...fragments for later padding...

REM:- match tenses later

It was around the age of 40, that B. had first received the diagnosis. The terminal diagnosis. Four, perhaps five decades at best, the doctors had said. The trouble was the prescription. The cost of the prescription. B. appreciated that rationing was a necessary evil - in any system of finite resources, but infinite demand, rationing was inevitable. That was the way things must be. A fool might complain - but how could it be otherwise? Money didn't grow on trees, the most one could hope for growing on trees was biscuits.

But B. had not sat at home sulking. What would be the point of that? Sulking was not the point of the universe, no. And B. knew the point of the universe. Besides which, B. had private means. That had been the clever thing about gathering the means. B. had enough means for the first part of the prescription. The motorbike had not been a problem. It was item 2 that was to prove expensive. The teenage blonde. The teenage blonde with the superstimuli.

Many people had laughed at cuckoos, with their ugly beaks and silly clockhouses, but then many people had voted for Hitler. Hitler and cuckoos were different things - B. could see that - but they were also the same. They were superstimuli. Hitler, cuckoos, and the Pope's hat - all the same. It was superstimuli that ran the world. That was the method of the troika. Cuckoos, and Popes, were fed for free by unsuspecting dupes - all because of the superstimuli. And Hitler was no vegetarian.

In the coming age of the New System, the third and a half way, females would be bred specifically for their superstimuli. B. had a strong feeling about that. That was the scientific way. That was the goal of empiricism. An unspoken goal perhaps, but the goal nonetheless. However, the rational person starts a journey from where they are. Not were they would like to be. The thinker started at the start, not the destination. Had not Mao himself proclaimed that the journey of a single Magi started with 10,000 miles? Mao was a proclaimer ahead of his time, but not with ginger hair. B. had ginger hair, but no glasses. There was no myopia where B. was concerned - if anything, he had hypersight. Sight beyond sight, like the Sword of Omens.

B.'s first attempt to collect item 2 on the prescription had suffered a setback. At the holding bay a loud bell had heralded the parade of the breeders. It seemed to be an over-elaborate ritual - conducted twice daily - matins and evensong -, but such was the nature of culture. The intricacies of the ritual were, as yet, impenetrable to B. and it soon became obvious he had transgressed one of the rules. Maybe more than one. Clumsy. And the troika were relying on B. being clumsy. That was their only hope.

But how else? What possible way in all the world could B. achieve immortality, other than by creating a miniature copy of himself inside a breeder? The answer came from an unexpected source.

Wind turbines. What did you see all around the land? Wind turbines. Renewable energy. Renewable. That was the secret. B. was to be renewed. It had even spread to the sea. All around the coast, giant wind turbines spun their green electric life-juice webs, wafting the world like pinned spiders with five legs pulled off, on vertical record players.

Sagan's golden record would last a thousand years. B.'s cds skipped at 5. And Elvis had a lot of golden records.

It was clear to B. that God didn't exist. Not in His conventional forms, as foretold by the prophets. In fact, B. alone in the world could be certain of the fact of God's non-existence, since God Himself had told him. It had been a confusing day, one of those days that were difficult to dress with order.

William Blake had just finished drawing Newton with his mason-compasses, and was trying to claim he saw angels in a tree. Clearly the man was hallucinating. Something had gone wrong with his primary brain for sure. Otherwise he wouldn't see biscuits as angels, would he? It was patent nonsense. Either biscuits were biscuits, or they were angels. Which was it? He couldn't say. And yet he did say. And he said angels. The man was insane.

It was unlikely God would speak in quatrains. Or so B. had thought. But a moment's reflection revealed that, outside of Space and Time, - nowhere, never - probability theory was invalid. Immaterial beings did not require material, and B. could see that there was no material. Elvis had released no material for years, but it was deeper than that. And B. had it for sure. That was when the quatrains came.

A signal depended on a receiver. B. was that receiver. It was time for the quatrain download. Dark split the matter and the ice-daemon tremored like a reed in Bohemian lips...

Since nothing is justified, or unjust
The only imperative that you must
For all the world of is to ought
To teach the lessons you were taught

You know the lessons that were true
You know the them, you know the you
The talk the teacher treasure hoard
The chalk writ deeper than the board

It was evident that God was not very good at poetry. Perhaps that was unkind. Perhaps something had been lost in translation. Perhaps the signal had been clear, but the receiver had not been finely-tuned enough. No matter. It was the next verse that stood out to B. like a 4D pencil:-

I speak the truth from A to B
I speak for all eternity
I speak as you and you as me
Put you and thou and we get thee.

It wasn't much better, but one had to start somewhere. Or, nowhere in God's case. Even harder. What did it mean? Could B. be some kind of God? One that didn't exist? By their very nature, Gods were impossible paradoxes, immune to the feeble proddings of science. If there really were a God, one thing was certain. He would be impossible. A slow smile of appreciation stretched across B.'s skull-meat.