"Things fall apart, the center cannot hold
The best lack all conviction,
while the worst are full of passionate intensity."
-The Second Coming,
William Bulter Yeats
Silence is never the best way to heal wounds. If anything else, it
aggrivates the problem, tearing open scars long healed, and causing them to
fester once more.
Across the omniverse, quintillions of individuals made knowing everything
about Watson Taylor their new hobby. They switched from simple televising
scrys to actual past-visions, started up computers, crawled across the vast
dataweb through a thousand different means. Within the first ten minutes
after the broadcast, versions of the speech were dissiminating themselves
through the population of a thousand more industrialized worlds. Virtually
everyone on Khazan proper who had access to the datanet had at least one
copy of it, whether in video, audio, or text, within the next twelve hours.
A full twenty-four later, it had infected all the central dimensions,
especially heavily industrialized worlds and agricultural systems.
They recieved it, and they read it, viewed it, felt it. Believed it.
Perhaps
that last, more than anything else.
The upper crust waited patiently, not daring to interfere with the progress
of the speech, fearing the response if their actions should ever become
known. Like a virus, it moved through the 'nets, transmitted between
friends, coworkers, subjects, slaves. Accountants watched it, farmers
watched it, students, programmers, industrial workers, mechanics.
The speech fell like a seed into over-ripe soil, growing and flourishing.
With each passing moment, more and more dirt surfaced about the upper
echelons of society. All the old news articles, accusations true or false,
over the last fifty years, rose to the surface like logs atop
plague-infested waters. The LaCroix family was charged with twenty-seven
individual accounts of xenocide, the Matthezx with insider trading.
Incaratan Pharmecuticals stood, by day's end, accused of starting three
seperate waves of cross-dimensional pestilence, taking trillions upon
trillions of lives, before releasing an antidote, in a simple attempt to
boost their stock price a few points. With every whisper, every tale, no
matter how far-flown, no matter who spoke it, Watson Taylor's words became
more valid.
Most movements start slowly, with planning, with speeches and papers,
giving
plenty of warning. This was no different, except for the fact that it began
in a medium of pure information, where distance meant nothing and thousands
of speeches could be made to millions in a matter of seconds. People heard,
and they understood. They rememebered Watson, choking on his own blood.
"Fight for freedom."
They looked for a leader.
Candidates presented themselves in droves, but none had the charismatic
power, the universal appeal of the original, now lying dead inside the
Khazan PD's morgue. None could unify the growing feeling of unrest into the
brilliant flame of strength that such a movement would demand.
Thus, when the riots began, they were not planned, or unified. They simply
started, organically. The first took place on Tarra, a Earth-paralell
dimension safely outside the Major Probability Sphere. The rebellion was
brief, brutally crushed by the police authorities, but the rioters managed
to sieze a broadcast station, exhorting their allies in other worlds, other
universes, begging for help.
"Help us! Fight back! Watson told the truth. They are
afraid. Follow our
example and fi-"
The transmission broke off in static.
Others joined it, trickles adding up to form a rushing river, the tide of
discomfort creeping closer and closer, throughout the interlocking
dimensions, to Khazan itself.
Throughout the multiverse, they gathered, coworkers, friends, enemies. It
was time, they told each other. It is time to cast off the chains, to rise.
A man is dead. He died for us, to tell us this. It is time. We must strike
back. We must rise. It is time.
And, deep beneath the surface of the universe, something other laughed. It
is time, it said. It is time....
Thus ends the first book of the End Times, called Inception.
It is to be followed by the second Book, called Apocalypse.
The Skies are Falling.