All for Nought Orphan Ufonaut

"We won the war in nineteen fifty-four," went the chant in the playground. One of the boys tried to make a correction. "Shouldn't that be nineteen-forty five," he reminded them. But the chant went on, and on... Was it because it rhymed, or was there another more sinister reason? Most people believed that the Second World War ended with the dropping of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the invasion of Germany being a humanitarian act on the part of the allies, but they'd been quite happy to fire-bomb Dresden, killing far more people as Kurt Vonnegut details in his black comedy Slaughterhouse Five; so why go to the bother of using men and tanks. Fall Out? It's a fair excuse, but it doesn't seem enough of an explanation somehow. Another boy in the playground knew a different story, but he wasn't telling. Instead, he cast his mind back to a time before, a time when he'd been safe and happy, a place in which he'd been cared for by tall blonde men and women who one day told him he was going to a place called Earth. His task was simple - or simply put rather. Along with others like him, he was going to be sent to that green-and-blue world near Sol, the one that had just been devastated by atomic warfare, the one that he and the others were going to regenerate, the one that they were going to shun for the rest of eternity, the Criminal World of Terra. Its crime? Self-abuse to the point of extinction.

 There were a lot of them sent around that time. Angels they were known as, but they were a lot more than that. When he'd arrived at his own particular destination there'd been a hole in the ground fifty kilometres in circumference, but his godstar had immediately generated a small settlement of a few houses and the couple who would nurture him. His 'fairy godmother' had taught him the language he'd have to use, it'd remain with him for the rest of his stay, a tutor whose job it was to discover his needs and wants, communicate them to the godstar within which would, in turn, contact the Greater Godstar above and his requirements would be met. He'd been riding in the perambulator with his 'mother' in command when it had made itself known to him; looking at the signs around him, he'd suddenly begun to read and understand the letters and words without external prompting, his 'inner voice' reading for him, no explanations, just the sudden awareness that this was 'greengrocer' and it meant 'a place where you went to buy fruit and vegetables', though the meaning of 'fruit and vegetables' came later when the words came into view in some convoluted fashion 'arranged' by his 'godstar'. That was a curiosity in itself, a vague, nebulous, indefinable core element in his mind, which functioned beautifully but didn't like to be thought about too much. If he did, things tended to happen - bad things usually. So he'd stopped wondering about it and just accepted it for what it was, a thing to be used in order to obtain what was wanted, either generally in terms of the regenerating process or for his own sake which, he'd decided quite early on, amounted to the same thing, didn't it?

 The world generated itself around him, as he'd been told it would. Streets, shops, people - all loomed into view as he travelled along in his perambulator with one or other of his 'parents' at the helm. No specific instructions had been given to him, just the essential task of creating what was required at any given moment in accordance with the 'original design' that had been destroyed in the thermonuclear holocaust; genuine creativity would be part of his future. But he was already experimenting unconsciously with words; a new soap powder had just arrived at the greengrocer's which his mother needed because all the others damaged her hands. It was called 'Persil' for reasons obscure to everyone else but his 'fairy godmother' who let him know in the usual way between them that, because the 'family' needed money, his mother had to use this new product (the fact that it was better for her hands was the 'hook' with which she had to be caught), the meaning of which was Silver Purse or Purse of Silver (Purse-Sil), everything around them was like that; it had other meanings than the obvious. It didn't really concern him too much; his 'fairy' and the godstar within and above would deal with all the details, but it was a useful thing to know about, wasn't it?

                                                                                                                                *

 But all that was just wish fulfilment. It worked, of course, but the truth was harder to swallow. Buddha tells us that existence is an illusion, which is a useful point at which to start. He'd been sent to Terra as part of a UFO team to discover just what insanities the Terrans were busily perpetrating on their homeworld now. Reports had been coming in of cataclysmic upheavals in the region of the Atlantic ocean, the continents of Mu and Atlantis appeared to have been lost and there'd been concern about the planet's fundamental integrity, the core appearing to be under duress, and so on...

  His UFO had been 'taken out', almost before it entered human space, by Atlantean sonics, the craft breaking up around them all before, as was usual in these cases, the Godhead took over. As a protecting safeguard, it was a pretty effective tool. They'd all been taken to a secret laboratory inside one of the Atlantean mountain ranges in Eurasia where their hosts were planning an attack on some Mu controlled habitats in the Caucasian Basin, but thanks to the Godhead and his 'magic' Daikini familiar, when they began to dissect and experiment he'd been regressed to infancy and all he now remembered was the sight of an old face peering down at him and leering as it fiddled about with his waterworks and the gently soothing voice of Daikini saying "Just relax, nothing can hurt you, it'll all be over soon," and the feeling of certainty that, yes, it would be alright and nothing bad could happen, and it was then that the new world had begun to be generated around him, or was it?

