Spanner 23.5: The Fuses Have Been Lit

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Chaos Angel Spanner — Chapter 23: Black Panic in the Suites
Part 5: The Fuses Have Been Lit (Final Revision)

The voice of the Chairman comes down from heaven, amplified by multiple military-industrial satellites. His feral growl reveals him to be closer to full werewolf transformation than he has ever allowed himself to be in front of a public his now intends to destroy.

Brinkman: Traitorous Commonist rabble of Cascadia! You have murdered your King instead of obeying him, and you have chosen to betray us in league with the Antichrist instead of fighting against his evil under our command! We fought our Revolution to save America’s sacred Manhood from you! Surrender unconditionally and prepare for punishment and penitence, or we will sentence you to eternal torment! You have five minutes!

They stand together on the streets of the cities and towns below, arms linked together in solidarity, forced by the immortals who control the instrument of heavenly wrath to face their mortality and acknowledge their common humanity: Christians, Muslims, Jews, Pagans, Buddhists, unbelievers alike; student and worker, white and black, young and old, American and non-American, insufficiently rich to desperately poor, common mortals faced with sudden death and the realization that they are the enemy the Revolution means to destroy, they are the true target of World War IV. They thought they could force the Owners to give them an actual education or decent pay and working conditions; all they did was enrage a race of paranoid and implacable gods into genocide. For the first time since the death of socialism at the hands of Stalin, it dawns on a critical mass of unspecial ordinary people that the American Dream was always a lie, that to the small élite of Real Americans they have always been the Sons of Satan, and this is only the beginning of the rain of drones the Americans will be raining upon them from one end of the Empire to the other.

The Party wants them to surrender and submit. They choose to join together peacefully. Together, some without consciously realizing it, they reject the authority of the all-powerful Conservative Revolutionary Party and all that it stands for.

Yet the Revolutionaries comprehend nothing. They perceive only the Threat From Below that threatens to destroy their carefully planned utopia. They think only of the profit rate falling ever faster toward zero, the System of Free Enterprise speeding toward the singularity. They feel the American Exceptionalism embodied in their Party slipping away. But Brinkman has taken their vengeance out of their hands. They slip to their knees and chant prayers to Jesus America, to Echelon and NORAD, and to the Great White Father who leads their Party. From the sky above Seattle, the Liberators look down appalled.

A million cameras continue to shoot video. Not wanting the professional hacks of the MSM to interpret their own experience for them, they narrate it as if they can pour out their hearts and souls onto the Darknet in the last five minutes of their lives. If they pray to a supernatural power, they pray to a Supreme Being beyond the comprehension of even the Nine-Principled God and his son Jesus America.

But Admiral Currie is not fazed. Enthusiastic as ever, he declares, “We’ve got it in the bag! The Revolution is saved!”

“Don’t get your hopes up,” Brinkman grumbles. “I’ve got two daughters in the right position to ruin everything.”

He pats Brinkman’s back. “Nobody can stand up to Nuclear Power, comrade! Once our heavenly sword of justice cuts through your treasonous spawn like butter, we’ll crowd the sky with ’em and end the Communist threat for certain! Just have faith.”

Flying above the Seattle skyscrapers, Shira and Kira spin a double reality distortion field around themselves, their sisters, and their lovers, not so much as to hide them as to distort the images Echelon’s spysats are sending to the NORAD killsat’s aiming system. Jennifer asks, Do you really think we’ve got the power to pull this off?

The girl with the violet eyes flies into Shira’s arms. Shira replies, We killed King Patriot, didn’t we? Kira embraces Jennifer from behind, caresses her breasts, nibbles her ear; with so little time remaining, the three couples begin making furious love in mid-air. Down below, the Rockers aim their sound cannons at the mass distortion in the sky.

The Party censors allow the Great Firewall to keep the MSM channels blue. They don’t want any information to leak through.

The women in the sky above Seattle fight into ever more intense ecstasies. The twins’ reality distortion field externalizes their inner states.

Currie looks into his scope and fine-tunes his aim with a joystick. He transmutes his consciousness into the killsat. The Board and the Investors silently look on.

From below, the crowds in the streets of Metropolitan Seattle watch with their eyes and cameras. They’re done praying; they hold their collective breath.

From above, Echelon points its spysat eyes at the cloud of distortion obscuring the center of Seattle and tells Currie where to aim.

Between, two reality distortion fields combine with three Repulse fields operating at highest power into a cloud of pure chaos which a Patternist’s mind distorts in eleven dimensions. Eyes in Seattle, in Salem, in heaven watch in shock. The Rockers begin to play their symphony of destruction.

