Banana Slug Resurrection
Written between the Feast of the Dancing Dragon and the Feast of the Thunderbird, Waxing Buck Moon, 13 to 15 Sebastuary 2024.
15 Solstuary 2255
Franklin Delano Obama Washington Pierce, named for 5 founding fathers who walked the earth over 349 years, was named for the fifth time 5 days into his life as a gurrilla hiking through the olympic mountains with a captured demigod and an unfortunate set of documents which all parties would have preferred they'd never seen.
his fifth renaming was something of a formula. the prophet, whom they had all taken to worshipping even as they transported him as living cargo, was prone to pick figures from history, all of whom he claimed he was on intimate terms with, being a time traveler as well as exceedingly old, except travel implied a sort of bridled force, like the bones of Jurassic forests used to bisect the costs on steps of spinning metal, while he was, he claimed, caught up in a hurricane, a hurricane of time which had coming roaring up through Eden closer to the Metazoak and a good deal left of Moses
the gurrilla fighters bore Gadsen flags and had Lazer printed the Declaration of Independence and geometric angelic geometry on their shields and Rumi poetry inspired tattoos and a sigil from the spectre of communism envoked in that party's famous manifesto painted red on their bullets, copied and paradied and translated and memed enough that it had taken on quite different meanings which varried by garrison.
Franklin Delano Obama Washington Pierce was the 11th gurrilla fighter re-named by the prophet since his capture. they hiked 35 miles over 48 hours mostly through the rain and dense brush and eerie mists which the Pacific Northwest coasts are famous, humid but not really hot @5th Solstuary 2255, their eyesight buzzed when they glanced at a red water bottle or an orange dripping sticky sweet down a comrade's face because of all the verdant green bushmass and canopies and hanging ferns, not to mention the camouflage panchos of the 10 men ahead of him and three women behind. the prophet was cooperative enough to walk along without the need for restraints but could hardly maintain such a pace for more than two hours, despite terse 2 minutes breaks and water to his face and threats, so he was traded back and forth between the two or three biggest men. Franklin expected that when the resumed their pace he would begin to take custody of shifts as well as they made their way to the safe house, and from there by sea to British Columbia, and the thought made his stomach thrill with sacrilegious unease.
currently they are camped under a wilderness watchtower, most likely abandoned for lack of need at the end of the Burning Years, when the weather machines at last unleashed the rains onto thoss countries who could afford to pay, while those who couldn't filed for bankruptcy before or after they were reduced to ash. but they aren't yet certain it's abandoned as such Arial huts are often found hermitages for mushroom hunters, feral Sages, homeless vagrants or other decently outfitted very well armed guerillas who had one reason or another to be moving through these parts quickly enough or conspicuously enough to take the risks implied by high visibility in deference to the convenience. they would wait here overnight, perhaps 12 hours more to depart with the darkness, under the penumbra of the watchtower's roof to minimize the risk of being photographed by a satellite. once the watchtower had been declared vacant they would all climb the rope ladder and pass those hours out of the rain.
a soldier slipped on a slike stone or more de- than -composed log and stumbled wildly, and in so doing placed his boot directly bisecting a 13 inch long banana slug and the prophet squealed with distress, in clear violation of the general command for silence. the prophet leaped and ran to the site of the slug's slaughter, and though by now they had all grown to trust in him and testify to his uncanny charms of reading the precise causes of their martial and maritial distress in their love lines, the silk guerillas jumped to grab their prisoner before he could undertake some mad attempt at escape, but he only took two full strides before he's kneeling in the ferns and mulch and scooping the slug guts and what dirt and twigs they lay in, muttering something with gutteral stops
..
"what day is it?"
the 15th of Solstuary 2255
is this sun above the horizon?
how should I know, we're in a forest
zoonds, he said, and the soldiers noted his frustration though not the curse.
he pressed down suddenly, squeezing the mass of slug and mulch hard enough to take life if it hadn't already been lost, doubling over and daveing
Willy Fireston, the closest Franklin D O W Pierce had to a friend among the guerrillas had, awkwardlyly approached the Prophet. the 6'03" Mexican has a discordant shyness to him, all the more so if approaching him.
I have, ... bandages, hijo. in my ... backpack, if you need them
Franklin whipped his head around in time to see two others charge for them.
