Editing Phase Q/Birth Throes

The Futuristas sit huddled around a fire.

Burning wood emits a glowing light and heat and the smell of wood smoke.

At the encampment – final holdouts of the Futurista revolution – individuals keep themselves warm, linger in conversation or thought, dance, and chant.

The songs harken back to times of old.

The dances and chants do, too.

Who knows where the Futuristas come up with these behaviors?

Deep in their genetic code, honed over thousands of years of cultural evolution, millions of years of biological evolution, and billions of years of spacetime, some ancient rhythms vibrate.

Do they have any logic?

Sirens ring in the background. Thunder and lightning fill the sky, as rain pours.

A Futurista pounds a rock against a piece of wood. Another listens intently to the ground.

The Futuristas have shed all their clothes, which contained Trad tracking devices.

Naked and dancing in front of the fire, their diverse body sizes and shapes catch flickering shadows. Ashes fly up from the flames.

A Futurista whistles an eerily familiar tune.

Dogs bark, out across the river. Flashlights search. A helicopter flies overhead.

Maybe the Futuristas are resigned to their fate, and have chosen just to have festivities till the end?

Crack! Boom! Zang!

Gunfire erupts, rockets explode near the fire, and shock troops storm the camp site.

The Futuristas scatter.

Operating as a team, the Trad forces round up every Futurista they cross. Some they handcuff and pin down, delivering brutal attacks with their clubs and knives. Others they shoot in the head right away.

Trad dogs tear up the flesh of Futuristas they catch. Growling and barking, obeying their Trad leaders, the mad dogs live out the glory of their genetic code.

With weaponry invented in labs decades ago, the Trad forces take tactical control of the camp ground. The unit commander radios in to the dispatch center. He relays a message to Command HQ.

The enemy is defeated. We have secured the area.

Lifeless bodies of Futuristas scatter the area. A few are still alive, emitting moans of agony.

From the vantage point of a nearby hill, the scene looks like a classic last act in a work of tragedy.

Clouds roll over the encampment. Embers glow. Sirens flash. Dogs bark.

And on that hill, under a tree, overlooking the scene, somebody watches.

With tears flowing, the salty watery drops make for blurry vision.

And the chaos and confusion distort the mental processes.

And the cool chilly wind almost hurts against the naked skin.

Yet, the Futurista manages to pull together a few threads of thought.

Spinning and twisting, dancing in the wind, singing an old chant, the Futurista performs an extreme act of logic.

Through the analog logic of the holographic data set on which the spatiogeneticocultural code runs, the Futurista converts a few vibrations in the vol into a signal that runs out to a particular part of the flux, where it cracks open a new interconnect.

Lightning jolts.

{{Phase Q}}