The voice of Jesus America booms deafeningly from the sky:

I
AM
GOD

Ariel and Taylor combine their Repulse fields to keep out the Liberators as three sets of two bodies fuse their consciousness into single beings held together by superpower and absolute ecstasy. On the streets, in the CPMC boardroom, in newsrooms everywhere, people go woozy and faint at the alien barrier between the city and the weapon that would destroy it. An enraged Nightwolf tries to murder his granddaughters; they gleefully throw him into the cloud of chaos. Drusilla blasts them with massive lightning bolts; Ariel Repulses it into the entire superteam. Nightwolf emerges screaming; Taylor railguns him at the Crusader, who knocks him hurtling into Lake Washington. Johnny Rebel whips out four cyborg Vulcan cannons and fires into the cloud, only to get sucked into it; his body disintegrates, and his mind with it — with a shock the Liberators realize that one of them is dead and they are now eight.

Currie continues to adjust his aim. “Come on, baby,” he tells the killsat’s aiming system like a lover, “you can do it.” His eye starts to twitch.

The twins collapse themselves and their lovers into one charged superconsciousness and draw their sisters into the ecstasy-powered fusion that draws in the collective hope of the people down in the city while thirty blasts of concentrated Rock ’N’ Roll combine to transmute pure love and reality distortion into sound that echoes statewide and across the mountains into Standard Oil-owned Okanagan. Shattered fragments of what was once Johnny Rebel, the Great American Hero, fly out of the cloud like shrapnel at the survivng Liberators. Drusilla tries to destroy the cloud, and with it her own daughters and stepdaughters, with the most powerful Repulse field she has ever unleashed, only for it to collide with two from Ariel and Taylor that annihilate it with a deafening shockwave. Below, many of the strikers panic and head back to shelter.

Brinkman yells in Currie’s ear, “Admiral, what the hell is taking you so long?”

Currie grins. “Patience, comrade. I told you to have faith.”

Henry, Richard, and Tom Becket wave back the other Liberators so they can combine their Destruct fields into a giant fireball they hope will eliminate the barrier protecting Seattle. They chant with a single voice in ancient Coptic from the Gospel of the New Genesis. Ariel and Taylor slip into the heart of the chaos. A triangle of power burns between the Becket brothers — their forms distort into rail-thin figures of light and then burning auras of blinding light — together they unleash a single coordinated Destruct field into the cloud of reality distortion—

the cloud glows and spins — it spits out a vortex of fire that blasts the Liberators and send them flying to the edges of the city; Liberty Belle slams into a mountain, and now they are seven. The Crusader lets out a wail of pain at her loss, then directs his most powerful Destruct field directly at the heart of the cloud hoping to murder the twins, only for it to dissipate in their hypercharged aura.

Mr. Seon asks, “When do you intend to fire, Admiral?”

Currie replies, “When our Party leaders get out of my way. We can’t afford to lose any more heroes.”

The Shape railguns the Streak at where he thinks Shira could be; the cloud flings him back out, but Drusilla catches him in her Repulse field and curves him back in; this time centrifugal force shoots him out, right into the Shape, and they spin out into Puget Sound.

The remaining five Liberators, the four Becket siblings and brother-in-law John Brinkman, fly away from the vortex to a safe distance.

Ariel and Taylor pop out below and take their positions between the cloud and the ground. The KCUF crew switch the sound cannons to maximum power; supercharged with adrenaline, the Rockers play like they’ve never played before. Civilians on the ground look up in fascinated terror.

Currie spits out his cigar and grins triumphantly. “Now!” He pulls the trigger.

his signal travels at the speed of light
sound and ecstasy transmute into power
SOL-9000 explodes its nuclear fuel
a burst of light emerges from the cloud
six spysats go blind and start to fall
Currie holds his eye and screams
the particle blast bullseyes the cloud
the counterblast turns from light to sound
SOL loses its wings
six falling stars light their path to earth

and Currie falls to the ground twitching in an epileptic seizure. The silent Investors watch Brinkman’s emergency plan fall apart along with the seven satellites on the CPMC boardroom monitor. Brinkman whimpers like a wounded fighting dog. Luke Everson and Locke Holmes faint dead away.