Willy you mother fucked idiot you've got to stop him if he does that!
the prophet had, at some point during his efforts to match their pace, or perhaps even before he'd been captured--they'd had only searched his person so thoroghly-- come to carry a very narrow, very slice of some brittle stone which he more used to make two quick, practiced slashes at his wrists, and drizzled the blood into the mud and guts mess.
thank you, Willy. the prophet said, his shard of flint no larger than his thumbnail surrendered without a fight. Willy began the process of disinfecting the Prophet's arm and bandaging the red lines which made tears well in his eyes. the prophet accepted a second bandage and using his right hand and his teeth unwrapped it, so that as soon as Willy's hospital was concluded he could bandage the sundered body of the slug.
I could sense it. it's life. boiling away. the way they feel pain is different, but not untranslateable into our own.
the slug rolled over, it's eyestalks extending and retracting. around it was mud and lost intestines, yet now that it was bandaged back together it began to crawl and deinvolve from the muck and begin a slow retreat into the undergrowth, it's bandage already beginning to slide off, the milimeter of new flesh it uncovered pale and subtly untextured.
we must have killed hundreds of bugs and frogs and spiders and shit, Willy responded, watching the slug with the prophet.
true. and I've felt them. but I'd been half asleep most of the time. you found me exhausted and being carried prisoner through the mountains in the pouring rain isn't exactly conducive to rest and relaxation. now we stop and I have a moment to catch my breath and tap into my surroundings and big foot over there splits my alone in half except it isn't my spine cause it's not a spine, and I'm just boiling away from both ends in my guts.
you did it for yourself. so you wouldn't have to feel yourself die.
the Prophet didn't make answer.
I want you to rename me. you've named everyone else except me. I'm the only one with his old name left.
the Prophet looked at Willie, and Franklin can see from over his soldier how fucking exhausted the prophet was. he didn't weigh 90 pounds, practically weightless to the two ex- gymrat guerillas who'd been carrying him, except a human body is not a dumbbell or an ergonomic backpack, and the constant swinging from over the shoulder to piggyback to cradling had warried both soldier and soothsayer.
why do you want a new name.
Franklin got his new name. John Jay Calvin Coolidge got his name. ask the others.
why do you want a new name.
Willy staired back, then looked away, his eyes hot with what he would not let others see to be tears.
Give me a new name.
You are William Jefferson McKinley Shakespeare. You are named for three consuls and a playwright. You will carry this name until it brings you fame and glory or until it brings you infamy and tragedy. or...both.
William Jefferson McKinley Shakespeare looked up, his shyness blanched with gratitude and fear, his eyes wet but not testifiably in tears, given plausible deniability by sweat and the rain.
But ...Willey for short?
the prophet stared hard at his nominee. No, he pronounced, and Franklin felt gooseflesh under his soaking clothes and clinging pancho. No. he said again. That life is dead to you now. I could no more bring that person back than I could resurrect that slug.
you just did resurect that slug.
not for long.
and as he said the last word another soldier, this one called Matthew Mark Luke John Jay Adams, stumbled as he swatted in primal terror as a 60 foot long dragon fly plunged into his eye. his panicked slapping gave way as his brain caught up and realized the behemothic invertebrate was infact only two inches long and mery appeared so large because it had flown directly into his eye, but not in time for the soldier to skip on the rainslick waxy leaves further up the incline and land, with the insects organs smeared across his face, his body falling head over heels, and his aayward machette spining out of his hand end over end until it came to launch firmly in the mulch, it's blade splitting the banana slug longitudinally from its lower right eye stock to the bandage-enveloped tip of it's tail.
ALL CLEAR came the shout from the watchtower.
while Willie fished in his pack for painkillers and Abraham Benito Cicero treated Matthew Mark Luke John Jay Adams's fractured wrist, the Prophet started out at the finally lessening rain.
we've got 25 miles before the next tower at minimum and the safe house is 60 miles beyond that. we'll rest here until dark tomorrow and then if we haven't heard anything
haven't heard anything how
radio. we've got a guy in the radio station who can get a stop or go signal out, they'll mention a shoot out on i5 if it's safe and a car chase if it's not.
what if there really is a shootout on i5 and it's not safe.
then we don't go.
but we wouldnt know
of course we'll know we've for William Shakespear's radio
the transition of names had the eerie smoothness of dreams.
but what I'm saying is--
there's a shootout on i95 every hundred miles. it's not news worthy. and our source will be saying just that--a shootout on i5. not "the governer's been killed in a shootout on i5. not a rockstar's tour bus burst into flame following a shootout on i5. both of which happened unbenownst to us this week. this one will be just a shootout."
that's what they might have said, had they known that unbenownst to them Rockstar Governer Hailey Wyoming had been killed during a shootout in which his tour bus burst into flame. the aging rockstar statesman was on his way to a historic bill signing after which he would be performing live in a concert dedicated to raising money to help homeless vets take out microloans to learn how to read.
