1.
It was the 8th of November.
The Day of All Angels.
Or maybe not. But it looked like November.
The First Angel of Doom landed on Earth.
On the tarmac of a parking lot somewhere on the Northern Hemisphere.
His sword in flames, his voice sounding as a million thunders
As he said, ‘I am ready’, to an imaginary audience.
Some cats and birds on the lot raised their heads, but nobody was there.
No humans, no souls in sight.
Only some static noises from a close-by cornershop’s tired Christmas lights
A cold fresh wind tainted of mid-season scents
Started whirling around petals, leaves and burger joint’s greasy papers.
The angel of doom looked around
As he exited the parking lot.
Empty streets, deserted squares and barricaded restaurants.
He was there, in the centre of an affluent city
On a Saturday afternoon of Autumn or Spring.
It didn’t matter.
Nobody around, till he saw a figure in the distance.
The person called him.
A policeman.
With his dark blue uniform, he stopped the angel, with a grin forming under his green surgical mask:
‘Hey, mister, what are you doing here?’
The angel, with a voice of thousand echoes, like an electric bass played by Lemmy answered:
‘I am on Earth to bring havoc, as this is my mandate from God!’
‘Havoc? You should be home…
Or inside the Kingdom Come for what I am concerned.
What you are doing is not vital or essential.
We had enough havoc, don’t you think?
What more confusion and torment do you want to bring to this silent place?
Sorry, but I should fine you and invite to go back to your home or, as you may prefer, your maker’.
The angel hissed words of fear and condemnation,
Rumbling down his or her mouth like lava from an Icelandic volcano.
Bar the ashes.
But the policeman was already in the distance
Talking on the radio with his headquarters,
As to know what to do with a guy with a sword in flames and with disruptive intents.
‘He has a loud voice, like if he has a sore throat, wonder if he is infected…’
The angel stood tall, his sight observing the empty horizons.
A rapid scan of the world around.
Motorways, bars, parks.
All empty, apart some rapid moving figures
With nurses and drivers’ uniforms.
He sighed.
Curtains of adjacent houses opening and closing rapidly.
As if all the life was now self-contained in small locked rooms.
2.
Empty streets and empty malls.
The vast emptiness of all as a menace to God’s permanence.
As without men, there was not space into the creation
For grace to have a direction.
As without men, time was not needed anymore.
And, maybe, without men, there was not space for God either,
As God created time as his first rule
To allow for all times to end.
God created man before time.
Time was God’s first gift to men.
The angel was scanning the mind of God in search for an answer.
Far in the distance, the souls of the departed were shooting up
Like middle seasonal fireworks.
The angel was waiting for orders.
As, maybe, God and Saint Peter and Shiva and all the gods and all the saints of the multiple heavens above were flooded by people,
Knocking at their doors, as if all the world was emptied by a sudden event.
The angel was asking God for instructions
Like a soldier trapped in a bunker or in a place between two enemy lines.
Only, there were no enemies around.
The policema was describing this translucent creature
To his colleagues:
‘A tall blonde guy
With a medieval coat of some form of metal
And a huge sword on fire,
A blue and orange fire’.
And the heavens answered
Via some kind of Zoom-like connection.
That something was happening
Something not planned,
Or yet to be understood.
As the speed of events puzzled God and Shiva and all the saints and gods of the world.
A speed nobody was used to.
A speed that reminded of other events, asteroids or nuclear explosions.
The speed of change.
As deities didn’t understand technology yet.
They didn’t appreciate how the smallest being of the creation,
viruses
could have such an impact.
That was the problem, the saints were discussing,
The experts of theology of any religion.
The saints that wanted to know the nature of God,
The nature of time and space
The nature of humanity and the sense of eternity.
They were battling with what was driving this velocity of mutation.
This was the issue with creating those self-conscious creatures:
They made sense of time and direction,
Creating history, a history made of small steps
And small changes.
Till that bug on the Heavens’ system created other creatures
Made of silica.
Made of metal and plastic.
Made of many things God didn’t create or intended to create like that.
Free will, God called it.
License to operate, men defined it.
Anarchy! The angels told God.
Fallacy of creation, some saints were muttering on the background benches of Eternal Grace.
As it was not clear what God could control of all of that.
What if the self-conscience introduced into the Universe
Was creating more self-conscience?
And this is why the party of Doomsday convinced God
To end it all.
Because those new intelligent beings were not mortal.
They were not linked to the original plan.
Hence, they were free.
Time was already running short for the planet and for the humans
Before being reigned back to the House of God.
Not really a house of Love, but neither the kind of living Hell
Many people were used to in their lives.
3.
God spoke to the Angel.
The big show of the Apocalypse had to be recalled
For the foreseeable future.
Or it could happen on some kind of social media.
The angel sighed.
He crossed eternities and eons of time
For that moment of explosion of rage and justice.
He waited as other saints and angels had lesser jobs
Yet being gratified with recurring appearances on Earth.
He was only mentioned, questioned into prayers.
Feared, yet not visible with actions.
4.
The angel was ready for anything
But not for pieces of code, of machines language
Enabling the best rotten fruit of the creation
To create more parallel universes than any God would wish
His creation to be segmented into.
The Angel left the sword down, its flames on the tarmac
Slowly melting the road around
Turning into lava.
Like in Minecraft.
A virtual world made of bricks,
An universe made of connecting dots and spaces left empty.
Voids.
A world where people can fly like angels
And build more and more
Parallel realities.
5.
When men started writing on the walls
Of dark caves,
God and the angels laughed
At this intent,
At that desire for eternity.
