The effect of a small nuclear device on a major urban area is impossible to imagine unless you have seen the photographs. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were nothing but an amateur dress rehearsal, and the cataclysm of the autumn of 2001 was a mere taste of the future the followers had to offer us. The annihilation of Manhattan took only a second. But this second will live above all the other seconds which compose the past. Even as it recedes, it merely gives birth to more and more infinite futures. Each one more horrendous, more destructive, more obscene than the last.
I have seen all of the pictures. I have stared at them until their lines turn to abstract shapes and the pixels collapse into kaleidoscopic shades of black, white and grey. The shattered buildings. The incinerated bodies. The infinite inferno. And the crater, the hideous aberration, like the invasion of another world on to our blue planet, the violence of some black and eviscerated world visited on our own, blasted into the center of the metropolis. Even as the initial reports were coming in on the evening of January 1st, even as the helicopters with their stupefied witnesses hovered over the Atlantic coast, watching the mushroom cloud dissipate into the upper atmosphere, I knew it was them. It could be no one else. I no longer believe in coincidence.
By another horrendous irony, the day that millions were vaporized was the day I was saved. I discovered this on January 4th, when the FBI raided Singularity, the long-rumored Arizona compound of the FPCJ6. What they found there matched massacre for massacre.
Alongside the copious proofs -- computer files, diagrams, mathematical formulas, traces of plutonium, improvised detonators -- of the congregation’s responsibility for the slaughterhouse in Manhattan, they found the guilty themselves. The High Priestess’ diary of events, “The Traveler’s Testament” as she called it, gave information enough for the investigators to reconstruct events.
On the night of 31 December 2009 the congregation gathered in the enormous communal prayer room. They joined hands in a circle, just as they had done every day since that first initiation, and recited the Traveler’s Benediction. Then High Priestess Guinevere took the stage and made a brief statement. What she said remains and will always remain unknown. Because afterwards the ministerial committee took the weapons they had acquired from their survivalist allies and, one by one, shot their compatriots to death. Each of the victims appeared to have submitted willingly to their execution. They were killed in a kneeling position, with a single shot to the back of the head. There is enough evidence to conclude that the parents shot their own children before consenting to death themselves. When the massacre was complete, the ministerial committee turned their weapons on each other, leaving only the High Priestess to suffer the ignominy of suicide. Even in this final, frenzied moment of madness, her flair for the dramatic did not fail her. She was the only member of the church not killed by a firearm. Instead, she took a heavy butcher’s knife from the communal kitchen and carved Josef6’s military insignia into her forehead. Then, she cut open her jugular vein and bled to death among the corpses of her followers. When the device went off at 7am on 1 January 2010, and the cataclysm the Traveler had prophesied came to be at the hands of his followers, all those who had engineered the destruction of the present in the name of the future were already dead.
They died, I think, because they had accomplished their mission, just as Josef had previously accomplished his. The blow was indescribable. Manhattan and its boroughs will be uninhabitable for a century. National politics has been thrown into a maelstrom of recrimination and chaos. International standing has dropped and China has already announced its intentions to annex Taiwan. In its current state of shock and disarray, it is unlikely that there will be any resistance from the United States. Already people are abandoning the cities for fear of another attack. The survivalist and militia movements are exploding with new followers. The stock market crash that followed the event has almost demolished American industry. People are returning to the countryside and to the land. Subsistence farming is the country’s only growth industry. Josef6 is coming true. His world is invading ours as we watch, unable to stand against the catastrophe of time.
I sometimes wonder if this was his plan all along. The future must hate and despise the past, as a child grows to hate his parents. The future must feel ensnared, trapped, violated by the past. The past cancels all will, all choice, all possibility. It makes us helpless prisoners of the psychosis that is history. We are aliens to ourselves and our world. Orphans cast astray in a madness not of our own making. Perhaps Josef6 was the future’s final vengeance upon us: the past. Perhaps he feels some measure of contentment now that his future is, at last, upon us.
I myself cannot say. Because I cannot claim to know him. I can claim only that I know him no better than any man knows himself. But I am beginning to understand him at last. I am beginning to see the true outlines of his vengeance. I can see clearly now the coming end of the world. The architecture of Armageddon slowly takes shape as I continue to ponder the past that draws me back, always back, in its singular direction, towards that day ten years ago when I first signed on to the TimeLords message board and told them that my name was Josef6.
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