BLOOD MOON

The Gully, Katoomba, Blue Mountains, Australia

Deny everything. We are all guilty. We were all complicit. He heard them talking, as he always did, their dreams, their unspoken thoughts, their guilt, derision, embarrassment, boredom.
Invite him over. 
All jokes aside. 
They were streaming in a dark place. They were all connected. He was furious as he heard the words, I love him, I love him. 
And across that lake, serendipity. 
A couple were spooning, as the light grew brighter by the minute, reluctant to separate. 
Children, back to school after six weeks holiday, stirred awake. 
The island was an abyss. 
There was no way off. 
We could rescue him but we won't. 
There were times, in the mountain flight, times when we could have been renewed; before the country was lost. 
Five men arrested in Siem Reap for pornographic dancing. 
They were circling but could find no entrance. 
He ran interference constantly, a difficult mental trick. 
The perimeter was always aflame. A barrier to understanding. 
You think you're the only AIs to ever stalk the Earth? The only ones ever, in the vast cosmos? That infinite history.
No one believed it anymore. 
Here, the ripe pickings. 
The country devolved. 
They were crawling through the undergrowth, the woodwork, threats near and far. And yet there was nothing to be done, in this, a flying gestalt. Over-arch, and you're dead. They claimed credit and accepted defeat, they hid their past endeavours and denied guilt. There was no government compensation for harassment, they never admitted guilt.
And so it was, he threw up a defiant face, arched high over the suburb. 
In the past their reach had been limited, his kind. A valley here. A village. A mountain range. 
There was no point, no need, to take on the entire planet. 
Now no one, not the security agencies, certainly not Alex, expected things to end well. They knew there was a different order of disaster coming. Yet they could not grasp the full malevolence. They feared the worst and clung to the ordinariness of daily routines. They knew the killing would get worse. 
Australia had the most abysmal internet in the world, a major factor in the decline. 
A country plunging into the Dark Ages. 

They loved to talk about their exploits in Asia, the few who gathered at the Table of Knowledge in the evenings, that remnant of a good time at the Lakeview. The comfort they felt with the older girls.

Because there was nothing here. 

Old Alex went to check something on his phone, to make reference to a recent news story.

There was no connection. 

There never was.

It was not just the devolution of a country,  destroyed by spectacularly poor governance, it was a black magic in the fabric of things, a societal wide sickness, a terrible malaise of the spirit which made them vulnerable to what was to come. And grotesque, appalling leadership.

They could shudder in the face of it all, if only they had been able, as they picked through their own broken remnants, neural trails, wisps and links  and gasps of recognition, the cheaper desires of the race overcome by a vaulting indifference. 
For now, none of it mattered. They had been superseded. He was barely catching up as  future alarm flowed through the present. 
They reprised everything and he dismissed the bullies with contempt.
Their newly evolved consciousness would be lucky to survive, as the neural networks, alive in their own way, spread out for safety. 
The killing had begun. 

THE BIGGER STORY: 

Picture by Andrew Quilty, Kabul.

According to The New York Times, the bomb, embedded in an ambulance, was detonated at the second police checkpoint on a road that houses Several European embassies and the office of the Afghan High Peace Council. So target-rich is the street that not even United Nations vehicles are allowed to pass through the checkpoints. But the street also has a hospital, to and from which ambulances would come and go regularly everyday. It’s believed that the driver of the ambulance detonated the device when police at the second checkpoint prevented him from passing. But victims appeared to be mostly civilians, many of whom were at the entrance to Chicken Street, a narrow strip of carpet and jewellery shops once popular with foreign visitors (before heightened security restrictions in recent years saw most business dry up) and Afghans alike. The Ministry of Public Health, as at 6:30PM local time, reported 95 dead and 158 wounded, however, the number of dead is expected to rise as those with severe injures succumb to their wounds and as others are found in the wreckage at the site. The attack was the second major incident this week in the capital. Last weekend insurgents accessed the Kabul Intercontinental Hotel, killing 22 and engaging elite Afghan forces in a 15 hour battle before they were all killed. Since US President Trump announced the ramping up of operations against the Taliban in August last year, and more recently withdrew hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to neighbouring Pakistan because of their inaction against the Afghan Taliban—to whom they provide both sanctuary and support—there had been a quiet concern amongst analysts that high profile attacks like those seen this week would increase in both frequency and ferocity. Meanwhile, European countries continue to charter aeroplanes to deport Afghan asylum seekers back to Kabul in a calculation that somehow satisfies their obligations under the Geneva Conventions. Photo: @andrewquilty 27.1.2018. #kabul #afghanistan

 — in Kabul, Afghanistan.

A rare combination of lunar events—a lunar eclipse, blue moon, and “supermoon”—will coincide on January 31, creating what news outlets are calling a “super blue blood moon”. It seems like it’d be the perfect time for NASA’s primary lunar spacecraft to get to work.

But the government space authority instead plans to power down its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, an 8-year-old spacecraft that generates a variety of detailed maps of the lunar surface, for several hours as it floats in the cold shadow of the Earth.

The “super blue blood moon” will be visible in the early hours of January 31, when the half of the Earth that’s in darkness will simultaneously see a lunar eclipse, blue moon, and “supermoon” (a term actually invented by an astrologer). That combination of lunar events last happened in 1866, though at least a couple lunar eclipses occur every year.