work to make every day for the rest of their lives.
The Consortium would, of course, fabricate the book’s author and background, and subtly channel it through the world’s flows with conventional marketing, maybe at the height of one or another movement or trend or era of fictional articulation.
The Consortium knew the ideals within their text would take decades, maybe millennia of time, to truly take hold in our hearts and minds. They’d have to be patient; lucky for them, that kind of thing was easy. For them. They are each immortal, after all.
For all their mad power and psychotic plans of action, these seven were truly betting on the human spirit.
Might we now begin to do our part? (Not for them but for us!)
Yes, in fact, the Consortium’s story, their precious, life-saving book of infinite import and projected, collective spiritual transforming, was woven into the midways of the 20th century and is already among us.
You may have already read it.
When the Consortium finished their nameless tome, they used an ouija board to seal its mystic name in the annals of history, just before launching it into the collective psyche for all time. She was their opus and they named her Dune. ~