Governor Hailey Wyoming had risen to prominence in the 2210s, as a child-actor, musician, and gymnast who'd performed during the Superbowl halftime show. he'd done two worrld tours by the time he turned twenty in 2220, performed in the olympics in the Large Instrument Team and Solo categories as well as the trampoline. Perhaps driven by insecurity relative to a younger brother and older sister who had both gone to college in their tweens, Hailey semi-retired from performing to focus on his studies, graduating with a degree in music theory and a degree in law, participated in governmental simulations and got a taste for politics. his performance at the consular inauguration of Jeremiah Whitebirn and Cassius McFee.
Jeremiah, then entering his eighty-eighth year in the Senate, had been a back bencher for the liberals ever since the ramp up of troop involvement in the fourth Ohio War, when he criticized the cowardice of his colleagues for not voting to conscript children into non combat oriented laboring positions. he'd alienated both the moderate radicals and the radical moderates by definitely attempting to articulate a "third center", while his fillibustering on the ecology board alienated the Green Aristocracy, which recieved eco-rent from the taxpayers in exchange for not developing their thousands of acres of life-critical biomass. the shutdown cost 6 weeks of the Censors' life evaluation and with it the accompanying payments, which had led at least two bio share groups to start building strip malls and strip mines on overlapping land claims, the removal of which the tax payers ultimately had to burden.
thus alienated, he shifted to advertising himself and outsider's insider, or an insider's outsider, he could never quite pick which, and stormed the talk shows, podcasts, EZ feeds and Ham radio holographics to denounce his former allies in Congress. this rallied the Liberal Party's voters, who on the whole detested their front bench for having failed to deliver them electoral success. Jeremiah Whitebirn hatred the liberals, therefore he could appeal to voters who hated the Liberals. he was also b an expert in that most Liberal of moral arts: he always took whatever position he felt to be most morally repungent, that way he could austentatiously brag of his own dedication to the greater good, namely electoral success.
thus in his 88 years in the Senate, he had derisively supported the right to abortion as a necessary evil and endorsed forced birth as a heroic compromise with strange bedfellows 16 times each. he'd been for ever war once it was clearly a loosing and unpopular prospect and threw all his political capital behind ever great and exciting reform as soon as it became a dead letter. his principles were that I've never regrets doing nothing except when doing nothing is the right thing to do because a politician who has not made mistakes is a fragile and easily corrupted or co-opted force, while one who has learned from a lifetime of fuck-ups will inevitably regarded as a wise and pragmatic statesman.
Cassius McFee did not want Jeremiah Whitebirn as his running mate. he did not want anyone as his running mate. but ever since General Washington died of a fever in a hastily recqisitioned brothel while putting down a slave rebellion, the executive of the Republic had been too tempting a prize to leave in one piece under the custody of one man. instead, Washington''s ghost declared in a missing voice from his rightful podium at the constitutional convention, the babe must be split in two, executive power divided under two Consuls and a half dozen secretaries, who would be nominated and approve on by the Senate at the Consuls recommendation, and who would discharge their departments through chairmanship of a committee of senators.
without a unified executive and a Congress eager to hunt out it's rivals, the states claimed reserve powers over a protracted struggle known as the era of bad feelings, winning the Bill of Rights, a restriction on the power of congress to raise its salary, and the right to refuse taxation and regulations if it removed itself from the corresponding areas of interstate commerce, a blow to those who dreamed of a single unified economy with set tarrifs and taxes, since each industry and area of policy would have to be worked through in piecemeal, since any dominant regional interest could lean on the local governor or Praetor or the states tribunes in Philadelphia and have the whole state cut off from the continent's trade network, a policy which certain large cities could occasionally get away with but which otherwise invariably led to a regional if not national recession.
Tribunes were loved for their defiant weilding of suicidal vetos, from Calhoun resigning the administration he'd inaugurated with Jackson to take up the tribunal sash in defence of nullification, to the Whigs vetoing the extradition of runaway slaves and the return of imprisoned slave catchers without exorbitant ransom.
the tribunal model owed at least as much to the example of the Hottonoshowne, who in 1801 agreed to statehood only as a pact of mutual defense and safe passage with the New England states and the Dominion of Luisiana, giving them privileged access to the great lakes and the Mississippi while the southern planters grumbled and turned their sights on Cuba, San Dominguez, the Yucatan and Central America.
