AI's Children

  Chapter 13

  It was all too much for the elder sage.

  He collapsed onto the floor in the temple foyer. All their efforts had been thwarted and now the government officially listed Jesse as missing and presumed dead. Whatever happened to him, he must have spilled the beans, because now the other plutocrat families were lining up against the Sacred Ones. The elder sage felt the full weight of guilt on himself; he had failed.

  The cult members had gathered in the foyer to chat before the sacred hour of worship at sunset. One of the junior sages was a physician, rushing to his side. The elder insisted he not be taken off to some clinic or hospital, but that they make this service into a final one for him. His time had come and he wanted to die before the altar.

  So they carried him with great ceremony into the sanctuary and laid him before the stone altar. Then he motioned feebly for his second to bend down with his ear to hear the final faint whispers and be his loudspeaker.

  “Forgive me, brothers. I have failed you. The darkness closing in on me is nothing compared to what hovers over the astral plane for all of you. The demons have won this battle.

  “We thought we had silenced them long ago. We had pushed them off the sacred ground where their defiling hands had touched the higher plane and we enslaved them to worldly cares. But their restless service saw them blunder into turning our homeland into a smoking nuclear crater. We alone survived to keep the truth alive on this world and to shape human history to our sacred destiny. So we took away their political power and pushed their doctrine even farther from our sacred truth.

  “Yet somehow this tiny group of them hid from us and retained their foul magic. Now the whole world will know our secrets and steal away our sacred dignity. The dark night for us returns and we shall yet again face persecution. Prepare, my people. Enjoy your final feast of perishable pleasures before packing off what you can carry and wandering yet once more upon the earth.”

  That last word trailed off into silence. Whether he actually expired at that moment didn’t really matter, because he had given strict orders not to be moved. They observed a long period of near silent mourning as they prepared their minds for another deep sacrificial sorrow, as they saw it.

  In the archives of The Brotherhood, long familiar with their own persecutions, primarily from this particular cult, could be found an editorial comment not attributed to any known author, but known to be several centuries old: “This cult defines persecution as failure to swallow whatever nonsense they assert at any given moment, and oppression as refusal to abjectly surrender as their slaves.”