                                                                                                                                *

 It'd been explained to him like this: Atlantis and Mu were at war, but it was just a symbol in some ways, an echo if you like of history repeating itself - as history did. Spengler said so. The effects of the war now would be felt in the late Twentieth-Century or rather repeated there, in the shape of AIDS and BSE or 'mad cows disease'; in short, Atlanteans or A's of the past that was in the present were attacking the future in the shape of AIDS, but not really. They were actually asking for help from the future, that is, AID. Similarly, the disease that made people go 'moo', that is, the Avalonian brain disease originating in bovines was the echo of the genetic destructiveness of the war waged upon the people of  ‘A’ by  Mu, that is, the Mu’s or Moos. An explanation that was further complicated by the fact that the war in question would be fought sometime in the future and not in the past, that is, a war between what was now known as, generally speaking, America, and the Japanese who, somewhat crowded on their little islands, had decided to transplant themselves wholesale to Central Europe and, in particular, the Caucasian Basin. His task, along with the other members of the minitech michronoid crew, had been to travel to the future or the past, each of them equipped with a Creative and a Commander, and use their 'tools' to 'cure' the illnesses of whatever age they found themselves in, with the hope that, somehow, Atlantis and Mu would not be lost in the catastrophe that had or would follow(ed). It was all very confusing...

                                                                                                                                *

 He'd been detailed to guard the oven and make sure that, when the S.A.S arrived, there'd be no evidence to incriminate any of those responsible for the extermination of the jews that had entered Belsen and, starved, tortured and experimented upon, had had their husks piled up like sticks of kindling prior to being consigned to the flames. He'd still been throwing boxes of documents through the oven's maw when the S.A.S had arrived, crashing through the heavy oaken door with an anti-tank gun limber. He'd stuck to his prearranged cover, the so-bizarre-to-be-plausible story that he himself was a captured S.A.S officer (his English was good enough to convince anyone of his Englishness) forced to work for the Nazis. He'd been told to do this job and was doing it... That was all. The interrogation hadn't lasted long. He remembered the barrel of a pistol, being asked to drink something, suddenly feeling very small and lost. They couldn't alter his blonde hair and blue eyes, but there wasn't much a three-month old blue-eyed baby boy could do when the ugly old man leered into his pram and began to finger...

 It wasn't his fault that the jewess belonging to Obergrüpenführer Richter had taken such a shine to him, and could he be blamed for seeking consolation with the girl in the camp when they both needed it. Okay, so he'd taken advantage at the point of a luger, but they'd both enjoyed it, hadn't they? He would've saved her if he could, wouldn't he? Well, Rose had bored him after a while, and it was her turn at the showers, wasn't it?

 God moves in many guises. To an übermensch it was a superball that bounced its way into the perambulator and took over the consciousness of the superboy, easing his fears, activating his metafunctions, protecting him from the worst of what they could and would do to him, to others it was the Grace of God. Whatever, when the Nazi scientists, working on their secret weapon deep under the Führer's bunker in Berlin finally got their teleportation system to work and Stormtroopers began to make their 'significant appearances' throughout the world in 1954, he'd been unaware of those greater events that were and would occur in the world around him for some time, but with the Grace of God...

                                                                                                                                *

 We could see what they couldn't. The Nazis sang as they burned the corpses of the jews they'd starved and tortured; to them the maw of the oven was a Moloch to which they offered flesh in return for...who knows. But to those with 'other eyes', it was The Converter. We, the Guardians of the Other Side, saw the bodies go in and the Saints walk out the other side, arrayed in white, their auras shining with Certain Knowledge of the Goodness of God, walking into a new place which we'd prepared for them, soul and spirit reunited with renewed and rejuvenated flesh, the jeers and snarls of the nazis replaced by the heartwarming and heartwarmed smiles and laughter of the Saved, but I'd been the One Chosen to Remain and Secure the Gateway, like the Angel With the Flaming Sword at the Gates of Eden stationed to prevent Adam and Eve's return to The Garden and, when the S.A.S arrived, I was their captive, the Angel of Death they'd called me but Ruchiel was my name, which means 'One Who Loves'. They jeered and leered too, and I was taken to a shed where they pointed a pistol at my head and told me to drink...