The fact that the pact remained in effect even as each block of states improvised their own blocs and concordances with distinct property law, foreign policy, official churches and agnosticism, testifies to the threat of certain common enemies (the European powers, the increasingly unifying Empire of Brazil, the Western Chinese Navy, servile insurrection and Indian savagery, which the Consuls and their Secretaries were called upon to address, required a common project and investment in empire to which the constituent states, commonwealths, republics despotisms clans and theocracies were only ever 3/4 committed.
that year Governer Hailey McGovern performed a tribute to Harold Reginald Washington, an eight year old who'd died heroically attempting to repair a submarine off the shore of Lake Michigan, at the invitation of Jeremiah Whitebirn and over the stoney displeasure of Cassius McFee. Cassius wanted to run his consulate like a business, dragging, in his words, the federal Republic into the 22nd century, if only belatedly halfway through the sixth decade of the 23rd. it was Cassius' third term as Consul, 45 years after his first. he'd been a young man them, just turned 50.
now he was 95, and given that the consulate was a non consecuative office, he figured he'd probably only be eligible for 6 or 7 more terms at most. the consulate term of office had been raised from four years to 5 2190s to cut costs related to elections, then dropped to 1 year when the election workers went on strike with eligibility renewing after 20 years. on paper he and Whitebirn were entitled to 3 years 3 months 3 days and 3 hour long terms, but they of course were always subject to the risk of a no confidence vote, and there was always the possibility they could have restrictions on consecutive office holding suspended.
FDR, for example, had managed to be elected to seven consecutive terms with 7 different co-consuls--Garner, Long, Wallace, Bird, Wilkie, Eisenhower, and O'Douglas, though he only made it 17 days into his final term, with Eleanor being appointed by acclamation to finish his 56-60 term and later being elected in 64 in her own right alongside a toothy Robert F Kennedy. she would later be unsuccessful impeached for refusing to drop the automic bomb on Vietnam and passed the ERA.
McFee had big hopes for this consulship. after two terms in the 22-teens his faction had been in the political wilderness, their quietly condescending technocratic distain winning them few donations and fewer votes. twice MCFee had been in danger of losing his seat in the 500 member Senate, having to change districts at the last minute jumping between the New Mexico at-large to the corporate owned seat of the Las Vegas Gaming Trust, and then again from the Trust to the Ivy League Lawyers Union. now safely nested in one of the eight 65+ Senior Citizen Voters League seats for the last 6 years (ever since 131 year old Orrin Highpark had died and left an opening for a spry 89 year old) he'd been able to claw his faction, called the Scientificos, to senior coalition status on three governments, for which they had been awarded 6 secretariats and a supreme court justice. by embracing the quixotic fire of Whitebirn, who had inherited his seat in the Senate at the age of 8 from his great grandfather and been at the job ever since, he could finally implement his transformative policy: reorganizing the Social Security Office so that every American had a prime number for their SSN, which he claimed would reduce identity theft and related fraud by almost 4 percent, given the much longer numbers thieves would need to overhear and memorize.
The prophet had been so exhausted because he'd resurrected Rockstar Governer Hailey McGovern following the shootout, and it was in the burning wreck of his bus that the guerrillas had come across the unfortunate document.
he has nanobots in his blood capable of resurrecting the recently dead. the nanobots were given to him by an angel from another star system. the angel arrived at the speed of light in the 50th millennia after being summoned by Jesus or Muhammad or Zoroaster or Zarathustra or Aesklepius or the Morrigan or the Virgin Mary or Joan of Arc or Nefritoti or a slave girl born on Titan during the time of the Thirsty Cough. the angel had them followed the threads of it's invocation backwards and forwards and sideways through time like a graceful predatory spider, legs rolling over each other through the iterations of history and nightmare, but i repeat myself. currently it was traveling backwards in time through the life of the Prophet, whispering them things to come and sorting through the Prophet's past expirences to make sense of why snarl in time had congested around this individual, so that the angel would know whether to kill the prophet and drink the time traveling nanobots out of the blood he would never have, or abduct the prophet by commissioning one of the crude human made starships they would
just about begin to make at the end of the third milenium or unwrite his parents so that he could never be born.
that's the story the Prophet had given to his most recent shrink anyway. the guy had the Exegesis of Philip K Dick on his office bookshelf. sometimes you had to tailor your message to your audience.