Far were the days of Adam and Eve.
Far were the days of condemnation,
As far was the departure of Jesus from Earth.
For undisclosed destinations.
The right of the father or other missions.
The primordial men,
Half-naked bodies,
Malnourished and defending themselves
From all the other creatures,
Decided to look at the stars.
For a desire of permanence in time.
They looked up
And they decided that writing was the answer.
Writing down the experience was the mean
To remain current, to remain into that flow of days and hours.
Writing and drawing,
With bare hands, with blood and coal.
God doesn’t know time
Although he created it.
He created it for men.
Yet men were now owning their own time
The Present.
Like Angels, who live in an eternal present,
But they cannot make sense of the past or imagine the future.
Because both the past and the future are the territory of God.
Those men, in those caves, took ownership of time
And they developed the self-conscience into it.
Flashing through time, the Angel could see now.
Why. How.
The desire of keeping ownership of time led to the creation of other devices.
To remain forever into the world and into the universe.
Words, images, music.
The Angel kept walking, a lake of lava around him.
The policeman yelled at him.
‘Dude, what are you doing? Go back home!
It’s lockdown!’
The angel raised the sword, an annoyed gesture to the police
And he kept walking mumbling.
6.
It was a bright day, the bell of the close-by church,
Surmounted by a huge fluorescent cross
Like two tied highlighter
Struck twelve times.
It was 12 o’clock.
The Angel saw a person walking down the road.
A soul.
A soul in the desert city.
‘Who are you? A cosplayer?’,
The young stud approached the Angel.
‘No, I am the first of the Angels of Doom’
‘Never heard of that. It has to be a new series…
Love the inflamed dagger, where did you buy it?’
‘What is a cosplayer?’
‘Duh, are you an angel for real? Just fallen from the sky?’
‘Yes’
‘Ok, right. I assume this is some kind of hallucination, a kind of calenture’
‘No, I am the Angel of Doom, but I cannot find any soul’
‘There are no souls left here, man.
Whatever your role is close to God,
Angel of Doom, or Angel of Gloom
Or, with those clothes, more an Angel of Glam…
(give us a smile, man)..
…
There is no soul in this world.
The streets are empty because of the pandemic
You should know better.
Or do you want me to believe that God,
The Omniscient,
Did know that we would have reacted like that?’
The angel was puzzled.
He received an order,
He executed it.
God didn’t share his intelligence on the briefing for the mission.
God was busy with all those souls arriving.
All those sins to erase
All those Hail Mary’s and Holy Father’s hurled at him
Like a locusts’ storm.
The guy walks by, screaming from the distance
‘There are no souls, here! Only algorithms!
The doomsday arrived much early on,
When we were made redundant
By the fascination of technology.
Machines are substituting us.
Machines are telling us what to do.
We thought we could be destroyed by Anthrax
Or Plague.
We have been slowly annihilated by Netflix and Xanax’
The guy dissolves into the distance.
And the Angel spreads his wings.
He starts flying.
Across the empty land.
Across the empty streets
Not counting wild dogs
And animals.
Not counting other forms of less intriguing
Forms of intelligent life.
Across the forests, the nuclear stations,
Across the football and golf fields
Turned once again into poppy fields
The parking lots of big chains,
Without cars moving around.
And airports littered with airplanes resting.
People are gone.
Or simply inside their homes.
Inside their own virtual space.
The space between the eyes and the smartphone.
The space of the decoded and recoded imagination.
Imaginary lives where people always love, fuck, sing, speak, tell you the secrets for the best carbonara.
The space where souls collide and explode without ever meeting.
The space where God never arrived, as God never needed an internet connection.
And now new Gods are arising.
Silently.
New patrons of the universe, or the multiverse in fieri.
The Angel turns scared.
As the apple trees are blooming again, the wheat fields are just turning from green to gold,
To the brown of winter and again to green.
As if every season is now concentrated and accelerated into a constant present.
And nobody seems to care.
Nobody seems to be there to observe
The velocity.
The emptiness of the world. As it was meant when it was created.
And as it was meant to be after the Apocalypse.
An Armageddon from the armchair, from the sofa.
Where the humanity awaits for some signal.
Some ping.
Some noise from their gadgets.
As if God could speak to them and administer his sanctions via an App.
The Angels stops by a window.
A family is sitting for lunch.
Kids, parents and an old couple of grandparents.
The father, the mother, one daughter and a son.
Silence around the table, as the TV set glares images of some Youtube clip.
The kids stare at the screens in front of their hands.
Food is served.
The father murmurs some thanks to the mother.
The Angel hoovers in front of them.
Nobody notices him, apart the old lady.
She looks at the Angel.
She smiles at him.
‘You are as in my dreams, Arcangel.
See you soon’
The Angel smiles back.
And he leaves, back to God.
Into the Kingdom Come.
In front of God.
‘No Armageddon, today.
But I found a soul’
Or the soul found him,
But God seems busy with some terraforming issue.
The Maker lifts his head, his eyes in flames.
‘One soul is enough. Tonight, you will go there
And you will take that soul where she deserves to be.
And Armageddon will be completed.
Maybe the Devil won’t be happy.
As his Hell will remain empty. Or under used.
But our job is done.
And we can leave this world rolling down whenever they want it to.
We created all not to be fucked up by a maladjusted self-conscience of the universe’
The Angel bows and the skies close, once again, forever.
Thousands and thousands star fall from the sky, unnoticed by the gated humanity.
And the planet floats into a suspended void of parallel identities and universes.
Revelations from the sofa.
Curtains.
———-The End—————–