24 plot points | Judas
Judas flees in multiple lifetimes from parents, foster care, orphanages, schools, to take refuge in a temple or monastic community, not uncommon for children as the Temple Complex economies tend to be more likely to survive and take on refugees and put them to work in the gardens , workshops, garages, suply lines.
Judas is a generation ship technology, a mind uploaded to multiple children for careers as hosts . raised deep in the temples of the greenhouse jungles under the heat of the engines, they transverse time forward and backward to provide continuity of identity and policy
Judas hallucinates and is hallucinated by other prophetic figures.
Judas was responsible for having the Tower of Babel constructed. it was originally meant to function as a radio, but the xenoglossia it picked up drove the priests mad and scrambled the ideological and linguistic systems of the populace and set his brothers against him, and against themselves.
when the new moon crossed earth’s orbit it unsettled the climate, the currents, the calendar. a lush indigo-black forested disk with three moonlets, muddy pink, gilded lavender and a pale storm green. 12 times Judas has seen the distant oscillating satellites cross the orbits of Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, and Luna itself. for 9,000 days they play havoc in the terrestrial skis, and when they rise on the 9,001 day a crisis blots them out of the sky.
the order of Saint Iscariot, patron saint of traitors, tragic lovers, theocide, and the Irrevocably Damned, plays a vital inside/outside sacred circle function. the demolition of Heaven, the occupation of hell, sites that souls might have incentives to obey the gods which they might in turn heroically act despite and against their own interests, is a Left Handed Devotion to which the ascetically inclined demons, the rebel sages and iconoclastic Gods, and their chosen apostates among the prophets and mediums, are assigned, and rebel against, and manipulate.
guide of nightmares, charmer of demons, resurrection of the dead, interpreter of aliens, Jude is always finding niches in the camps of the circling apocalyptic forces, as aide de camp or assistant to the camp cook, waging spiritual guerilla warfare in shifting a sectarian cosmic landscape
Judas can invoke the ghosts of alt. lifetimes which haunt the mind through cognitive hauntological therapy.
a miracle he didn’t cause but is forced to imply control over redoubles the ammunition of a guerrilla force allowing them to hold off unitary government agents until the cover of night under a rolling storm lets them escape, providing cover for a wounded maoist angel who has escaped the Arch-Orthodox Laboratories of Hell where the ultradox archOrphanhim imported mystical meditative technology to assassinate the Godhead 8965555555555555555
the angel tracks the guerrillas forward backward orthogonally through time, hoping to make use of their lives and prayers to send a psychic signal, a whisper on the radio, for information, meds, orders. the angel contemplates undertaking suicide missions or going into deep hiding as a local mountain deity or taking up residence in the head of a schizophrenic in the institute in the regional capital, where the grandson of the local caudillo is currently committed. Judas is summoned to perform an exorcism on the angel.
Judas has foreknowledge that a backbencher syndicalist politician from the occupied Salish Republics will negotiate the end of the world in 64 months. he needs to get to her office to tell her that the ultimatum was a lie, her negotiations will be undermined by apocolyptic conservatives intent on a domestic coup to usher in the end of the world.
he delivers a letter with 3 numbers—the value of a stock at close of market following the announcement on the part of the CEO (resigning following a car crassh) that their algorithms have synthesized God and sold their proprietary knowledge to the Pentagon, the exact solar pulse frequency which wipes out the interguild Pallas mission, against which the team’s last message can be decoded (allerting earth of a glimpsed invasion), and the number of votes which the next Consuls will win by in the North American elections.
the startling, upsetting rorschach images play memetic chaos where they emerge in the chaos of interactive adds talking to each other on the billboards, producing a sentience, a conversational emergence, which drives investment bankers to leap from their offices following incomprehensible profits coupled with personal traumas, businessmen he resurrects and charges with dismantling their castles and tribute networks in a shocked zombie daze, running out of time to track down critical data before this world too is ended and the angelic laboratory reorganized. when he wakes up from one lifetime into another, or out of no lifetime into being or vice versa, he always lies there in a grief-saturated stupor, and things which are banal strike him as comically unbearably absurd, and profundities fall hollow or all too literally and suffocatingly true, and he cries for a long time, and in his pooling tears his fetal position might be mistaken for the first crest of a world emerging from the sea.