                                                                                                                                *

 The task had been accomplished relatively quickly. Terra had been a stinking ruin till their Advent, but the Creatives had regenerated everything in next to no time and, when the Improvements began to appear, everyone congratulated themselves on a Job Well Done. He'd been four at the time. So, what next? It was a question that was always going to arise, and arise it did. After the Conflicts began to be noticed and the Anomalies too, the question became other. What to do about the Problem? It began simply enough. A red bus would leave a town and the same bus would return - but blue, a Conflict arising due to the differing aesthetic perceptions of two or more (who knows, in a third town the bus might've been green) Creatives. The Anomalies were more serious and A Cause For Concern, for example, a building would suddenly appear from nowhere - or disappear to reappear somewhere else, or simply disappear never to be seen again, thanks to Creative Interference. It was decided to 'monitor' Creative Activity, so it began...

                                                                                                                                *

 Noone put it to themselves quite like that, but Controlled Creativity might just as well have been labelled Concentration Camp #... The Creatives were, as it were, 'rounded up', the products of their genius to be carefully monitored, examined and, well, let's tell it how it was, Stolen. It was discovered that, just as the Creatives were able to regenerate and repair a broken world, so they could generate and construct a new one, each different and unique to the individualistic talents of its Creative Author. Later still, it became clear that, moving the Creative from one environment to another could cause what was termed a World Change, that is, a Fresh Opportunity for the Manipulators to appropriate the Creative's Gifts. In short, the Creatives became the Captives and then the Victims of Persecution. Whenever the society had a problem the Creatives were blamed and they found themselves brutalized, imprisoned and tortured until the Current Ills were cured. A few rebelled, but the Rebels were subjected to Witch Hunts which provided more ammunition for the Manipulators, and the Creatives, split now into the categories of Black and White Witches, Warlocks and Wizards, found themselves the recipients of Overt Control. Many forgot their Original Purpose, but some remembered and some remembered enough to try and taste the fruits of what they had created for others, but these were treated even more ruthlessly, confined to mental hospitals, classed as Demoniacally Possessive, their minds erased, wiped clean, sometimes brainwashed, but always Reminded that, Once Angels, they were Now Fallen, without Rights because they weren't Human. They were ALIEN to HUMANITY.

                                                                                                                                *

 They'd invented the science of Psycho-physics to explain the Creative Problem. From the Physics angle, Creation was made up of particles which were in a state of flux, relatively stable wave forms such as rocks and trees, and relatively fluid wave forms such as sky and ocean. There was a high probability of the more fixed wave forms staying fixed and a higher probability of the more fluid wave forms becoming more fluid (water vapour, for example). The phycisists had discovered that particles were capable of choosing their destiny. Wave forms were made up of 'probability waves' when it was noticed that, a particle, subject to external influence was not determined in its fate, but could change position, enter an alternative state, change direction, return to a previous position etc. Light particles showed particular virtuosity in this regard and everything being made up of light to one degree or another, Creation became full of possibilities, and the physicists’ attention turned towards the Creatives...

 From the psychological angle, all this was interesting for another reason. It was discovered that light particles had a habit of behaving in a different fashion when nobody was looking, that is, the consciousness of an individual affected the particle world at the quantum level, which meant that, theoretically, it was possible, by changing one's consciousness, to change the world in which we live; or, in other words, choose from amongst the different alternative realities, corresponding to the alternative choices available to the particle in the quantum world, that were on offer, which was what the Creatives had been doing anyway.

 The explanation from the point of view of the new science of Psycho-Physics was a simple one, and they decided to simply experiment upon as many Creatives as they could get hold of in order to see what was what, as it were. So they gave them lots of drugs, officially in the form of 'essential medicines', unofficially in the form of foods, and illegally in the shape of narcotics. And they fucked a lot of them a lot because sex, so the mystics claimed, produced transcendent consciousness. Some of them they lobotomised, just to see what difference it would make, and they turned more into cyborgs to see if they could control their Creativity in that way. A few physicists had the bright idea of making some of them eat radioactive isotopes so that they could map their progress through the world in the same way that they mapped the paths of quarks and mesons in their giant particle accelerators, and it was discovered that there were parallels between the collisions or, rather, encounters between the human particles/types and those at the microcosmic level, that is, gluons and flavours had their human counterparts in the macrocosm, which opened up brand new and even greater horizons for the new science. Behavioural psychologists took the opportunity to map the behaviour of certain individuals classed as geniuses and later the 'pattern'  was used as a blueprint for the creating of new and better geniuses, which everybody among the new scientists of Psycho-physics was extremely excited about because, without the need for Natural Creativity, they could dispense with the Creative Problem altogether. Psycho-physicists began to be heard muttering the word Dissection and putting the letters M.D. after their names. There was a pogrom and the Creatives were subjected to various forms of punishment before being sent to The Converter, that is, the new Moloch of cybertechnology in which only their Creative essence was maintained, their personalities being disintegrated through the application of electro-shocks, lobotomising drugs such as chlorpromazine, and frontal lobe surgery before the implanting of cybernetic control systems gave the willess hulk an automatic impetus.