The reality distortion barrier slowly weakens. The alien spacescape loses dimension. The power system at the cloud’s core buds apart into three and then into six. The Rockers stop playing; the strange unearthly music goes softer until it dissipates into wind. The Liberators hover at the edge of the chaos, sensing a perfect moment to strike but too transfixed with horror to risk another deadly battle with the two Repulsors still warily guarding the vulnerable newtypes within. Six consciounesses reconstitute out of the energy field and congeal into individuality; consciousness returns, and then reason, and finally their sense of their own physical presence as wet hot trembling bodies carried by the wind. They let themselves fall into exhausted unconsciousness; Ariel and Taylor catch them in their fields, enfold them in an invisibility shield, and whisk them away.

And they are gone. The reality barrier has vanished. And all is silence.

Brinkman: (frantically waving The Black Book of Communism) You monsters! You think you just beat me! You think you’re gonna rob the deserving for your bloodthirsty Communist welfare schemes! You think you just voted yourselves into freedom you never deserved! Well, think again, parasites. You’ve got another thing coming. By the Flag of God and the Nation for which it stands, I swear!

Angela Coyne: (waving a sheaf of legal papers) Attention, board members, executives, and shareholders of the Cascadia Public Management Corporation. On behalf of the Wilder Institute, I have just filed a class-action lawsuit against CPMC on behalf of hundreds of thousands of its victims. CPMC has been engaged in massive fraud since it was established. Its existence depends entirely on fraud, robbery, insider trading, and other crimes, up to and including murder. CPMC executives have been caught subsidizing, and taking money from, known criminal organizations. Here is proof:

She broadcasts a series of surveillance and phonecam videos of CPMC executives and investors, including Brinkman himself, accepting bribes from Chinese industrial spies and Syndicate leaders — dozens of them, back to back, looped.

Agent 2468: (in total panic) Governor! Chief! We’ve been infected by a virus! We’re losing—

The CPMC board watch in cold horror as the distress call from COPCO Seattle breaks up into total noise, out of which the low-resolution face of Spanner emerges. He chants “blah blah blah blah” without a break — the angel of chaos takes over all the monitors, hijacks all the computers in the building, transforms the entire statewide CPMC system into himself. Outside, his entire botnet of roboagents chants “blah blah blah blah” with a single voice. The firewall protecting the COPCO android guards from the compromised COPCO Seattle system falls, and they join their voices in his chant. From them Spanner launches himself into the COPCO corporate system to assimilate it and follow its connections directly into NORAD and Echelon.

“Lord have mercy on us,” says Jack Becket in despair, “the motherfucker’s turning the entire system into a Spannerbot...”

Brinkman glares at Currie. “Are you still positive, Admiral?” For the first time, Currie’s heart sinks and his cheery smile disappears.

Nameless Reporter: The Conventional Wisdom thought it was impossible, but now it’s actually begun: CPMC’s stock price has started to collapse!

Into the streets the triumphant strikers flood, out of buildings half destroyed by their own military-industrial defenders, past the debris of fallen drones and Mech Knights, past the Spanner-infected copbots tearing off their own heads, to take advantage of what may be their final opportunity to seize their freedom from the implacable gods of the Revolution. To their shock they find themselves the sole remaining power controlling the cities and towns of Cascadia. Excited by the shocking victory in Cascadia, people return to the streets in the oppressed cities of the Homeland and throughout the Empire, even clashing with authorities terrified into irrational rage in the Caliphate and the corporate properties of Chinese Corporatist Party (Holdings) Limited.

It starts as part of a delirious victory dance among small groups of anarchists and culture jammers scattered among the strikers, spontaneously in nearly every city, chanted in every language the strikers speak. It spreads throughout the striking crowds, a chant of triumph in Cascadia, a slogan of defiance elsewhere, spread from person to person and city to city; from out of their collective defiance, like a middle-finger salute thrust into the face of CPMC, the masses unleash their war cry: “The people united will never be defeated!”

Still flying above Seattle, the Liberators assemble at the point of Brinkman’s defeat and trade mighty fists and superpower blasts over whether to destroy Cascadia for its people’s disobedience. Caught in the middle is their leader: Dr. Prince Charles Henry Becket of Dictel, Incorporated, Secretary General of the Conservative Revolutionary Party and the American Crusader third of his lineage; hovering untouched amidst the strife of America’s superpowered leaders, he struggles to make his choice: accept the Challenge the Populists are throwing him, or destroy them and start history anew? He hovers unmoving, paralyzed by the burden of choice.

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Copyright © 2013 Dennis Jernberg. Some rights reserved.

[Revision 4 Final, 4/19/13: Mostly new material. All scenes remaining from R2 have been condensed and rewritten to fit Final Revision continuity. All song lyrics and the entire “body-painted dancers” thread have been removed.]