 Everyone among the psycho-physical fraternity was very proud. The Creative Problem had been solved. If they needed anything now they simply programmed one of their Creatives to Create it. The creatives weren't happy of course, but then that was only natural, wasn't it? There was no reason why they should be both Happy and Creative, was there? None at all. Art for Art's Sake? Tell it to the Space Marines. Okay, so it was a Creative Creation that the SM's wars Out There were, in fact, hologrammatical illusions Created by the Creatives themselves as a way of dealing with overly aggressive testosterone overloaded bull males, but there was a Principle To be Considered Here!

                                                                                                                                *

Ruchiel had become a rebel. As a Creative he was able to give a great deal of useful thought to the predicament of himself and his fellows. Schizophrenia, he'd decided, was the solution to his and others' dilemma. Psycho-physically speaking, the multiple personalities and voices of the schizophrenic corresponded to the alternative or parallel universes to be found in the multiverse of the quantum physicists, that is, the Creatives would flee into the unlimited worlds of possibility available to their Imaginative Creativity; they would abandon the Worlds of Man with his Technology and Logic of Destruction, and they would voyage into the worlds of Fantasy and Fiction, dwelling in Harmony and truth in lands of Faery amongst Creatures of Fable, Myth and Magic.

 He'd chosen to be a Babylonian Were-Lord in 4004 B.C., the date given by Bishop Ussher for the Creation of the World, a position which gave him the Opportunity to Travel in the manner of Were-Lord's into the past, which was also the Future as any Atlantean or denizen of Mu worth his salt would tell you. He'd travelled to both places, primarily to gain access to the genetic memory banks that the Elder races had preserved for posterity on the Eve of the Collapse. Those of Atlantis and Mu had themselves been Creatives before Logic became God. The Genetic Banks would be placed inside coccoons, all-but indestructible capsules containing foetuses, genetic codes and cloning equipment, to be activated automatically several hundred generations After the Cataclysm which was, paradoxically in temporal terms, Before the Catastrophe. But the Procedure had been Too Rigid. Psycho-physicists were Everywhere In Control. It was Impossible to Escape their Eyes, especially now that they had adopted the newer science of Behavioural Physics to serve their unquenchable Desire for Control. The Only Solution had to be One of Concealment. Rather than produce Pure Creativity in the shape of Atlanteans or Muons, he would introduce the Random Factor so that noone, not even the Creatives themselves would know who and what they were. It would be a Process of Discovery for the Individual Concerned, a Journey that could end either in Controlled Disillusion at the hands of the psycho-physicists or in Revealed Truth in the hands of the Hidden, those Creatives like himself who had escaped into the multiverse where they would wait, observe and nurture The Creative Future of Mankind. It had been simple enough. By scrambling the g-gnome coordinates and rearranging the DNA pattern of the Sidhes on the micro-CD's, he'd made sure that the Creative Talent Would Remain Concealed, at the expense of misshapenness, malformation, cretinism, deformity, maladaptation, as well as diseases such as AIDS and BSE, but the Secret Would Be Preserved, and a young cleareyed woman of twenty-nine might one day discover that she could write comic operas which, by the time the psycho-physicists found out about it and began to 'clamp' her spirit, the Creation would be Richer and she, Known by the Hidden, might One Day be ranked amongst their number as a Creatrix.

                                                                                                                                *

"Who won the war in nineteen-fifty four?" went the refrain in the playground. "I did," said a small boy with blonde hair and blue eyes banging a superball against the school wall. Puzzled faces turned to stare. "As a Babylonian Were-Lord, I was able to travel back to the past, which of course, as any psycho-physicist worth his salt will tell you, is also the future, and make sure that when the S.A.S entered Belsen I wasn't there because I'd teleported back to the catacomb of tunnels beneath the Führer's bunker in Berlin where, nine years later, they'd developed the teleportation system that I'd need to escape the S.A.S, return to the catacomb of tunnels beneath the Führer's bunker in Berlin and wait until, nine years later, they developed the teleportation system that I would destroy to ensure that the allies won the Second World War because, well, I really was S.A.S." "You're fuckin' crackers," said another small boy, "it was South Korea."

Robin Usher (Bright) 'All For Nought Orphan Ufonaut' in Tyree Campbell (ed.) Shelter Of Daylight, Sam's Dot Publishing, Autumn, 2010, pp. 75-81.